Rise of the Horde

Chapter 786 - 785

The street fighting began at the breach’s interior and spread through the capital’s northwestern district like fire through dry timber, the fighting’s expansion following the street grid’s geometry from intersection to intersection, each intersection a chokepoint that the defenders held and the attackers breached and the holding and breaching produced the casualties that urban combat’s specific mathematics guaranteed.

King Aldric organized the street defense from the palace’s war room, the room where the council had met and where the maps now showed the capital’s street grid marked with the positions that the defense’s plan prescribed. The plan was the plan that urban defense’s doctrine provided: layered barricades across the major streets, firing positions in the buildings flanking the barricades, reserve formations at the intersections behind the barricades, the defense’s depth providing the time that the defense’s width could not because the barbarian assault force’s numerical and weapons superiority made the width’s defense untenable.

"The northwestern district is lost," Aldrath reported from the field command position at the first barricade line. "The barbarians control the breach area and the four blocks surrounding it. Our forces have withdrawn to the second barricade line at the market district’s northern edge."

"How many through the breach?"

"Approximately five thousand. They are expanding from the breach in the arc that breach exploitation tactic prescribes, securing the buildings adjacent to the breach and establishing the boomstick positions in the upper floors that provide the plunging fire into the streets that our own defense used against them in the corridor."

"They learned from our defense."

"They learned from our defense and they are applying the learning against us. The buildings that we used for plunging fire are now the buildings that they use for plunging fire. The tactic is the same. The direction is reversed."

The king looked at the map. The barbarian penetration at the northwestern corner. The arc of secured buildings expanding from the breach. The barricade lines that the defense’s plan had placed at the intersections where the northwestern district met the market district, the barricade lines that were now the front line of the defense that the city’s interior provided.

"The boomstick ammunition," the king said.

"The armory reserve is the last boomstick ammunition in the kingdom. The reserve was intended for the wall defense. The wall defense has failed. The reserve is now distributed to the barricade positions. When the reserve is expended, we fight with steel."

"How long will the reserve sustain the barricade defense?"

"At the current expenditure rate, approximately thirty-six hours."

Thirty-six hours. The number settled into the war room with the weight that finite numbers carried when the finitude was the constraint that the defense’s duration depended on.

* * * * *

The first barricade engagement at the market district’s northern edge was the engagement that street combat in a capital city produced when both sides understood that the street’s control determined the district’s control and the district’s control determined the city’s control.

The barricade was constructed from the materials that the market district’s commerce provided: market stalls’ timber frames, grain merchants’ storage crates, ironmonger’s stock of iron bars and plates, the accumulated inventory of a commercial district converted into defensive construction by soldiers whose engineering training had been supplemented by the dispatches from General Snowe’s defense of his dominion and Captain Merritt’s defense of Kellsworth.

The barricade’s timber-and-iron construction spanned the street’s forty-foot width and rose to a height of eight feet, the height that provided the cover that standing soldiers required while the barricade’s firing slits provided the apertures that the boomstick fire’s delivery required. The construction was not elegant. The construction was effective because the construction’s effectiveness was the effectiveness that timber-framed iron produced when the alternative was stone that cracked under thundermaker fire.

The barbarian infantry advanced down the street toward the barricade in the column formation that the street’s width dictated: twenty warriors abreast, the column’s depth extending back through the blocks that the barbarian breach exploitation had secured. The warriors’ boomsticks fired as they advanced, the rolling volleys sweeping across the barricade’s surface with the sustained density that unlimited ammunition provided.

The Threian soldiers behind the barricade returned fire through the firing slits. Each slit was an aperture six inches wide and twelve inches tall, the size that accommodated the boomstick’s barrel while minimizing the slit’s exposure to the incoming fire. The soldiers fired through the slits with the aimed precision that the slits’ limited field of view enforced: each shot aimed at the specific section of the street that the slit’s angle covered, each ball directed at the target that the slit’s field contained.

