Rise of the Horde - Chapter 774 - 773

The barbarians did not retreat far.

Warchief Garrok, his jaw wound scarred into the permanent gash that Sixth Realm healing produced when the healing’s power was insufficient to fully close a wound inflicted by another Sixth Realm warrior’s blade, assembled the chieftains on the ridgeline five miles north of the Thornwall battlefield.

Five chieftains. All wounded. Garrok’s jaw. Tharn’s left arm, broken at the elbow by the Royal Guard warrior’s mace strike at Harken Field and healed crookedly by the shamanic bone-setting that the field surgeons had performed. Brokk’s right eye, blinded by a frost bolt’s glancing impact that the shamanic field’s partial deflection had reduced from lethal to disfiguring. The fourth chieftain, Morag, bore the puncture wound in his right thigh that had reduced his mobility to the pivot-and-strike technique since the melee at Ashford Bridge. The fifth, Kael, had lost three fingers on his left hand to the sword strike that had penetrated his gauntlet’s finger guards during the Thornwall engagement.

Five chieftains. All alive. All Sixth Realm. All capable of combat despite the wounds that the combat had inflicted. The Sixth Realm’s healing and pain suppression sustained them past the wounds’ natural consequences, the Realm’s power converting what would have been crippling injuries in lesser warriors into the persistent damage that Sixth Realm warriors carried and compensated for and fought through because the fighting was the thing that the Realm existed to sustain.

“The mountain’s stand was made at Thornwall,” Garrok said. “The stand was honored. The ancestors witnessed. The withdrawal was earned.”

“The thundermakers are fifteen,” Tharn said. “The flying ones killed thirty-five of our weapons. The flying ones changed the battle’s weight.”

“The dwarves send more,” Brokk said. “The wagons come. New weapons. New ammunition. The forges do not stop.”

“The dwarves’ wagons take fourteen days from the Iron Hills to the front,” Garrok said. “Fourteen days for the replacement weapons to arrive. Fourteen days during which fifteen thundermakers are what we have. Fifteen thundermakers did not hold the line at Thornwall. Fifteen thundermakers will not hold the line at the next position.”

“Then we do not hold a line,” Morag said. The chieftain whose thigh wound reduced his stance spoke from the position that the wound allowed, seated on a granite outcropping with his weapon across his knees. “We do not hold lines. We never held lines. We held mountains. The mountains are north. We withdraw to the mountains. We wait for the dwarves’ wagons. We rebuild the thundermaker count. We come south again when the count is fifty and the pinkskins’ boomstick ammunition is zero.”

The council’s silence was the silence that the highland tradition’s councils produced when the assessment was accurate and the accuracy was uncomfortable. The barbarian army had been advancing south for weeks. The advance’s momentum was the momentum that the campaign’s success had built and that the thundermaker count’s decline had undermined. Withdrawing to the mountains was the withdrawal that momentum’s loss demanded, the specific retreat that a highland army conducted when the valley’s resources were beyond the army’s reduced capability to seize.

“The pinkskins’ boomstick ammunition is almost zero now,” Garrok said. “Almost non-existing at Ashford Bridge. Less after Thornwall. The pinkskins fight with swords. Swords against our boomsticks. The advantage remains.”

“The advantage remains against the pinkskins,” Kael said. “The advantage does not remain against the tusked ones.”

The council was quiet.

* * * * *

“The tusked ones,” Garrok said.

“The tusked ones sit in their camp near the pinkskin capital,” Kael said. “Seven thousand warriors in estimate. They have not fought the pinkskins for weeks. They have not fought us. They sit and watch. Their weapons are not dwarven. Their weapons are their own. Their ammunition is their own. Their supply is their own. They depend on no one.”

“The tusked ones’ weapons are inferior to dwarven weapons.”

“The tusked ones’ weapons are not dwarven, but the tusked ones’ tactics are not inferior. The tusked ones defeated the pinkskins’ army of forty-seven thousand with eight thousand warriors. The tusked ones march to the pinkskin capital and the pinkskins could not stop them. The tusked ones sit in their camp and every army that was fighting them stopped fighting them because they could not be beaten.”

