Rise of the Horde

Chapter 673 - 672

The message that Khao’khen sent to General Snowe was carried by a Verakh under a white flag, which was the second time in the campaign that the Horde had initiated formal communication under that protocol, the first being the delegation to Greywater that had returned with a crossbow bolt as its answer.

The Verakh found Snowe’s advance guard four miles north of the corridor entrance, the Threian vanguard’s pace slowing as it absorbed Thaddeus’s withdrawing force and the colonel’s report of the corridor’s loss.

The white flag was respected without hesitation, because whatever Snowe’s other qualities, he was a soldier who observed the conventions that made warfare between professional forces something different from the unstructured slaughter that the absence of those conventions produced.

The message was brief, written in Sakh’arran’s precise formal Threian and delivered in a sealed dispatch case that the Verakh placed in the vanguard commander’s hands with the instruction that it was addressed to General Snowe personally.

It read:

The Yohan First Horde holds the southeastern corridor, the provincial capital of Irenmere, and demonstrated operational capacity within the interior of the eastern province.

The Horde does not seek the destruction of the kingdom or the permanent occupation of its territory. It seeks formal acknowledgment of the orcish people’s right to self-determination in the southern territories, the withdrawal of Threian military forces from the frontier zone south of Valdenmarch, and a negotiated agreement that establishes the terms under which the two civilizations may exist without the recurrence of the invasion that produced this war.

The Horde proposes a cessation of offensive operations by both parties for a period of thirty days, during which representatives may meet under agreed terms to determine whether the conditions for a lasting settlement exist.

If the kingdom does not wish to discuss these terms, the Horde will continue operations and the discussion will be held under less favorable conditions for the party that declined it.

Sakh’arran had written it. Khao’khen had approved it word by word.

* * * * *

Snowe read the message at his command position in the corridor, Thaddeus’s report spread on the map table beside it, the arithmetic of his current situation detailed in the colonel’s characteristically precise language.

He read both documents twice, set them side by side, and spent a long time looking at the gap between them.

The military reality was clear. His force of fifteen thousand had been maneuvered across the eastern province for two weeks by an orcish army of eight thousand that had demonstrated, at every decision point, a capacity for strategic and tactical innovation that the kingdom’s military had not credited to the species that produced it. He had won engagements.

He had also been outmaneuvered in ways that had repeatedly converted his numerical advantage into irrelevant pressure against a force that declined to be where he needed it to be.

The corridor was in orcish hands.

The provincial capital had been in orcish hands. The Lettra barony had been occupied, however briefly, as a demonstration of reach that had required him to detach forces at an operationally significant moment.

The Horde had not destroyed his force.

His force was intact, cohesive, and capable of continuing operations.

But the question of what continuing operations would accomplish was one that the past two weeks had made genuinely uncertain in ways that his professional confidence had not previously had to accommodate.

More soldiers were coming. The kingdom had been mobilizing its broader military reserves since the campaign crossed the frontier, and the forces that would eventually concentrate against the Horde would be substantially larger than anything the eastern province had managed to produce.

But those forces were weeks away, and during those weeks the Horde would continue to operate in the interior, occupying and releasing positions with the fluid purposefulness that had characterized its entire campaign, establishing the political and psychological facts on the ground that shaped what any negotiation would ultimately look like.

He drafted his response.

* * * * *

The response reached Khao’khen before nightfall.

It was not an acceptance.

It was not a rejection.

It was a communication from a general to an opposing commander that said, in the formal Threian that Snowe’s staff produced with considerably more polish than Sakh’arran’s translation captured: the matter of terms for cessation of operations was beyond the authority of a field commander to determine and required consultation with the kingdom’s council and the Lord Marshal’s office.

General Snowe was prepared to transmit the Horde’s proposal through appropriate channels and to request a response with the urgency the situation warranted.

During the period of that transmission and response, he was prepared to maintain his current positions without offensive action, which he understood to be the practical equivalent of the thirty-day cessation proposed, while the proposal was under consideration.

"He is saying yes," Sakh’arran said, "in the language of a man who cannot say yes without authorization."

"He is also saying that he is sending the proposal to people who can say yes or no with authority," Khao’khen said. "What does the council look like?"

"The kingdom’s council includes voices from every province that has been touched by this campaign. The eastern province’s governor has been cooperative with our occupation and will communicate that cooperation to the council as a data point about the Horde’s conduct. The Baron of Lettra will communicate that his estate was occupied and evacuated without harm, which is a different story from the one he would have told if we had burned it. Colonel Cedric will communicate that his sword was returned to him. And Gresham, who has been sitting in Valdenmarch watching our supply wagons move through his countryside without incident for two weeks, will communicate whatever a frontier colonel communicates when the enemy he was assigned to stop has behaved in ways that complicated his professional assessment."

Khao’khen absorbed this with the quiet attention of a commander who had been planting these particular seeds since before the campaign crossed the frontier and was now considering what the harvest might produce.

"We maintain our positions," he said. "We do not advance. We do not withdraw. We hold what we hold and we let the kingdom’s council speak."

"And if the council says no?"

"Then Snowe and I continue the conversation we have been having since Thornfield, and we continue it in the knowledge that the kingdom’s council looked at everything we have demonstrated about what the Horde is and what it seeks and concluded that demonstrating it more forcefully was the required response."

He stood and walked to the tent’s entrance and looked south, through the corridor mouth, toward the highlands and the long road to Yohan.

The Snarling Wolf banner caught the evening wind above the position, its profile against the fading sky the same as it had been above every position the campaign had occupied, fixed and forward, the wolf’s expression not the anticipation of victory but the refusal of defeat, which was a different thing entirely and one that the past weeks had shown the Threian military something they had not previously understood about the creatures who marched beneath it.

The eastern province was not broken. The Threian military was not destroyed. General Snowe was alive and capable and would continue to be formidable regardless of what the council decided.

But the Horde had come eight hundred miles from its city in the southern plains, had fought the kingdom’s frontier fortress, crossed its defended river, occupied its provincial capital, demonstrated its reach into the kingdom’s interior, and sealed the corridor that connected it to its base against the concentrated effort of fifteen thousand professional soldiers.

And it had done all of this without burning a farmstead that was not a military target, without killing a civilian who was not a combatant, without treating a single surrendered garrison with anything other than the respect that the return of a sword communicated.

The wolf snarled. The message was sent. The council would answer.

And whether that answer was yes or no, the world that received it was a different world from the one that had existed before the Snarling Wolf crossed the frontier, because the world that existed now knew something about the orcish people that the previous world had not known.

They had built something worth fighting for, and they had fought for it in a way that made the fighting itself into an argument for the thing they were fighting to protect.

Yohan endured. The Horde endured. And the wolf waited, as it always had, for whatever came next.