Rise of the Horde

Chapter 807 - 806

The gates opened at the fifth hour’s first light.

The capital’s eastern gate, the gate that the Horde had entered through the postern beside it two days before, swung wide on the hinges that the gate mechanism’s interior operation provided. The gate’s two iron-bound oak panels, each fifteen feet tall and eight feet wide, separated at the center and the gap between them widened and the gap’s widening admitted the dawn’s light into the gate’s arch and the arch transmitted the light into the street that connected the gate to the market district’s eastern approach.

The western gate opened simultaneously. The southern gate opened three seconds later, the delay produced by the gate mechanism’s age and the specific resistance that the mechanism’s three-century-old components imposed on the mechanism’s operation when the operation was conducted by warriors whose familiarity with the mechanism was the familiarity that two minutes of inspection had provided.

Three gates. Open. The capital’s walls, which had been the barrier that separated the interior’s fighting from the exterior’s thundermaker batteries, were now the walls with holes in them, the holes the specific size and configuration that the gates’ openings provided.

The thundermaker batteries outside the walls had been positioned for the siege’s bombardment axis: the western and northern approaches, the arc that the batteries’ fire had used to breach the walls and support the barbarian assault. The batteries’ barrels were aimed at the walls. The batteries’ ammunition stacks were behind the batteries. The batteries’ crews were at the batteries’ positions, maintaining the weapons with the attentiveness that the weapons’ operational status required.

The gates’ opening changed the batteries’ tactical situation. The gates were not on the bombardment axis. The gates were on the eastern, western, and southern walls, the walls that the bombardment had not targeted because the assault’s approach had used the northwestern breach rather than the gates. The gates’ opening created the access points that the walls had denied, the access points whose existence provided the entry corridors that the things outside the walls could use to reach the things inside the walls.

The things outside the walls included the Baron of Frost.

* * * * *

Valden dove through the eastern gate’s opening at the velocity that the griffon’s power dive produced when the dive’s initiation altitude was two thousand feet and the dive’s trajectory was aimed at the twelve-foot gap between the gate’s panels.

The dive was not the high-altitude release that the shamans’ atmospheric compression had forced the guerrilla campaign to adopt. The atmospheric compression was gone. The Seventh Circle shaman whose power had sustained the compression was dead, killed by Rakshas spears in the avenue’s erupted cobblestones. The air above the capital was the air that natural atmospheric conditions produced: clear, uncompressed, the specific air that griffon dives required for the velocity that maximum-effect frost bolt delivery demanded.

The griffon’s wings were folded. The beast’s twelve-hundred-pound mass accelerated downward at the rate that gravity and the folded wings’ minimal drag combined to produce. The gate’s opening was fifteen feet tall and sixteen feet wide. The griffon’s wingspan when folded was eight feet. The passage’s clearance was sufficient.

Valden’s griffon passed through the eastern gate’s arch at the velocity that two thousand feet of dive produced. The beast emerged inside the capital’s eastern district and the wings opened in the pull-out that the interior flight’s requirements demanded: wings spread, lift restored, the flight path transitioning from the dive’s vertical trajectory to the horizontal flight that the capital’s streets’ altitude constraints required.

The griffon flew west at rooftop height. The buildings’ rooftops passed beneath the beast’s belly at the altitude that the buildings’ four-story height allowed between the rooftops and the flight path. The flight’s destination was the northwestern battery positions, the batteries whose weapons’ barrels pointed at the walls and whose ammunition stacks were behind the weapons and whose ammunition stacks were the targets that the frost bolts existed to destroy.

Valden’s sceptre blazed at the battery arc’s eastern terminus.

The frost bolt struck the first ammunition wagon at the velocity that the rooftop-height flight and the dive’s residual speed combined to produce. The thermal detonation was the detonation that twenty-five nights of guerrilla operations had refined into the specific result that the frost bolt’s thermal shock produced in dwarven-forged ammunition: the iron balls’ molecular structure cracked by the instantaneous temperature differential, the cracking propagating through the stacked balls in the chain reaction that thermal-shocked iron produced in the density that ammunition storage created.

The wagon exploded. The shrapnel scattered. The adjacent ammunition stacks detonated in the chain reaction that the first wagon’s detonation initiated.

Three thundermaker batteries’ ammunition destroyed in four seconds. Three weapons silenced. One hundred and six remaining.

The griffon banked and climbed. The boomstick fire from the battery positions’ guards rose toward the climbing beast in the trajectories that upward-aimed fire produced. The balls’ accuracy at the climbing beast’s increasing altitude decreased with each foot of altitude gained. The griffon’s armor absorbed the two balls that found their mark: one in the chest plate, one in the left wing’s trailing edge guard.

Sir Harath’s griffon entered through the western gate.

