Rise of the Horde

The ghost fires started on the seventh night.

Khao’khen had ordered twelve Verakhs to carry bundles of treated brush, the kind that burned with heavy smoke but minimal light, to positions along the ridgelines east and west of the combined force’s camp. The positions were not the positions that the Horde used for combat operations. They were the positions that the Horde had never used for anything, the empty high ground that the combined force’s patrols had checked and cleared and marked as safe.

At the second hour past midnight, the Verakhs lit the brush piles and withdrew.

The smoke rose from twelve positions simultaneously, the heavy columns visible against the night sky in the moonlight, creating the impression of twelve fire positions on the ridgelines above a camp of twenty-five thousand soldiers.

The camp’s response was immediate and professional. Alarm drums. Cavalry dispatched to the ridgeline positions. Infantry moved to defensive arrangements. Mages, working with degraded equipment, attempted detection spells that consumed magical reserves they could not afford to spend. Officers roused sleeping soldiers and moved them to their assigned stations, the entire process consuming the transition time that twenty-five thousand soldiers required to shift from rest to readiness, which was time that could not be recovered and sleep that could not be replaced.

The cavalry found empty ridgeline positions with brush piles burning. No warriors. No weapons. No positions. Just smoke. The smoke itself was the operation’s secondary effect, the heavy, acrid quality of the treated brush producing a persistent haze that lingered in the valley’s low air for hours after the fires were extinguished, the haze reducing visibility at the camp’s perimeter and further degrading the sentries’ ability to distinguish between genuine threats and the residual effects of the previous night’s operation.

The camp returned to rest status at the fourth hour. Two hours of disrupted sleep for twenty-five thousand soldiers. Two hours that the soldiers’ bodies would feel the following day in the specific degradation of reaction time and decision-making clarity that sleep deprivation produced, the degradation invisible in individual moments and cumulative across days.

The following night, the ghost fires appeared on different positions. The same response. The same empty ridgelines. The same two hours of disrupted sleep.

On the third night, the camp’s command staff debated whether to respond to the fires at all. Colonel Drev argued that the fires were psychological operations without military content and that the response cost more than the fires themselves. Captain-General Oswyn argued that the night the command decided not to respond to fires on the ridgeline was the night the fires would be covering a genuine assault.

They responded. Empty ridgelines. Brush piles.

On the fourth night, Khao’khen did not light fires.

The camp responded anyway. Sentries reported fires that were not there. The alarm drums sounded for smoke that was the normal ground fog of the valley’s night temperatures. Two hours of disruption for a stimulus that did not exist. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

* * * * *

"They are disrupting their own sleep," Sakh’arran said, with the particular satisfaction of an analytical officer watching an opponent’s decision-making process degrade in real time.

"Thrak’gul," Dhug’mhar said, using the Orcish word for rock-brained with the affectionate contempt that the word carried when applied to an enemy. "The pinkskins are fighting ghosts. Perfection approves. Ghosts are the only opponents whose combat readiness is as impressive as Perfection’s."

"Night five," Khao’khen said. "Fires on the eastern ridgeline only. But this time, the Throat Teams go in through the western approach while the fires hold the cavalry’s attention east."

The fifth night’s fires burned on schedule. The cavalry went east. The Throat Teams went west. The combined force’s farrier station, the facility that maintained the cavalry’s horseshoes and hoof care equipment, was dismantled and its tools distributed across three miles of countryside in the systematic manner that made recovery possible but time-consuming.

The cavalry that returned from the eastern ridgeline the following morning discovered that its horses needed farrier attention that the farrier station could no longer provide. The attention would be delayed until the tools were recovered. The delay reduced the cavalry’s operational readiness by thirty percent for four days.

The four days were four days that the cavalry could not patrol, could not screen, could not pursue, and could not respond to the Throat Team operations that continued during the farrier station’s absence with the specific enthusiasm of teams that knew the cavalry response they had been designed to evade was currently barefoot and stabled.

"Vraak duum!" Krak’thul said, upon hearing the results, his voice carrying across the Hammer Team’s camp with the projection that made Krak’thul audible at distances that other warriors required signal horns to achieve. "We tear it apart, no retreat! The pinkskins’ horses will walk barefoot! Zug zug, their farrier weeps! His tools are in a field! The field is very large!"

"Your supply master weeps!" he continued, addressing the northern ridgeline where the combined force’s camp was not visible but where Krak’thul’s voice might, with sufficient volume, be audible. "Your horses are shoeless! Your mages have no crystals! Your sentries see smoke that is not there! NAK’ROSH! I will not be stopped! KRAGH!"

"Krak’thul is providing operational commentary again," Arka’garr observed, from the 1st Warband’s position.

"Krak’thul’s operational commentary is accurate," Khao’khen said. "The farrier’s tools are in fact in a very large field."

The ghost fires continued. Not every night. Not on a schedule. The unpredictability was the weapon, the inability of the combined force’s command to know whether tonight’s darkness would bring smoke on the ridgelines or silence, and whether the smoke was covering something real or was the thing itself. The sentries who watched the ridgelines through the night watches developed the specific exhaustion of soldiers whose alertness was being drained by the requirement to maintain it against a threat that materialized unpredictably and that was never, when it materialized, the threat it appeared to be.

"Thrak’gul pinkskins," Dhug’mhar observed, watching the distant camp’s alarm response to the fifth night’s fires from the ridgeline observation post that the Rumbling Clan chieftain occupied when he was not sleeping, which was most nights, because Dhug’mhar’s sleep requirements were, by his own assessment, minimal and by Graka’s assessment, a lie. "They see smoke and they think fire. They think fire and they think attack. They think attack and they do not sleep. They do not sleep and they make mistakes. Perfection approves of mistakes made by Perfection’s enemies. Perfection has always believed that the best opponents are the tired ones."

The wolf above the market hall watched the valley’s nights and the valley’s days, the banner visible in daylight and invisible in darkness, the snarl constant regardless of whether anyone could see it. The wolf did not need to be seen to be present. The wolf was always present. That was the ghost fire that the combined force could not extinguish.