Rise of the Horde - Chapter 777 - 776

The silence that settled over the forty-three miles between the barbarian positions and the Threian earthworks was not peace. It was the silence of three predators circling the same clearing, each one watching the others, each one waiting for the movement that would determine which predator struck first and which direction the striking came from.

Day one of fourteen.

The barbarian camp’s morning routine began with the thundermaker crews’ maintenance cycle. Fifteen weapons, their dwarven-forged barrels gleaming in the predawn light, were cleaned and inspected by crews whose professional attentiveness to the weapons had increased in proportion to the weapons’ scarcity. Each thundermaker received the individual attention that fifty weapons had not required because fifty weapons provided redundancy and fifteen weapons did not. A cracked barrel, a misaligned part, a corroded touch hole: any deficiency that would have been addressed at the next scheduled maintenance under the fifty-weapon regime was now addressed immediately under the fifteen-weapon regime because the fifteen-weapon regime could not afford to lose a single weapon to mechanical failure.

The ammunition stacks behind the batteries were smaller than the stacks that the campaign’s earlier engagements had maintained. The dwarven supply wagons’ delivery cycle had been disrupted by the Baron of Frost’s twenty-five-day guerrilla campaign, the wagons’ routes adjusted to avoid the aerial corridors that the griffon squadron’s attack patterns had established. The adjustments added two days to the delivery cycle’s timeline, the two days converting the three-day delivery frequency into a five-day frequency, the longer interval reducing the ammunition available at the battery positions between deliveries.

A thundermaker crew chief named Aldur walked the line of weapons at the camp’s northern perimeter, his inspection the specific inspection that a Fourth Realm warrior applied to the tools that the warrior’s army depended on. He checked the barrel of the third weapon, the weapon whose last firing had produced the slight irregularity in the ball’s trajectory that suggested the barrel’s internal surface was developing the scoring that sustained firing produced in iron barrels.

“Barrel three needs reaming,” Aldur said to the crew’s loader. “The scoring is at the midpoint. If we fire without reaming, the next ball’s accuracy at three hundred paces drops from reliable to approximate.”

“The reaming tool is in the supply wagon,” the loader said. “The supply wagon is on the mountain road. Five days.”

“Then barrel three does not fire until the reaming tool arrives. We fight with fourteen until the tool comes.”

Fourteen thundermakers. The number that had been fifteen at the threshold’s achievement was now fourteen because of a maintenance deficiency that the supply chain’s disruption had made uncorrectable, the specific cascade that reduced capability produced when the supply that sustained the capability was interrupted and the interruption’s effects propagated through the system that the supply maintained.

* * * * *

Sixty miles southeast, the Horde’s camp at Ashwell conducted its first day of the fourteen-day period with the routine that the camp’s weeks of occupation had established and that the fourteen-day period’s heightened significance had intensified.

The Verakhs departed before dawn.

Twelve scouts, the specific number that the surveillance architecture’s full-spectrum coverage required, moved from the camp’s perimeter into the landscape that separated the Horde from both the barbarian positions and the Threian positions. The scouts moved in the pairs that the Verakh operational doctrine prescribed: two scouts per surveillance axis, each pair responsible for the observation and reporting coverage of the axis’s terrain.

Two pairs moved northeast toward the barbarian camp. Their route followed the terrain’s concealment features, the drainage ditches and tree lines and stone walls that the agricultural landscape provided, the features that the Verakhs’ training converted from landscape elements into movement corridors that the corridors’ appearance did not suggest. The Verakhs did not walk on roads. The Verakhs did not walk on open ground. The Verakhs walked in the spaces between the spaces that other forces used, the spaces that were invisible to the observation methods that other forces employed because the spaces’ inconvenience made them unworthy of observation.

The first pair reached the barbarian camp’s outer perimeter at the ninth hour. The perimeter was the perimeter that a highland army produced: loose, alert, dependent on the warriors’ individual vigilance rather than the structured sentry rotation that professional armies maintained. The barbarian warriors at the perimeter’s positions watched the landscape with the hunter’s attention that the highland tradition developed in warriors whose childhood training included the tracking and stalking of mountain game, the attention that detected movement and sound and the specific disturbances that living things produced in environments that living things occupied.

The Verakh pair did not produce disturbances. The pair lay motionless in the drainage ditch forty paces from the perimeter’s nearest warrior, their bodies pressed into the ditch’s contour, their cloaks’ colors matched to the ditch’s earth and vegetation, their breathing controlled in the rhythm that the Verakh training prescribed for sustained concealment: shallow, silent, the chest’s expansion limited to the minimum that consciousness required.

They watched. The barbarian camp’s layout was the layout that the previous surveillance had established and that the fourteen-day period’s intelligence requirements demanded confirmation of: the thundermaker positions, the ammunition stacks, the chieftains’ tent locations, the shaman positions, the infantry formations’ camping areas, the supply wagons’ parking area.

The layout was unchanged from the previous surveillance’s findings. The thundermakers were in the same positions. The ammunition stacks were in the same locations. The chieftains’ tents were in the same arrangement.

One detail was different. The shamans’ position had expanded. The area that the shamanic practitioners occupied had grown from the single tent cluster that the previous surveillance had documented to a larger cluster that included three additional tents and the specific ritual space that shamanic preparation required for extended magical operations. The expansion suggested that the shamans were preparing something that the previous magical doctrine had not included, the something that the expansion’s specific configuration implied.

The Verakh noted the expansion. The note was committed to memory because the they did not carry written records in the field. The memory would be delivered to Sakh’arran at the evening’s debriefing, the debriefing where every detail that every pair had observed during the day’s surveillance would be compiled into the comprehensive intelligence picture that Sakh’arran maintained and that Khao’khen’s decisions depended on.

The pair withdrew at the fourteenth hour, the withdrawal conducted with the same concealment discipline that the approach had required, the Verakhs moving backward through the drainage ditch for sixty paces before turning and following the concealment corridor back toward the Horde’s position.

They were not detected. They had never been detected. Their operational record across four months of continuous surveillance included zero detected approaches and zero compromised positions. The record was the record that the training produced when the training’s standard was perfection and the training’s consequence for failure was the failure’s detection by an enemy whose response to detection was the response that enemies produced when they discovered that the thing watching them had been watching them for longer than the discovery suggested.

Two pairs of Verakhs moved south toward the Threian positions. The southern surveillance was the surveillance that the Horde maintained of the force that had been its primary opponent for four months, the combined force under Aldrath whose five thousand soldiers at the capital’s approaches represented the kingdom’s institutional awareness of the Horde’s continued presence.

The Threian positions were easier to surveil than the barbarian positions because the Threian military’s structured sentry rotations produced the predictable patterns that the Verakhs’ training exploited. The sentries changed at the specific hours that the rotation schedule dictated. The patrol routes followed the specific paths that the patrol doctrine prescribed. The gaps between the sentries’ fields of observation were the specific gaps that the rotation’s timing produced, the gaps that the Verakhs moved through with the practiced precision of scouts who had been navigating the specific gaps that professional military sentry systems produced for four months.

The Threian camp’s disposition was the disposition that they had been documenting since the combined force established its current position. Five thousand soldiers. Standard fieldworks. The command tent at the camp’s center. The supply depot at the camp’s rear. The specific details that Sakh’arran required for the comprehensive intelligence picture that the fourteen-day period’s heightened significance demanded.