Five months before the Snarling Wolf reached the capital’s walls, Fort Harken fell.

The thundermaker ball struck the main gate’s left tower at the third hour of the second day’s bombardment. The impact was not the impact of a catapult stone, which hit and cracked and required repeated strikes to produce structural failure. The thundermaker ball hit and punched through. The stone facing on the tower’s eastern side exploded inward, fragments of masonry the size of a man’s head spraying across the courtyard in a horizontal rain that killed three soldiers who had been standing at the tower’s base and wounded nine more who had been moving between positions.

The fortress that had guarded the northeastern passage between the Threian heartland and the Gorath Highlands had stood for ninety years, its stone walls twenty feet thick at the base, its garrison of two thousand soldiers equipped with the boomsticks and thundermakers that the kingdom’s armories had stockpiled over decades of peacetime procurement. The fortress was supposed to hold. The fortress had always held. The mountain barbarians who descended from the Gorath Highlands every generation to raid the border settlements had broken against Fort Harken’s walls the way waves broke against cliffs, and the garrison had watched the breaking with the professional detachment of soldiers who held an impregnable position.

The barbarians who came down the mountains this time were not the barbarians that Fort Harken’s garrison expected.

They wore the standard dwarven-forged iron armor that the forges of Khaz-Dorum sold to any customer who met the price. Iron breastplates, iron helmets, iron greaves, each piece bearing the maker’s stamp of the Ironbeard Clan’s foundries, the same foundries that had supplied the Threian military for three generations before the dwarves severed the trade agreement. The armor was not crude. It was not improvised. It was the professional output of the finest weapon-smiths on the continent, sold to the highland clans through the mountain trade routes that the dwarves maintained for customers whose gold was good and whose politics the dwarves did not concern themselves with. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

They carried boomsticks. Dwarven-forged boomsticks, the same model that the Threian military had wielded as its signature advantage over every other land power for two generations. The boomsticks in the barbarians’ hands were identical to the boomsticks in the garrison’s hands because both had been manufactured by the same forges and sold through different ledger entries. The barbarians’ boomstick ammunition was dwarven-standard, packed in the same powder charges, using the same caliber balls, producing the same muzzle velocity at the same ranges.

They brought thundermakers. Fifty of them, dragged down the mountain passes on iron-wheeled carriages that the dwarven engineers had designed specifically for mountain transport, the massive weapons positioned at six hundred paces from the fortress’s main gate and fired at the walls with the sustained bombardment that the dwarves’ unlimited ammunition supply sustained.

Colonel Vask heard the second impact from the command post and felt it through his boots. The vibration was different from the catapult strikes that the garrison’s training had prepared them for. Catapult strikes shook the walls. Thundermaker strikes shook the earth beneath the walls.

"Second tower hit!" The sentry’s report came down the communication chain with the urgency that reports carried when the thing being reported was the thing the garrison feared most. "Eastern face compromised! Crack running from the impact to the foundation!"

Vask climbed to the battlement and looked at the crack. It ran from the tower’s midpoint to the ground in a jagged line that followed the mortar joints, the line of least resistance that the thundermaker’s concussive force had found and exploited. Three inches wide at the top and widening.

Outside the walls, twenty thousand barbarians occupied the ridgeline and the valley below it. Twenty thousand warriors in dwarven-forged armor carrying dwarven-forged weapons with dwarven-supplied ammunition that arrived in the continuous resupply wagons that the mountain trade routes sustained. The garrison’s own ammunition was finite. The kingdom’s trade agreement with the dwarves had been severed more than six months before the invasion, the Ironbeard Clan’s Thane having learned that Threia had entered into a commercial alliance with the elven kingdoms whose relationship with the dwarves was defined by centuries of mutual hostility. The dwarves did not sell to friends of elves. The dwarves had stopped selling to Threia, and the Threian military’s ammunition stockpiles were the stockpiles that existed at the moment the trade was cut, with no prospect of replenishment.

Every thundermaker ball the garrison fired was a ball that could not be replaced. Every boomstick charge was irreplaceable. The barbarians’ ammunition arrived on the mountain wagons without limit.

The barbarians’ assault doctrine was not the raiding doctrine that the garrison’s training had prepared for. Previous highland incursions had been raids: short, violent, aimed at seizing portable wealth and retreating before the garrison’s reinforcements arrived. This incursion was a siege. A sustained, methodical siege conducted with the patience and the equipment that siege warfare required, the patience supplied by the barbarians’ new organizational discipline and the equipment supplied by the dwarven forges that had armed both sides of the engagement and that profited from both sides’ destruction.

The garrison’s quartermaster reported the ammunition status to Colonel Vask at the end of each day. The reports were the reports that finite resources produced: declining numbers, each day’s expenditure subtracted from a total that could only decrease. The thundermaker stockpile declined from one hundred percent to eighty-two percent in the first two days. The boomstick stockpile from one hundred percent to seventy-one. The rates of decline accelerated as the barbarians increased the intensity of their probing attacks, each probe designed to draw fire and each drawn shot one fewer shot available for the assault that would come when the barbarians judged the garrison’s ammunition sufficiently depleted.

* * * * *

By the fifth day, the left tower was rubble. The wall section beside it had been breached. The barbarians poured through the breach, twenty thousand strong, their dwarven armor absorbing the garrison’s fire at the ranges where the breach’s confined space forced the engagement.

A barbarian warrior took a ball in his breastplate at ten paces and staggered but did not fall, the dwarven iron dented but holding, and the warrior behind him stepped forward with his hand axe swinging. The garrison soldiers at the breach fought with the courage of professionals whose fortress was falling and whose ammunition was running out and whose replacement supplies were never coming because the dwarves had cut the trade.

A Threian sergeant held the breach’s narrowest point for eleven minutes with six soldiers, their boomsticks firing and reloading in the sequence their training prescribed, each ball finding a target at the range where missing was impossible and each target replaced by the next barbarian before the smoke cleared. The sergeant’s boomstick misfired at the twelfth minute, the weapon’s barrel cracked from the sustained firing that the weapon’s aging construction could no longer sustain. He drew his sword. A hand axe found his thigh. He fell. The barbarians stepped over him.

Fort Harken fell on the seventh day. The garrison’s fourteen hundred survivors retreated south, carrying the dispatches that would inform King Aldric III that the northeastern border was open and twenty thousand dwarven-armed barbarians were inside the kingdom.