Rise of the Horde-Chapter 629 - 628

Zul’jinn did not sleep for four consecutive days during the week the Roarer’s barrel problem was finally cracked, and when he finally did sleep he did so sitting upright at his workbench with his cheek resting on a cooling mold and his left hand still loosely curled around a brass measuring gauge. His three goblin assistants debated among themselves in the low, rapid chatter of their language whether to wake him or let him rest, and eventually concluded that the question answered itself: anyone capable of sleeping through the sound of the forge district’s morning operations had earned the sleep and would not thank them for interrupting it.

The breakthrough had come at the thirty-first hour of the consecutive session, in the way that breakthroughs almost always came after long effort, which was to say not with a dramatic revelation but with the quiet collapse of a wrong assumption that had been blocking the correct one. Zul’jinn had been working on the barrel’s interior geometry, convinced that the problem was the angle at which the propellant charge expanded against the ball as it traveled the bore. He had filled three notebooks with calculations about pressure gradients and expansion ratios and the specific way that orcish hands, broader and shorter than the Threian hands the original musket designs had been built around, affected the hold and therefore the moment of discharge and therefore the consistency of the ball’s departure angle.

All of that was real and had been worth calculating. But the true problem was simpler and deeper and had been staring at him from the first barrel he had ever cast: the iron itself was wrong.

Not the forging technique. Not the tempering. Not the quenching schedule or the alloy ratios or the hammer-work that he had refined over months of iteration until it was as close to the captured Threian specimens as his tools and materials could achieve. The iron was wrong because it came from the eastern highland deposits that the Horde’s supply lines accessed most reliably, and those deposits had a sulfur content that the Threian metallurgical traditions had spent two hundred years learning to compensate for through specific smelting temperatures and flux additives, knowledge that existed nowhere in the Yohan Horde’s institutional memory because the Horde had not previously needed to smelt iron to weapons-quality tolerances.

Zul’jinn had discovered this not by analyzing the iron directly but by a sequence of failures whose pattern he had finally recognized. Every barrel that failed under test conditions failed in the same region, roughly a third of the way from the breech, and it failed not by splitting along the weld seam where the forge work was most vulnerable but by fracturing across the grain in the way that iron fractured when it was brittle in the specific way that excess sulfur produced. Once he saw the pattern, the solution was obvious in the infuriating way that obvious solutions always were once the wrong assumptions had been cleared away: he needed different iron, or he needed to remove the sulfur before he cast, and removing sulfur required a limestone flux addition during smelting at a temperature higher than the forge had previously been run at.

The higher temperature required modifications to the forge itself. Those modifications took a day and a half and destroyed one of the forge’s secondary air channels in a way that took another six hours to repair. By the time the first barrel was cast from properly fluxed iron and cooled and proofed by being loaded with double the standard charge and fired remotely by a long cord from behind a stone barrier, Zul’jinn had been awake so long that his vision was producing a faint shimmer at the edges that he recognized as the body’s way of registering a complaint it did not have the authority to make him act on.

The barrel held. Not just held. When they dug the test ball out of the sand berm forty paces away and measured its deformation, it had maintained a rounder profile than any previous test round, which meant it had traveled the bore more cleanly, which meant the expansion gases had done more useful work pushing it forward and less wasteful work leaking around its imperfect edges.

Zul’jinn had made a sound that his assistants would later attempt to describe to the other forge workers and fail, because it was not a shout of triumph or a grunt of satisfaction but something between those two things that existed in the specific register of a person who has been proven right about something they were not certain they were right about and who is experiencing simultaneously the relief of the proof and the annoyance that it took this long.

Then he had sat down at his bench, closed his eyes, and fallen asleep with his cheek on the cooling mold.

His assistants let him sleep four hours before Khao’khen himself appeared in the doorway of the experimental workshop with the unhurried authority of a chieftain who did not knock because the forge district understood that the chieftain’s arrival was its own announcement. He looked at Zul’jinn asleep at the bench, looked at the new barrel cooling in its rack, looked at the three assistants who looked back at him with the anxious readiness of people uncertain whether the interruption they were being implicitly asked to facilitate was appropriate.

Khao’khen crossed the workshop, picked up the cooled barrel from its rack, and examined it with the hands of someone who had handled weapons since before he could form the tactical concepts that made weapons meaningful. He turned it, ran his thumb along the bore’s edge, checked the straightness by holding it level and squinting down its length, weighed it against the previous barrel stock that sat beside it on the shelf.

He set it down and looked at the sleeping engineer.

"Let him sleep," he said, and left.