A Threian soldier fired through the slit at a barbarian warrior advancing at thirty paces. The ball struck the warrior’s visor and the visor cracked and the warrior fell. The soldier reloaded. The next warrior in the column filled the space that the fallen warrior had occupied. The soldier fired. The ball struck the next warrior’s breastplate and the armor held. The soldier reloaded. Three balls from the armory reserve expended. One kill. The conservation’s mathematics applied to the barricade defense the way the conservation’s mathematics applied to every engagement that the finite ammunition constrained.

The barbarian column pressed against the barricade. The column’s weight, the forward pressure of hundreds of warriors pushing against the warriors in front of them, applied the force that the barricade’s construction had to resist. The timber frames groaned. The iron plates shifted. The barricade held because the construction’s timber-framed flexibility absorbed the pressure the way the earthworks’ timber frames had absorbed the thundermaker impacts, the timber bending rather than breaking.

The thundermakers could not fire in the streets. The streets’ confined space and the barbarian infantry’s proximity to the barricade meant that the thundermaker balls’ impact radius included the barbarian assault force as well as the barricade’s defenders. The thundermakers, which had been the barbarians’ decisive advantage in every field engagement, were the weapons that the urban environment denied the barbarians because the weapons’ destructive radius exceeded the engagement’s spatial constraints.

The barbarians fought without their thundermakers. The barbarians fought with boomsticks and hand axes and the physical ferocity that highland warriors produced when the warriors were fighting in close quarters where the close quarters’ constraints eliminated the weapons advantages that the open field provided. The boomstick fire continued. The hand axes found the barricade’s surface and struck the timber and the iron. The barbarian warriors climbed the barricade’s face and the defenders at the barricade’s crest met them with swords and bayonets.

A barbarian warrior reached the barricade’s crest and swung his hand axe at the defender who held the crest’s position. The axe struck the defender’s shield and the shield’s timber cracked. The defender drove his bayonet into the warrior’s armpit, the point entering the gap between the breastplate’s shoulder plate and the arm’s mobility joint, the point sliding along the inner arm’s surface and severing the brachial artery. The warrior slumped against the barricade’s crest, his body draped across the timber frame’s upper edge, the blood from the severed artery flowing down the barricade’s interior face.

The next warrior climbed over the slumped body and the defender who had killed the first warrior could not withdraw his bayonet from the first warrior’s armpit because the bayonet was lodged in the joint and the withdrawal required the specific pull that the lodging’s angle demanded and the second warrior’s arrival did not permit the specific pull. The defender released the boomstick and drew his sword and the sword met the second warrior’s hand axe at the barricade’s crest and the exchange was the exchange that the crest’s confined space produced: short, brutal, decided by the fighter whose weapon found the gap first.

The second warrior’s hand axe found the defender’s neck. The defender fell inside the barricade. The warrior climbed over the barricade’s crest and dropped to the interior side and the three defenders at the interior’s base met him with the bayonets that the base’s defenders used for the specific purpose of killing the warriors who crested the barricade.

Three bayonets. Three points finding the warrior’s body at three different entry angles. The warrior fell.

The barricade held. The fighting continued. Each warrior who crested the barricade was killed by the defenders at the interior’s base. Each defender who fell at the crest was replaced by the reserve formation’s next soldier. The exchange rate at the barricade’s crest was the exchange rate that barricade defense produced: approximately three barbarian dead for each Threian dead, the ratio that the barricade’s tactical advantage provided to the defenders and that the defenders’ boomstick ammunition’s depletion would eventually neutralize.

Thirty-six hours of ammunition. The barricade held. The street held. The market district held. And the clock of ammunition counted down toward the zero that would convert the barricade defense from the defense that boomstick fire sustained into the defense that swords and determination sustained.

The capital fought. The barbarians pushed. The streets ran red. And the sound of the fighting, the boomstick fire and the hand axe impacts and the screaming of the wounded, carried through the capital’s streets and beyond the capital’s walls to the positions where the Horde’s observers watched the capital’s defense with the specific attention that observers applied to the thing they were observing and that the observing’s purpose determined.

The wolf watched. The capital fought. The week continued.