Rise of the Horde - Chapter 749 - 748

The ninth day of the siege of Snowehaven was the day the barbarians almost broke through.

They came at the third hour before dawn, three thousand warriors in the iron armor that the dwarven forges provided, their boomsticks loaded with the fresh powder that the latest supply wagon had delivered, their shamans chanting from the ridgeline behind the assault force in the low harmonic frequency that disrupted the iron stakes Snowe had driven into the ground to counter the shamanic vibrations.

The stakes had been holding for eight days. The shamans had spent eight days studying the stakes’ pattern and the disruption frequencies they produced, and on the ninth night the shamans adjusted their chanting to the harmonic that the stakes’ iron composition resonated with rather than resisted, turning the counter-measure into a conductor.

The ground beneath the eastern earthwork liquefied at the second hour.

“Eastern section! The ground is moving!” The sentry’s shout was swallowed by the sound of the earthwork’s timber frame groaning as the foundation it rested on shifted from solid to silt. The berm that had absorbed eight days of thundermaker fire leaned eastward, the timber frame’s integrity dependent on the ground it sat on and the ground was no longer sitting still.

Snowe was at the eastern section within four minutes, his boots sinking into soil that had been packed hard by the engineering crews and was now the consistency of wet clay. The militia at the firing positions were scrambling backward as the berm tilted, their positions’ footing dissolving beneath them.

“Battlemages! Solidify the foundation! Now!”

Three battlemages ran forward. Their frost spells hit the liquefied ground and the ground froze, the ice locking the silt in place and providing the structural support the earthwork needed to remain upright. The berm stabilized. The timber frame stopped groaning.

The shamans redirected the frost spells.

The ice that the battlemages had created beneath the earthwork expanded. Not the controlled expansion that the battlemages’ incantation specified. The uncontrolled expansion that redirected magical energy produced when shamanic manipulation converted a stabilizing spell into a destructive one. The ice pushed outward from the foundation, cracking the timber frame from below, the frozen silt expanding with the force that freezing water produced when it had no room to expand except through the things surrounding it.

The earthwork split. The berm’s center section opened a gap twelve feet wide, the timber frame’s crossbeams snapping like bones, the packed earth cascading through the gap in a mudslide that buried two militia fighters at the base.

“Breach! Eastern section! Twelve feet!” The officer’s report was the report that Snowe had been preparing for since the siege began, the report that every defensive commander knew was coming and that no amount of preparation made comfortable to receive.

* * * * *

The barbarian assault force hit the breach at the third hour.

Three thousand warriors compressed into the twelve-foot gap, the gap’s width limiting the assault to approximately twenty warriors abreast, the compression that breach assaults produced channeling the attackers into the killing ground that breach defenders created.

Snowe positioned his garrison’s remaining boomstick-equipped soldiers at the breach’s flanking walls, the soldiers firing into the compressed assault force from positions that the gap’s width could not protect against. Each boomstick ball that entered the gap traveled through the compressed mass of warriors the way thundermaker balls traveled through compressed infantry formations: through one body and into the next.

A militia farmer named Karl fired his hunting boomstick from the breach’s left flank. The ball struck a barbarian warrior in the shoulder, the dwarven armor denting under the impact, the warrior staggering sideways into the warrior beside him. Karl reloaded. His hands moved through the sequence that eight days of continuous fighting had converted from unfamiliar to automatic: powder, wadding, ball, ram, prime. He checked his pouch. Four charges remaining.

The barbarian behind the staggered warrior stepped over his companion and into the breach, hand axe raised, his face painted in the highland ritual markings that the shamans applied before assault operations. Karl fired. The ball caught the barbarian in the chest plate. The dwarven iron held. The barbarian stumbled but did not fall. He kept coming.

“Steel!” Karl’s neighbor screamed, the word that militia fighters used when their boomsticks were empty and the only thing between them and the barbarians was the blade they had been issued at the siege’s start. The neighbor drew his sword, a hunting blade that had been designed for skinning game and that was now being asked to stop a warrior in dwarven armor.

The barbarian’s hand axe came down. The hunting blade caught it, the smaller blade deflecting the axe’s arc but not stopping the barbarian’s momentum. The barbarian drove into the militia fighter with his shoulder, the dwarven armor’s weight adding to the impact, and the farmer went down with the barbarian on top of him.

Karl dropped his empty boomstick and drew his own blade. He stabbed at the barbarian who was on his neighbor, the blade finding the gap between the barbarian’s helmet and his gorget, the narrow space that every armor design left exposed because every armor design had to allow the head to turn. The blade went in three inches. The barbarian thrashed, blood spraying from the neck wound, and Karl pulled the blade free and stabbed again.

The neighbor crawled free. Both men stood. The breach was still open. The barbarians were still coming.

“Hold the breach!” Snowe’s voice carried from the command position behind the breach, the general’s command tone cutting through the noise of the assault with the authority that thirty years of military leadership provided. “Every man at the breach holds! The breach is the line!”

The breach held. For forty minutes, the garrison’s remaining soldiers and the militia fighters held the twelve-foot gap against three thousand barbarians, the gap’s width limiting the assault’s frontage and the defenders’ desperation providing the specific motivation that Snowe had described at the siege’s beginning: farmers defending their homes fought differently.

The Baron of Frost arrived at the forty-first minute.

Valden Snowe’s griffon descended from the predawn darkness with the speed that the aerial mount’s dive produced, the Baron’s sceptre blazing with frost magic that struck the breach’s entrance and sealed it with a wall of ice three feet thick. The barbarian assault force, compressed in the gap, found the gap’s interior surface suddenly frozen, the ice wall cutting the breach in half and trapping the barbarians who had penetrated inside the ice wall’s perimeter.

The trapped barbarians were killed by the garrison’s soldiers in four minutes. The ice wall held for twenty minutes before the shamans’ redirected magic melted it. By the time the ice melted, Snowe’s engineers had positioned a barricade of wagons and timber across the breach.

The barbarian assault withdrew at dawn. Four hundred dead at the breach. The garrison’s losses were sixty-three dead and ninety-one wounded.

“That was close,” Snowe’s aide said.

“That was inevitable,” Snowe said. “The earthworks were always going to breach. The question was when, not if. The answer is: day nine. We have three days of ammunition remaining. After three days, the next breach has no boomsticks defending it.”

He looked at the northern skyline where the Baron of Frost’s griffon was circling, the aerial mount’s frost-rimed wings catching the dawn’s first light.

“Valden cannot hold every breach,” Snowe said. “He is one man on one griffon with one sceptre. The barbarians have twenty thousand warriors and fifty thundermakers and shamans who turn our magic into their weapons. The numbers are not in our favor.”

“They never were,” his aide said.

“No. They never were.”

The siege continued. Three days of ammunition. The earthworks were breached. The breach was barricaded. And the question that the siege had been asking since the first day remained the question: how long could determination hold against superior numbers and superior supply.