The battle at Ashford Junction was the battle where the king's ammunition ran out.

Not depleted. Not reduced. Ran out. The thundermaker batteries fired their last balls at the fourteenth hour of the engagement and the crews stood behind weapons that were now eight-ton monuments to the kingdom's former capability, weapons whose iron barrels gleamed with the dwarven craftsmanship that had made them and that the dwarves would never repair or replace because the grudge was the grudge and the Book of Grudges did not have an eraser.

The engagement had begun well. The king's army, reduced to sixteen thousand effective, had fortified the junction where three provincial roads converged, the defensive position chosen because the junction's geography created a natural funnel that compressed the barbarian advance into the frontage that the Threian force's reduced numbers could cover.

The thundermakers had fired for eight hours. Eight hours of sustained bombardment that consumed the last of the stockpile that three generations of dwarven trade had built and that six months of dwarven trade severance had made irreplaceable. Each ball fired was a ball that the crews knew was among the last, and the knowledge produced the specific firing discipline that finite resources demanded: each shot aimed with the care that a shooter applied when the shot might be the final shot the weapon ever fired.

A thundermaker crew chief named Harwick, a veteran of twelve years whose career had been built on the assumption that the dwarven supply would always be there, watched his loader place the last ball in the barrel.

"Last one," the loader said.

Harwick looked at the ball. Dwarven-forged iron, smooth, perfectly spherical, the product of the foundry's casting process that produced identical projectiles by the thousand. This ball was the last of the thousands. The last thundermaker ball the kingdom possessed.

"Make it count," Harwick said.

He aimed. The barbarian thundermaker battery on the eastern ridge was firing at the junction's central fortification, the battery's position visible in the smoke that each discharge produced. Harwick's weapon was sighted on the battery's ammunition stack, the pile of dwarven-forged balls that the latest supply wagon had delivered that morning.

He fired.

The ball struck the ammunition stack. The stack detonated. The barbarian thundermaker battery's ammunition exploded in the chain reaction that stored iron balls produced when the thing storing them was hit by a projectile traveling at thundermaker velocity. The battery's three weapons were thrown from their platforms by the explosion's force. The crew was scattered. The ammunition that had been stacked for the afternoon's bombardment was destroyed in four seconds.

"Morg," Harwick said, using the orcish word for glory without knowing he was using an orcish word. The word had entered the Threian military's vocabulary through the campaign's cultural osmosis, the process by which enemies' words became familiar through repeated exposure.

The thundermaker was empty. The last ball was fired. The weapon that had been the Threian military's signature advantage for two generations would never fire again unless the dwarves relented, and the dwarves did not relent because the dwarves did not forget and the dwarves did not forgive and the Book of Grudges was eternal.

* * * * *

The barbarian assault hit the junction's fortifications at the sixteenth hour, two hours after the thundermakers fell silent.

The silence was the weapon. Not the barbarians' weapon. The silence's weapon. The Threian soldiers who had been fighting with the thundermakers' support for eight hours discovered the specific vulnerability that the thundermakers' absence created: the psychological vulnerability. The thundermakers' sound, the deep concussive boom that shook the ground and scattered barbarian formations and provided the specific reassurance that heavy weapons provided to infantry who were fighting lighter, the sound was gone. The silence where the sound had been was louder than the sound had been, because the silence said the weapons were empty and the emptiness was permanent.

The boomstick-equipped infantry held the line. Their ammunition was at thirty-one percent of the original stockpile. The boomsticks fired in the rolling volleys that the Threian military's training prescribed, each volley a volley from a diminishing supply, each ball a ball that brought the stockpile closer to the zero that the thundermakers had already reached.

A barbarian warrior breached the junction's eastern barricade. He came through the gap that a thundermaker ball would have sealed if the thundermaker had ammunition, the gap that the boomstick fire was too sparse to cover because the boomstick fire's volume was reduced by the ammunition conservation that finite supply required.

The warrior was six feet tall, iron-armored, hand axe in his right hand and a short sword in his left. He hit the first Threian soldier behind the barricade with the axe's full swing, the dwarven-forged head biting through the soldier's shield and into the arm behind it. The soldier screamed. The warrior drove the short sword into the soldier's exposed side while the soldier was processing the axe wound, the blade entering at the gap between the breastplate's lower edge and the hip armor's upper edge.

The second Threian soldier thrust his bayonet at the warrior's throat. The bayonet caught the gorget and skidded. The warrior headbutted the soldier, the iron helmet's rim catching the soldier across the forehead, opening a gash that bled into both eyes. Blind, the soldier swung his boomstick as a club. The stock caught the warrior's knee and the warrior buckled. The blind soldier drove the bayonet downward by feel, the point finding the warrior's shoulder gap and entering the joint.

Both men fell. The gap remained.

Three more barbarians came through the gap. Then ten. Then twenty. The barricade's eastern section was overwhelmed in four minutes because the four minutes' defense required the concentrated boomstick fire that the ammunition conservation could not provide.

The king ordered the withdrawal at the eighteenth hour. The withdrawal was the withdrawal of an army that had fired its last heavy weapon and whose light weapons were approaching the same condition, the withdrawal of a force that was running out of the things it fought with and that could not replace them because the supplier had written the kingdom's betrayal in a book that the supplier never closed.

Two thousand dead. The thundermaker ammunition gone. The boomstick ammunition at twenty-six percent.

"We have perhaps two more engagements with boomstick capability," Fairfax said, at the evening's council. "After that, we fight with steel."

"Steel against dwarven boomsticks," the king said.

"Steel against dwarven boomsticks. Swords against firearms. The engagement that every military commander in history has lost."

The king looked at the map. The barbarian advance was forty miles from the capital. His army was sixteen thousand and counting down. His heavy weapons were gone. His light weapons were nearly gone. The combined force under Aldrath could not be redeployed. The Horde sat at Ashwell and watched.

"What options remain?" the king asked.

Fairfax looked at the king with the expression that advisors produced when the advisor's professional obligation required honesty and the honesty was the kind that monarchs did not want to hear.

"Negotiation, Your Majesty. With the barbarians. With the orcs. With anyone who will listen. Military options are approaching zero. Diplomatic options are all that remain."

The king sat with the word. Negotiation. The word that the council had rejected when the orcs proposed it. The word that the campaign against the barbarians was supposed to make unnecessary. The word that was now the only word left because every other word had been consumed along with the ammunition.