Rise of the Horde

Chapter 671 - 670

The first night corridor run succeeded, and its success was the product of the specific precision that Haguk applied to every operation he designed.

Twelve riders entered the corridor at the third hour past midnight, moving in the silence that warg-mounted cavalry could maintain at low speed through terrain they had already surveyed.

Two pairs led, their mission the observation posts that Thaddeus had established at the three-mile mark and the eight-mile mark of the corridor’s final approach, the positions that would make the supply wagons’ passage impossible if they remained occupied.

Six riders flanked the wagon train through the corridor’s full length, covering the approaches that a Threian cavalry probe might use and creating the early warning time that would allow the wagons to halt and the wargs to engage before a probe reached contact with the supply column.

Eight wagons moved through the corridor in the dark at the pace that the track and the muffled wheels allowed, their teams walking rather than trotting, the drivers following the Verakh markers that had been placed in the corridor’s covered sections earlier in the evening.

The cloth strips wrapped around the wheels reduced the sound to the level that blended with the highland night’s ambient noise: wind through the corridor’s limestone walls, the distant sounds of the camp above, the occasional shift of stone that the cooling temperature produced.

They arrived at the ridge position at the first gray lightening before dawn.

Their cargo was unloaded with the efficient urgency of warriors who understood that the ammunition being stacked in the ridge position was the ammunition they would expend when Snowe arrived and that arriving before Snowe meant the difference between a resupply and a desperate measure. Six hundred Roarer loads. Eighty fire spheres. Three days of rations at operational consumption rates.

The wagons turned and began the return north before full light, and Thaddeus’s dawn patrol, sweeping the corridor’s approach section with the systematic attention of troops who had been told that overnight activity was a possibility, found the two observation posts empty and a set of wheel tracks in the corridor’s clay surface that told a clear and unwelcome story.

The colonel’s response was the response of a professional who understood that what had happened once would be attempted again.

He tripled his picket strength in the observation section, established three additional visual posts at the corridor’s turns where the track provided natural concealment for approaching traffic, and dispatched a cavalry patrol up the corridor to follow the wheel tracks, assess what had moved through, and determine what the supply run implied about the Horde’s operational timeline.

The patrol found the Verakh who had been waiting in the third bend with the particular patience that the Verakh network’s training produced in its scouts: absolute stillness for hours in a position that covered the approach and that provided no indication of its occupant’s presence until the moment the occupant chose to make that presence known.

The crossbow bolt that removed the patrol leader from the equation was fired from fifteen paces in the dark, the range close enough that the treated bolt ignited on impact and the flare it produced was the first indication the remaining patrol members had of where the threat was coming from.

They withdrew. Thaddeus received the report and noted the resistance in his dispatch to Snowe along with his revised assessment of the probability that a second resupply run would succeed.

* * * * *

Snowe’s response arrived at Thaddeus’s position on the evening of the second day, carried by a dispatch rider whose pace confirmed that the general considered the timing important.

The general was moving with his nine thousand soldiers at forced march pace. His estimated arrival at Thaddeus’s position was thirty hours. His instructions to the colonel were specific: maintain the current position, deny corridor resupply by every available means, do not initiate a general assault on the ridge position until Snowe’s arrival provided the numerical weight that would make an assault decisive rather than merely expensive.

Thirty hours.

Khao’khen received the Verakh report on Snowe’s timeline with the same absence of visible reaction that characterized his reception of all significant intelligence, the composure not concealing the calculation that was happening behind it but rather reflecting a calculation that had been running continuously since before the corridor was reached.

"Thirty hours," Sakh’arran said. "The second convoy run is planned for tonight. If Haguk succeeds against the reinforced picket line, we extend operational capacity by four additional days beyond Snowe’s arrival."

"Against fifteen thousand soldiers holding the south while Thaddeus holds the north," Khao’khen said. "The picket line will be harder tonight. Thaddeus has had a day to improve it and he does not improve things carelessly."

"No."

"What has Trot’thar reported from the north?"

Sakh’arran unfolded the most recent Verakh message from the holding position. "The main position is intact. Snowe’s withdrawal toward the corridor drew pressure off Trot’thar’s line as the assessment predicted, his nine thousand moving south rather than maintaining the containment force at full strength. Trot’thar has been using the reduced pressure to conduct the reconnaissance that the Verakhs identified as possible during the holding period."

He moved his finger to a point on the map two miles east of the corridor entrance. "A low ridgeline here. It connects to the open ground behind Thaddeus’s fortifications. The face of the ridge on Thaddeus’s side is not fortified because Thaddeus designed his position to face the corridor mouth and the direct approach from the ridge. He did not design it to face an attack from behind."

Khao’khen studied the route, measuring it against the distances and the time that remained before Snowe’s arrival changed the arithmetic permanently.

"Can Trot’thar be in position on that ridgeline in twelve hours?"

Sakh’arran calculated. "If he moves immediately and holds his forced march pace through the night, he reaches the eastern ridgeline at approximately the time that a dawn assault from the front would be optimal for engagement."

The window was narrow enough that the margin for delay was not a margin at all.

"Send the message," Khao’khen said. "Cancel the second convoy run. Redirect Haguk’s riders to reach Trot’thar before dawn with the movement order. The supply risk we accept. The flanking position we cannot afford to miss."

The wolf banner came down from its pole above the ridge position, not to signal retreat, but because the standard-bearer had been given the instruction to prepare the pole for movement, which was a different signal entirely and one that the warriors of the Horde had learned to read correctly.

The movement that preceded commitment was always different from the movement that preceded withdrawal, in the quality of the preparations, in the direction the warriors faced while they made them, in the particular expression that settled over a formation when it understood that the waiting was over and the thing that the waiting had been building toward was now in motion.

What was in motion now was the last operation the corridor engagement would require if it succeeded, and the assault that would be launched at dawn with everything the Horde had committed itself to bringing to this point in this campaign.