Rise of the Horde

Chapter 904: Chapter 903

The Threians left eight dead at the build site when the twenty-one-minute engagement ended.

The count had been established before the last exchange of blows because highland warriors counted opponents with the same automatic precision they applied to their own people. Sarra gave Drakk the figure when he arrived at the palisade: eight dead, four on the western approach side of the breach, four within the perimeter. The surviving Threian soldiers had withdrawn north in order, not in rout. They had taken their wounded with them.

That detail told Drakk more about the force’s quality than the attack itself had.

He went to the breach.

The gap was eight feet wide at its widest point. The timber had not been cut. It had been struck repeatedly with something heavy and swung with consistent force, a controlled battering rather than a hasty assault. The force that had come through was not improvising. The breach point itself confirmed this: the western face, the section of palisade farthest from the stone wall and closest to the completed cistern, positioned to place the attacking soldiers between the building and the workers’ fastest route to the eastern defensive line. Someone had studied this site before the attack and selected the approach based on what they observed.

Drakk made a note of this and went to find Tharuk.

Tharuk was at the eastern door of the building with his left arm wrapped in a strip of work linen. The cut was three inches long and not deep. It was the kind of wound a forearm collected when its owner had used it to block something intended for the head. He was standing near the wall where two of his workers were pressing fresh mortar into a crack that a falling Threian soldier had opened in the eastern face’s lower course.

The stone beneath was undamaged. He was watching it anyway.

"The cistern," Tharuk said when Drakk reached him. "They were going for the cistern."

"That was not their primary objective," Drakk said. "They were assessing this site’s defensive capacity. The cistern would have been secondary, something to destroy on the way out to degrade our operational position."

Tharuk looked at him. "They planned this before they came."

"Yes," Drakk said.

The workers Tharuk had sent to hold the building door were five of the twelve capable fighters he had pulled from the crews. Three of those five had left the door position when the fighting became general and had joined Sarra’s people on the southern palisade section. Tharuk found this out from Droktagar, who had watched them go. He did not say anything about the three who had left. He said: "The two who stayed held the door." Droktagar said they had. That was the accounting.

Sarra’s report was three sentences. Two of her eight warriors had sustained injuries requiring treatment: one a cut across the left shoulder, one a compression blow to the ribs that had not broken them but had made full breathing painful. Both remained functional. None of her people were down.

She said: "The force that hit us was a company. Sixty minimum."

"Yes," Drakk said.

"The last Threian raid on the eastern ridge positions was thirty-two."

"Brekk’s figures put the main western column at two hundred," Drakk said. "Sixty is thirty percent of that committed to a construction site assessment. They are not raiding anymore."

Sarra understood the implication without him explaining it further. He could see her placing it.

Drakk sent three reports before the morning’s second hour was complete.

The first went to Kael: the attack’s composition, the selected breach point, the controlled withdrawal with wounded, and his assessment that sixty soldiers from a column of two hundred represented a deliberate allocation against a specific objective rather than opportunistic frontier pressure. He added one line: the breach point was chosen, not improvised. Pre-attack observation of this site is confirmed.

The second went to Brekk at the Ravine settlement with the same operational numbers and an additional notation: the attacking force had intelligence on this site’s layout before they arrived. We have either been under observation longer than the patrol patterns suggested or the western column has better interior coverage than the raid history implied.

The third report went to the Ashkar families still sleeping in the fire-hall. It was two sentences. The attack has been repelled. The building schedule continues.

Then he went to the palisade breach to calculate what it would take to close it before dark.

Droktagar brought four of his people to the breach repair. The gap required a brace structure before the permanent section could be installed, a temporary frame to hold the line through the following night. Tharuk walked Droktagar through the brace sequence from memory: measurement points, timber angles, the load distribution order. He did not assist with the physical work. He stood at the breach line and gave measurements and Droktagar’s people executed them correctly.

The temporary brace was in place by midday.

Drakk walked the perimeter twice after the brace was set. He walked it the way a commander walked ground after an engagement: not checking the obvious things but looking for what the immediate aftermath had obscured. He found it forty yards south of the breach point, two places where scrub brush had been cut back from the palisade’s exterior face in the days preceding the attack, clearing sight lines to the breach point from the western ridge line above.

They had been watching for at least four days before they moved.

He added this to the report to Kael with a notation at the bottom: the observation period places the western column’s forward scouts inside the highland interior boundary a minimum of four days before the assault. This is not frontier pressure. This is a sustained intelligence operation preceding a deliberate assault on a specific target.

He sent the updated report with the same rider who was already saddled for Kael’s camp.

The foundation stone that Tharuk had been standing near after the fight was the Var’kha corner block, three feet below grade. It had not moved during the engagement. It had not moved in four thousand years before this morning and it had not moved this morning either. Tharuk stood near it in the way that he sometimes stood near it, not consciously, not for any reason that could be stated to Droktagar or Sarra or Drakk. He stood near it and then he went back inside to check the stairwell riser stones, because the schedule had called for the stairwell work today and the attack had not changed the schedule.