Rise of the Horde

Chapter 845 - 844

Sakh’arran worked late. This was not unusual. The commander’s late-night work was the work that the day’s administrative responsibilities had deferred and that the night’s silence permitted: the assessments that required the specific quality of uninterrupted attention that the day’s meetings and dispatches and operational decisions continuously interrupted.

The current assessment had been in progress for eleven days. Not because the assessment was slow , Sakh’arran did not conduct assessments slowly , but because the assessment’s subject required the accumulation of the intelligence that the Verakh network’s dispatches provided on a schedule that the network’s operational rhythm determined, and the dispatches’ arrival rate was the rate that the network’s coverage area and the courier intervals produced rather than the rate that the assessment’s urgency demanded.

The assessment’s subject was the next five years.

The map on the assessment table was the map that Sakh’arran used for long-range analysis rather than for operational planning: a larger scale, covering the continent’s relevant portion rather than the immediate campaign’s operational area. The markers on this map were not the markers of troop positions and supply depots and terrain features that battle-planning used. These markers were the markers of trends: the Threian kingdom’s military recovery trajectory, the highland clans’ post-campaign restructuring, the dwarven commercial network’s realignment since the Ironbeard Clan’s trade severance with the kingdom, the southern territories’ population movement toward Yohan.

Each trend had a direction and a rate. The direction and the rate, extended across five years, produced a picture. The picture was what Sakh’arran had been building for eleven days.

The picture was not comfortable.

* * * * *

Khao’khen arrived at the assessment chamber at the second hour after midnight, which was the hour that the chieftain’s evening walk through the city’s streets ended and the hour that the chieftain’s awareness of light under the assessment chamber’s door prompted the specific decision to enter.

Sakh’arran did not look up. "The Threian kingdom has conscripted forty thousand soldiers for the northern campaign against the highland clans," the commander said. "The conscription occurred six weeks ago. The Verakh network’s count is forty thousand plus or minus eight percent, which I weight toward the higher end because the Threian army’s conscription records are organized by province and the western provinces’ records are the ones the network has least coverage of."

Khao’khen sat in the second chair. The assessment chamber’s second chair was there for exactly this purpose: the conversation that the assessment required once the assessment had produced enough to discuss.

"Forty thousand," Khao’khen said.

"Against an enemy that is fighting from mountain terrain, is armed with dwarven weapons, has unlimited ammunition, and has shamans who can redirect Threian battlemage spells back at their source." Sakh’arran set down the quill. "Forty thousand soldiers against that situation is not sufficient. The Threian army is going to discover this. The kingdom has already discovered some version of it at Fort Harken and Harken Valley. The lesson has not yet produced the strategic revision that would reduce the army’s losses, because the revision requires a change in doctrine that the army’s institutional culture resists and that change only produces after the resistance has been made expensive enough that the institutional culture’s maintenance costs more than the change."

"How long before the revision?"

"Eighteen months to two years. The army is losing at a rate that the kingdom’s economy cannot sustain indefinitely. At some point, a person with sufficient authority and sufficient analytical capability will present the case for negotiation with the highland clans using the framework that Kael’s provisional council has been proposing since Garrok’s death. That proposal mirrors the framework Khao’khen offered the Threian kingdom before the campaign: recognition, acknowledgment, withdrawal from contested territory. The highland clans’ version is less specific because the highland clans’ political structure is less developed, but the shape is the same."

"And when the northern conflict resolves," Khao’khen said.

"When the northern conflict resolves, the Threian kingdom will have an army of some size, an economy that is recovering, a political structure that has been reformed , Lord Castellan’s arrest removed a significant destabilizing element , and a treaty with the Horde that the kingdom has incentive to honor while it is weak and reduced incentive to honor when it is strong." Sakh’arran looked at the map. "The five-year window is the window in which the kingdom is occupied with the north, constrained by the treaty, and not yet recovered enough to consider revisiting its southern borders. After the window, the kingdom’s decision-making calculus changes."

"Changes how?"

"The treaty is in place. The treaty acknowledged the invasion. A king who attempts to violate the treaty he signed and his council ratified produces a domestic legitimacy crisis that the current king, who has spent the past year rebuilding the trust that Lord Castellan’s manipulation damaged, cannot afford. The treaty is protective because the violation’s cost is political, not merely military." Sakh’arran paused. "But treaties are what nations honor when the honoring is easier than the alternative. In ten years, when Aldric III’s successor sits on the throne, the treaty’s preamble is history and not personal shame, and the calculation is different."

