Rise of the Horde

Chapter 808 - 807

The last thundermaker ball inside the compound was fired at the seventeenth hour.

The ball crossed the two-hundred-pace distance between the compound’s northern wall and the Rakshas’ position at the palace avenue’s approach and struck the ground three paces in front of the formation’s front shield. The impact cratered the cobblestones and the shockwave shook the shields in the Rakshas’ front rank and the warriors behind the shields braced against the shockwave’s force with the automatic response that sustained thundermaker bombardment had trained into the warriors’ neuromuscular systems across two days of continuous urban combat.

The thundermaker’s crew reloaded. The loader reached for the ammunition stack behind the weapon. The loader’s hand found the stack’s surface. The surface was flat. The surface was flat because the stack was empty. The stack’s contents, the forty-pound balls that the emergency dispatch had provided, had been fired across twelve hours of sustained defense at the rate that the four remaining thundermakers’ staggered firing had consumed, the rate that twelve hours’ continuous fire against the Horde’s probing advances had demanded.

"Empty," the loader said.

The crew chief looked at the empty stack. The stack that had been the stack that the defense’s continuation depended on and that the defense’s continuation had consumed. The crew chief looked at the three remaining thundermakers’ positions at the compound’s other approaches. The other crews’ loaders were performing the same inspection. The other stacks were producing the same result.

Empty. All four. The compound’s thundermaker defense was gone.

The silence that replaced the thundermakers’ firing was the silence that the Rakshas heard through the shields that the bombardment had been striking for twelve hours. The silence was not the silence of peace. The silence was the silence of the specific threshold that every engagement with the barbarian army had been defined by: the threshold where the thundermaker advantage ended and the engagement’s other factors determined the outcome.

"The thundermakers are silent," Arka’garr said. The 1st Warband master’s statement was the statement of observation, delivered in the flat tone that did not distinguish between the observation’s significance and the observation’s delivery, the tone that said the thing that was observed was the thing that was, and the thing’s being was sufficient without the being’s elaboration.

"Advance," Khao’khen said.

* * * * *

The Rakshas advanced on the palace compound from four directions simultaneously.

The 1st Warband from the south, through the palace avenue that the Seventh Circle shaman’s earth eruption had disrupted and that the eruption’s cessation had settled. The spear wall’s seventeen hundred remaining warriors filled the avenue’s sixty-foot width in the formation whose twelve-rank depth provided the sustained pressure that the compound’s wall assault would require.

The 2nd Warband from the east, through the administrative district’s approach that the Yurakk clearance had opened. The eastern approach was narrower than the avenue, forty feet, and the 2nd Warband’s formation compressed to the width that the approach accommodated.

The 5th and 7th Warbands from the west, through the approach that the western gate’s opening and the Baron’s thundermaker destruction had cleared. The western approach was the approach that the Yurakk warbands had been clearing building by building during the twelve hours that the thundermaker ammunition’s depletion had required.

The 3rd and 4th Warbands from the north, through the palace district’s narrow streets that connected the residential districts to the compound’s northern wall. The northern approach was the approach that the narrow streets’ width restricted to the two-abreast column formation that the 3rd Warband’s urban advance had been conducting since the sixth hour.

Four approaches. Thousands of warriors. The palace compound’s twelve-foot walls.

The compound’s barbarian defenders met the advance with the defense that boomstick-equipped infantry produced from fortified wall positions: sustained fire from the walls’ fighting platforms, the balls descending into the advancing formations at the angles that the walls’ twelve-foot elevation provided, the fire’s density the density that eight thousand boomstick-equipped warriors produced when the warriors were concentrated in the defensive positions that the compound’s walls accommodated.

The boomstick fire struck the Rakshas’ shields. The shields held. The shields had been holding against boomstick fire since the advance through the market district’s central avenue at the sixth hour. The shields’ surfaces bore the embedded balls of two days’ continuous urban combat, each ball a testament to the shield’s iron face’s capacity to absorb the kinetic energy that the boomstick balls delivered at the ranges that the urban terrain’s close distances produced.

The advance reached the compound’s walls. The spear wall’s advance stopped at the walls’ base because the spear wall was designed for the open-field engagement that flat terrain provided and the compound’s twelve-foot walls’ vertical surface was not flat terrain.

"Ladders!" The command traveled through the formation. The ladders that the 1st Kani’karr Corps’ troll engineers had constructed during the twelve hours’ preparation were brought forward through the formation’s depth, the ladders’ fifteen-foot length sufficient for the twelve-foot walls’ height with the three-foot overhang that ladder doctrine required for the transition from ladder to wall-walk.

