The barbarian victory celebration shook the capital’s remaining windows.

Twenty-nine thousand warriors filled the streets and the squares and the palace’s courtyard in the specific configuration that a victorious highland army produced when the army’s objective had been achieved and the achieving’s euphoria had not yet been replaced by the administrative reality that occupation demanded. The warriors drank the wine that the capital’s cellars provided, the cellars whose contents the civilian population’s exodus had left behind and that the barbarian warriors’ highland traditions regarding captured provisions made available without the rationing that a more disciplined army would have imposed.

The thundermakers stood silent in the battery positions that the siege had required. One hundred and twenty-one weapons whose sustained bombardment had breached the capital’s walls and whose concentrated fire had incapacitated the Threian king. The weapons’ crews celebrated with the infantry, their professional responsibilities deferred by the victory’s completion and the celebration’s priority.

Warchief Garrok sat on the Threian throne.

The oak and iron chair held the warchief’s seven-foot frame with the specific accommodation that a chair designed for human monarchs provided to a highland warrior whose physical dimensions exceeded the chair’s design parameters. Garrok’s legs extended past the chair’s seat front. His shoulders exceeded the chair’s armrests’ width. The warchief’s jaw wound, the scar that the Threian king’s Sixth Realm blade had carved across the mandible, pulled as the celebration’s mood lifted the warchief’s expression from the flat combat assessment that the campaign had sustained for weeks into the specific satisfaction that victory produced in a commander whose campaign had achieved the objective that the campaign existed to achieve.

The valley was the mountains’. The capital was taken. The Threian military was broken. The kingdom’s central authority had been removed by the specific mechanism that the thundermakers’ destruction of the walls and the infantry’s occupation of the streets had produced.

"The valley," Garrok said, from the throne. The word carried the weight that the word had carried since the first chieftains’ council had spoken it on the ridgeline above Fort Harken, the word that described the thing the mountains had descended for and that the descending had obtained. "The valley is ours."

The chieftains raised their cups. The highland warriors’ toast was the toast that victory’s celebration prescribed: the cups raised, the words spoken, the drink consumed in the single motion that the toast’s ritual tradition required.

"The valley," the chieftains answered.

* * * * *

The Horde’s messenger arrived at the capital’s eastern gate at the twenty-third hour.

The messenger was a Verakh named Tul’rok, the senior scout whose diplomatic function within the Verakh network included the specific assignment of delivering communications to parties whose relationship with the Horde was defined by agreement rather than hostility. Tul’rok was accompanied by four additional Verakhs whose presence provided the escort that the messenger’s security required and the observation that the Horde’s intelligence requirements demanded.

The eastern gate’s barbarian guards were drunk. Not the impairment that professional soldiers experienced when the professional soldiers’ celebration included controlled consumption. Drunk in the specific way that highland warriors whose cultural relationship with captured wine was the relationship of warriors who had spent their lives drinking fermented goat milk and who were now consuming the vintages that the Threian capital’s aristocratic cellars had accumulated over decades of peaceful commerce with the southern provinces’ vineyards.

"Halt!" The guard’s challenge was delivered with the slurred articulation that the wine’s quantity and the wine’s unfamiliar potency combined to produce. "Who approaches?"

"Messenger of the Yohan First Horde," Tul’rok said, in the trade dialect. "Under the agreement between Warchief Garrok and Commander Khao’khen, the Horde requests confirmation of the agreement’s terms. The capital is taken. The agreement specified that the mountains would honor the Horde’s existing agreement with the Threian kingdom. The Horde requests the confirmation."

The guard looked at the Verakh. The looking was the looking that a drunk warrior produced when the looking’s subject was an orcish scout standing at the gate of a capital that the drunk warrior’s army had just conquered and the looking’s assessment was filtered through the wine’s impairment.

"The tusked brutes want something," the guard said, to the guard beside him.

"The tusked brutes always want something," the second guard said.

"They want us to honor some agreement."

"What agreement?"

"The agreement with the pinkskins. The tusked brutes’ agreement with the pinkskins. The tusked brutes want us to honor the pinkskins’ agreement because the tusked brutes sat in their camp while we took the city."

The second guard laughed. The laugh was the laugh that wine and victory combined to produce in warriors whose assessment of the Horde’s claim was the assessment that victory’s euphoria and wine’s impairment provided rather than the assessment that sober strategic analysis would have produced.

"Tell the tusked brutes to leave," the second guard said. "Tell them to go back to their camp and sit. The city is ours. The valley is ours. The pinkskins’ agreements are the pinkskins’ problem and the pinkskins are gone."

Tul’rok’s expression did not change. The Verakh’s training included the specific preparation for diplomatic encounters whose reception was hostile, the preparation that converted the hostile reception’s insult into the intelligence that the reception’s content provided about the receiving party’s disposition and intentions.

"The Horde’s commander requests a formal response from the warchief," Tul’rok said. "The agreement was made between the Horde’s commander and the barbarian eldest shaman. The formal response is the response that the agreement’s terms require."

The guard’s expression shifted from the drunk amusement that the initial exchange had produced to the specific aggression that drunk warriors produced when the drunk warriors’ celebration was interrupted by a demand that the drunk warriors’ victory made them feel entitled to dismiss.

"You’d better be gone," the guard said. The words were delivered with the specific menace that the trade dialect’s limited vocabulary concentrated into the specific phrases that the dialect provided for threats. "Less you taste our fury. The mountains’ fury. The fury that took this city. Be gone, tusked brute."

Tul’rok looked at the guard. The looking lasted two seconds. The two seconds were the two seconds that the Verakh’s assessment required to determine that the guard’s response was the response that the guard’s impairment and the guard’s victory’s euphoria and the guard’s cultural contempt for the Horde combined to produce, and that the response’s content was the content that the Horde’s commander needed to receive.

"The Horde’s commander will receive your response," Tul’rok said.

The Verakh turned and walked from the eastern gate into the darkness that the gate’s torchlight did not reach. The four escort Verakhs fell into the movement pattern that the darkness’s concealment required, the scouts dissolving into the landscape between the capital’s walls and the Horde’s observation position sixty miles southeast.

The message that Tul’rok carried back to Ashwell was not the message that the agreement’s terms had anticipated. The message was the insult that the agreement’s violation had produced. The message was the specific content that the drunk guard’s contempt had provided: the barbarians did not intend to honor the agreement. The barbarians did not intend to acknowledge the Horde’s claims. The barbarians intended to hold what the barbarians had taken and to dismiss the Horde’s concerns with the specific phrase that the guard had used.

"You’d better be gone less you taste our fury."

The Snarling Wolf banner at the observation position held its direction northeast. The wolf’s snarl had been the snarl of observation for a week. The snarl was about to become the snarl that observation became when the observation’s conclusion demanded the action that the snarl existed to announce.