Rise of the Horde - Chapter 769 - 768

The Baron lost his second griffon knight on the ninth day.

Sir Aldren’s griffon took three boomstick balls in the dive. The first ball struck the beast’s neck armor and deflected. The second struck the saddle’s flank guard and penetrated, the ball lodging in the griffon’s hip muscle. The third struck Sir Aldren’s right leg above the knee, the ball entering through the cuisses’ inner surface and shattering the femur.

The griffon’s dive continued on momentum. The beast’s wings, still folded, could not arrest the descent because the folded position was the dive’s committed phase and the committed phase’s aerodynamics did not permit recovery until the wings opened at the pull-out altitude. The hip wound’s pain caused the griffon to twist in the dive, the beast’s body rotating along its longitudinal axis, the rotation throwing the dive’s trajectory off the ammunition wagon target and toward the thundermaker battery’s crew positions.

Sir Aldren’s frost bolt fired at the wrong target. The bolt struck a thundermaker barrel rather than the ammunition wagon. The barrel cracked. The weapon was destroyed but the ammunition was intact. One thundermaker eliminated. The ammunition stacks untouched. The remaining three weapons at the battery position continued firing.

The griffon hit the ground.

The beast’s pull-out attempt, initiated at one hundred feet by the mount’s autonomous flight instincts, was insufficient to arrest the dive’s velocity with the hip wound’s pain disrupting the wing muscles’ coordination. The griffon struck the ground at the angle that the partial pull-out produced: thirty degrees from horizontal, the beast’s chest and forelegs absorbing the impact, the saddle’s frame crumpling around Sir Aldren’s body, the knight’s broken femur driven further into the thigh muscle by the impact’s compression.

Sir Aldren’s griffon was dead. The impact had broken the beast’s neck. The twelve-hundred-pound body lay in the cratered ground that the impact had produced, the frost-rimed wings spread across the earth in the specific arrangement that dead griffons’ wings produced when the wings’ muscular tension released in death.

Sir Aldren was alive. Alive in the specific condition that a knight with a shattered femur and three broken ribs and a probable spinal compression injury produced when the knight was lying in the wreckage of his mount sixty paces behind the barbarian infantry’s line.

He drew his sceptre. The frost magic blazed from the weapon’s crystal focus in the defensive pattern that the Griffon Knight order’s training prescribed for downed riders: the frost dome, the hemispherical barrier of ice that the sceptre’s power sustained around the downed knight’s position, the dome’s thickness and duration determined by the rider’s remaining reserves.

The barbarian infantry converged on the crash site. Twelve warriors, their boomsticks aimed at the frost dome, their hand axes ready for the moment the dome’s power expired.

Sir Aldren’s reserves sustained the dome for four minutes. Four minutes of ice between the knight and the warriors. Four minutes during which the knight’s broken femur bled into the thigh’s compartment and the compartment’s pressure increased and the pain that the knight’s training allowed him to manage became the pain that the knight’s training had not prepared him for.

The dome cracked at the fourth minute. The ice thinned. A barbarian warrior drove his hand axe into the thinning dome and the axe penetrated the ice and the dome shattered.

Sir Aldren’s sceptre fired one last frost bolt. The bolt struck the nearest warrior in the chest and the warrior’s dwarven armor frosted over and the warrior stumbled backward and the frost’s thermal shock cracked the breastplate at the rivet points. The warrior fell.

The remaining warriors closed. Sir Aldren drew his sword with his left hand because his right arm was trapped beneath the griffon’s body. He fought from the ground, the sword’s reach extended by the position’s low angle, the blade catching a warrior’s ankle and severing the tendon above the boot’s rim.

The warrior fell beside the knight. The warrior’s hand axe found Sir Aldren’s throat.

* * * * *

Valden received the loss through the communication crystal that the griffon knights carried. The crystal’s signal terminated when the knight’s life force ceased providing the magical resonance that the crystal’s function required. The termination was a specific absence in the magical spectrum, the silence where a signal had been.

“Aldren is down,” Valden said to his two remaining riders. Three griffons. Three riders. Three sceptres. Against twenty-seven remaining thundermakers and the abundant ammunition that the dwarven supply sustained.

“We continue,” Valden said. The statement was not the statement of a commander who had options. It was the statement of a commander whose mission’s importance exceeded the mission’s cost and whose cost was being paid in the specific currency of griffon knights who could not be replaced because the griffon breeding program required six years to produce a combat-ready mount and the kingdom did not have six years.

The three remaining griffons climbed to altitude in the predawn darkness. The barbarian camp below was the camp that seventeen days of continuous operations had spread across the landscape between Kellsworth Ridge and the capital’s approaches. The barbarians had advanced twenty miles since the Battle of Kellsworth Ridge, each advance purchased at the cost of a day’s fighting and the thundermaker bombardment that made the fighting favorable.

Twenty-seven thundermakers. Twenty-seven targets. Three griffons.

“We prioritize ammunition wagons,” Valden said. “The weapons are replaced by the dwarven supply. The ammunition is replaced by the dwarven supply. But the ammunition’s replacement takes longer because the ammunition is heavier than the weapons and the wagons carry less ammunition per trip than they carry weapons per trip. Every ammunition wagon we destroy produces a longer gap in the bombardment capability than every weapon we destroy.”

“The wagons are behind the battery positions,” the second rider said. “Behind the infantry screen. Behind the boomstick fire.”

“The wagons are where the wagons are. We dive through the boomstick fire the way we have been diving through the boomstick fire for seventeen days. The boomstick fire has not stopped us. The boomstick fire has cost us two knights and one griffon. The boomstick fire is the cost. The thundermaker destruction is the product. The product exceeds the cost.”

The three griffons dove. The boomstick fire rose. The night’s work began.

By dawn, three more thundermaker batteries had been silenced. The ammunition wagons behind the batteries were cracked ice and scattered shrapnel. The barbarian thundermaker count was twenty-four.

Twenty-four thundermakers. The threshold was fifteen to twenty. The decline continued. The Baron continued. The kingdom’s survival was measured in the thundermaker count’s descent and the descent was the Baron of Frost’s contribution to the war, measured in dive angles and frost bolts and the specific courage that three griffon riders demonstrated when they flew into the boomstick fire every night because the flying was the thing that needed to happen and the three riders were the three riders who could do it.

The loss of Sir Aldren reduced the griffon squadron to the minimum that the guerrilla campaign’s operational requirements could sustain. Three riders could cover the barbarian battery positions’ geographic spread with the sortie pattern that the campaign had established: one rider per battery concentration, each rider conducting three to four dives per sortie, each sortie producing one to three battery silencings depending on the dive’s accuracy and the boomstick fire’s interference.

Two riders could not cover the spread. Two riders could cover two of the three battery concentrations per sortie, leaving the third concentration’s thundermakers operational and firing during the gaps that the two-rider coverage could not fill. The third rider’s loss would reduce the coverage further, to the level where the guerrilla campaign’s effectiveness decreased below the threshold that the thundermaker count’s continued decline required.

The three riders were the three riders. There were no replacements. The griffon breeding program’s six-year cycle meant that the next combat-ready griffon was five years away. The kingdom’s future aerial capability was a promise. The kingdom’s current aerial capability was three tired griffons with dented armor and three tired riders with depleted magical reserves.

“We are enough,” Valden told the two remaining riders. The statement was the statement of a commander whose force had been reduced to the minimum and whose mission’s importance had not been reduced at all, the statement that commanders made when the force’s size was insufficient for the mission’s scope and the commander’s will was the thing that bridged the gap between insufficient and enough.