Rise of the Horde

Chapter 813 - 812

Kael heard the silence from the central hall and understood what it meant before the first runner arrived to confirm it.

Silence after a Sixth Realm engagement was not the silence of an engagement that was still being decided. It was the silence of an engagement that had been decided and whose participants were adjusting to the result. The barbarian warriors who had entered the hall with Garrok were not producing the sustained combat noise that the engagement had generated for the past eight minutes. The orcish formation on the other side of the throne room doors was not producing the victory sounds that an orcish army produced when it won an engagement, because the orcish army in the corridors did not produce victory sounds. It produced forward movement, and forward movement was quiet in the way that professional operations were quiet.

Kael looked at the throne room. The fortified antechamber. The barricade at the doors. The four hundred warriors who remained inside the compound’s innermost section, the garrison he had organized for the contingency that the analytical mind had prepared for while the emotional mind had hoped the preparation would be unnecessary.

Garrok was dead. Kael did not need confirmation to know this. Garrok’s Sixth Realm aura had been detectable through the walls for the duration of the engagement, the golden-amber energy radiating with sufficient intensity that any Realm-sensitive warrior within a hundred paces could feel it, and the aura had gone out. Auras did not go out because their bearers chose to extinguish them. Auras went out because the bearers no longer had the capacity to sustain them, and a Sixth Realm aura that went out entirely was a Sixth Realm warrior who was either dead or so close to dead that the distinction was irrelevant.

Tharn arrived through the side corridor two minutes later, and his arrival confirmed what the silence had communicated. He was carrying a wound in his left thigh that had been inflicted during the disengagement from the 1st Warband’s shield wall, a spear thrust that had found the gap in his greave when he pivoted away from the formation, and he was carrying on his face the expression of a Sixth Realm warrior who had watched another Sixth Realm warrior fall and who was processing the event with the particular intensity that warriors of that caliber applied to losses that they understood were not random.

"Garrok is down," Tharn said. "The hall is theirs. The formation broke when their rear attack hit. The warchief committed everything to the duel and the orcish chieftain read him the way a hunter reads a wounded animal. He knew the overhead strike was coming before Garrok knew he was going to throw it."

Kael absorbed the tactical information with the three-fingered hand resting on the map table and the analytical mind doing what analytical minds did when the situation they had calculated as probable became the situation they were actually in: transitioning from analysis to execution.

"How many survived the hall?"

"Two hundred. Perhaps less. The compression killed as many as the swords did. They are retreating through the service corridors to the inner compound. The orcs are not pursuing at speed. They are clearing and securing. The same pattern they have used since dawn."

"Room by room."

"Room by room."

Kael looked at the four hundred warriors in the throne room. He looked at the barricade at the doors. He looked at the throne, the marble and gold leaf seat that Garrok had been sitting on four hours ago when the world had still been the world that the barbarian campaign had created, the world where the capital was taken and the thundermakers were operational and two Seventh Circle shamans stood between the barbarian army and anything that challenged it.

That world was gone. Shul’Korr was dead. Vor’gath was poisoned. The thundermakers were empty. Brokk was dead in a corridor. Garrok was dead in a hall. Morag was missing since the Rhakaddon ambush. Of the command structure that had descended from the highlands with seventeen thousand warriors and one hundred and twenty-one thundermakers and the confidence of a force that had defeated the best army the Threian kingdom could field, what remained was Kael and Tharn and four hundred warriors in a throne room whose doors were about to receive the attention of an army that had not been stopped by anything between the postern gate and this room.

"The dwarven resupply is fourteen days away," Kael said, because the analytical mind required stating the facts before it could process them. "We cannot hold this room for fourteen days. We cannot hold this room for fourteen hours. The force on the other side of those doors has been fighting inside buildings since dawn with a doctrine designed for exactly this kind of combat, and every defense we have constructed they have dismantled through methods that the defense was not designed to address."

"Then we negotiate," Tharn said. Not as a surrender. As an assessment. "The tusked chieftain did not kill Garrok’s warriors after the formation broke. The rear attack compressed the formation and the compression killed some and the melee killed more, but the warriors who yielded were not executed. I watched it. Their chieftain gave an order and the killing stopped where warriors dropped their weapons. That is not the behavior of a force that intends to exterminate us."

"No," Kael said. "It is the behavior of a force that intends to use us."

The analytical mind was working now with the cold clarity that had always been Kael’s particular contribution to the chieftains’ council, the clarity that had warned about the Horde as a variable and that had calculated the force ratios and that was now calculating something different. Not force ratios. Outcomes. The possible outcomes of continued resistance versus the possible outcomes of negotiation, assessed against the information that the day’s fighting had produced about the orcish chieftain’s objectives and methods.

"The orcs came here for a reason," Kael said. "They had an agreement with the kingdom. The agreement was signed before we took the capital. They are fighting us not because we are barbarians but because we are standing between them and the agreement that the kingdom signed with them. The agreement that we interrupted by taking the capital while they were camped at Ashwell."

"The agreement that gives them the southern territories."

