Rise of the Horde

Chapter 723 - 722

The morning after the Eastern Plain was quiet in the way that mornings after large battles were always quiet, the specific silence of a landscape that had been saturated with violence and was resting, the way a field rested after a storm, the damage visible but the energy that had produced the damage discharged.

Khao'khen walked the battlefield at dawn.

He walked alone, because the walk was not a tactical inspection but a personal one, the walk that a commander made when the battle was done and the cost needed to be felt rather than counted. The counting was Sakh'arran's work. The feeling was the chief's.

The dead were being collected by the warband details that the post-battle protocol required. Orcish dead carried to the collection point where the shamans would perform the rites that orcish tradition prescribed. Threian dead collected separately, with the respect that Khao'khen's standing order required, the order that enemy dead were treated with the same care that orcish dead received because the enemy's soldiers had fought with the professional courage that fighting deserved to be honored with, regardless of which side the fighters had stood on.

He stopped at the position where the spear wall had held for four hours. The ground was marked by the specific evidence of what the spear wall produced: a line of disturbed earth, the boot-furrows of two thousand warriors who had held their position against the pressure of forty thousand soldiers, the ground compressed and scarred by the weight of the thing that had happened on top of it. In front of the line, the dead lay in the pattern that the spear wall's killing geometry created, the bodies concentrated at the range where the long spears' points met the advancing soldiers' bodies, the pattern dense at the center where the pressure had been greatest and thinning toward the edges where the flanking warbands had operated.

"Mok'na vol," Khao'khen said, to the dead. Ancestors, we do not forget. The memorial oath, the words that were spoken for the fallen on both sides because the fallen had been warriors and warriors deserved the memory regardless of the banner they had fought under.

He walked to the position where the Rhakaddon charge had broken the combined force's center-right. The ground bore the marks that fifty-seven three-ton animals produced when they ran through an infantry formation at full speed, the deep hoofprints in the earth, the scattered debris of weapons and armor that the charge had displaced, the wider pattern of destruction that radiated outward from the charge's path.

He walked to the position where the 11th and 12th Warbands had broken the left flank. The position where the battle had turned. The ground here was different, the marks of a close-quarters infantry engagement rather than a cavalry charge, the boot prints and blood stains and scattered weapons of warriors who had fought each other at arm's length for the minutes that it took the fresh warbands' assault to break the tired flank's coherence.

* * * * *

He returned to the market hall at the eighth hour. Sakh'arran was at the table with the maps and the numbers and the assessment that the analytical officer produced after every engagement.

"Six hundred and forty-one dead," Sakh'arran said. "Eight hundred and ninety wounded, of whom approximately six hundred will return to the formation within two weeks. Our effective strength at that point will be approximately seven thousand two hundred."

"And theirs?"

"The battle's losses reduce their effective strength to approximately thirty-nine thousand. The ford battle's cumulative losses bring the campaign total since the new phase began to approximately ten thousand eight hundred. Their effective force is now smaller than the combined force was before the Second Reserve Corps arrived."

The number settled into the room with the weight that numbers carried when they represented the distance between where a campaign started and where it had arrived.

"We have reduced their force by ten thousand eight hundred soldiers in six weeks," Khao'khen said. "At a cost of fifteen hundred and sixty dead and approximately two thousand wounded. The exchange ratio is seven to one."

"The exchange ratio is not sustainable indefinitely. Our losses are absolute. Our reinforcement is zero. Every warrior we lose is a warrior who is not replaced. Their losses are replaceable from the capital's reserves. The kingdom's total military capability exceeds one hundred thousand soldiers. Ours is eight thousand. The seven-to-one ratio must be maintained or improved for the campaign to remain viable."

Khao'khen looked at the map. The positions had shifted since the campaign's new phase began. The Horde held the Meren valley, the ford, and now the eastern plain. The combined force had withdrawn to a defensive position east of the plain, its camp reduced in confidence and expanded in the protective perimeter that the Throat Team operations and the ghost fires and the camp penetration's memory required.

"The dispatch Aldrath sends tonight will reach the council within a week," Khao'khen said. "The council that receives it will be a council that committed twenty-two thousand additional soldiers and still lost the pitched battle. The council will make a decision. The decision will determine whether the campaign continues or whether the council chooses to revisit the peace that it rejected."

"And if the council chooses to continue?"

"Then we continue. The wolf does not choose whether to fight. The wolf fights whatever is in front of it. If what is in front of it is thirty-nine thousand soldiers, the wolf fights thirty-nine thousand soldiers. If it is one hundred thousand, the wolf fights one hundred thousand. The wolf fights because the alternative is the end of everything the wolf was raised to protect, and that alternative is not acceptable. Not to the wolf. Not to the Horde. Not to Yohan."

He looked at the Snarling Wolf banner in the corner of the hall.

"Grak'ul mok, thrak vol duum," he said. Blood of the strong, earth of the fallen, no surrender.

The wolf waited. The battle was won. The campaign continued. And the Horde, reduced by fifteen hundred dead and surrounded by hostile territory and outnumbered five to one by forces that could be reinforced and resupplied from a kingdom whose resources exceeded the Horde's by an order of magnitude, continued because the alternative was not acceptable and because the wolf did not accept alternatives.

The wolf accepted only one thing: the completion of the task it had been raised to perform. And the task was not yet complete.

Forward. Always forward. The wolf waited.