“The tusked ones are not our concern. The pinkskins are our concern.”

“The tusked ones become our concern if we march south and the tusked ones decide that our march threatens the thing the tusked ones are protecting. The tusked ones are protecting a document. A piece of paper. The tusked ones bled for the paper. The tusked ones will fight anyone who threatens the paper’s value. If we destroy the pinkskin kingdom, the paper has no kingdom to honor it. If the paper has no kingdom to honor it, the tusked ones’ campaign was wasted. The tusked ones will not accept waste.”

The observation settled into the council with the weight that observations carried when the observation’s logic was clear and the logic’s implications were serious. The barbarian chieftains had been fighting the Threian kingdom for weeks. The barbarian chieftains had not been considering the orcish Horde as a variable because the Horde had been sitting in its camp and sitting did not register as a threat in the highland tradition’s threat assessment.

But the sitting was the threat. The sitting was the thing that the orcish commander had been doing since the campaign’s strategic picture included the barbarian invasion. The sitting was the patience that waited for the outcome that the sitting’s continuation produced: the exhaustion of both the barbarians and the Threians, the exhaustion that left the Horde as the strongest force in the region, the exhaustion that gave the Horde the negotiating position that the Horde’s campaign had been designed to produce.

“The tusked ones are a problem we address after we address the pinkskins,” Garrok said. “The pinkskins first. The tusked ones second.”

“The tusked ones do not wait for second,” Kael said. “The tusked ones act when the acting’s moment is optimal. The acting’s moment is the moment when both we and the pinkskins are weakest. That moment is approaching.”

Garrok looked north, toward the mountains. Then south, toward the Threian positions. Then east, toward the orcish camp at Ashwell that the scouts’ reports described.

“Then we must finish the pinkskins before the tusked ones’ moment arrives,” Garrok said. “We march south. We fight with fifteen thundermakers and fourteen thousand warriors and the boomstick ammunition that the dwarves’ wagons provide. We break the pinkskins before the tusked ones move.”

“And if we cannot break them before the tusked ones move?”

Garrok’s jaw wound pulled as he set his expression. The scar tissue that the Sixth Realm’s incomplete healing had produced stretched across the exposed mandible’s surface, the pain a constant companion that the Realm’s suppression managed but could not eliminate.

“Then we fight the tusked ones too,” Garrok said. “The mountains have always fought everyone. The mountains have always survived.”

The barbarian army reformed. Fourteen thousand warriors. Fifteen thundermakers. The dwarven supply wagons’ next delivery fourteen days away. The Threian army forty-three miles south. The orcish Horde sixty miles southeast.

The march south resumed.

The march south resumed with the specific quality that a highland army’s march produced when the army had been fighting for weeks and the fighting’s toll was visible in the warriors’ gait and armor and the expression on the faces that the helmets’ visors did not cover. The warriors moved with the endurance that highland conditioning provided, the conditioning of men who had spent their lives in mountain terrain whose elevation and slope demanded the physical capability that sustained military operations also demanded.

The fifteen thundermakers rolled on their dwarven-engineered carriages at the column’s center, the weapons’ crews maintaining the weapons with the attentiveness that the weapons’ reduced numbers demanded. Each thundermaker was now worth three times what each thundermaker had been worth when the count was fifty, the specific value increase that scarcity produced in assets whose replacement was fourteen days away and whose operational contribution was the contribution that the army’s tactical viability depended on.

The dwarven ammunition wagons followed the thundermakers, the wagons’ contents the specific inventory that the current supply represented: sufficient for approximately four days of sustained bombardment at the fifteen-weapon rate. Four days of fire. Fourteen days until resupply. The gap between four and fourteen was the gap that the army’s march south would need to manage, the gap that required the thundermakers’ expenditure to be conserved for the engagements that the march’s objectives demanded rather than the harassing fire that the march’s security preferred.