Batu POV

Torghul’s tumen was moving north when Batu looked south, at the smoke from the first position and understood what the second would look like when they arrived.

The first garrison had come south to find what was coming. The signal fire had given the second garrison time to do something different. Dorbei’s raiding smoke was already rising to the west, three columns from the agricultural ground beyond the ford where his dispersed parties had reached the winter stores.

Batu held this thought without warmth and moved past it.

Torghul POV

Torghul observed the second position from five hundred meters. The palisade walkway was fully manned. He could see from this distance the dark horizontal line of bows above the rail, arrows already nocked.

The first garrison had been caught by surprise. This one had prepared for over an hour. He gave the signal, and the tumen spread into its encirclement arc, the leading riders pushing east and west at a canter.

The garrison opened fire before the arc had closed.

The first volley came from the south wall at one hundred and fifty meters. A rider at the arc’s vanguard took a shaft through the throat as his horse was still moving.

The arrow entered the left side of his neck below the ear and punched through the muscle bundle and came out the right side in a spray of blood that reached his horse’s mane before his hand came up.

He did not fall. He pressed his palm against his throat, and the blood ran through his fingers in a thick pulse and down his forearm and across the back of his hand. His horse carried him another thirty meters while the blood kept coming.

Then his grip on the reins let go and he went off the horse’s near side without catching himself and hit the ground. The horse ran on.

A horse in the western arc took a shaft through the eye socket. The thin bone at the socket’s rear gave under the broadhead and the point drove through into the cranial cavity behind it. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

The horse dropped its front end without any intermediate step, head pitching down and legs folding at the same moment, and went chest-first into the grass at a canter. The rider went over its neck and into the ground.

The suppression fire went up from the encirclement, thousands of arrows going toward the south palisade in flat trajectories at a hundred meters. Two men on the walkway went down in the first return volley. One took a shaft through the chest and folded backward off the rail.

The other took one through the jaw from below, the point entering under the chin and traveling upward through the tongue and hard palate. The impact rocked his head back and he went sideways against the rail and stayed there gripping it, trying to hold himself upright.

Torghul looked at the gate. The garrison had barricaded it from inside, timber bulk visible through the opening, supply barrels and stable boards stacked against the interior face.

The fire would cost more here than the first position. He looked east along the wall and found the section he wanted, the timber posts paler and drier than the flanking sections. He turned to the relay rider.

"East section. Move the fire."

The fire arrows worked the east section for ten minutes while the encirclement kept its suppression. The base posts caught first, the pitch spreading where two arrows had found the timber at the earthwork crown, and the dry wood took the fire fully.

By the time Torghul signaled the assault, the section was burning from the base up and the posts were failing inward.

Nameless Rider POV

The assault wedge moved east along the outer perimeter and turned north for the assault. From the second wave, he could see the burning wall at two hundred meters, posts leaning as their bases gave. Archers on the flanking sections were shooting down at the ground in front of him.

A rider two positions ahead took a shaft through the left thigh at eighty meters. The arrow entered the outer thigh, drove through the muscle, reached the femur, and deflected downward along the bone’s surface, exiting the inner thigh below where it entered.

The man made a sound before he could stop it, a single compressed exhalation with his teeth locked, and his left leg drove hard against the saddle from the involuntary contraction. The horse pulled right.

He corrected with his right leg, and the correction pulled the shaft sideways in the wound. The man made the sound again, longer this time.

He did not stop. He kept going at the same pace, the shaft still through his thigh, blood running down both sides of the saddle leather.

The burning section came down when the first horses pushed against it. The left post cracked at its base and the wall leaned inward, then the second post gave and the third, and the whole burning stretch fell across the interior floor, trailing sparks.

They stepped over it and went through.

The garrison’s remaining men were in the barrack block doorway and at its two windows, using the timber walls as cover. The opening was too narrow for a horse, and the men in it had spears set.

The first assault rider to reach the block drove his horse at the doorway. The defender in there had his spear at chest height for a mounted man.

The spearhead went into the horse’s neck below the jawline, angling upward. The shaft bowed but held because the rider’s momentum drove the horse forward onto it.

The horse screamed, raw and very high, and its front legs buckled from the damage in the neck. It went down chest-first into the compound dirt and rolled onto its side.

The shaft snapped under the animal’s weight as it rolled, the broken point still buried in the neck. The horse’s legs worked the air in hard, irregular strikes against the ground as it tried to rise and could not, each impact sending a jolt through the dirt.

The rider was thrown over the horse’s neck when it buckled. He hit the ground on his left shoulder, rolled once, and came up with his saber.

The defender who had set the spear stood empty-handed in the doorway for a few seconds, still processing what had happened. The rider cut across the man’s forearm on the upswing, the saber opening the arm from wrist to elbow, and on the return found the throat.

The cut went through the skin and muscle and into the carotid. Blood came out fast and dark in a pumping stream. The man’s hands went to his neck as he sank down in the doorway.

Other riders were already coming through behind him.

The barrack block’s defense came apart in the minutes that followed.

Torghul POV

Torghul came through the collapsed wall after the interior had stopped fighting. He looked at the compound floor and the block doorway and did not stand in it long.

He turned to the relay rider and received the count for both positions combined. Eleven riders dead, twenty-nine wounded and riding, sixteen horses gone.

He looked at the grain store and gave the same orders as before, to carry what the loads could hold, burn the rest.

Then he walked his horse to the earthwork’s crown and looked north. Both positions burned behind him. Dorbei’s raiding smoke was visible from three directions now as his parties moved through the settlements that had fed this garrison.

The outer defensive ring was gone. The day’s first objective was complete, and the day was not yet finished.