Colder Than Ice - Part 6 Jardon sat down at his desk and took out a quill.

The voice of his old drill sergeant roared through his mind. "The knee that buckles drags ten men down. The break in the shield wall dooms the unit!" He shook it away. If he was going to be a warcaster he was going to have to get used to making order, not taking orders. Besides, Brucker had told him that the mandatory meditation they had enforced upon him at the end of every day was just to keep him from attempting to use his newfound powers and detonating himself. Anything that relaxed him would serve as well as the arcane exercises that Lewell insisted upon.

He placed a scrap of papyrus before him and smiled, an old thin smile. It was a habit from before the Pit, from back when he'd served in active duty. He wrote at the top of the page the word "Ord".

He shook his head, too general. Beneath it he wrote "Five Fingers". He nodded to himself, a small movement but a conscious one. Now he'd defined the scope of his concern.

Beneath it he drew a long vertical line, stretching from the top of the page to the bottom. The quill tore through at one point, but he simply passed the tear and continued. He hadn't thought that he'd been pressing so hard.

He labeled both sides of the split. On the left he wrote "Ordic forces". He crossed that out. "Human forces". Much better. On the other side he wrote "Cryxers". It was tempting to insult the enemy, but Morrowan tradition held that hate, and its attendant emotions and expressions, was ultimately a battlefield hindrance. The clear mind grasped victory.

Off to the right he wrote. "Position". Then he considered each column.

There was much to be said for the human position. They had a fortified city. If the walls which surrounded it were somewhat decrepit and crumbling still they were walls. The famous 'two walls', North and South, were antiquated from a military perspective. They were in poor repair. But they were still considerably better than nothing. It was commonly held that a fortified position was at least a threefold force multiplier. Further, Five Fingers had several advantages.

First and foremost was its location. On the edge of the water it should be a simple matter for any siege to be born via ship borne supplies. Cryx might have force superiority on land, but so far as he knew their navy was a rag tag band of pirates and Satyxis, no match for the navies of Ord, Cygnar and Khador.

In addition there was the steady supply of water. Salt made it undrinkable, but in any besieged city the greatest threat came from fire, and Five Finger's unique construction rendered it mostly resilient to such a threat. The city's civilian population, those unable to join the militia, could be pressed into service as a massive bucket brigade.

Lastly there were the Guns. The famous trio of land borne cannon, which had felled a Khadoran Collossal. They could toss a shell at the horizon that would sink any boat it touched. They could target and fell warjacks or any of those hideous engine things that he'd seen in the river battle. The Guns had a limited ammo store, but unless treachery neutralized them they'd take a heavy toll on the Cryxian heavy iron before they fell silent.

He smiled, and wrote limited versions of these advantages down on the living side of the column. Then his face grew more sombre as he looked onto the other side. He tried to envision what the ensuing battle would look like from the Cryxian perspective.

For all of Five Finger's fortified nature there was a massive and gaping vulnerability. The Devil's Tongue itself ran between both walls. The city's islands were, by and large, high above the waterline, but against a foe which drew no breathe the islands could each be besieged alone. The bridge network, far from hampering Cryx's progress from one shoreline to another, would be the Ordic relief forces only hope of saving each islands inhabitants. An underwater sally, conducted while the main battles raged on either shore, could be devastating.

Further, the Cryxian forces had the inherent advantage of the attacker. They could set the terms of the engagement. In terms of fresh water, Ord needed the springs on both the north and south banks. So they must, of necessity, ward both places. The people were on the islands, and couldn't readily be moved, so there must be some forces left in preparation for an underwater attack. Cryx, by contrast, could concentrate its attack on either the north or the south, and pin the other bank with some hastily created thralls.

Cryx had nothing to defend. If the tide turned, the Cryxers could withdraw. If a new tactic were brought to bear, they could move away, study it and return at leisure. Ord could give no ground. They'd traded map for material to this point, and it had brought their forces into rough parity (thanks to the Four Star's ruse), but now they were backed against the Bay of Stone.

Jardon scratched the enemy's advantages onto their side of the line, then considered. Finally, and with vast reluctance, he ticked "Position" with a check facing Cryx's way. Their enemy held the metaphorical high ground.