Rise of the Horde

Chapter 809 - 808

The palace corridors were narrower than the avenues, and narrower was what Khao’khen wanted.

The Rakshas could not deploy in the corridors. The broad shield coverage was wasted in spaces where no more than four warriors could stand abreast. The Rhakaddons were outside, holding the compound courtyard where their bulk served as a living barricade against any barbarian counterattack through the palace’s western doors. What entered the palace was the 3rd Warband and the 4th Warband, moving in the staggered column formation that Arka’garr had developed for the urban clearance operations in Greywater and refined through every engagement since.

Stabbing swords. Short thrusts. The weapons that worked in the space that the space allowed.

The first barbarian formation they met was thirty warriors holding the grand foyer, positioned behind overturned banquet tables that had been dragged from the great hall and stacked into a barricade that blocked the corridor from wall to wall. The tables were oak, three inches thick, heavy enough that the warriors behind them had required six men per table to move them into position. The barricade was crude but functional, the kind of improvised defense that warriors who had been drinking twelve hours ago and fighting for four hours since could produce when survival replaced celebration as the organizing priority.

Arka’garr did not charge the barricade.

He sent Grukk.

The ogre filled the corridor the way a boulder filled a streambed. Not the tallest creature in the Horde’s service, the trolls held that distinction, but the densest, the most concentrated expression of mass and purpose that the palace corridors had ever been asked to contain. His shoulders scraped both walls as he advanced. His hands, each one large enough to palm a man’s skull, were wrapped in the iron-studded gauntlets that Zul’jinn’s forge had built to the specifications that only an ogre’s frame required. The gauntlets were not weapons in the conventional sense. They were structural reinforcement for hands that were already the most dangerous things in any room they entered.

He hit the barricade at a run.

The oak tables did not shatter. Oak did not shatter. They moved. The entire barricade displaced backward in a single mass, three tables and the thirty warriors behind them driven across the marble floor by an impact that carried the full momentum of an ogre at full stride in an enclosed space where the momentum had nowhere to go except through whatever was standing in front of it. The barbarians who had braced against the tables were folded over the edges as the tables continued moving, their feet losing purchase on the smooth marble, their formation collapsing from the rear forward as the compression wave propagated through the bodies that had been standing in disciplined ranks a heartbeat before.

The warriors of the 3rd Warband poured through the gap his impact created. Stabbing swords found the spaces between the displaced tables where barbarian arms and legs were exposed by the compression. The fighting was close enough that breath met breath, close enough that the warriors could see the confusion in the barbarians’ eyes as the barricade they had built became the trap they were caught in.

Fourteen barbarians died in the foyer in less than two minutes. The rest pulled back through the hall beyond, dragging wounded with them, leaving the overturned tables and the blood on the marble floor and the Snarling Wolf banner that Arka’garr’s standard bearer planted in the gap between the tables before the last barbarian body had stopped moving.

"Vor’kash drak," the standard bearer said. It was not a shout. It was a statement. The wolf snarls.

* * * * *

Garrok heard the palace fighting from the throne room where he had established his command position six hours earlier, when the capital had still been his and the celebration had still been the dominant sound in the streets.

He sat on the Threian throne because sitting on it was the point of the campaign. The throne was marble and gold leaf and four centuries of accumulated symbolism, and Garrok sat on it with the blood from his jaw wound staining the left armrest and his war axe across his knees and the weight of a campaign that had cost eleven thousand barbarian dead pressing on him with the specific gravity that command produced when command’s decisions were being tested by someone who had not been part of the original calculation.

Kael stood at the map table. Of the chieftains, Kael was the one whose mind worked in the way that the current situation required, the analytical assessment of force ratios and positional advantage that the other chieftains processed through instinct but that Kael processed through arithmetic.

"Eight thousand entered the city," Kael said. His left hand, missing three fingers from the fighting at Harken Field, held the edge of the table. "They have taken the market district, the harbor quarter, and the eastern residential blocks. The avenue fighting cost them. Shul’Korr’s eruption cost them more. But the avenue fighting cost us worse, and Shul’Korr is dead."

"How many do we have?" Garrok’s voice carried the particular roughness that the jaw wound produced, the exposed mandible affecting his speech in a way that made every word sound like it had been carved from stone rather than spoken.

"The compound holds nine thousand. Perhaps eight. The avenue losses and the building clearance and the Rhakaddon ambush." Kael paused. "And the thundermakers are empty. The exterior batteries are destroyed. The ammunition that arrived two hours late gave us four reloads. Those four reloads are spent."

"The dwarven resupply."

"Fourteen days."

The number sat between them like a stone. Fourteen days was a lifetime in a siege where the besieging force was inside the walls and the defenders were compressed into a compound whose perimeter was being tested at four points simultaneously.

"Tharn," Garrok said.

Tharn entered from the corridor that connected the throne room to the compound’s inner bailey. His crooked elbow, the one that the Royal Guard’s mace had bent at Harken Field, was strapped to his side in a makeshift binding that allowed his right arm to swing a weapon but not raise a shield. He had been fighting at the western barricade for the past hour and the evidence was on him in the particular way that close combat left its evidence: blood that was not his own on his armor, blood that was his own on his face from a cut above his right eye, and the exhaustion that sustained fighting produced in even a Sixth Realm warrior when the fighting had been continuous for four hours.

"The western barricade holds," Tharn said. "But they are in the corridors now. The tusked brutes fight differently inside buildings. They do not use the formations they used in the avenues. They come in small groups, four or five, through doors and stairways, with short weapons that work in the spaces our axes cannot swing in. They are faster in the corridors than we are."

