Rise of the Horde

The cavalry engagement that developed east of the depression was unlike the cavalry actions earlier in the campaign.

Earlier engagements between Haguk’s wargs and the Threian horse had been characterized by the particular dynamic of warg predator psychology against trained cavalry instinct, the wargs’ superior aggression and the horses’ natural fear of predatory animals producing outcomes that favored the wargs in confined terrain and at short range.

The Threian cavalry had adapted across the campaign, their riders learning to maintain tighter formation to limit individual horse exposure to the wargs’ close-range aggression and to use their greater numbers to compensate for the individual disadvantage.

The adaptation was correct. It was also built on the assumption that the Warg Cavalry would continue to operate as it had been operating, using speed and predatory intimidation as its primary instruments.

Haguk had received his new instructions.

Two thousand Threian cavalry moved east at the gallop to relieve the ridgeline force that Trot’thar’s assault was pressing back up its own slope. They were organized in the squadron formation that the Threian cavalry’s doctrine specified for rapid response: a leading element of four hundred riders to make contact and fix the enemy position, three following elements of five hundred each to exploit the contact in sequence.

The leading element was three hundred paces from the eastern ridgeline when Haguk’s riders came out of the low ground to the north.

The Warg Cavalry did not use the ambush formation that earlier engagements had favored. Four hundred and sixty riders came out of the low ground in a single line, the line stretching across four hundred paces of open ground, every rider at the full gallop that the wargs could sustain for the distance between the low ground and the contact point. Not pairs. Not packs. A line.

What the leading Threian element saw was a wall of wargs moving toward them at a speed that made the two forces’ closing rate something that required immediate decision, and the decision that cavalry made when it saw a wall of faster predatory animals closing at full gallop from the front was not a comfortable decision to make in the three seconds available.

The leading element’s commander made the correct decision, which was to wheel the formation ninety degrees and present the line’s flank rather than its front to the closing wargs. The wheel was competent and rapid and reduced the collision impact significantly.

It also took the leading element ninety degrees off its original direction and pointed it at the low ground to the north rather than the ridgeline to the east, which was not where the ridgeline force’s relief needed it to be.

The following elements hit the leading element’s reformed position from behind as the leading element’s wheel brought it across their approach line. The resulting tangle of four formations trying to reorganize at the gallop in the face of a warg line that was now forty paces away was the kind of cavalry situation that cavalry training addressed in quiet drills on flat ground and that cavalry reality reproduced in a compressed, chaotic, dust-obscured version that bore limited resemblance to the drill.

Haguk drove his line into the tangle.

The next twenty minutes were the most expensive cavalry engagement of the campaign for the Threian horse.

* * * * *

Dhug’mhar hit the road column’s western flank at the moment that the cavalry engagement to the east was consuming the attention of the combined force’s command position.

The Rumbling Clan chieftain had positioned his forty riders in the drainage feature that ran along the road’s western edge, where the ground was soft and the vegetation was dense enough to conceal the distinctive silhouettes of the great-horned mounts from observation at more than a hundred paces.

Forty riders was not the force that the western ridgeline’s four thousand infantry represented, and Dhug’mhar was not interested in engaging four thousand infantry. He was interested in the road column’s flank at the point where the column was most compressed by the road and most engaged at its front by the 1st Warband’s rotating assault.

The compressed, engaged, front-focused road column was not watching its western flank at the moment Dhug’mhar chose.

He chose with the instinct for timing that was the Rumbling Clan chieftain’s particular gift, the ability to read the moment when an engaged force’s attention had narrowed to its front and its flanks had become the thing it knew about rather than the thing it was watching. The moment was there for perhaps thirty seconds. Dhug’mhar used it.

The Rumbling Clan’s mounts came out of the drainage feature at the full gallop, their horns lowered, the paired blades of bone that had gutted corrupted ogres in the Season of Damnation and broken the protecting company of Snowe’s command post at the Eastern Road engagement now aimed at the compressed road column’s flank at a range that made the target impossible to miss and the impact impossible to absorb.

The mounts hit first. Three tons of armored animal at full gallop moving into a column of infantry that was packed so tightly by the road’s width that there was nowhere for the warriors who absorbed the initial impact to move.

The warriors nearest the impact were not knocked over. They were thrown, the transferred momentum of three-ton animals at speed producing a physics that the human body could not negotiate on favorable terms. The warriors behind them had the warriors in front of them land on them, and the warriors behind them were pressing forward because the front of the column was engaged and the rear elements did not know that the flank had just opened.

Dhug’mhar came through the mount’s initial impact with his weapon already moving, the two-handed swing that he used when the objective was not precision but devastation, the blade moving through the space that the column’s compression made into a harvest rather than a duel. The riders behind him did the same, forty blades moving through forty lanes of the same compressed opportunity that the column’s geometry had made for them.

The road column’s western edge erupted.

Not broke. Erupted. The difference was important. Breaking was a formation losing its coherence gradually under sustained pressure. Erupting was a formation losing its coherence at a specific point in an instant, the shock propagating outward from the impact point in both directions along the column before the command structure could address it.

The road column’s western edge erupted, and Dhug’mhar rode through the eruption and out the other side, turned his mount, and assessed the damage with the cool professional eye that existed behind the grin.

"Again," he said, and the forty riders turned with him.

Three more passes. Four. The road column’s western edge was no longer a coherent element of the formation and the column’s center was rotating to address the flank that its edge had ceased to provide, which meant the center had turned away from the 1st Warband’s rotating front, which meant the 1st Warband had just received room to press.

Arka’garr took it.