Chapter 903 - 902
Chapter 903: Chapter 902
The Threian western column hit the highland build site at dawn on the fourteenth day following Brekk’s departure, with sixty soldiers in a force composition that was not a patrol. Sixty was a company, and a company had objectives rather than routes.
Brekk had been in the north for two weeks, fighting the Threian advance at the Ravine settlement. He had sent back the numbers Drakk asked for: approximately two hundred soldiers in the western column’s main force, operating in rotating detachments of forty to sixty, pushing south along the highland terrain’s western ridge system. He had also sent back the intelligence Drakk had not asked for but needed: the western column was being supplied by a forward depot three days north of the highland boundary. The depot’s existence meant the column’s presence was not a probe. It was a sustained operation.
The build site had a palisade on the western approach and a stone wall on the eastern side and a finished cistern and a windbreak wall and the first floor of a twelve-room residential structure whose foundation stones included the corner block from Var’kha’s original settlement, sitting three feet beneath the current grade. The Ashkar families who were sleeping in the fire-hall were scheduled to move into the first floor’s completed rooms in eleven days.
What the build site did not have was sixty soldiers’ worth of defensive capacity. Tharuk had twelve workers capable of combat. Droktagar had seven. The highland warriors assigned to site security were eight, the number that had been adequate for patrol deterrence and completely inadequate for a company assault.
The attack came from the western approach, through the palisade, at dawn when the light was bad for defenders and the terrain confusion was high. The first workers through the palisade breach were knocked down before the alarm bell had completed its second ring.
Tharuk heard the bell from the first floor’s unfinished stairwell and came down the stairs at a run, which was not a run that a mason should have been capable of but that a former Fifth Realm warrior could still produce when the situation required it. He came out the building’s eastern door and immediately saw that the palisade’s western section was breached and that eight workers were between the breach and the building.
He did not have a sword. He had a four-pound stone hammer in his belt and a two-foot pry bar that he had been using on the stairwell’s riser stones. He went to the palisade breach.
"On the building," he said to the workers behind him. "Hold the building door. Do not let them inside."
He did not wait to see if they understood. He went to the breach and used the pry bar as a staff, which was not optimal, and his weight and his former warrior’s trained body, which were.
The highland security warriors were already engaged at the palisade’s southern corner. Their commander was a woman named Sarra who had been one of Ishara’s people before the garrison rotation sent Ishara to the Arch. Sarra fought with the controlled efficiency of highland close-quarters training: short blade, constant movement, never presenting a stationary target, using the palisade’s corner timber as a position that limited the angles she could be approached from.
The Threian soldiers were professional. They were not fighting with the kind of urgency that meant they expected resistance at this scale. A construction site with workers and eight security warriors was not what their intelligence had told them to expect. What their intelligence had told them was a cistern and some walls. What they found was a cistern, walls, a partially built two-story building, and a former Fifth Realm warrior blocking the main breach with a pry bar.
The soldier who came through the breach first saw Tharuk and adjusted his approach for a larger target and swung. Tharuk took the blow on the pry bar and stepped inside the swing and hit the soldier in the knee with the stone hammer. The soldier went down. The next soldier through the breach stepped over the first and was already swinging before he had fully cleared the palisade gap, which was the mistake that a moment’s urgency produced and that a former Fifth Realm warrior was trained to recognize and use.
Tharuk used it.
He held the breach for seven minutes. Not through superior skill, though his skill was real, but through the specific tactical advantage of a single narrow gap that channeled the force on the other side into ones and twos rather than the full sixty. Seven minutes was enough.
Drakk arrived with forty warriors from the eastern ridge, where the clan’s reserve force had been stationed following the first raid. He had not moved them from the eastern ridge until the alarm bell rang because moving them before the attack materialized would have told the Threian scouts that the site was aware of the surveillance.
Forty highland warriors against sixty Threian soldiers, on terrain the highland warriors had been walking for their entire lives, in the early morning light that the highland warriors knew and the Threian soldiers were working against. The odds were not comfortable but they were workable.
The fight lasted twenty-one minutes.
The twenty-one minutes of the main engagement were not the whole of the defensive action. Before the main engagement there was Tharuk at the palisade breach, and that was seven minutes of fighting that shaped the conditions for everything that came after.
Tharuk had no shield. He had a pry bar and a stone hammer and the specific understanding of a former Fifth Realm warrior who knew that a narrow gap was an equalizer. A gap that was two feet wide channeled the force on the other side into a series rather than a mass, which meant the skill of the person defending the gap was more relevant than the number of people who could be on the other side of it.
He was hurt twice in seven minutes: the forearm cut in the seventh minute and a bruised shoulder in the third from a shield edge that caught him when he was already moving to the wrong side of the gap. He noted both and continued working because noting them did not require stopping.
The workers he had sent to the building door held it. He heard them holding it from the palisade breach and he did not look back to check because looking back at the thing you trusted was the action of someone who did not actually trust it. He had told them to hold the door. They held the door. That was what he had built in the months since the chisel and the name-plates: people who did what they said they would do because the work required it and they had learned that the work requiring it was reason enough.
When Drakk’s forty arrived and the engagement shifted from Tharuk’s seven minutes of pry bar against company assault to a proper military engagement on terrain the highland warriors knew, Tharuk moved to the building’s eastern door and stood there until the fight was over. He was not guarding the door. He was standing near the foundation stone three feet beneath his boots. He was not sure why he did this. He did it.