Khao’khen was quiet for a long moment. The assessment chamber’s lamp burned steadily between them. Outside, the city’s nighttime sounds continued their low undertone: the forge district’s permanent fires, the river’s distant run, the training grounds’ night-shift drills that Arka’garr maintained on the grounds that enemies did not respect the sun’s schedule and neither should the Horde’s readiness.

"What does the five-year window need to produce?" Khao’khen asked.

Sakh’arran turned back to the map. "A Yohan that is not worth attacking. Not a fortress , a fortress invites the question of what is behind the walls worth storming. A civilization. A city that has produced enough visible prosperity and enough visible capability that the kingdom’s rational assessment of attacking it concludes that the cost exceeds the benefit. A Yohan that any future king’s advisors look at and say: we could take it, at this price. And the price being high enough that the king and his council say: the price is not worth paying." He paused. "And a Yohan that has enough allied relationships , with the highland clans, with the dwarves commercially, with the Order of the Seal through the Tekarr framework, with the southern settlements whose people now live here , that attacking Yohan is not attacking an isolated orcish settlement but attacking a node in a network of relationships whose disruption costs everyone in the network."

"The pillars," Khao’khen said.

"The pillars are the visible portion. The relationships are the invisible architecture. Both are necessary. The haven that cannot defend itself is vulnerable. The haven that can defend itself but has no one to defend it alongside is merely difficult. The haven that is embedded in a web of relationships whose members each have a reason to want the haven to continue existing is the haven that future kings weigh against the alternative and choose the alternative of leaving alone." Sakh’arran looked at the chieftain. "We have five years. The pillars are the work of months. The relationships are the work of years. We are building both simultaneously because the window does not extend its deadline for pillars that are incomplete."

* * * * *

They sat with the map between them for a while in the specific quiet of two people who have worked together long enough that silence was not the absence of communication but a mode of it.

"You are tired," Khao’khen said.

Only the specific familiarity of long partnership produced this kind of observation: something the other person had not reported, something they were managing quietly, made visible precisely because concealment was the managing’s intent.

Sakh’arran did not deny it. "The campaign required a specific kind of endurance. The building requires a different kind. The campaign’s endurance had a shape , a series of engagements with defined objectives and defined conclusions. The building’s endurance has no shape. There is no engagement to conclude. There is only the next assessment and the next problem and the next decision and the next assessment." The commander looked at the map. "I do not regret the building. The building is what the campaign was for. But the campaign’s shape was easier to sustain than the building’s shapelessness."

Khao’khen was quiet for a moment. "You told me something when the Horde was still a warband and the city was still a camp. You told me that the discipline required to stop advancing when the advance is working is harder than the discipline required to advance when everything is failing, because the failure is its own motivation and the success has to find its motivation elsewhere."

"I said that during the Lag’ranna assessment. Before the campaign."

"You were right. And the building’s motivation is harder to sustain than the campaign’s motivation for the same reason. The campaign had an enemy. The building has no enemy. The building has only the future, which is a harder thing to march toward than a defensive line."

Sakh’arran looked at the chieftain. The look carried the quality of a person who had been given a framework for what they were experiencing and who was assessing whether the framework was accurate and finding that it was.

"What is the motivation?" Sakh’arran asked. Not rhetorically. As a genuine question from a person whose analytical capacity required that the thing sustaining them be nameable.

Khao’khen thought about the harvest fire. He thought about Skarra teaching Yurrak to find the bent stick that meant four. He thought about the grandmother who would exist somewhere in the city’s future that they were building toward, who would sit on a stone floor and put her hands flat and feel the permanence that the city represented.

"The children," he said. "The children who grow up in the city that does not yet exist. The children who take for granted the things that we built because they cannot remember the time before them. The motivation is the people whose existence will be the proof that the building was worth doing. They cannot sustain you because they do not yet exist. But they are there regardless, in the city’s potential, in the fields that will feed them and the walls that will shelter them and the law that will apply to them equally and the learning hall where they will read the things we wrote down so that what we knew would survive past us." He paused. "The motivation is that they will not know our names. They will live in the city and use the water and eat from the fields and be protected by the law and not once think about who built the pipe or planted the seed or carved the first provision into the wall. That anonymity is the proof of success. The building becomes invisible when it becomes the world. That is what the building is for."

Sakh’arran was silent for a long time.

Then he picked up the quill.

"Five years," he said.

"Five years," Khao’khen confirmed.

The assessment continued through the third hour. The city slept around them. The lamp burned. The map held its markers and its trends and its projected directions, the geometry of a future that was not guaranteed but was possible, that was possible because the people building it had chosen to treat it as a commitment rather than as a hope, and the difference between a commitment and a hope was the difference between the pipe in the ground and the wish for water.

The pipe was in the ground.

Forward.