The Battle of Harken Valley taught King Aldric III that the weapons he remembered from his military academy’s instruction manuals now belonged to the enemy.

The king’s thirty thousand soldiers advanced into the valley in the formation that the Lord Marshal’s campaign doctrine prescribed, the infantry in three lines, the cavalry on the flanks, the thundermaker batteries on elevated platforms. The formation was professional. The formation was the formation that the Threian military had used successfully for three generations when the Threian military had possessed the weapons advantage that made the formation effective.

The barbarians met the formation with identical weapons and superior ammunition.

The first barbarian volley struck the king’s center at eight hundred paces, the dwarven-forged iron balls smashing into the advancing infantry with the downhill velocity that the barbarians’ elevated positions provided. A soldier in the front rank took a ball through his breastplate.

The dwarven iron that his armor was made of, iron from the same forges that had made the ball that struck it, failed at the velocity the thundermaker produced. The ball punched through the chest plate and continued through the soldier’s body and struck the soldier behind him in the hip. Both men fell in the compressed space the formation’s density created. A third ball found the stumbling man behind them in the shoulder, spinning him sideways. His scream mixed with the screams of the men beside him who were discovering that the formation’s density was its vulnerability under thundermaker fire because every ball that entered the front passed through multiple ranks.

"Advance! Close the distance!" The officers’ commands carried through the chaos. The formation pushed forward because doctrine said close the distance, and the doctrine was written when the Threian military’s thundermakers could fire and the enemy’s could not. The doctrine’s assumption had been invalidated by the dwarven trade that armed both sides with the same weapons.

The barbarians’ reload speed matched the Threian crews’. The same dwarven-designed mechanisms, the same loading procedures, the same rate of fire. The second volley struck at six hundred paces. The third at four hundred. The fourth at two hundred.

The barbarian boomstick line opened at one hundred and fifty paces. Twenty thousand boomsticks firing in staggered volleys, the dwarven-standard balls descending into the formation with the density that twenty thousand weapons produced at close range.

The front rank dissolved. The second became the front and dissolved. The third became the front.

The king’s own thundermakers returned fire. The Threian balls struck the barbarian positions and produced casualties, but each Threian ball fired was a ball subtracted from a stockpile that could not be replenished. Each barbarian ball fired was replaced by the next wagon from the mountain trade routes. The mathematics of finite versus infinite ammunition was the mathematics that the battle was fought within, and the mathematics favored the side whose supply was unlimited.

The western passage plan was Fairfax’s contribution, the minor noble’s analytical mind having identified the terrain feature that the army’s standard maps did not include because the army’s standard maps described routes that armies used. The passage was a goat-herder’s trail, narrow and steep, unsuitable for cavalry or thundermakers or supply wagons. Five thousand infantry with three days’ rations carried on their backs, moving in single file through terrain that the barbarians’ defensive planning had not considered because the terrain’s unsuitability for conventional military movement had made it invisible to the barbarians’ tactical assessment.

The plan required the main body to demonstrate against the barbarian ridgeline positions while the flanking force traversed the passage, the demonstration convincing the barbarians that the next assault was coming from the direction the assaults had been coming from while the actual assault came from behind. The demonstration would consume ammunition that the army could not afford to consume, but the alternative was the frontal assault that had consumed four thousand dead and eighteen percent of the thundermaker stockpile and had not produced any territorial gain.

* * * * *

The barbarian shamans entered the battle at the second hour.

They came from the ridgeline positions where they had been chanting, their bodies painted in ritual markings, their voices carrying the harmonic frequencies that shamanic magic used to interface with the natural world’s energies. The shamans did not cast spells the way Threian battlemages cast spells, with structured incantations and geometric patterns. The shamans screamed.

The ground beneath the king’s left flank liquefied. Not water. Something between solid and liquid, the earth’s structure disrupted by the shamanic vibration. Soldiers sank to their knees in soil that had been firm three seconds before. Their armor’s weight drove them deeper.

The Threian battlemages responded. Frost spells solidified the liquefied ground. Fire spells targeted the shamans’ ridgeline positions, flames arcing across the distance.

The shamans redirected the fire. Not deflected. Redirected. The flames curved in the air and returned, striking the Threian positions that had launched them. The battlemages’ own spells became the barbarians’ weapons.

"The shamans are turning our magic against us!" The battlemage’s report carried the panic of trained professionals watching their own spells reverse direction and burn their own soldiers.

A frost spell meant to solidify the mud instead froze the Threian soldiers trapped in it, the ice locking their legs in place while the barbarian infantry advanced through the untouched ground beside them. A fire lance meant to scatter the shamans instead detonated among the Threian cavalry’s horses, the animals screaming and throwing their riders as the redirected flames consumed saddles and barding.

The battle lasted six hours. The king’s army withdrew with four thousand dead and six thousand wounded. The king’s thundermaker batteries had expended eighteen percent of the total remaining ammunition stockpile in a single engagement. The barbarians had expended nothing that the next dwarven supply wagon would not replace.

Fairfax stood beside the king as the withdrawal’s columns moved south.

"The uphill assault is not viable," Fairfax said. "The shamans and the thundermakers create a defensive advantage that our numbers cannot overcome. And every engagement consumes ammunition we cannot replace. The dwarves have cut us off. What we fire today is ammunition we will not have tomorrow."

The king’s thundermaker batteries had expended eighteen percent of the total remaining ammunition stockpile in the single engagement. Eighteen percent. The dwarven trade that had maintained the supply for three generations was severed. The stockpile that existed when the trade was cut was the stockpile the kingdom would fight all remaining wars with, and eighteen percent was gone in six hours against barbarians who would receive fresh supply from the next dwarven wagon.

"We cannot sustain the expenditure," Fairfax said. "Five more engagements at this rate and the thundermakers are empty. We are fighting with weapons we cannot replace against an enemy whose weapons are continuously replenished by the same supplier that used to replenish ours. The irony is structural and the irony is killing us."

"Then we go around," the king said. The words carried the quality of a monarch learning, through the expensive curriculum of casualties, that the weapons superiority his kingdom had enjoyed was not the kingdom’s anymore and the enemy he was fighting had the same weapons and better supply of them.