Rise of the Horde

Aldrath reached the depression at dusk and found it empty, and the finding of it empty was more instructive than finding it occupied would have been.

An empty position told him several things simultaneously.

It told him that the Verakh network was faster than his camp movement had hoped it would be.

It told him that the orcish commander had received the report of the movement and had responded with a displacement rather than a reinforcement of the position, which was the response that accepted the premise that the combined force had successfully taken the timing initiative and denied it simultaneously by vacating the ground before the initiative could be exercised.

And it told him that wherever the Horde had gone, it had gone in the four hours between the Verakh’s report and the combined force’s arrival at the empty depression.

Four hours at the Horde’s marching pace was approximately twenty miles in open terrain, less in difficult terrain. The Horde could be anywhere within a twenty-mile radius of the depression.

His cavalry patrols went out at first light, five squadrons in five directions, and found the answer at the third hour: the Meren valley. The Horde was back in the valley, occupying Millbridge again, and the valley road’s grain traffic was stopped again, and the wolf banner was back above the market hall in the position where it had flown for the two weeks of the diplomatic sessions.

Aldrath received the cavalry report at his command post in the depression, where the combined force had made camp for the second time in a week, and he sat with it for a long time.

The Horde was back in the valley. Back on the ground that had cost the combined force four hundred and thirty soldiers at the dock crossing. Back on the ground that channeled any advance force into a single road and a river that could not be forded. Back in the position that the Horde understood better than the combined force did because the Horde had been there for two weeks and the combined force had not.

"He is doing it deliberately," Snowe said, standing at Aldrath’s shoulder with the map between them. "He knows we see the pattern. He is showing us the pattern. He is telling us that he can return to any position he has previously held faster than we can respond to the return, which means he can choose the ground at any moment by simply choosing to return to it."

"He is showing us that we cannot control where he fights."

"Yes."

"Then we make where he fights irrelevant. We do not go into the valley. We go around it. We seal the corridor entrance from the south. We cut the supply line completely and we hold the seal until the supply constraint produces the result that the military engagements have not."

Snowe was quiet for a moment. "He sealed the corridor entrance with eight thousand warriors against six thousand of ours and held it for three days before Trot’thar’s flanking maneuver broke Thaddeus’s position. We have twenty-three thousand eight hundred. The maneuver that broke Thaddeus’s position requires Trot’thar’s force to reach the ridgeline behind the blocking position. Trot’thar’s force is inside the corridor on the orcish side of any blocking position we establish."

"Then we seal it at the southern mouth, which is inside the highland corridor where Trot’thar cannot reach without coming south through the corridor past our position."

"To establish a position at the corridor’s southern mouth requires moving through approximately forty miles of highland terrain that the Horde’s Verakh network controls and that our cavalry cannot screen effectively. Forty miles of highland approach through terrain where an eight-thousand-warrior force can ambush a road column in the confined spaces that the corridor’s geography creates."

Aldrath set the map down and looked at nothing in particular for a moment.

"He has been inside our decision loop since the beginning of this campaign," he said.

"Yes," Snowe said. "That is the campaign."

* * * * *

The dispatch that reached the Lord Marshal’s office on the twelfth day after the depression engagement was longer than any previous dispatch and was written in the voice of two generals who had completed their analysis and arrived at a conclusion they had not anticipated when the campaign began.

"The Yohan First Horde cannot be defeated in the conventional sense by the forces currently available to this command," the dispatch read.

"Not because the force is more numerous or better equipped, it is neither, but because its command structure is operating at a level of tactical and strategic sophistication that consistently denies us the conditions under which our numerical advantage becomes decisive. Every condition we create, it dissolves. Every position we establish, it vacates or flanks. Every timing window we open, it closes before we can use it. In the depression engagement, the force demonstrated that its physical capacity, when fully released, is also a significant tactical asset that our doctrine has not been designed to address. The combination of discipline and ferocity in a single force is not a combination that the Threian military has a response to that we can deploy in the field."

Aldrath wrote the final paragraph himself, without Snowe’s input, because the final paragraph was a recommendation that went beyond military assessment into the territory of policy, and policy recommendations from field generals required the individual accountability of individual authorship.

"This command recommends that the Lord Marshal’s office reconsider the council’s position on the diplomatic process, specifically the question of whether the word that terminated the diplomatic arbiter’s authorization can be authorized in a subsequent mandate. The military path to a favorable resolution of this campaign is not visible from the field. The diplomatic path, while difficult, has a visible structure and a demonstrated counterpart who has shown consistent good faith throughout a campaign in which good faith was a choice rather than an obligation. We are losing this campaign slowly. The rate of loss is not catastrophic. It will become catastrophic when the supply constraint on the orcish side is resolved, which it has demonstrated it can resolve through means we cannot reliably interdict. This command recommends that the council act before the situation forces the acting."

The dispatch rider departed north at the fastest pace the roads allowed.

And in the Meren valley, the Snarling Wolf flew above Millbridge’s market square in the afternoon wind, the wolf’s snarl directed at nothing in particular and everything in general, patient in the way of an animal that had made its choice about direction and needed only the time that all directions eventually required.

The war was not over. But the two generals who had spent eight weeks trying to end it on terms favorable to the kingdom had just told the kingdom, in writing, that they could not.

The kingdom would have to decide what to do with that information.

The Horde would wait for the decision with the same patience that it had waited for everything in this campaign, the patience that Khao’khen had built into it from the first day, the patience that looked like stillness and was actually readiness, the wolf’s patience, fixed and forward and absolutely unwilling to be anything other than what it was.