Rise of the Horde

Chapter 812 - 811

The duel between two Sixth Realm warriors was a conversation conducted in iron and speed, and the conversation had been going on for four minutes when Garrok realized that the tusked chieftain was not trying to kill him quickly.

The realization came between the eleventh and twelfth exchange, in the fraction of a second where Garrok’s war axe completed its swing arc and began its return and Khao’khen’s sword was already positioned at the angle that would meet the return rather than chase the departure. The positioning was not reactive. It was anticipatory. The orcish chieftain was reading the axe’s trajectory before the trajectory completed, moving to the destination rather than toward the weapon, treating the duel not as a sequence of individual exchanges but as a continuous flow whose next movement was predictable because the flow itself had a pattern and the pattern was what the orcish chieftain was studying.

Garrok was being read.

The axe came back. Khao’khen’s sword met it at the haft, two inches below the head, the same deflection point he had used three times in the last thirty seconds. The consistency was not a failure of creativity. It was a message. The message said: I know where your weapon goes before you send it there. The message said: I have been watching you fight the shield line for ninety seconds before I stepped through it and I have been watching you fight me for four minutes since and the watching has produced an understanding of your movement that the movement itself cannot escape.

Garrok adjusted. The twelfth exchange came from a different angle, the axe dropping from the high guard to a low sweep aimed at Khao’khen’s leading knee, a deviation from the figure-eight pattern that was designed to punish the anticipation that the pattern had invited. It was a good adjustment. It was the adjustment of a Sixth Realm warrior whose combat intelligence had identified the problem and whose physical capability was sufficient to implement the solution.

Khao’khen was not at the knee when the axe arrived.

He had shifted his weight backward at the moment the axe began its descent, the timing window between recognition and response measured in the fractions of a heartbeat that Sixth Realm perception operated within. The low sweep passed through the space his knee had occupied, the axe’s edge close enough that the wind of its passage moved the fabric of his trouser leg, and Khao’khen’s sword came down on Garrok’s extended arm at the wrist, the point of the blade finding the narrow gap between the gauntlet’s cuff and the vambrace’s edge.

The sword point entered a quarter inch. The Sixth Realm enhancement hardened Garrok’s skin and the tissue beneath it, the Realm energy responding to the wound attempt with the autonomic defense that higher Realm bodies produced against penetration. A quarter inch was not disabling. A quarter inch at the wrist, on the weapon hand, was a wound that added itself to the jaw wound and the hip wound and the sustained exertion of the day’s fighting and became part of the accumulated arithmetic that the Horde’s combat doctrine was built around.

Garrok pulled the axe back. The motion opened the wrist wound wider and the blood that came from it was the blood of a Sixth Realm warrior, darker than normal blood, denser with the Realm energy that saturated every cell, and it ran down the axe’s haft and made the grip fractionally less certain than it had been a moment before.

Fractionally. Not decisively. The distinction mattered because the duel was not being decided by decisive moments. It was being decided by fractions, by the accumulation of quarter-inch wounds and fractional grip reductions and the steady, patient erosion of a warrior’s capacity that resembled nothing so much as the campaign itself, the same campaign that had reduced the Threian military’s effective fighting strength through persistent, systematic pressure applied with the specific intent of making each day’s position slightly worse than the previous day’s position without ever producing the single catastrophic event that would justify the kind of dramatic response that a single catastrophic event allowed.

Khao’khen was fighting the duel the way the Horde fought the campaign. Patient. Systematic. Finding the gaps. Always finding the gaps.

* * * * *

Around the duel, the hall engagement had developed its own arithmetic.

Arka’garr held the left flank against Tharn’s Sixth Realm sword work with the formation discipline that was his defining contribution to every engagement the Horde had fought. The 1st Warband’s shield wall absorbed Tharn’s strokes the way it had absorbed every individual threat since the Horde’s founding, through rotation. When the warrior at the contact point took damage, the warrior behind stepped forward and the damaged warrior stepped back and the line continued without interruption, the seamless replacement that training had reduced from a two-second operation to a half-second operation and that half-second difference was the difference between a line that Tharn could exploit and a line that Tharn could not.