"The agreement that gives them what they came for. The thing they have been fighting for since they crossed the frontier. Not the capital. Not the throne. The valley."

Tharn’s expression shifted. The warrior’s face processing the strategic implication that the warrior’s instincts had not previously considered because the warrior’s instincts were trained for combat, not for the calculation of political objectives that extended beyond the immediate engagement.

"They do not want the mountains," Tharn said slowly.

"They do not want the mountains. The shaman advised us to deal with them because the shaman understood what they wanted and understood that what they wanted was not what we wanted. We wanted the valley. They wanted the south. The two objectives do not conflict if the two forces are not fighting each other. Vor’gath understood this. We chose not to listen."

The sound of organized movement reached the throne room through the doors. The sound was the particular sound that the Horde’s clearance operations produced, the measured advance of warriors who were securing each space before moving to the next, the sound that had been moving through the palace for hours and that was now two rooms away from the throne.

"What do you propose?" Tharn asked.

Kael removed his sword from its scabbard. Not to fight. He placed it on the map table, the blade flat, the hilt toward the doors. He placed his three-fingered hand beside it.

"I propose that we speak with the tusked chieftain before he reaches the doors," Kael said. "I propose that we send a messenger under a flag that communicates willingness to discuss terms. I propose that we offer what Vor’gath advised us to offer before the victory celebration and the poisoned wine and the insulting delegation to Ashwell produced the situation we are currently in."

"The chieftains will not accept surrender."

"The chieftains are dead, Tharn. You and I are what remains. And what I am proposing is not surrender. It is the acknowledgment that continued fighting in this room will kill four hundred warriors who do not need to die for a throne that was never ours to begin with. The throne belongs to the kingdom. The mountains belong to us. The valley between them is the question, and the question can be answered with a conversation rather than with the deaths of everyone in this room."

Tharn looked at the sword on the table. He looked at the barricade. He looked at the four hundred warriors who were watching the two remaining chieftains with the expressions of fighters who had been fighting for eighteen hours and who had watched their warchief walk into a hall and not walk out of it and who were waiting for the decision that would determine whether the next hour of their lives was the last hour or the first hour of something that came after the fighting.

Tharn placed his sword beside Kael’s.

"Send the messenger," he said.

* * * * *

Khao’khen received the barbarian messenger in the central hall, standing beside the crater that Garrok’s final axe strike had made in the marble floor. The Snarling Wolf banner flew above him. Garrok’s body had been moved to the hall’s eastern wall and covered with the mountain cat standard that the barbarian warriors had carried into the engagement, a gesture that Arka’garr had performed without instruction and that Khao’khen had noted without comment, because covering a fallen chieftain with his own banner was a thing that warriors did for other warriors regardless of which side of the fight the fallen warrior had been on.

The messenger was a young barbarian, Fourth Realm, carrying a cloth that was not white because the barbarian army did not carry white flags but that was pale enough to communicate the intent. He approached Khao’khen with the careful steps of a warrior who was walking toward an enemy chieftain who had just killed his warchief and who was surrounded by the army that had killed his warchief and whose expression provided no information about how the approach would be received.

"The chieftains Kael and Tharn wish to speak terms," the messenger said. His voice was steady. His hands were not.

Khao’khen looked at the messenger. He looked at the throne room doors, behind which four hundred barbarian warriors and two Sixth Realm chieftains waited for the response that would determine whether the fighting continued or whether something else began.

He looked at Sakh’arran, who had entered the hall behind the 1st Warband and who had been observing the engagement’s conclusion with the analytical attention that he applied to everything, cataloguing the information that the conclusion produced for the assessment that would follow.

"Terms," Khao’khen said, and the word was neither acceptance nor rejection. It was the word of a chieftain who had fought from Yohan through the frontier and the valley and the capital and the corridors and the hall to reach this specific moment, and who understood that what happened in this moment would determine whether the fighting that had brought him here had been fighting for something or fighting for the sake of fighting.

"Tell Kael and Tharn," Khao’khen said, "that the Horde will hear what they have to say. Tell them that the hearing does not guarantee agreement. Tell them that the hearing requires both chieftains to present themselves in this hall, unarmed, with no more than four guards. Tell them that the Snarling Wolf’s word is the word of the Yohan First Horde, and the word says: come and speak and see whether speaking produces what fighting could not."

The messenger departed. The throne room doors remained closed. The hall was quiet in the way that the aftermath of decisive engagement was quiet, the particular silence of a space where something had been resolved and the resolution was still settling into the stone and the air and the consciousness of everyone who had been present for it.

Dhug’mhar, leaning against a column with the studied casualness of a warrior who had just hit a six-hundred-warrior formation from behind and who was managing the post-engagement energy with the visible satisfaction that his temperament produced, caught Khao’khen’s eye across the hall.

"Perfection observes," Dhug’mhar said, "that the diplomatic phase has resumed."

Khao’khen looked at the crater in the floor. At the Snarling Wolf above. At the throne room doors that had not yet opened.

"It never stopped," he said. "The fighting was the negotiation. This is the part where both sides decide what the negotiation produced."

The doors opened.