The first interception came at the Ashburn Bridge, forty miles north of the Meren valley, where Colonel Thaddeus had positioned four thousand soldiers across the stone bridge and the river’s fordable sections with the professional competence that Thaddeus had demonstrated since the corridor engagement.

Khao’khen did not attack the bridge.

He sent the 5th and 6th Warbands upstream in the predawn darkness, the thousand Yurakks moving through the river’s upper reaches where the water was knee-deep and the crossing took ten minutes instead of the bridge’s contested hours. The warbands crossed three miles upstream, reformed on the northern bank, and marched south toward the bridge’s northern approach, arriving behind Thaddeus’s defensive position at the moment the main column’s advance guard appeared on the bridge’s southern approach.

Thaddeus found himself facing south, defending a bridge against an army that was now behind him.

"GRAK’THAR!" The 5th Warband’s fury cry erupted from the northern approach as the warbands hit Thaddeus’s rear with the assault pace that contact with an undefended rear produced. The Yurakk warriors drove into the rear positions with stabbing swords drawn, the narrow blades finding the gaps in armor that the soldiers’ southward orientation exposed, the specific vulnerability that a force facing the wrong direction presented to an attacker arriving from the direction the force was not expecting.

A Yurakk drove his sword into the back of a soldier’s knee joint, the blade entering the unprotected space between greave and cuisses, and the soldier dropped onto the knee that no longer supported his weight, his scream cut short by a second Yurakk’s blade finding his throat as he fell. The efficiency was the efficiency of warriors who had been fighting for four months and whose technique with the stabbing sword had been refined to the specific art of finding gaps and exploiting them.

The Threian soldiers at the rear turned to face the assault and exposed their backs to the main column’s advance guard, which was already moving onto the bridge.

Thaddeus withdrew east. He could not hold a bridge position that was attacked from both sides simultaneously. The withdrawal was professional, organized, and cost two hundred dead and the bridge.

The column crossed Ashburn Bridge at the tenth hour and continued north.

* * * * *

The second interception was at the Greendale crossroads, sixty miles north of the valley, where Varen had positioned eight thousand soldiers in a blocking formation that covered the road and the flanking fields.

Khao’khen stopped the column two miles south of the blocking position and sat.

He sat for two days.

The combined force’s blocking position, which had been established for a mobile interception rather than a static defense, consumed its provisions at the rate that eight thousand soldiers consumed provisions when they were standing in formation rather than marching, and the provision rate exceeded the supply delivery rate because the supply chain was organized for a marching force rather than a stationary one.

On the second day, Khao’khen moved. Not north. West. The column turned west on a farm road that the Verakh network had mapped weeks before the march began, a road that curved north through the agricultural belt’s western edge and rejoined the capital road twelve miles beyond Varen’s blocking position.

Varen discovered the column’s westward movement when his scouts reported the column’s dust cloud moving in the wrong direction. He broke the blocking position and marched to intercept the column on the farm road, but the column’s two-day head start and the farm road’s shorter distance meant the column reached the capital road’s junction before Varen’s intercepting force could close the gap.

The intercepting force’s march consumed the provisions that the blocking position had been consuming, the double expenditure of first holding and then pursuing producing the specific logistical drain that Khao’khen’s two days of sitting had been designed to produce. Varen’s eight thousand soldiers had consumed six days of provisions: two at the blocking position and four in the pursuit. The Horde had consumed two days of march rations during the sitting period and two more during the bypass. The provision arithmetic favored the side that had been sitting still.

The column turned north on the capital road. The blocking position was twelve miles behind it.

"He sat for two days and did nothing," Varen said, at the evening’s council with Aldrath.

"He sat for two days and consumed your provisions from a distance," Snowe said. "While you fed eight thousand soldiers in a blocking position, he fed his warriors on the march rations they carried. When your provisions required resupply, he moved. The two days of sitting were not inaction. They were the consumption of your logistics."

"Thrak’gul," Aldrath said, using the Orcish word for rock-brained with the specific application that the word carried when used to describe one’s own decision-making in retrospect.

"We are learning his vocabulary."

"We have been learning his vocabulary for four months," Snowe said. "The question is whether the nobles will learn it before he arrives at their walls."

The column continued north. Each interception attempted by the combined force produced a variation of the pattern that every previous engagement had established: the Horde did not fight the engagement the combined force prepared for. The Horde fought a different engagement, or fought no engagement at all, or sat and waited until the engagement’s conditions changed in the Horde’s favor. Each variation was new. Each variation used the combined force’s correct professional response as the mechanism for the Horde’s success, turning the combined force’s training against itself the way a wrestler used an opponent’s momentum to produce the throw.

Aldrath catalogued the variations in his campaign journal with the meticulous precision that his professional habit required. The Ashburn Bridge flanking. The Greendale provision depletion. The variations that would follow. Each entry described an engagement that the combined force had prepared for correctly and had lost because the preparation’s correctness was the thing the Horde’s plan exploited.

The Snarling Wolf moved north at the column’s head, each day’s march reducing the distance between the wolf and the capital, each day’s failed interception demonstrating to the combined force’s officers and to the dispatch riders who carried reports to the council that the army they had been failing to stop was still not being stopped and was now closer to the capital than any hostile force had been in the kingdom’s recorded history.

The wolf’s direction was north. The wolf’s pace was steady. The wolf was patient. And the capital, four hundred miles away at the march’s start, was now three hundred and forty miles away. Three hundred and twenty. Three hundred.

The distance was closing. The nobles would hear the wolf soon enough.