Tharn was bleeding from three wounds that the shield wall’s spear points had found during the rotation transitions, the half-second windows where a spear thrust from the second rank could reach through the gap that the rotation created. None of the wounds were deep. All of them were bleeding. The crooked elbow was limiting his ability to press the advantage that his Realm enhancement gave him, because pressing an advantage required committing weight forward, and committing weight forward with one arm strapped to his side meant that every forward commitment was a balance risk that the orcish spears were positioned to exploit.

He was being managed. Not beaten. Managed. The 1st Warband was not trying to kill Tharn. It was trying to keep Tharn occupied while the rest of the engagement resolved itself, and the keeping was succeeding because the keeping was exactly what the 1st Warband’s formation had been designed for.

On the right flank, the barbarian warriors who were not Sixth Realm chieftains fought with the courage that desperation produced and the skill that highland training had developed and the disadvantage that fighting a force whose formation discipline exceeded their own in a confined space always created. They pushed. The Horde’s line bent. They pushed harder. The line bent further but did not break, because the line’s bending was controlled, the warriors at the contact points giving ground by design to draw the barbarian push into the deeper formation where the spears from the third rank could reach and where the barbarian momentum, spent on the push itself, arrived without the force to break through the depth that was waiting for it.

The hall’s floor was covered in the evidence of what was happening. Blood from both sides, pooling in the cracks that the Sixth Realm duel had produced in the marble, running in thin streams toward the lower ground at the hall’s eastern edge where the floor’s original grade directed rainwater from the shattered windows. Bodies from both sides, the barbarian dead outnumbering the orcish dead by a ratio that was consistent with what every engagement of the campaign had produced: the ratio of a force that was trained to fight as individuals against a force that was trained to fight as a system.

Dhug’mhar arrived.

He came through the western corridor behind the 1st Warband’s position with the Rumbling Clan’s dismounted warriors at his back, forty fighters who had left their mounts in the courtyard because the corridors would not accommodate the beasts and who had spent the last thirty minutes clearing the palace’s western residential wing room by room in the technique that the building clearance doctrine demanded. They were bloodied. They were grinning. They were Dhug’mhar’s warriors and Dhug’mhar’s warriors grinned in combat because Dhug’mhar grinned in combat and the quality was contagious in the way that a commander’s temperament was always contagious in the warriors who served under him.

Dhug’mhar assessed the hall in three seconds. The duel at the center. The formation engagement on both flanks. The barbarian line’s rear, which was thirty paces from the corridor mouth he had just emerged from and which was not defended because the barbarian line had committed everything forward and had nothing remaining to cover the direction that Dhug’mhar had arrived from.

"Perfection has found the back of something," he said.

He hit the barbarian line’s rear.

Forty Rumbling Clan warriors, led by a chieftain whose personal combat record included a demon and a general’s cavalry guard, struck the undefended back of a six-hundred-warrior formation that was fully committed to pushing forward against a shield wall that had been designed to absorb exactly that push.

The effect was immediate and structural. The barbarian formation, already under pressure from the front, received pressure from the rear that it had no capacity to absorb because every shield and every weapon and every body was oriented toward the threat that had been the only threat for the past five minutes. Warriors in the rear ranks who had been pushing forward found themselves pushed from behind, the compression sudden and violent, the two pressures meeting in the center of the formation and producing the crush that compressed formations produced when the compression came from two directions simultaneously.

The barbarian line broke.

Not at the edges, where formations typically broke when pressure exceeded cohesion. At the center, where the compression was most intense, the place where warriors could not swing weapons because the warriors on either side were too close, where shields could not be raised because the shields of the warriors in front and behind were pressing them down, where the only movement possible was the involuntary compression that turned a battle line into a mass of bodies whose individual strength was negated by the collective inability to use it.

