Rise of the Horde

Chapter 797 - 796

The first barbarian to die in the capital’s streets died confused.

He was a Fourth Realm warrior from the Broken Tooth clan, a man who had descended from the Gorath Highlands three months ago with the first wave and who had survived Fort Harken and the Harken Valley and every engagement since. He had fought well. He had killed seven Threian soldiers across the campaign’s engagements. He had earned the wine that the celebration provided and he had consumed the wine in the quantity that the earning’s celebration demanded and he had fallen asleep on a bench in the market district’s central square with his boomstick across his chest and his hand axe at his belt and the specific unconsciousness that highland wine consumption produced in warriors whose tolerance for fermented goat milk did not translate to tolerance for Threian vintages.

He woke to the sound of seven thousand orcish voices roaring inside the capital’s walls.

The sound entered his awareness through the specific filter that wine-impaired consciousness produced: a deep rumbling that the warrior’s sleeping brain initially categorized as thunder, then recategorized as an earthquake, then recategorized again as the thing the sound actually was, which was the sound of a very large army announcing its presence in a place where the army’s presence was not expected and where the army’s announcement communicated the specific information that announcements at the fifth hour communicated: the thing that was announcing itself was the thing that had come to fight.

He sat up. The bench’s wooden surface creaked under his shifting weight. His boomstick slid from his chest and he caught it with the reflexes that the Fourth Realm’s combat training provided, the reflexes slowed by the wine’s impairment but functional at the level that the Realm’s neural enhancement sustained past the impairment’s natural degradation of response time.

He looked down the street. The street was the market district’s central thoroughfare, the broad avenue that connected the market square to the eastern district’s residential blocks. The avenue was forty feet wide. The avenue’s eastern end was two hundred paces from the bench where the warrior sat.

At the avenue’s eastern end, the 3rd Warband’s Yurakk formation stood.

Hundreds of orcish warriors in the rectangular-shield-and-stabbing-sword configuration that the Yurakk warbands deployed for urban combat. The shields’ overlapping coverage filled the avenue’s width. The warriors’ eyes were visible above the shields’ rims. The eyes were the eyes that orcish warriors produced when the warriors had been waiting for weeks to fight and the waiting was over and the fighting was here.

The warrior’s boomstick came up. The weapon’s barrel aimed at the formation that filled the avenue’s far end. The warrior’s finger found the trigger mechanism. The finger squeezed.

The boomstick fired. The ball crossed the two-hundred-pace distance and struck a Yurakk warrior’s rectangular shield. The shield’s iron face absorbed the ball’s impact. The ball embedded in the shield at the depth that the shield’s layered iron construction permitted, which was the depth that stopped the ball without the ball penetrating to the warrior behind the shield.

The Yurakk formation advanced.

The advance was not the charge that the avenue’s distance invited. The advance was the measured, step-by-step progression that urban combat’s specific requirements demanded: one step per heartbeat, each step’s placement verified for the footing that urban terrain’s irregular surfaces required, each step accompanied by the shields’ maintained coverage that the advance’s disciplined pace sustained.

"Zug zug mag," the formation chanted. The chant was quiet. The chant was the murmur that hundreds of voices produced when the voices’ volume was controlled by the urban environment’s acoustic amplification, the stone walls and the hard surfaces converting the murmur into the sound that filled the avenue with the specific quality of an approaching thing whose approach’s pace was deliberate and whose approach’s purpose was the purpose that the chant’s words described.

We are one. We are war.

The warrior on the bench fired again. The ball struck another shield. The shield held. He fired a third time. The ball struck a third shield. The shield held.

He looked at his ammunition pouch. Six charges remaining. Six balls. The formation was one hundred and fifty paces away and closing at the pace that would cover one hundred and fifty paces in approximately three minutes.

Six balls. Three minutes. And behind the six balls, his hand axe and his sword and the Fourth Realm’s combat capability against hundreds of orcish warriors whose advance’s discipline communicated the specific information that the advance’s pace communicated: these warriors were not going to be stopped by six boomstick balls.

He ran.

* * * * *

The confusion spread through the barbarian-occupied districts at the speed that confusion spread through armies whose communication systems depended on the command structure’s alertness and whose command structure’s alertness had been degraded by the celebration’s wine consumption and the celebration’s assumption that the threats were gone.