"Because they trained for this," Kael said quietly.

The words had the quality of a truth that arrived too late to prevent the consequences it described. The barbarians had not trained for urban combat. They had trained for field engagements, for the thundermaker-supported formations that had broken the Threian army at Harken Field, for the kind of warfare where superior firepower and shamanic support turned numerical advantage into mathematical certainty. The Horde had trained for precisely the opposite, for the close-quarters, building-by-building, room-by-room fighting that negated every advantage the barbarians had built their campaign around.

"The tusked brutes defeated forty-seven thousand with eight thousand," Kael said. He had said it before, at the chieftains’ council when Vor’gath had advised dealing with the Horde rather than fighting it. He had said it as a warning. The warning had not been heeded. "They did it by choosing the ground where their strengths mattered and our strengths did not. They are doing it again."

Garrok’s hand tightened on his war axe. The axe was dwarven-forged, the same quality as the thundermakers and the boomsticks and the armor, the product of the alliance that had armed the barbarian campaign from the highlands to this throne. The axe had killed a Threian general at the breach. It had wounded a king. It had not yet met the tusked chieftain who was somewhere in the corridors of this palace, moving toward this room with the methodical patience that the entire orcish campaign had demonstrated from its first engagement to this one.

"We hold the throne room," Garrok said. "We hold the inner compound. We fight them in the corridors where our strength can contest their speed, and we hold until the resupply arrives."

"Fourteen days," Kael said again.

"Fourteen days," Garrok confirmed. His jaw wound opened slightly as he spoke, the exposed bone visible in the torchlight, and the blood that seeped from it was the color of the decision he was making, which was the color of a chieftain who had taken a capital and would not give it back without the kind of fighting that would give this palace a name in barbarian history.

* * * * *

Khao’khen moved through the palace’s eastern wing with the 4th Warband at his back and the particular silence that he carried into every engagement where the outcome was not yet decided but the direction was clear.

The direction was forward. It had been forward since the postern gate insertion at dawn, forward through the market district where the first confused barbarian had died on a bench, forward through the avenues where the Rakshas had ground four thousand warriors into the cobblestones, forward through the compound walls where Torgrim had climbed under fire and driven his stabbing sword into a defender’s throat from a crouch.

Forward. Always forward. The Snarling Wolf did not reverse.

He found the corridor junction where the palace’s eastern wing met the central hall, and the junction was held by barbarians. Twenty of them, Fifth Realm warriors, their auras visible in the dim corridor light as the faint shimmer that enhanced warriors produced when their bodies were operating at combat readiness. They had positioned themselves at the junction’s narrowest point, where the corridor necked down to a single doorway before opening into the central hall beyond, and they held the doorway with the grim professionalism of warriors who understood that the doorway was the only thing between the orcs in the eastern wing and the throne room.

Khao’khen assessed the doorway. Four paces wide. Stone frame, load-bearing, could not be broken through. The barbarians had stacked furniture on either side, creating a channel that further reduced the effective width to two warriors abreast.

He did not send warriors into the channel.

He raised his fist. Six warriors from the second rank stepped forward, each carrying a Roarer in one hand and a stabbing sword in the other. The Roarer was the weapon Zul’jinn had built for exactly this kind of moment, a short-barreled weapon that an orc could fire with one hand if he braced his arm properly, the barrel wider and stubbier than a boomstick, designed to sacrifice the range that boomsticks provided in exchange for the concentrated blast of powder and iron that turned the weapon into a fist of destruction at close quarters. Where a boomstick could kill a man at a hundred paces, the Roarer could kill whatever was standing in front of it at fifteen. And fifteen paces was exactly the distance between the 4th Warband’s front rank and the furniture barricade at the doorway.

Six warriors. Six Roarers. Six individual weapons held at shoulder height by six orcs who understood that the coordinated volley was not a crew operation but a discipline, each warrior responsible for his own weapon, his own aim, his own trigger, synchronized not by mechanical linkage but by the training that had made the simultaneous discharge a matter of timing and trust.

"Grak’thar," Khao’khen said.

Six Roarers fired.

The sound in the enclosed corridor was a physical force. The stone walls amplified the combined report into something that transcended noise and became pressure, a wall of sound and fragmented iron that filled the doorway from floor to ceiling. The Roarers’ balls were heavier than boomstick shot, driven by a charge that the shorter barrel compressed rather than dispersed, and at fifteen paces the iron punched through the furniture barricade as though the oak were parchment. The Fifth Realm auras behind the barricade flared, the Realm energy attempting to shield the bodies it enhanced from impacts that the enhancement had not been designed to contest.

Three died instantly. Fifth Realm enhancement could deflect a sword strike, could absorb a crossbow bolt, could sustain a warrior through wounds that would kill an unenhanced fighter. It could not sustain a warrior through a Roarer ball at fifteen paces, not in an enclosed space where the pressure alone cracked plaster from the walls and the iron arrived with the authority that only a weapon designed to trade range for stopping power could produce.

The six warriors slung their spent Roarers across their backs in a single practiced motion and drew their stabbing swords. They would reload later, behind the formation, each orc repacking his own weapon with the powder and ball and wadding that he carried on his own belt. For now the swords were what the next thirty seconds required.

The survivors pulled back. Not in panic. In the controlled retreat of professionals who understood that the position was no longer tenable. They fell back through the central hall toward the throne room, and Khao’khen’s warriors flowed through the shattered doorway behind them, the 4th Warband’s stabbing swords finding the wounded who had not retreated fast enough, the advance continuing with the relentless forward momentum that was the Horde’s defining characteristic.

The throne room was two corridors away.

The Snarling Wolf moved forward.