The Baron of Frost struck at the third hour before dawn.
Valden’s griffon descended from fourteen hundred feet in the power dive that the aerial mount’s anatomy was designed to produce, the beast’s frost-rid wings folded against its flanks, the dive’s acceleration converting altitude into velocity at the rate that a twelve-hundred-pound predator’s mass and gravity’s constant combined to dictate. The wind scread across the Baron’s visor. The ground rushed upward. The barbarian thundermaker battery at the column’s rear beca a cluster of shapes that resolved into individual weapons and crews and ammunition stacks as the dive’s altitude consud itself.
Three thundermakers. A crew of nine barbarians per weapon. Twenty-seven n in dwarven armor standing beside three weapons whose barrels glead in the predawn moonlight. Behind the weapons, four ammunition wagons whose contents represented the dwarven supply that the mountain trade routes delivered with the regularity that the Ironbeard Clan’s grudge sustained.
Valden’s sceptre blazed at two hundred feet.
The frost bolt struck the first ammunition wagon at the velocity that a Fifth Realm practitioner’s casting produced when the casting was augnted by the dive’s kinetic energy. The bolt did not freeze the wagon. It detonated the wagon. The frost’s thermal shock, the instantaneous transition from ambient temperature to the absolute cold that Fifth Realm frost magic produced, cracked the iron balls in the wagon’s cargo bed. The cracking produced the chain reaction that thermal-shocked iron produced when the iron was stacked in the density that ammunition storage required: each cracking ball’s fragnts struck the adjacent balls and the adjacent balls’ thermal shock was accelerated by the fragnts’ impact and the entire wagon’s cargo cracked simultaneously.
The wagon exploded. Not with fire. With ice. The thermal shock’s energy release scattered the cracked iron fragnts outward in a sphere of frozen shrapnel that struck the two adjacent wagons and the thundermaker crews who were standing between the wagons. The shrapnel’s velocity was the velocity that thermal detonation produced, insufficient to penetrate dwarven armor at twenty paces but sufficient to destroy the unarmored wagon structures and the unarmored ammunition that the wagon structures contained.
The second and third wagons detonated in sequence. The chain reaction propagated through the ammunition stacks beside the thundermakers, the stacks that the crews maintained at the weapons’ positions for imdiate reloading. Three thundermaker batteries’ ammunition stores destroyed in four seconds.
The griffon pulled out of the dive at sixty feet, the beast’s wings snapping open with the force that arrested twelve hundred pounds of mass traveling at dive velocity, the g-forces pressing Valden into the saddle with the pressure that the saddle’s reinforced fra was designed to absorb. The griffon banked left, climbing, the wings’ frost-rid feathers catching the moonlight as the beast regained altitude.
Behind the griffon, three thundermaker crews scrambled in the wreckage of their ammunition supply. The three weapons were undamaged. The ammunition that the weapons required to fire was scattered across the ground in cracked, frozen fragnts that the weapons’ barrels could not accept.
Three thundermakers silenced. Not destroyed. Silenced until the next dwarven supply wagon arrived with replacent ammunition. The next wagon was twelve hours away on the mountain road.
"Three more," Valden said to his griffon. The mount’s response was the banking turn that carried the beast toward the barbarian column’s center where the next battery position was visible in the moonlight.
* * * * *
The Baron of Frost’s squadron had been reduced from twelve griffon knights to four.
Four griffons. Four riders. Four sceptres whose Fifth Realm frost magic provided the specific capability that the guerrilla campaign against the barbarian thundermaker batteries required: the ability to strike from above, at speed, at the positions that ground forces could not reach because the positions were behind the barbarian infantry’s screening line and protected by the boomstick fire that the infantry’s unlimited ammunition sustained.
The four riders had been operating for six days since the Battle of Harken Field, the sustained guerrilla campaign that the Baron had designed from the specific understanding that the thundermaker batteries were the barbarian army’s decisive advantage and that the batteries’ destruction was the only military objective that produced strategic effect.