Warriors woke in the buildings where the celebration had deposited them: in the market stalls, in the merchants’ shops, in the taverns whose cellars had been emptied, in the palace’s corridors and chambers. They woke to the orcish battlcries echo produced in the capital’s stone-walled streets, the echo’s sustained reverberation providing the ongoing acoustic stimulus that the initial oath’s speaking had initiated and that the streets’ geometry sustained past the speaking’s completion.

A warrior in the northwestern district stumbled from a tavern doorway with his hand axe drawn and his boomstick slung across his back and the specific disorientation that the transition from wine-impaired sleep to combat alertness produced in a body whose neurology was processing the transition through the filter that wine’s metabolic byproducts imposed on the neurology’s processing speed.

He looked south down the street that connected the northwestern district to the market district. The street was narrow, twenty feet wide, the buildings’ upper stories overhanging the street at the height that the buildings’ construction’s medieval architecture produced. The street’s southern end was occupied by shapes that the predawn’s limited light and the warrior’s wine-impaired visual processing rendered ambiguous for the two seconds that the ambiguity lasted.

The shapes resolved. The shapes were orcish warriors. The shapes were the 7th Warband’s forward element, twelve Yurakk fighters moving through the narrow street in the two-abreast formation that the street’s twenty-foot width permitted, their rectangular shields covering the formation’s front and flanks, their stabbing swords held in the specific ready position that the swords’ close-quarters function demanded.

The warrior raised his boomstick. The sighting was the sighting that wine-impaired targeting produced: approximate rather than precise, the barrel’s aim directed at the general area that the formation occupied rather than the specific target that sober aiming would have selected.

He fired. The ball struck the wall beside the formation. Stone fragments sprayed across the lead warrior’s shield. The lead warrior did not flinch. The lead warrior advanced.

"DUUM!" The defiance cry erupted from the forward element as the twelve warriors accelerated from the advancing pace to the assault pace, the rectangular shields raised, the stabbing swords extended past the shields’ edges in the specific configuration that the assault’s closing distance required.

The barbarian warrior’s hands reloaded the boomstick. Powder. Wadding. Ball. Ram. The sequence took fourteen seconds. The formation was twelve paces away when the sequence completed. The warrior raised the loaded boomstick.

A Yurakk warrior’s rectangular shield struck the boomstick’s barrel. The impact drove the barrel sideways. The boomstick fired into the wall. The ball struck stone. The warrior’s hands, still gripping the boomstick, were wrenched by the shield’s impact, the grip loosening, the weapon’s control lost.

The Yurakk’s stabbing sword came over the shield’s top edge. The narrow blade found the gap between the barbarian’s helmet and gorget, the gap that every armor design left exposed, the gap that the stabbing sword’s narrow point was specifically designed to exploit. The blade entered the gap at the angle that the gap’s two-inch width permitted and the point found the cervical spine.

The barbarian fell. The Yurakk warrior stepped over the body and continued the advance. The forward element moved through the narrow street toward the northwestern district where the barbarian occupation’s concentration was densest and where the engagement’s primary contact would occur.

Behind the forward element, the 7th Warband’s full formation followed. Hundreds of warriors filling the narrow street in the two-abreast column that the street’s width demanded, each warrior’s rectangular shield covering the warrior’s front and the adjacent warrior’s flank, the column’s depth extending back through the street’s length in the specific visual that an orcish warband produced when the warband was moving through urban terrain toward the engagement that the urban terrain contained.

The capital’s streets absorbed the Horde’s advance the way the capital’s streets absorbed everything: the advance’s sound echoing from the stone walls, the advance’s visual presence reflected in the windows’ glass, the advance’s physical footprint marking the cobblestones’ surfaces with the boot prints that seven thousand orcish warriors produced when the warriors were walking through a city’s streets at the assault pace.

The barbarians were waking. The Horde was advancing. The capital’s streets were becoming the battlefield that Khao’khen’s plan had designed them to be: the battlefield where the thundermakers could not fire easily and the boomsticks’ range advantage was neutralized by the streets’ confined distances and the Horde’s tactical advantages in close combat were the advantages that the streets’ confined spaces maximized.

The wolf was hunting. The hunt was in the streets. And the streets were the wolf’s terrain now.