Rise of the Horde

Chapter 656 - 655

The bypass of Ashford was more complex than the bypass of Valdenmarch had been, and the complexity was the point.

Valdenmarch was a fortress isolated in open terrain, its garrison unable to sortie against a screening force without abandoning the walls that gave it strategic value. The garrison of a stone fortress was defined by the stone fortress itself, its strength was its immobility, and that immobility was also its limitation. A force that declined to assault the walls could move around them without interference from a garrison that could not pursue without surrendering its own purpose.

Ashford was different. The town's garrison was infantry, infantry that could move through the buildings and streets of its own defensive position faster than an external force could move around the perimeter.

If the screening force that contained Ashford left gaps, Snowe could drive forces through those gaps and strike the Horde's main body during its passage. If the screening force was dense enough to eliminate the gaps, it would consume the warriors that the main body needed for its continued advance.

The balance between containment and preservation was narrower here than it had been at Valdenmarch, and getting the balance wrong in either direction would cost the campaign something it could not recover.

Sakh'arran solved the problem with the methodical ingenuity that was his particular genius. Rather than a static cordon, he proposed a mobile screen: two warbands in continuous movement around Ashford's perimeter, their formations too dispersed to assault the town but too numerous and too unpredictably active to ignore.

The movement pattern was designed not to be a patrol, predictable, exploitable, but to be a pressure, the constant suggestion of imminent assault that forced the garrison to keep its infantry at the bridges rather than detaching them to pursue the column passing to the north.

Paired with Haguk's Warg Cavalry maintaining active pressure on the roads north and west, the mobile screen would create the tactical environment Sakh'arran's plan required: a garrison that felt besieged while being left entirely alone, spending its energy managing a threat that never quite materialized into the assault that its preparations had been designed to receive.

The main body would split. Three warbands would push north along the eastern road, skirting Ashford's eastern edge at sufficient distance to remain outside the effective range of the mages' channeling workings, which the Verakhs had assessed at approximately two hundred paces from the bridge approaches.

Two warbands would move west, crossing the tributary streams at the shallows that the Verakh surveillance had identified during the advance through the region, waist-deep crossings over smooth stone, manageable in daylight with the water running at its current early-season level. The two elements would converge north of the town's defensive perimeter and continue the advance toward the provincial capital by mid-afternoon.

The complexity was in the timing. Three simultaneous movements, the mobile screen, the eastern element, the western element, each one dependent on the others maintaining their pace and position. A screen that moved too slowly would compress the eastern element against the town's defensive range.

An eastern element that moved too fast would open a gap that Snowe could exploit before the western element had cleared its tributary crossing. The synchronization that Sakh'arran's plan required was the kind that drills approximated and combat tested, and the test was now.

The Horde executed it with the precision that eight months of preparation had built into the warriors' bone-level understanding of formation movement.

The eastern element moved at first light, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Warbands under Arka'garr's direct command slipping north along the road at the measured pace that kept the intervals between units constant as the terrain shifted from open farmland to the more broken ground east of Ashford's buildings.

They passed within half a mile of the town's eastern face, close enough to be observed from the upper floors of the stone buildings that rose above the defensive perimeter, close enough that the garrison's crossbow crews could see the formations and estimate their numbers, too far for the mages' workings to reach and too numerous for the sortie that one company could have managed to have any effect on.

The western element crossed the tributary streams in the predawn darkness, moving quietly through knee-deep water that was cold enough to make the warriors' legs ache but shallow enough that the crossing posed no structural threat to formation integrity.

The Verakhs guided them through without a torch, the scouts' intimate knowledge of the crossing route accumulated over months of surveillance sufficient to navigate the passage in conditions where most forces would have halted until daylight made the way visible.

The mobile screen performed its function with the operational thoroughness that Sakh'arran's design demanded. Snowe, observing from the town's central bridge, dispatched two companies to probe the eastern approach when the Horde's vanguard appeared on that road, and the screen's northern warband responded by advancing to within three hundred paces of the bridge approach before halting, a demonstration of force precise enough to recall the probe companies without triggering a general engagement. Snowe recalled them.

The screen shifted north, covering the gap the recall had created. Snowe sent a second probe west, and the screen's western element moved to meet it with the responsive mobility that four hundred and sixty Warg Cavalry riders added to the two warbands' infantry mass.

The message every exchange delivered was identical: the garrison of Ashford could hold its bridges or it could pursue the Horde's main body, but it possessed neither the numbers nor the strategic permission to do both.

By midday, the Horde's two elements had converged seven miles north of Ashford on the provincial road, the town and its garrison left behind in the south with the Snarling Wolf banner's passage marking the northern sky as it rose above the reunited column and caught the afternoon light.

The wolf moved north above the formations the way it had moved above every mile of the campaign, not triumphant, never triumphant, that was not the animal's expression, but persistent, forward-pressing, fixed on the direction of march with the quality of a creature that understood there was only one relevant direction and that direction was always ahead.

The screening force under Trot'thar would maintain its mobile pressure for one more day before withdrawing north to rejoin the column. By that time, the reinforcements converging on Ashford from three directions would have arrived, and Snowe would find himself commanding a force large enough to pursue the Horde through terrain it had already passed through, terrain where the advantages of local knowledge now belonged to the orcish army rather than to the kingdom whose provincial roads it had been marching along for days.

Three days' march ahead lay Greywater. Beyond Greywater, the provincial capital.

The march continued. The wolf did not stop.