The second rider’s dive was the dive that the western gate’s opening provided: the approach from the west, the passage through the gate’s arch, the pull-out into the horizontal flight that the western district’s streets’ altitude constraints allowed. Harath’s frost bolt struck the western battery arc’s ammunition wagons at the range that the horizontal flight’s velocity and the target’s proximity combined to produce.

Four wagons detonated. The chain reaction propagated through the western arc’s ammunition supply. Six thundermaker batteries’ ammunition destroyed. Six weapons silenced. One hundred remaining.

The two griffons worked the battery arc’s circumference from opposite directions. Valden from the east, moving west. Harath from the west, moving east. The frost bolts struck the ammunition wagons at the rate that the griffons’ flight speed and the wagons’ spacing combined to determine: one wagon per twelve seconds of flight, the twelve seconds the time that the flight’s velocity required to cover the distance between adjacent battery positions.

The battery crews responded. The boomstick fire intensified. The guards at each battery position fired at the griffons that passed above and beside and between the battery positions at the rooftop-height altitude that the urban terrain’s buildings provided. The balls rose and the balls fell and the balls struck the griffons’ armor and the armor held because the armor had been holding for twenty-five days and the armor’s holding was the holding that the griffons’ survival depended on and that the armor’s dwarven construction sustained.

A ball struck Valden’s griffon in the right wing’s leading edge armor at the specific angle that the leading edge’s curvature did not deflect. The ball penetrated the armor at the rivet point where the armor’s plate joined the armor’s mounting bracket. The ball entered the wing’s leading edge membrane at the depth that the penetration’s velocity provided: one inch into the membrane’s layered tissue.

The griffon’s flight wobbled. The right wing’s leading edge membrane’s damage disrupted the wing’s aerodynamic profile at the point where the leading edge’s curvature was critical for lift generation. The wobble was the wobble that membrane damage produced in flight: the periodic oscillation that the damaged wing’s lift irregularity created in the beast’s flight path.

Valden compensated. The rider’s weight shift, the specific technique that griffon knights used for the correction of flight irregularities, moved the rider’s center of mass toward the damaged wing’s side, the mass shift providing the counterbalance that the damaged lift’s irregularity required. The wobble stabilized. The flight continued.

The frost bolts continued. Wagon after wagon. Detonation after detonation. The battery arc’s ammunition supply decreased at the rate that two griffons’ sustained attack produced. The rate was the rate that twenty-five days of guerrilla experience had refined into the specific efficiency that the targets’ spacing and the frost bolts’ accuracy and the flight path’s velocity combined to maximize.

By the seventh hour, the battery arc’s ammunition was destroyed.

One hundred and nine thundermaker batteries. One hundred and nine weapons whose ammunition had been the ammunition that the dwarven supply sustained and that two griffons’ two-hour sustained attack had converted from the stacked reserves behind each weapon to the scattered, cracked, frozen debris that the frost bolts’ thermal detonation produced.

The thundermaker batteries outside the walls were silent. Not destroyed. Silenced. The weapons’ barrels were intact. The weapons’ mechanisms were functional. The weapons’ ammunition was gone, destroyed by two griffon knights whose twenty-five-day guerrilla campaign had begun against fifty thundermakers and had ended against one hundred and nine and whose ending’s success was the success that the campaign’s sustained persistence had earned.

"The batteries are silent," Valden reported through the communication crystal. "All exterior ammunition destroyed. The batteries require dwarven resupply to resume fire. The next resupply from the Iron Hills requires fourteen days."

"Fourteen days," Khao’khen said, receiving the report at the command position inside the capital. "Fourteen days without the exterior batteries. Four thundermakers remaining inside the compound. The barbarian defense at the compound depends on four weapons."

"Four weapons whose ammunition is the ammunition that the emergency dispatch provided. The dispatch’s ammunition is finite. The dispatch’s ammunition sustains approximately twelve hours of continuous fire at the four weapons’ rate."

"Twelve hours. Then the compound’s thundermaker defense is gone."

"Then the compound’s thundermaker defense is gone and the compound’s defense is eight thousand barbarian warriors with boomsticks and hand axes and four Sixth Realm chieftains against seven thousand orcish warriors whose Rakshas can advance through the compound’s approaches without the thundermaker fire that denied the approaches for the past six hours."

"We wait twelve hours."

"We wait twelve hours, Chief."

The wolf waited. Twelve more hours. The thundermakers’ ammunition counted down inside the compound the way the Threian boomstick ammunition had counted down across the campaign’s weeks: ball by ball, charge by charge, the finite supply’s depletion measured in the firings that the defense required and that each firing subtracted from the total that remained.

The wolf was patient. The wolf had always been patient. Twelve more hours was twelve more hours that the patience accommodated because the patience’s purpose was the purpose that twelve hours’ additional patience would fulfill.

The compound waited. The thundermakers fired. The ammunition counted down. And the dawn that would follow the twelve hours’ passage would be the dawn that changed everything again.