Six days. Fourteen thundermaker batteries destroyed or temporarily silenced. The barbarian army’s thundermaker count reduced from forty-eight operational weapons to thirty-four. The reduction was real. The reduction was also temporary because the silenced batteries returned to operation when the dwarven supply wagons delivered replacent ammunition, and the destroyed batteries returned to operation when the dwarven supply wagons delivered replacent weapons.
The dwarves supplied everything. Ammunition. Weapons. Replacent parts. The supply was the supply that a three-thousand-year-old industrial civilization produced when the civilization’s grudge demanded the production and the production’s cost was irrelevant because the grudge’s satisfaction was the production’s purpose.
The Baron’s griffon climbed to eight hundred feet and the second battery position beca visible below. Four thundermakers. The crews were alert. The previous six days’ attacks had taught the barbarian crews to watch the sky. Boomstick-equipped warriors stood at the battery positions’ periters with their weapons aid upward, the vertical firing angle reducing the boomsticks’ accuracy but not eliminating it.
"They are watching," Valden’s wing rider said, the knight’s griffon holding position fifty paces to the Baron’s left. "The boomstick fire will be heavier than last night."
"The boomstick fire is always heavier than last night. The barbarians adapt. We adapt faster."
The Baron dove. The boomsticks fired. The balls rose past the diving griffon in the vertical trajectories that upward firing produced, the balls’ accuracy reduced by the angle but the balls’ density increased by the number of barbarians firing. Thirty boomsticks aid at a diving griffon at six hundred feet. Thirty balls rising in the approximate direction of the griffon’s path.
A ball struck the griffon’s left wing armor. The dwarven plate that the Threian military had fitted to the beast’s wings rang with the impact, the ball denting the plate and deflecting away from the wing’s structural mbrane. The griffon’s dive trajectory wobbled for a fraction of a second as the beast’s flight musculature compensated for the impact’s asymtric force.
Valden’s sceptre fired at three hundred feet. The frost bolt struck the ammunition wagon behind the battery and the thermal detonation began. The wagon cracked. The shrapnel scattered. The adjacent stacks detonated.
Four thundermakers silenced. The griffon climbed. The boomstick fire followed the climbing beast in the diminishing trajectories that increasing altitude produced, the balls falling short as the range exceeded the boomsticks’ effective vertical envelope.
"Seven tonight," Valden said. "Seven batteries. Forty-eight was the number at Harken Field. Fourteen destroyed or silenced in six days. Seven tonight. The number is declining. The number must continue declining because the number is the thing that is killing the kingdom’s army."
The griffon banked toward the next position. The night continued. The guerrilla campaign continued. And the thundermaker count, the number that determined whether the barbarian army’s seventeen thousand warriors were competitive with the kingdom’s thirty-one thousand remaining soldiers, continued its decline toward the number that changed the battle’s mathematics from the mathematics that the barbarians won to the mathematics that the barbarians could not sustain.
The six-day campaign’s toll on the griffon squadron was the toll that sustained combat operations produced in a force whose replacents did not exist. The griffons’ armor bore the dents of boomstick impacts that the armor had absorbed. The riders’ bodies bore the bruises and the fatigue that nightly diving through hostile fire accumulated. The sceptres’ crystal foci were dimr than they had been at the campaign’s start, the sustained frost bolt expenditure drawing down the magical reserves that the crystals stored and that the crystals’ natural regeneration rate could not fully replenish between sorties.
Valden felt the fatigue in his arms and his back and the specific deep exhaustion that Fifth Realm sustained casting produced in a practitioner whose body was the conduit through which the magical energy flowed. The conduit’s capacity did not diminish. The conduit’s tolerance for the energy’s passage decreased with each passage, the way a river’s banks eroded with each flood even though the river’s volu remained constant.
"We continue," Valden told his remaining riders, the statent that began each night’s sortie and that carried the weight of every night’s sortie that had preceded it. "Every battery we silence is a battery that is not firing at our soldiers tomorrow. Every thundermaker we destroy is a thundermaker that the kingdom’s line does not face. We continue because the continuing is the thing that changes the number, and the number is the thing that determines whether the kingdom survives."
The riders mounted. The griffons spread their frost-rid wings. The night’s work continued.
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