The ladders struck the walls. The ladders’ hooks caught the wall-walk’s edge. The first Rakshas warriors began the ascent.

The ascent was the ascent that ladder assault produced: one warrior per ladder, the warrior’s shield strapped to the back in the position that the climbing’s two-handed requirement demanded, the warrior’s exposure to the wall defenders’ fire the specific vulnerability that ladder assault’s climbing phase created in warriors whose shield coverage was on their backs rather than their fronts.

A Rakshas warrior named Torgrim ascended the first ladder at the compound’s southern wall. The warrior’s hands gripped the ladder’s rungs at the pace that the climbing’s urgency and the climbing’s physical demands combined to produce: fast, committed, each rung’s grip released at the moment that the next rung’s grip was secure.

A boomstick ball struck the wall beside Torgrim’s position. The ball’s impact on the stone produced the fragments that the stone’s surface generated when the ball’s velocity exceeded the stone’s structural cohesion, the fragments spraying across Torgrim’s exposed right arm. The fragments cut the arm’s skin at three points. The cuts bled. The climbing continued.

Torgrim reached the wall-walk. The wall-walk’s edge was the edge that the ladder’s hooks held and that the warrior’s hands found and that the warrior’s arms pulled the warrior’s body over. The pulling was the pulling that the wall-walk’s defense contested: a barbarian warrior at the wall-walk’s position swung his hand axe at Torgrim’s hands as the hands appeared over the edge.

The axe struck the wall-walk’s stone surface beside Torgrim’s left hand. The stone chipped. The axe’s edge, deflected by the stone, skidded across the surface toward the hand. The edge caught the hand’s smallest finger. The finger’s tip separated.

Torgrim did not release the wall-walk’s edge. The hand’s grip on the edge was the grip that the Realm’s pain suppression sustained through the finger’s wound, the grip that the climbing’s completion required and that the wound’s pain could not override because the pain’s signal was the signal that the Realm’s filtering converted from the pain that released grips to the pressure that informed grips without releasing them.

Torgrim pulled himself over the wall-walk’s edge. His right hand drew the stabbing sword from the sheath at his hip. The barbarian warrior who had swung the axe at the hands was bringing the axe back for the second swing. The second swing’s arc was the arc that the warrior’s position at the wall-walk’s edge permitted: wide, horizontal, aimed at Torgrim’s neck at the height that the warrior’s standing position and Torgrim’s crouching position combined to target.

Torgrim drove the stabbing sword upward. The narrow blade found the gap between the warrior’s breastplate and the gorget at the angle that the upward thrust’s geometry provided from the crouching position. The blade entered the gap at the depth that four inches of stabbing sword point permitted. The warrior’s axe swing’s arc deviated as the warrior’s body processed the four inches of blade in the throat. The axe passed over Torgrim’s head.

Torgrim stood. The wall-walk was the wall-walk that the warrior’s death had opened. Torgrim occupied the position that the dead warrior’s body vacated.

"Wall-walk secured!" Torgrim’s report was the report that the wall-walk’s first foothold’s establishment required from the warrior whose ascent had achieved the foothold. "First position! Send them up!"

More warriors ascended. The ladders’ rungs received the boots of the warriors whose ascent followed Torgrim’s. Each warrior who reached the wall-walk expanded the foothold that Torgrim had established. Each expansion pushed the barbarian defenders further along the wall-walk’s length, the pushing the specific forward pressure that an expanding foothold produced in a wall-walk’s confined space when the foothold’s warriors’ arrival rate exceeded the defenders’ ability to contest each arrival individually.

The compound’s southern wall was breached in forty minutes. The breaching was the specific breaching that ladder assault produced when the assault’s warriors’ determination exceeded the defenders’ ability to prevent the determination’s implementation, the determination measured in the warriors who climbed and the warriors who fell and the warriors who climbed over the warriors who fell.

"Vor’kash drak," Torgrim said, standing on the wall-walk with the stabbing sword whose blade was dark with the blood of three barbarian defenders whose positions the sword had cleared. We fight as one. The words spoken at the volume that the wall-walk’s achievement deserved, the volume that the compound’s interior transmitted to the barbarian defenders whose positions the wall-walk’s fall had exposed.

The compound’s interior was open. The Horde poured over the walls. The fighting moved from the wall-walk to the compound’s courtyard and from the courtyard to the buildings and from the buildings to the palace itself.

The grinding resumed. The wolf was inside the compound. The wolf’s advance continued.

Forward. Always forward. The wolf did not stop.