Kael heard the silence from the central hall and understood what it meant before the first runner arrived to confirm it.
Silence after a Sixth Realm engagement was not the silence of an engagement that was still being decided. It was the silence of an engagement that had been decided and whose participants were adjusting to the result. The barbarian warriors who had entered the hall with Garrok were not producing the sustained combat noise that the engagement had generated for the past eight minutes. The orcish formation on the other side of the throne room doors was not producing the victory sounds that an orcish army produced when it won an engagement, because the orcish army in the corridors did not produce victory sounds. It produced forward movement, and forward movement was quiet in the way that professional operations were quiet.
