Rise of the Horde - Chapter 771 - 770

The Battle of Ashford Bridge was fought thirty-two miles from the capital’s walls, the closest that a barbarian army had approached the kingdom’s seat of government in the kingdom’s recorded history.

The king positioned his remaining twenty-eight thousand soldiers at the bridge where the Ashford River crossed the capital road, the bridge’s stone construction providing the chokepoint that the defensive position required and the river’s width providing the obstacle that the barbarian advance had to cross to continue southward. The timber-framed earthworks that every Threian defensive position now employed were constructed on the bridge’s southern bank, the earthworks’ timber-and-stone construction bearing the campaign’s accumulated engineering wisdom: the Horde’s principles, adapted by Snowe, disseminated through the army, refined by each garrison commander who had fought the barbarians since Fort Harken.

The barbarian army advanced from the north with nineteen thundermakers and fourteen thousand warriors.

Nineteen thundermakers. The number was the number that the Baron of Frost’s twenty-three-day guerrilla campaign had produced from the original fifty, the number that was inside the threshold’s upper boundary but had not yet reached the threshold’s lower boundary where the thundermaker advantage became insufficient to determine the battle’s outcome.

The bombardment began at the ninth hour. Nineteen weapons firing in staggered sequence. The staggering produced one impact every seven seconds, the interval longer than the six seconds at Kellsworth Ridge and significantly longer than the four seconds at Harken Field. Seven seconds between impacts was the interval that allowed the Threian soldiers in the earthworks to conduct the two-shot cycle that the conservation pattern had evolved into: aim, fire, aim, fire, duck. Two aimed shots between impacts. Two opportunities to put balls into targets that the thundermakers’ reduced suppression allowed the soldiers to see and engage.

The boomstick ammunition was at six percent. Six percent of the stockpile that had been one hundred percent when the dwarven trade was cut. Six percent meant approximately nine thousand rounds distributed across twenty-eight thousand soldiers. Less than one ball per three soldiers. The distribution was concentrated in the forward positions where the boomstick fire’s effectiveness was highest, the rear formations armed with swords and spears and the specific determination of soldiers who had been told that the forward positions’ boomstick-equipped soldiers were the formation’s primary weapon and the rear formations’ bladed weapons were the formation’s backup.

“This is the last battle we fight with boomsticks,” the king said to Aldrath. Both commanders stood behind the central earthwork, the timber-framed berm absorbing the thundermaker impacts that the staggered bombardment delivered at the seven-second interval. “After this engagement, the boomstick ammunition is gone. The next battle is fought with steel.”

“The Baron’s thundermaker count is nineteen,” Aldrath said. “Inside the threshold’s upper boundary. If the count reaches fifteen before the next engagement, the threshold is crossed and the battle’s mathematics favor our numbers.”

“If.”

“The Baron is destroying one to two thundermakers per night. At that rate, the count reaches fifteen in two to four nights. Two to four nights of holding this position while the thundermakers fire and the barbarians assault and our boomstick ammunition decreases toward the zero that every engagement brings closer.”

* * * * *

The barbarian infantry assault hit the bridge at the third hour.

The bridge was the chokepoint that the defensive position exploited: forty feet wide, three hundred feet long, the stone construction spanning the river whose spring flow was chest-deep and fast enough to prevent the wading crossings that the barbarians had used at Brennan’s Ford. The bridge funneled the barbarian assault into the forty-foot frontage that the bridge’s width allowed, the funneling compressing the fourteen thousand-warrior assault force into the column that the bridge’s geometry demanded.

The Threian boomstick fire concentrated on the bridge’s northern approach. The conservation pattern’s aimed shots struck the barbarians who were entering the bridge at the range where the bridge’s approach road provided the linear target that aimed fire at this range hit with the highest probability. Each ball that entered the approach road’s column traveled through the compressed barbarian formation the way the thundermaker balls had traveled through the compressed Threian formations: through one warrior and into the next.

A Threian sharpshooter in the central earthwork, a hunter named Lorth whose civilian marksmanship had made him the forward position’s most effective boomstick operator, aimed at a barbarian warrior entering the bridge’s northern approach at two hundred paces. The warrior was running. The boomstick’s ball required approximately half a second to cross the two-hundred-pace distance. Lorth aimed at the space in front of the running warrior, the lead distance that the warrior’s running speed and the ball’s flight time combined to determine.

He fired. The ball struck the warrior in the neck, entering through the gap between the helmet’s rear rim and the gorget’s top edge, the gap that the running posture’s forward lean exposed. The warrior dropped. The warrior behind him stumbled over the falling body and Lorth’s neighbor fired at the stumbling warrior and the ball caught the stumbling warrior in the knee and the warrior went down.

Two warriors from two balls. The conservation pattern’s effectiveness: one hundred percent kill rate at the range where aimed fire at carefully selected targets produced the hits that the selection’s precision required.