Warriors began to fall. Not from wounds. From compression. From the loss of footing that occurred when the press became too dense for boots to maintain purchase on marble that was slick with blood. Once a warrior fell in a compressed formation, the warriors around him could not help him up because they could not move their arms to reach him, and the warrior who fell became an obstacle that the compression drove the other warriors over, and the falling became contagious in the way that structural failures in compressed formations were always contagious.

Tharn saw the break happen. His Sixth Realm perception, operating at the speed that the enhancement provided, processed the collapse of the barbarian center and the implications of that collapse and the fact that the implications were terminal in the time it took a normal warrior to blink.

He disengaged from the 1st Warband’s shield wall. Not a retreat. A pivot, a turn toward the center of the hall where Garrok was still fighting Khao’khen and where the collapse of the barbarian formation was about to leave the warchief without the army that had entered the hall behind him.

"Garrok!" Tharn’s voice carried the particular harmonic that Sixth Realm vocal projection produced, the sound cutting through the battle noise with the clarity that enhanced lungs and enhanced vocal cords generated. "The center is gone!"

* * * * *

Garrok heard Tharn’s warning and understood its content and understood its implications and chose to ignore it.

Not because the implications were unclear. They were perfectly clear. The barbarian formation in the hall had broken. The rear attack had produced the compression failure that no formation could survive when it came from two directions at once. The warriors who had followed him into the hall were dying or compressed or falling, and the warriors who survived the compression would be surrounded within minutes by the orcish formation that had produced the compression and the orcish force that had caused it.

The implications were terminal. Garrok understood terminal implications. He had produced terminal implications for the Threian army at Harken Field and for the Threian garrison at the capital and for the king who had fought him at the breach and who was now unconscious and fleeing south with two surviving Royal Guards. Terminal implications were the currency of the kind of warfare Garrok had been conducting since the highlands, and the fact that terminal implications were now being applied to his own force rather than to someone else’s did not change his understanding of what they meant.

It changed his objective.

The objective was no longer holding the hall. The hall was lost. The objective was no longer holding the throne room. The throne room would fall when the hall fell, because Kael’s garrison could not hold the throne room against the force that was about to pour through its doors once the hall engagement concluded.

The objective was the orcish chieftain who was standing four paces in front of him with a sword in one hand and a stabbing sword in the other and the compressed, invisible Realm aura that made the air between them feel like something solid.

If Khao’khen died, the Horde would not cease to exist. Garrok understood that. But the Horde that existed without Khao’khen would be a different thing from the Horde that existed with him, and the difference might be enough. Enough for Kael to hold. Enough for the fourteen days to pass. Enough for the dwarven resupply to arrive and for the next chieftain to reorganize and for the campaign that Garrok had started in the highlands to find its way to the conclusion that Garrok had intended when he first looked south from the mountains and decided that the valley below belonged to his people.

Garrok committed everything.

The Sixth Realm aura that had been blazing at combat intensity went beyond combat intensity into the range that the Realm’s deepest reserves produced, the range that warriors could sustain for seconds rather than minutes, the range that burned through the body’s capacity the way a fire burned through kindling, fast and bright and destructive to the fuel that fed it. His golden-amber light filled the space between them with a radiance that made shadows impossible, the light pouring from every surface of his body, from the dwarven armor, from the exposed bone of the jaw wound, from the war axe’s blade.

The axe came at Khao’khen with everything Garrok had remaining.

Not the figure-eight pattern. Not the calculated swing arcs. A single overhead strike, the war axe raised above the seven-foot frame with both hands on the haft, the full weight of the weapon and the full power of the Sixth Realm’s deepest reserves concentrated into one descending blow that was aimed at the center of Khao’khen’s skull and that carried in its trajectory the specific quality of a warrior who had decided that this strike was worth everything it cost because the alternative to this strike was the alternative where everything was lost anyway.

Khao’khen did not block.

He stepped left.

The axe descended through the space where he had been standing and struck the marble floor with the full force of a Sixth Realm warrior’s maximum output behind it. The marble did not crack. It shattered. A crater three feet wide and six inches deep exploded outward from the impact point, fragments of stone flying in every direction, the sound of the impact a detonation that silenced every other sound in the hall for the half-second that the impact’s echoes required to reach the walls and return.

