Rise of the Horde

Chapter 655 - 654

Ashford was a town rather than a fortress, and General Snowe understood the distinction precisely, which was why he had chosen it.

The settlement occupied the confluence of the River Ashwell's two principal tributaries, a natural chokepoint where roads from three provincial directions converged at a series of stone bridges that were, individually, narrower than the North Bridge crossing but collectively more complex to force because they were distributed across four hundred paces of converging waterways.

An army assaulting from a single direction could not bypass all of them without exposing its flanks to the defenders who held the bridges it had left untouched. An army assaulting all of them simultaneously would need to divide its force into elements small enough that the garrison could defeat them in detail.

The town's buildings, stone construction in the old provincial style whose walls were thick enough to withstand Roarer fire at anything beyond close range, formed a labyrinth of streets and alleys that infantry could defend from every doorway and rooftop.

But the strategic value of Ashford was not its defensibility. It was its communications.

Three roads converged here, and three roads meant three avenues of reinforcement. From the east, the Baron of Lettra whose territory is adjacent to Valdenmarch just few leagues to the north.

From the north, the provincial capital's garrison had been mobilizing since Gresham's first dispatch arrived and could reach Ashford in two days of hard marching. From the west, a detachment of the kingdom's Second Army, stationed in the provinces near the kingdom's capital for reasons that had more to do with the political requirements of the capital's defense than any immediate military threat, was now marching east under orders cut in sufficient haste that the ink was probably still wet on the dispatches.

If Snowe could hold Ashford long enough for these forces to arrive, the arithmetic of the campaign reversed itself. Four thousand from the north. Two thousand from the east. Three thousand from the west.

Nine thousand additional soldiers against a Horde that had extended its supply line through a highland corridor and burned through its fire sphere inventory at North Bridge and was marching through territory it did not know against a population that was not neutral but actively hostile to its presence.

The numerical advantage that the Horde had maintained throughout the campaign would disappear, and with it the momentum that had carried eight thousand warriors from the southeastern highlands to the Threian heartland in less than two weeks.

He had perhaps two days to hold before the forces converging on his position made holding unnecessary.

The engineers began fortifying Ashford's bridges immediately upon the army's arrival, working through the night with the focused efficiency of soldiers who understood that the structures they were strengthening would determine whether they lived through the next engagement. Barricades of stone and timber rose at each bridge approach, their construction supervised by engineers who had spent careers designing exactly these kinds of rapid field fortifications.

Crossbow positions were established at the windows of the buildings that commanded the widest fields of fire across the bridge approaches. The mages, six practitioners whose combined capability was modest compared to a battle-mage of the Order of the Seal but whose coordinated workings could layer effects that individual effort could not sustain, warded the approaches with barriers designed to channel any assault into the killing zones where the infantry companies concentrated their fire.

Colonel Thaddeus organized the town's evacuation with the practiced urgency of an officer who had managed civilian populations under military pressure before. The inhabitants of Ashford, approximately fourteen hundred souls in normal times, were moved north toward the provincial capital with whatever they could carry in the time available.

Some refused, unable or unwilling to abandon homes that their families had occupied for generations. Some had livestock that could not be moved quickly enough. Some were elderly or infirm and could not sustain the march.

Thaddeus made provision for those who could not go, established collection points for those who could, and continued the military preparations in parallel with the humanitarian management because there was not enough time to do them in sequence without sacrificing one to the other.

By the time the Horde's vanguard scouts appeared on the southern road, Ashford had been transformed.

The open market town of the previous afternoon had become a prepared defensive position whose complexity and depth made it something different from both the stone walls of Valdenmarch and the bluff fortifications at North Bridge. This was not a barrier to be bypassed or a chokepoint to be flanked.

This was an urban defense layered through three dimensions, street level, building interiors, and rooftops with the defensive capacity that prepared infantry in stone construction produced when its engineers understood how to use the structures around them.

The Verakhs delivered their assessment with the precise contextual detail that the network demanded: three bridges fortified to varying degrees of strength, with the central span bearing the heaviest construction.

Infantry in the buildings on both banks, their positioning suggesting overlapping fields of fire rather than the concentrated defense of a single chokepoint. Mage workings active on the two eastern approaches, the energy patterns consistent with channeling barriers rather than offensive preparations.

No cavalry visible within the town perimeter, which indicated either that the remaining mounted forces were screening to the north or that they were held in reserve behind the town in a position the Verakhs had not yet located.

Khao'khen studied the town's skyline through his spyglass and thought about the cost of what he was seeing. Urban fighting consumed warriors at rates that open-field or perimeter engagement did not, and it consumed them in ways that produced less tactical return per casualty than any other form of combat.

Every building was a micro-fortification. Every alley was a potential ambush. Every intersection was a chokepoint that the defenders had already assessed, marked, and prepared their responses to while the attacking force arrived at it fresh and ignorant of its hazards.

The Roarers were too dangerous to fire in streets where warriors on both sides might be in the same fifty-pace stretch. The fire spheres could not be used near buildings that would burn and kill indiscriminately.

The Rhakaddons were useless in alleys that their bulk would not fit through. Every advantage the Horde had built over eight months of preparation became less decisive in terrain that compressed the engagement to the individual and the squad rather than the warband and the formation.

And behind those bridges, Snowe had time. Two days of time, if the reinforcements moved at their expected pace. Time that the Horde's extended supply line and diminishing fire sphere inventory could not afford to give him.

He lowered the spyglass. He looked at the Snarling Wolf banner where it flew above his command position, the wolf's outlined profile steady in the morning air, its snarl directed at the town's rooflines with the quality of a symbol that had learned, over the course of the campaign, not to be impressed by obstacles.

"We do not attack Ashford," Khao'khen said. "We go around it."

Sakh'arran's expression shifted by precisely the fraction that indicated he had reached the same conclusion three minutes earlier and was relieved to hear it confirmed.