The barbarian assault pressed onto the bridge. The thundermakers’ fire struck the earthworks behind the boomstick positions. The impacts shook the timber frames. A thundermaker ball struck the earthwork directly above Lorth’s firing position and the timber frame’s upper section collapsed onto his position, the timber and stone debris burying the sharpshooter beneath the rubble that the thundermaker’s impact had produced from the structure that had been protecting him.

Lorth dug himself out. His boomstick was broken, the barrel bent by the timber that had fallen on it. He drew his sword. The sword was a hunting knife, the long blade that the frontier settlements’ hunters carried for game dressing and that the mobilization had converted from a butchering tool into a weapon.

“Give me a boomstick!” Lorth shouted at the soldiers around him. A soldier handed him a dead man’s weapon. The dead man’s ammunition pouch contained three balls. Three balls. Lorth loaded the first.

The barbarian assault pressed across the bridge. The forty-foot frontage compressed the assault into the density that the bridge’s chokepoint produced. The Threian boomstick fire and the barbarian boomstick fire exchanged across the bridge’s three-hundred-foot length, the balls crossing in both directions, the impacts producing the casualties on both sides that the exchange’s intensity determined.

The magical practitioners on both sides contributed what the practitioners’ reduced capabilities allowed. Seventeen remaining Threian battlemages, the survivors of the Harken Field engagement’s mutual annihilation, cast Fourth and Fifth Circle spells at the barbarian formations on the bridge. The spells’ effectiveness was the effectiveness that the shamanic field’s degradation permitted: approximately sixty percent of the Fourth Circle spells reached their targets, the shamanic field’s reduced strength unable to absorb and redirect the full volume.

Frost bolts struck the bridge’s surface and the surface iced. Barbarian warriors crossing the iced surface lost their footing, the dwarven boots’ iron-shod soles finding no purchase on the magically produced ice. Warriors fell. The warriors behind them fell over the fallen warriors. The pile at the bridge’s center became the obstacle that the ice and the falling warriors combined to produce.

The barbarian shamans responded. The nine remaining lesser shamans, the survivors of the Harken Field degradation, countered the frost spells with the thermal manipulation that the shamanic tradition used for environmental control. The ice melted. The bridge’s surface steamed. The steam reduced visibility on the bridge to the level where the boomstick fire’s aimed shots became the boomstick fire’s guessed shots.

“The bridge is steaming!” A Threian officer’s report carried the frustration of a commander whose defensive position’s advantage was being neutralized by the magical contest that neither side’s reduced practitioners could decisively win.

Lorth fired his second ball into the steam. The ball crossed the bridge and struck something. The sound of the impact, the specific wet thud that iron balls produced when they struck flesh, confirmed the hit. The target was invisible. The hit was real.

“Shoot into the steam!” Lorth shouted. “They are on the bridge! The bridge is forty feet wide! Aim at the center of the steam and the ball hits something because the bridge’s width means everything on the bridge is within twenty feet of center!”

The boomstick fire shifted to the steam-covered bridge’s general area. The aimed shots became area fire. The conservation pattern’s precision was abandoned for the volume fire that the bridge’s compressed frontage and the steam’s reduced visibility demanded. The boomstick ammunition expenditure increased. The kill rate decreased. The ammunition’s countdown toward zero accelerated.

The battle lasted eight hours. The bridge held. The earthworks held. The barbarian assault withdrew with approximately twenty-two hundred dead. The Threian casualties were approximately twenty-eight hundred dead and four thousand wounded.

The boomstick ammunition was at two percent.

“Two percent,” the king said. “One more engagement. Perhaps. If the engagement is fought with extreme conservation. If every ball is aimed at a face rather than a chest. If every ball kills rather than wounds.”

“The Baron reports the thundermaker count at seventeen,” Fairfax said. “Two more destroyed last night. Seventeen thundermakers. The threshold is fifteen to twenty. We are inside the threshold. The next engagement, if the Baron reduces the count to fifteen, is the engagement where our numbers become the decisive factor.”

“Two more thundermakers. Two more nights of the Baron’s work. Two more nights of holding this position.”

“The boomstick ammunition will not sustain two more days of fighting at the rate this engagement consumed.”

“Then we do not fight for two more days. We hold the bridge. We do not engage the thundermaker bombardment with boomstick fire. We absorb. We shelter in the earthworks. We let the thundermakers fire into timber and stone rather than flesh and armor. We preserve the two percent for the engagement that the Baron’s work produces.”

The army held the bridge. The thundermakers fired at the earthworks. The earthworks absorbed. The soldiers sheltered. And the Baron of Frost, three griffons in the predawn darkness, continued the hunt that the kingdom’s survival required.

Seventeen thundermakers. Two more nights. Fifteen was the number. Fifteen was the threshold. Fifteen was the number that changed everything.

Fifty miles from the capital. The barbarians pushed. The Threians held. The thundermaker count declined. And the war’s resolution approached, one cracked ammunition wagon at a time, one frost bolt at a time, one griffon dive at a time.