He carried his assessment of the new barrel in his mind through the rest of his morning circuit of the city, setting it alongside the other pieces of the picture that Yohan was assembling piece by piece from the materials of necessity and ingenuity and the stubborn refusal of an orcish chieftain who had seen what defeat looked like and intended to make it look different the next time. The barrel mattered because the barrel was the piece that had been missing from a weapons development program that had been producing everything else at the rate and quality that the timetable required. Zul’jinn had been running his experimental work in parallel with the production program, pushing the boundaries of what was possible while the main forge operations produced the current standard weapon at the volumes the growing Horde needed.

The Roarers in current production were functional. They were better than the original boomsticks by a margin that any warrior who had carried both versions could quantify with immediate personal testimony. But they were still operating at the limit of what the old barrel design could safely contain, which meant the powder charge was conservative and the effective range was less than it could be. With the new barrel, the charge could be increased by fifteen percent without compromising safety margins. That fifteen percent translated to additional velocity, additional range, and additional penetration at the ranges where the weapon was most likely to be used in combat against armored targets.

Fifteen percent did not sound like a transformative number. Khao’khen had learned, through the calculations that Sakh’arran had been walking him through over the preceding months, that in weapons development fifteen percent compounded with other fifteen percents until the cumulative difference between where you started and where you were going was the difference between a weapon that an enemy could accommodate and a weapon that an enemy had to rethink their tactics to account for.

He found Sakh’arran in the war council chamber with the maps, as Sakh’arran was almost always found in the war council chamber with the maps at this hour. The commander’s long body was bent over the table, his marker-moving hand paused in the middle of adjusting a formation diagram while his other hand held a report from the Verakh network that he read with the fractional attention of someone tracking two information streams simultaneously.

"Zul’jinn solved the barrel problem," Khao’khen said.

Sakh’arran set the report down and straightened. The map between them showed the eastern Threian border in detail that had not existed in any orcish intelligence archive before the Verakh network’s establishment. Patrol patterns, supply route timing, garrison strengths at each fortified position, the location of the new observation posts that the Threian Frontier Force had established with the professional thoroughness of an organization that had been designed specifically to counter exactly the kind of border operations that the Highland clans had demonstrated and the Horde was considering.

"That changes the production schedule," Sakh’arran said.

"It changes more than that. Walk me through where we stand."

Sakh’arran turned to the table and began, because walking Khao’khen through the state of the Horde’s readiness was something he did every ten days and had been doing for six months, the accumulated analysis serving as a living document of the distance between where they were and where they needed to be. The briefing covered five areas: personnel, weapons and equipment, intelligence, logistics, and tactical doctrine. Each area had a status, targets, and a gap assessment that was the most important element because the gap was what the next ten days of work needed to close.

Personnel stood at nine thousand two hundred combat-effective warriors across all warband types, plus the Warg Cavalry at four hundred and sixty riders with their mounts, plus the Rhakaddon corps at three units each with two operational beasts, plus the goblin specialist corps at seven hundred trained individuals covering engineering, the Roarer crews, and the fire sphere teams. The number was larger than the Horde that had marched to Lag’ranna. The quality was different in ways that the raw number did not capture. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

"The new warbands," Khao’khen said. "Tell me about the new warbands honestly."

Sakh’arran paused, which was the pause of a man ordering his honesty rather than softening it. "The warbands recruited in the first three months of rebuilding are functional. They can hold a shield wall, respond to horn signals, and execute the dispersal drill to an acceptable standard. What they cannot do is the thing that made the veterans of the Lag’ranna campaign different from every other orcish force that has marched north in the last encounters. They have not been tested."

"They have trained. They have sparred. Warband Master Arka’garr has run them through every simulation we can construct without putting them against a real enemy with real weapons trying to kill them. But simulated death and actual death produce different warriors, and we have no controlled way to produce the latter." He looked at Khao’khen with the steady gaze of a commander making a report that his chieftain needed to hear accurately. "We will not know what the new warbands truly are until they are in a battle. That is the variable we cannot resolve by training harder."

"I know," Khao’khen said. "Keep going."

The weapons and equipment briefing was the portion of the assessment that had changed most visibly since the campaign. The Roarers in production were at one thousand four hundred units, with another two hundred in final assembly and six hundred planned for the next quarter. The fire sphere production was running at ninety per day once the Bufas harvest had come in from the southern groves, exactly as Zul’jinn had promised, and the spheres had been tested in controlled field exercises until the crews that handled them moved with a competence that Khao’khen could watch from the training ground’s observation point and assess as genuine rather than performed.

