Chapter 726: Chapter 725

The seventh engagement of the new phase was the engagement where the Rakshas showed the combined force what the spear wall did when the spear wall advanced.

Khao’khen ordered the advance at the ninth hour of the morning, the 1st and 2nd Warbands stepping forward from the defensive line that they had held through every previous engagement of the campaign and moving toward the combined force’s positions at the measured pace that the spear wall used for offensive movement.

The pace was slow. Deliberately slow. One step per two heartbeats, each step synchronized across the formation’s two-thousand-warrior width, each boot hitting the ground at the same moment in the rhythm that the Ironmaw chanting tradition provided.

“Zug zug mag. Zug zug mag.”

The chant was not loud. It was steady. The sound of two thousand warriors speaking two words in unison at the cadence of a walking heartbeat, the rhythm carrying across the plain between the two armies with the specific quality that large numbers of voices in synchronization produced, the quality that made the sound feel larger than the sum of its components, the quality that made the ground vibrate sympathetically with the boots’ rhythm.

The combined force’s forward positions watched the spear wall approach. The spears’ points caught the morning light in a rippling line that extended across the formation’s width, each point a bright spot in the bristling forest of iron that the wall produced, the line of bright spots advancing with each step in the synchronized pulse that the chant’s rhythm dictated.

“TOHR’TERRA!” The Threian officer’s command was the command that the combined force had adopted from the Horde’s vocabulary because the word described the formation more precisely than any Threian term. The infantry raised their shields into the overhead coverage that the Horde’s own doctrine used against arrow storms, the modification that the combined force’s officers had improvised to protect against the spear wall’s overhead strikes.

The Rakshas hit the modified formation and the spears found the gaps.

The overhead coverage protected the soldiers’ heads and shoulders. It did not protect their legs. The Rakshas’ long spears, thrust forward at the waist-height angle that the wall’s second rank employed, found the exposed legs beneath the overhead shields with the precision that training produced. Spear points punched through greaves, through knee joints, through the unarmored inner thigh where the femoral artery ran close to the surface.

A soldier screamed and dropped, his left knee shattered by a spear point that had entered from the front and exited through the side, the joint’s ligaments severed and the kneecap displaced by the iron point’s passage. He fell forward into the spear wall’s killing range and two points found his torso before he hit the ground.

Beside him, another soldier caught a spear thrust on his shield’s lower edge and deflected it downward, the point scoring a groove in the earth between his feet. The deflection was good. The deflection did not account for the spear to his left, which came under his shield arm while his shield was angled downward and found his hip at the joint where his cuisses ended and his mail shirt began. The point went in three inches. He lurched sideways, the movement opening the gap between him and the soldier to his right, and a third spear found the gap and punched through his ribs.

“Grak’thar,” a Rakshas warrior said, pulling his spear free from the fallen soldier’s torso. The word was not a battle cry. It was a statement. Victory. Said in the flat tone of a craftsman observing that the tool had performed as designed.

* * * * *

The spear wall advanced three hundred paces in forty minutes, each pace purchased at the cost of the soldiers who stood in the path and who were killed or wounded at the rate the spears’ reach and the warriors’ strength determined.

The ground behind the advancing wall was the ground that the wall produced: a strip of churned earth littered with the bodies of soldiers who had held their positions until the spears found them, the bodies arranged in the specific pattern that a formation’s casualties produced, clustered at the points where the spear wall’s pressure had been greatest and scattered at the edges where the flanking warbands’ pressure had been less concentrated.

A Rakshas captain named Thokk, the scarred veteran who had held position through the troll assault at Yohan’s walls, walked the wall’s center with his spear dark to the crossguard and his shield face running with blood that was not his. His boots found the ground through the bodies because the bodies were the ground in the strip behind the advancing wall, the dead packed closely enough that the footing was bodies rather than earth.

“Throm’gar!” Thokk’s command voice cut through the advance’s noise. “Half-step! Lock! Duum!”

The formation tightened. The spears’ synchronization sharpened. The advance continued.

“Mok’rok vol,” Thokk said, beneath the command voice, the honor cry spoken at the volume that the ancestors required, which was the volume of conviction rather than the volume of performance. “I see you watching. I have not forgotten.”

The combined force’s forward line broke at the four-hundred-pace mark. The break was not dramatic. It was the specific disintegration that occurred when individual soldiers’ survival instincts exceeded their formation’s collective discipline, each soldier making the individual decision that the thing in front of them was not something they were willing to stand in front of anymore. One soldier stepped backward. The soldier beside him stepped backward. The backwards step propagated through the formation in the wave that breaking produced, each step back encouraging the next, the formation’s coherence dissolving from the front rank backward until the break became the withdrawal that officers tried to organize and that the Rakshas’ continued advance made difficult to organize because the spear wall did not stop advancing when the formation in front of it stopped being a formation and became a collection of individuals trying to leave.

“GRAK’THAR!” The fury cry erupted from the wall as the break became visible. “VRAAK DUUM!”

The Rraskas advanced into the broken formation at the doubled pace that the breaking permitted, the spears finding the running soldiers’ backs with the same efficiency they found the standing soldiers’ fronts, the killing undiminished by the target’s orientation because the spears’ reach exceeded the soldiers’ running speed at the distance the contact had established.

The advance covered six hundred paces before Khao’khen recalled the wall.

The ground the advance had covered was the ground that the spear wall left behind. Sakh’arran counted the dead that evening. Eight hundred and forty Threian soldiers on the strip of churned earth that marked the wall’s passage. The Horde’s losses were fifty-one.

The Snarling Wolf advanced to the six-hundred-pace line and held. The wolf’s snarl was unchanged. The wolf did not celebrate advances. The wolf simply occupied the ground that the advance had purchased and snarled at whatever was next.

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