Garrok’s hands were still on the axe’s haft. The haft was buried in the crater. The force of the impact had transmitted through the weapon into his arms and shoulders and spine, the recoil of maximum output against an immovable surface producing the specific, devastating feedback that occurred when Realm energy that was meant to be absorbed by a target was instead reflected back through the weapon into the body that had generated it.

His arms trembled. The golden-amber aura flickered.

Khao’khen’s sword entered the gap between Garrok’s right pauldron and his gorget, the same gap that the dwarven armor’s articulation created in every suit of plate when the wearer raised both arms above the head, the gap that opened when the arms went up and that could not close until the arms came down and that existed for exactly the duration of the overhead strike that Garrok had committed to with everything he had.

The sword went in four inches.

Four inches, at the junction of the neck and the shoulder, through the muscle that connected the two, through tissue that the Sixth Realm’s enhancement had hardened but that the hardening could not make impervious when the reserves that powered the hardening had been spent on the overhead strike that was still vibrating in the crater at Garrok’s feet.

Garrok’s right hand released the axe. The hand that had held the weapon that had wounded a king, that had broken through the capital’s defenses, that had taken a throne, opened and the fingers spread and the arm dropped to his side and the war axe remained in the crater, its haft vertical, its blade buried in the shattered marble.

He looked at Khao’khen.

The orcish chieftain looked back. The sword was still in Garrok’s neck. The stabbing sword was in his left hand, ready. The compressed aura was steady, undepleted, the reserves of a warrior who had entered the duel unwounded and who had fought it with the economy of effort that the Horde’s doctrine applied to everything from logistics to melee combat.

Garrok’s left hand came up. Not to strike. Not to grab. To push. He pressed his palm against Khao’khen’s chest, a gesture that was neither attack nor surrender but something between the two, the gesture of a warrior who was acknowledging the position he was in without accepting the conclusion that the position implied.

"You fight," Garrok said, and the jaw wound made the words into something that sounded like the grinding of mountains, "like you have already won. Like the fight is something you are finishing rather than something you are in."

"Yes," Khao’khen said.

He withdrew the sword. Garrok swayed. The golden-amber aura guttered, the light dimming from the blaze of maximum output to the faint shimmer of reserves that were nearly exhausted. Blood poured from the neck wound in a volume that the Sixth Realm’s healing would struggle to compensate for, dark and dense with the Realm energy that was bleeding out along with everything else.

Garrok fell to one knee. The same knee that King Aldric’s blade had found at the breach. The same knee that had supported seven feet of warchief through thirty days of continuous campaign and that was no longer able to support the weight that the wounds and the exhaustion and the depleted reserves had made too heavy for even a Sixth Realm body to carry.

He looked up at Khao’khen from the kneeling position and his expression was the expression of a warrior who had been beaten and who understood exactly why he had been beaten and who found in the understanding something that was not shame and was not acceptance and was something closer to the recognition that the warrior who had beaten him had done so by being better, and that being beaten by someone better was the only form of defeat that a warrior of his caliber could process without it destroying the thing inside him that made him a warrior.

"The mountain," Garrok said. "The valley question. That is what this was about."

"That is what everything is about," Khao’khen said. "The Horde does not fight wars for thrones. We fight wars for the ground our people need to live on."

Garrok’s aura went out.

He fell forward onto the shattered marble, his face striking the floor beside the crater his own axe had made, his body settling into the stillness that warriors settled into when the Realm energy that had sustained them through everything departed and left behind only the body, the seven-foot frame and the dwarven armor and the jaw wound and the war axe in the crater beside him.

The Snarling Wolf banner did not move. The standard bearer held it exactly where it had been throughout the engagement, the wolf’s snarl directed forward, toward the fallen warchief and the broken barbarian formation and the throne room beyond them where Kael was organizing a defense for a contingency that had just become reality.

Khao’khen cleaned his sword on his forearm and looked at the throne room doors.

"Forward," he said.