Batu POV

Batu rode toward the rising smoke and let the picture form from what he could see.

Four smoke columns to the west, two more southwest, a seventh beginning to the northwest. Dorbei’s parties had found their targets. The outer garrison compound fires were behind him, still creating smoke but dying toward coals now, and the agricultural zone ahead was burning section by section through the morning.

Three more days on the left bank after this one. The horses needed them, and the territory would give him something useful to do with each one.

He looked north. The inner defenses were not yet visible from this route. It would come into view before the day ended.

He turned his horse and rode toward Dorbei’s coordination position south of the raiding zone.

Nameless Raider POV

The settlement was thirty buildings along a single road, granary at the center, livestock pens to the east.

The defenders had chosen their position before the forty riders reached the outskirts. They had converged on the granary. Twenty-five of them, perhaps thirty, formed in a rough line across the entrance. A man on the granary’s flat roof held a short bow. He had seen them coming for some time.

The lead riders spread east and west before the first arrow came, cutting off the lane exits, and the man on the roof loosed at thirty meters.

The arrow entered the lead rider’s left forearm between the bones, the broadhead driving through the muscle and exiting the inner forearm just below the elbow. The rider made a sound through closed teeth and his grip on the reins loosened. He transferred the reins to his right hand and kept moving.

The return fire from three riders found the archer on the roof at twenty-five meters. The first shaft caught him in the shoulder and spun him half-around. The second entered left of center in his chest, driving through the ribs and into the lung behind them, and the air from the lung came out of the exit wound with a wet hiss audible across the distance.

He sat down on the roof and then slid off it and fell into the livestock pen below and did not move.

Three defenders were in the granary entrance with spears set.

The first rider drove his horse at the gap between the two outer spearmen. One spear caught the horse’s shoulder and glanced aside. The man had panicked at the last moment and the strike lost effect.

The horse hit the middle defender at his chest with its full momentum. The impact sent the man backward through the doorframe, the door giving inward under his weight, and he hit the granary interior floor with the horse’s foreleg coming down on his sternum.

The sternum gave under the hoof. Both sides of the rib cage drove inward along the fracture and what had been inside the chest cavity compressed into flesh, and blood came from his mouth and the back of his throat as the horse stepped past him and into the store.

The two outer spearmen were taken by the riders behind. The rest were under attack by the rear riders.

Inside, grain sacks were stacked in rows four meters high with a narrow aisle between them. At the far end, behind the last stack, something was breathing fast. A rider dismounted and went in on foot. He found the man crouched against the far wall with his arms around his knees. The saber took him across the back before he could straighten.

What could be loaded was loaded onto the pack horses that had come up to the entrance. What could not be loaded was opened, the sacks split along their tops and the grain running across the floor.

The fire arrows went into the thatch after the riders were out.

Dorbei POV

Dorbei was on a low rise south of the raiding zone.

Riders came back at intervals, pack horses laden, livestock driven in strings toward the ford. He tracked the count without writing it down.

A rider came in from the northeast at a canter and pulled up. He wiped dust from his face with the back of his hand.

"There’s a larger structure a kilometer northeast. The farmer we caught heading east said there are men defending it. He put the count at fifty."

Dorbei looked northeast. A depot of that description would hold more than anything his parties had hit so far.

"Take the largest group and go," he said. "Load what you can carry. Burn the rest. Don’t stay inside it."

The rider turned and went.

Dorbei turned back to the coordination work.

Nameless Raider POV

He was in the largest group when it turned northeast and could see the structure from three hundred meters.

The platform raised the building a meter off the ground, heavy timber walls, a ramp along the south face. The defenders were organized around the ramp’s base and on the platform itself, some of them carrying themselves like the garrison men from the outer earthworks that morning, standing properly, spears in the right position.

The group came under fire before they had covered half the distance.

A shaft came down from the platform’s height and entered a rider’s neck at its base near the spine, the trajectory driving it forward and downward through the throat muscles. The man’s hands went up and he stayed in the saddle while the blood came, and then he went sideways off the horse and hit the ground.

A second horse was hit through the chest from the same elevated position, the arrow reaching the heart. The horse dropped at a full canter, its front end giving without warning, and the rider was thrown forward and landed on his arms at the ramp’s base, and the horse collapsed behind him in the grass.

He got up. He found his saber.

The defenders at the ramp base were ten meters from him. He went at the nearest man, a garrison soldier with a spear leveled, and the spear caught his upper arm, the point dragging across the surface from shoulder toward elbow and opening the skin and muscle in a long gash.

He got inside the reach and put the saber into the man’s side below the ribs, angling upward into the abdominal cavity. The man’s arms came down and his body locked around the wound, folding at the knees.

The mounted flanking riders came around the north and south sides of the depot and the garrison men who broke for the forest to the east were let go when they reached the trees. The ones who stayed were taken or killed on the platform and at the ramp base.

It took twenty minutes after the last of the defense was done to load what the pack horses could carry. The grain inside was stacked to the rafters, more than anything else the morning had found.

After the loading was done, the fire arrows went into the timber base of the platform and the structure burned from below. He sat his horse on the open ground north of the depot with his arm bleeding along its full length and watched it catch.

Batu POV

The inner defenses came into view from the rise north of Dorbei’s coordination position.

A dark horizontal line against the flat terrain, the earthworks taller than the outer positions and the palisade above them heavier, the scale of it readable even at this distance.

What was on the horizon was a different problem than anything the morning had handled, and it was not today’s problem. Dorbei was on the rise to the south with his count and his coordination work, and the riders kept coming in.