Rise of the Horde

Chapter 657 - 656

Greywater's walls were three centuries old, and they showed it in the way that maintained old things showed their age, not in decay but in the particular solidity of stone that had been repaired many times and knew what it was supposed to be.

The fortifications had been built in the period when the eastern provinces faced a threat from a direction that no longer existed, constructed by engineers whose names were lost to time but whose understanding of defensive geometry was evident in the overlapping fields of fire that the tower placements created, in the way the wall's course followed the natural contours of the ground to eliminate the dead angles that attackers exploited, in the thickness of the gatehouse construction that suggested the engineers had understood that gates were always where the enemy would focus and had built accordingly.

Three centuries of garrison commanders had maintained the walls with the professional instinct that understood neglected stone became rubble and rubble was not a wall, and the result was a defensive structure that was old without being weak.

It was also, as Khao'khen noted through his spyglass from the high ground south of the town, manned by a garrison that had not finished assembling when the Horde's vanguard scouts appeared on the southern road.

The Verakh assessment was precise in the way that the network's training demanded: the provincial garrison, approximately two thousand soldiers whose equipment and formation discipline indicated professional military service rather than militia origin, had been reinforced by levies from the surrounding settlements, adding perhaps eight hundred additional fighters whose individual quality was uncertain but whose numbers were real and whose presence on the walls thickened the defense in ways that raw numbers, whatever their limitations, always did.

The wall-walks were crowded with soldiers whose activity, the movement of supplies, the positioning of crossbow crews, the consultation of officers over the sectors they had been assigned, communicated clearly that the garrison's preparation was ongoing rather than complete.

The timing was, for once, entirely in the Horde's favor.

A garrison defending walls needed time the way any defensive position needed time: to position its forces in the sectors that the defensive plan assigned them, to distribute its ammunition and its supplies to the points where they would be needed, to establish the communication protocols between the towers and the wall-walk and the reserve positions that allowed a defense to respond to assault rather than simply react to it.

The Greywater garrison had some of that time but not all of it, and the difference between a defense that was ready and a defense that was still becoming ready was the difference between a wall that felt like stone and a wall that felt like something that could be found wanting if the pressure was applied in the right place at the right moment.

Khao'khen did not assault immediately. The instinct to hit a partially prepared enemy before it completed its preparations was correct in principle, but the application of that instinct required knowing which preparations mattered and which were superficial.

A garrison that had positioned its crossbow crews but not yet distributed its reserve ammunition was vulnerable to a sustained assault that exhausted the initial supply before the reserve arrived. A garrison that had positioned its officers but not yet established its communication protocols would lose cohesion when the assault created multiple simultaneous crises that the command structure could not coordinate responses to.

The Verakhs' continued observation would identify these details if given the hours to develop them.

He established the Horde's encampment on the high ground with the deliberate, visible thoroughness of an army that intended to stay. The positioning of the formations was tactical rather than merely convenient, the Rhakaddons to the center where the town's defenders could see them and calculate what they represented, the Roarer emplacements to the flanks in arrangements that suggested prepared fire positions rather than marching deployment, the catapults assembled from their transport configuration by the troll engineering corps and positioned at four hundred paces where they could reach the walls but the crossbow positions on those walls could not effectively reach them.

The message the encampment delivered was architectural: this army intends to break your walls if you force it to, and it is in no hurry about it.

Sakh'arran sent a delegation forward under a white flag, because there were things that fighting could not accomplish that conversation sometimes could, and because a garrison that chose to fight when fighting served no strategic purpose was a garrison that would cost the Horde warriors it needed for what came after Greywater.

The delegation carried a message written in the formal Threian script that Sakh'arran had spent years teaching himself to produce with precision: the Yohan First Horde sought passage north, not the destruction of Greywater.

A garrison that opened its gates would be treated with the respect owed to professionals who recognized when continued resistance served no purpose greater than the price it extracted. A garrison that forced an assault would receive the treatment that a garrison which forced an assault deserved.

The garrison's commander, a colonel named Cedric whose provincial reputation was built substantially on his refusal to be moved by any argument that ran contrary to his standing orders, declined. His response was a crossbow bolt that struck the delegation's white flag staff ten paces from the negotiators, close enough to be a clear statement, far enough to avoid killing ambassadors, which was a crime even Threian military law recognized.

Khao'khen received the refusal without visible reaction. Colonel Cedric was buying time. General Snowe was somewhere behind the Horde with a reformed force, and Cedric's calculation was that if he held long enough, the pressure from behind and the pressure from Greywater's walls would compress the Horde between two forces simultaneously. The calculation was not unreasonable. It was also, Khao'khen judged, precisely two days optimistic.

The catapults opened fire that evening.

Not with the rolling barrage that would have maximized destruction but with the deliberate, targeted precision of crews who had been trained to find the structural vulnerabilities in stone construction and exploit them methodically.

The gatehouse took the first attention, its towers struck by stones that cracked the merlon coursework and sent fragments skittering across the wall-walk in showers that drove the defenders away from the observation positions they needed to monitor the Horde's preparations.

The southwest tower came second, its base receiving the sustained attention of two catapults whose crews walked their impacts along the foundation line with the patience of engineers who understood that stone failed slowly and then all at once.

By midnight, the southwest tower had a crack running from the second stone course to the fourth. It was visible in torchlight from five hundred paces. The garrison's engineers would see it too, and they would calculate what it meant for the tower's structural integrity, and that calculation would reach Colonel Cedric's desk before dawn.

Inside Greywater, the colonel read the engineers' assessment and sent a dispatch to General Snowe with the particular urgency of a commander who had stopped calculating when relief would arrive and started calculating how much time he had before the relief became irrelevant.