Rise of the Horde

Aldrath called the war council at the sixth hour of the morning, after the horse recovery operation had retrieved eighty of the hundred and sixty animals and the remaining eighty were confirmed as scattered across a ten-mile radius that cavalry patrols were still working through, after the mage quartermaster had confirmed that the communication crystal replacements were six days away by supply convoy, after the supply depot had been examined and the wolf on its face had been documented and photographed by the artist that the Lord Marshal’s office attached to significant campaigns for exactly this kind of documentation.

The war council had a quality that Aldrath’s councils had not previously possessed. His officers were experienced professionals and they were sitting in a camp that an enemy force had been inside the previous night without triggering any of the security measures that the Threian camp’s defensive organization was supposed to provide.

The security measures had not failed. The Verakhs had not defeated the security. They had read it, found its intervals and its rotation schedules, and moved through the gaps that the security’s design necessarily created.

There was no security measure that did not have gaps. There was no rotation schedule that did not create intervals. The Horde had found them because the Horde had invested the time and the skills to find them, and the investment had been made during the four days that the combined force had assumed was recovery time after the depression engagement.

"They were preparing the camp penetration while we were treating our wounded," the cavalry commander said, his voice carrying the edge of a professional who had not been outside the wall of military decorum long enough to let frustration produce unprofessional language but who was working at that edge.

"Yes," Aldrath said.

"We are at twenty-three thousand eight hundred effective soldiers," the intelligence officer said. "Their force is estimated at seven thousand eight hundred effective after the depression engagement’s casualties. A three-to-one numerical advantage."

"A three-to-one numerical advantage that has produced, in the engagement record of this campaign, zero decisive results in favor of the numerically superior side," Aldrath said. He said it flatly, the way that professionals stated facts that were unpleasant, with the directness that prevented the fact from being more uncomfortable than its content required.

"We have three-to-one advantage and they entered our camp. I want to hear recommendations from this council that address the specific problem this army represents rather than the general problem of orcish forces, which our doctrine addresses adequately and which is not the problem we are facing."

The room was quiet for a moment.

Captain-General Oswyn, who had been the member of the council most willing throughout the campaign to name the patterns he observed, spoke first. "They have two modes, and both modes are variations of the same underlying capacity. The first mode is disciplined tactical maneuvering, the kind of campaign behavior that the earlier Chapters of this campaign demonstrated. The second mode is what we saw at the depression engagement and what the camp penetration extended into the night. Both modes are expressions of the same force. The difference is the degree to which they are releasing the physical capacity of the individual warrior. In the first mode, they suppress it for strategic purposes. In the second mode, they use it as the instrument."

"Then the counter is to engage them before they can choose the mode," the cavalry commander said.

"How?" Oswyn said. "They chose the mode four days before we arrived at the depression. By the time we were in contact, the mode was chosen."

Aldrath had been listening with the focused attention he gave to staff conversations that were working toward something useful. "They choose the ground, they choose the timing, they choose the mode, and they choose when to engage. We have been responding to all four of their choices and building our responses from the information they give us about those choices, which is always information they have decided to give us."

"So we take one of the choices away," Snowe said.

"Which one can we take?"

"Timing. Ground and mode we cannot take without knowing where they are before they choose. But timing we can contest by moving in a way that does not give them the four days they used between the depression engagement and the camp penetration. We do not stop and recover. We move immediately after recovery, before the next preparation is complete."

* * * * *

The combined force broke camp before noon.

It was the fastest post-engagement movement that Aldrath had ordered in his career, the decision to move made while the horse recovery patrols were still in the field and the mage quartermaster was still taking inventory of the crystalline losses.

The camp was struck in three hours, the supply wagons loaded in parallel with the tent strike, the cavalry reformed from the recovered horses and the cavalry that had not been in the eastern engagement.

The Verakh surveillance post that was watching the Threian camp reported the movement within forty minutes of its beginning.

The report reached Khao’khen at the same moment he was sitting with Sakh’arran discussing the timeline for the next phase of the operational plan. He read it once and then set it on the map table in the way he set things when the information required immediate action rather than analysis.

"They are moving."

"How soon did they move?"

"Camp broken at noon. They moved four hours after finding what we left them."

Sakh’arran was quiet for a moment. "Aldrath is faster than we assumed."

"He is. Which means the timing plan changes." Khao’khen looked at the map.

The combined force moving from its camp position had limited options for where it could move in the time available before darkness required it to establish a new camp. The road north was toward the capital and away from the corridor, which was not the direction that military logic supported.

The road south was toward the Horde’s position, which was the direction that three-to-one numerical advantage supported if the combined force believed it could set the engagement’s terms by arriving before the Horde finished its preparation.

The road south. Toward the Horde. Before dark.

"They are trying to take the timing," Khao’khen said.

"Yes."

"Then we take the ground." He turned to the formation runners. "Move the Horde. Not south. East. Into the Meren valley. They are coming south toward a position that will be empty when they arrive."

The Horde moved east into the valley it had held for two weeks, and the combined Threian force marched south for four hours to find the position that held nothing but the echo of an army that was no longer there.