Chapter 700: Chapter 699

The combined force moved on the Meren valley in the early morning darkness, before the Verakhs could establish the observation posts that the Horde’s surveillance network required for full situational awareness on the approach routes. Aldrath had ordered strict light discipline from the moment the columns formed, no torches, no fires, no lanterns. Twenty thousand soldiers moving in the dark on a road they knew well enough to walk without light.

The march began at the second hour past midnight. By the fourth hour, the advance guard was at the valley’s northern mouth. By the fifth, it was two miles south of the northern entrance, moving at the double pace, the main body behind it in the tightest column the road permitted.

The first Verakh signal fire did not go up until the advance guard was already two miles into the valley, because the observation posts that covered the northern approach had been positioned to detect daylight movement and the darkness had compressed their effective detection range to the point where the column’s leading elements were inside the outer boundary of the posts’ observation zone before the observer at the first post heard the footsteps and understood what the footsteps meant.

The signal reached Khao’khen at the fifth hour. He was already awake. He had been awake since the second hour, when the Verakh posted to the combined force’s camp area reported the unusual activity that pre-movement preparation produced in an army that believed it was operating under light discipline but that still made the sounds of twenty thousand people dressing and forming and checking their equipment.

“How far in?” he asked the runner.

“Advance guard approximately two miles south of the northern mouth. Main body behind them in column, moving at double pace.”

“How many?”

“Full force. Nineteen to twenty thousand.”

Khao’khen looked at the Snarling Wolf banner in the corner of the market hall. He looked at it for the two seconds of decision that the timeline allowed and then gave the orders that he had been holding ready for six days.

“Wake the formation masters. Signal the ridge positions. Formation order as prepared.”

* * * * *

The valley at night was the landscape that Khao’khen had been studying since the first day the Horde occupied it, not in its agricultural and commercial character but in its military character, the specific qualities of darkness and terrain and the acoustic properties of the river valley that shaped how engagements in it would develop.

Sound carried in the Meren valley at night in ways that sound did not carry in open terrain. The river’s constant background noise created a masking effect that concealed the sound of small groups moving quietly but that amplified the sound of large groups moving at pace, the collective footfall of twenty thousand soldiers on stone road surface carrying further and with more distinctive quality than the same number of soldiers on open earth.

The orcish warriors who had been positioned in the valley’s ridgeline positions for three days heard the combined force’s approach before the advance guard was within visual range, and the hearing gave them a preparation window that they used with the efficiency that three days of waiting had made acute.

The advance guard reached the five-mile mark and found the road blocked by one hundred and sixty warriors in a shield wall across its full width, their shields locked, their weapons ready.

And they were singing.

The song was the traditional orcish marching adaptation that had been developing over the previous weeks of the campaign, its lyrics now richly specific to the Threian commanders and formations that the Horde had engaged across the campaign’s full length.

The verse that the warriors were singing when the advance guard arrived referred to the combined force’s night march by name, which implied either remarkable prescience or that the lyrics had been written during the three days of waiting for exactly this moment, which was in fact the case.

The Horde’s song, in the translation that the advance guard’s Threian-speaking officer produced the following morning, covered topics including the combined force’s commitment to finding the Horde in places the Horde had recently vacated, the Threian military’s relationship to the concept of tactical surprise, and an extended metaphor comparing Aldrath’s strategic position to a specific kind of large animal that had pursued something into terrain that was not suited to its size.

The advance guard halted. The advance guard commander sent a runner back to the main body with a message that was both a tactical report and a professional man’s honest effort to describe something he had not been briefed to expect.

“Orcish shield wall at the five-mile mark, blocking the road. They are singing, sir. In Orcish. I cannot translate but the tone suggests it is not complimentary.”

The runner found Aldrath at the main body’s head and delivered the message. Aldrath read it. Looked north. Looked at the road ahead. Looked at the sky, which was still dark, which meant the night engagement he had been moving toward was still available but the darkness advantage he had planned on was being spent by the advance guard’s halt.

“Push through,” he said. “Support the advance guard with the first line. We do not stop in the valley.”

The order was correct. It was also the order that the singing shield wall had been designed to produce, because a push through the singing shield wall required the first line to compress into the road column behind the advance guard and the compression was what the ridgeline positions had been waiting for.

Forty fire spheres ignited on the eastern and western ridgelines simultaneously.

The flash lasted ten seconds. Ten seconds of illumination that showed the valley’s night geography with the specificity of a training map made temporarily real: the road, the column on the road, the positions on both ridgelines, the gaps in the valley walls where the flanking teams were positioned, the river in its channel, and the Snarling Wolf banner above Millbridge’s market hall, visible even at four miles in the orange light of forty simultaneous fires.

The advance guard commander, in the ten seconds of the flash, counted what he could see on the ridgelines and sent a message to the main body that required no translation in any language: “They were waiting for us.”

Then the flash was over and the darkness returned and the engagement began in earnest.

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