The crossbow program had produced a third generation of the weapon that was substantially heavier than the first, capable of launching a bolt to altitudes where griffon riders operated at a velocity that the Threian captured equipment had suggested would penetrate standard aerial armor. Testing against targets suspended from the training ground’s highest structures had been encouraging. Testing against actual griffons in actual flight remained the one data point that field conditions had not yet allowed them to gather.

"The big crossbow," Khao’khen said. "Zul’jinn’s siege weapon for aerial targets."

"Completed and tested against tethered targets at simulated altitude. The mechanism functions. The bolt is stable. Range is one hundred and eighty paces at a forty-degree elevation, which covers the operational ceiling that the riders of those big birds were using during the Lag’ranna engagements." Sakh’arran moved a marker on the map to a position that illustrated the field of fire geometry. "We built six. Each one requires a crew of four and takes two minutes to reposition. Against targets that are moving, that two minutes is significant."

"Against targets that are stationary, or that are committed to an attack run and cannot break off without abandoning the target."

"Yes. Against those targets, the weapon is effective." Sakh’arran looked at the map. "It changes the calculus of aerial assault against a prepared position. Whether it changes it enough depends on whether the Threian commanders understand what it can do before they commit their griffon assets in the way they committed them at Lag’ranna."

"If they do not understand it, the first battle will teach them. If they do understand it, we have forced them to change their tactics before the engagement begins, which means they are fighting our battle instead of their own." Khao’khen studied the map for a moment. "Continue."

The intelligence briefing was the portion of the assessment that Sakh’arran delivered with the most visible satisfaction, because it was the area that had been most completely transformed by the nine months of rebuilding. The Verakh network now covered the entire eastern Threian border corridor and extended two hundred miles into the kingdom’s settled provinces, providing daily information about troop movements, supply shipments, patrol timing, and the organizational changes that the Frontier Force’s establishment had produced. The intelligence was not perfect. No intelligence was. But it was deep and current and structured in ways that allowed Sakh’arran to construct predictive models of Threian military behavior with a reliability that would have been impossible before the campaign.

"The Frontier Force," Khao’khen said.

"Colonel Gresham. Forty years old. Former Tekarr expedition survivor. Competent. Methodical. Has been designing the frontier patrol network with an understanding of border security that is better than anything the Threians had in place before him." Sakh’arran did not say this with concern. He said it with the respect of a strategist who valued good opposition because good opposition produced better thinking. "His observation post network has reduced the corridors that can be used without detection from nine to three. The three remaining corridors are all in terrain that requires extended approach marches over exposed ground. Using them costs us time and concealment that the previous nine did not."

"What does that mean for the approach plan?"

"It means we do not approach from the east. We approach from the southeast, through the highland terrain that the clan coalition used before the Northern Ford engagement, but in force and with preparation that the clan coalition did not have. The Frontier Force’s patrol coverage on the southeastern approach is lighter than on the eastern approaches because the terrain makes large-scale movement through it appear unlikely." He moved markers steadily across the map. "It is unlikely for an underprepared force. For a force that has trained specifically for that terrain over six months, it is not unlikely. It is merely difficult."

Khao’khen watched the markers move and felt the shape of the plan assembling in the space between the map’s representation and the territory it described. The plan was not yet complete. It would not be complete until the readiness targets that Sakh’arran’s gap assessments specified were met, and those targets were still months away. But the skeleton of it was visible, and the skeleton was sound.

"How long," Khao’khen said. Not a question about when they would march. A question about when they would be ready in every respect that readiness required.

Sakh’arran looked at the map for a long moment. "Eight months from today, if the production schedules hold and the training program produces the results that the simulations suggest and the intelligence picture does not change significantly. Six months if we accept reduced margins on two of the five areas." He looked up. "You will ask which two. I will tell you that the two that offer the most compression are personnel and tactics, and that compressing those areas means marching with new warbands that have not been fully tested and with doctrine that has been drilled but not proven. The Lag’ranna campaign gave us one lesson more clearly than any other. Untested assumptions about our own capability are the ones that cost the most when they are wrong."

"Eight months," Khao’khen said.

"Eight months."

The chieftain of the Yohan First Horde looked at the map for a long time, at the markers that represented forces and positions and a kingdom that did not yet know it was being studied with this quality of patient, thorough attention. Eight months was not a short time. Eight months was the distance between a force that was capable and a force that was prepared, and prepared was the only condition under which he would march again.

"Eight months," he said again, as though saying it twice made it more concrete. "Then we use every one of them."

He left Sakh’arran to the maps and walked back into the city that was growing around him, the forge district’s smoke rising against the morning sky, the training grounds full of the sound of warriors learning to be better than what they had been, the streets full of the accumulated evidence that patience was not inaction but its own kind of force, building in the quiet the pressure that would one day be released.