Movement under the archway opposite- Too dark to make anything out except a general impression of moving bodies, a wave of men advancing steadily, cautious on unfamiliar ground. Not our men, anyway. Without looking round, he stepped back into the line, heard his own voice giving the order to mark and draw . . .

(The strain of the bow against his left wrist; a sharp twinge in his back as he brought his shoulder blades together. He looked for a single target to aim at but there wasn't one, just a featureless line seventy-five yards away across the square) . . . Hold and loose; his fingers relaxed and the string pulled away, slapping the inside of his left arm where the bracer protected it. He tried to follow the course of his arrow, but it was lost among so many, and now his voice was calling, Nock, mark, draw, hold, loose! and he was doing the drill in time to his own commands, as if he was once more a young boy under the sergeant's eye. He felt a muscle protesting in his left forearm, easy to pull something if you don't take care, but there wasn't time to worry about that, he had to keep up with the commands (nock, mark, draw, hold, loose) or else get hopelessly out of step, be the laughing-stock of the quarter- A shape loomed up at him in the darkness and turned into a man; short, thickset, in early middle age, a spear in both hands and his eyes full of terror, plunging towards him not twenty yards away. So that's what the enemy looks like, he realised as he lowered his aim, picking a spot a hand and two finger's breadth above the handle and letting his fingers relax. He saw the arrow strike, the shaft vanish into the man's chest until only the fletchings and the nock were left; he saw the man run on two, three paces until his legs folded under him so that he pitched forward on his face; and behind him another - enough time to nock another arrow, he wondered dispassionately, as one second expanded into a substantial part of a lifetime. Perhaps, but if he was wrong he'd never have time to draw his sword. He let the bow fall (my beautiful new bow, and someone's bound to tread on it) and dropped his hand to his belt, feeling for the pommel of the old standard-issue sword that had been his father's- Horrible, heavy great thing, cruel to the hands of a man who made his living by fine work; sword drill was compulsory but he'd never made an effort at it; enough that he should cut his fingers to the bone with a bowstring without rubbing the skin off his palms with a wire-bound sword-hilt . . .) -Which slid out of its scabbard with a rasping, grating noise and felt hopelessly heavy, lumpish in his hand, as the enemy came forward, running straight towards him- He's got his eyes shut, Corodin noticed with amazement. Bugger's charging with his eyes shut. Poor bastard must be scared stiff.

-In his hand a short-bladed, long-handled sword with a single cutting edge, which he held above his head like a winnowing-flail- Metrias Corodin the instrument-maker let him come, let him come; and when he was close enough to reach, he held out his sword and let the poor frightened savage run straight onto it; at which point he was close enough to hear the air escaping from the punctured lung, before the man dropped to the ground, pulling Corodin's arm down and yanking the sword from his grasp. Empty-handed, then, he looked up at the next one, coming straight towards him as the other one had done, a lance in his hands, the same terror reflected in his face. Too late to work the sword free, but he tried it anyway, felt it budge and start to move just as the other man's spearhead came into sharp focus, so close that even his dim eyes could make it out, down to the fresh marks of the stone on its broad, leaf-shaped blade. He waited for the lance to pierce him, in that long last second thinking, I wonder if it'll hurt much, and was still waiting when the man next to him in the line leant across him and fended the lance away before following up with a thrust that ripped into the other man's stomach and made him howl. Corodin was grateful to his neighbour - gods, if it wasn't Gidas Mascaleon under that big, rusty helmet, a cheapskate and a disgrace to our profession - but before he could say thank you, another one of the enemy slashed Gidas Mascaleon across the face, cutting right through his nose just above the bridge; and while he was still stunned with the shock and the pain, drove the sword into his chest and killed him.

Corodin had his sword free by now and looked round for the man who'd killed his neighbour, but somehow wasn't there any more. No time to look more carefully; another one of them straight ahead, running in, but slowing down to climb over the drift of dead and dying men that was starting to build up around the feet of the defenders. As Corodin watched, the man seemed to lose his sense of purpose; there was fear in his eyes too, but the man was thinking, weighing up whether the attempt was feasible. He stood there for a moment astride a dying man; a tall, thin boy with a straggle of beard and slim, muscular arms showing under the baggy sleeves of a mailshirt, a sensible lad who realised the attack was over, and turned his back and ran off the way he'd come.

'We've tried three charges,' the man said, a junior captain of the line. 'It's hopeless, we just can't budge them.'

'Why the hell are you bothering with that?' Temrai panted. 'Get your men out of my way so I can clear this lot out with my archers.'

Four volleys was all it took (nock, mark, draw, hold, loose) and then the few that were left standing broke and ran, leaving the way clear for another hundred yards or so. As his line advanced Temrai felt a cold rage inside him towards the young captain, the man whose mistake had cost the lives of many of his men; but he ignored it, concentrating on the way ahead, desperately trying to remember the geography, whether there was any point ahead that was likely to harbour an ambush, how the streets were laid out, whether there was another lane alongside this one that the enemy could come down and take them in flank and rear. Each time one of his men fell he wanted to run to him, protect him, get his body away from the danger just in case there was a little drop of life still left in him. But it was out of his hands now, he couldn't afford the luxury of indulging his finer sentiments and his noble nature, not when everything that happened here was his responsibility. He couldn't have run forward into the thick of the fighting even if he'd wanted to.

Sounds like an excuse to me, he told himself, but he knew that wasn't true.

Where in hell were the enemy? Three squares they'd crossed and not an arrow loosed at them, nothing in their path except a few parked wagons and the occasional trader's booth. A trap? Or were they struggling to bring their men up in time, or letting this district go so as to form a defence in strength at some more advantageous point? There was a map somewhere, but he couldn't remember who'd had it last; besides, he ought to know these things. He looked round and shouted, furious that in spite of everything he'd said the line wasn't keeping level. The right wing was trailing behind, the centre was too far forward. Gods, if they were to attack us now . . .

Down this one, Loredan muttered to himself, past the livery stable and the tavern that does cheap mutton pies, should bring us out opposite the beltmakers' guildhall, and that'll be right. Assuming they've advanced as fast as I think they have, and I haven't missed a turning in the dark.

Here we are; but we're too early, got to give them time to run up against the force blocking the chandlers' arch. Then we'll have them front and back, without room to turn or use their bows. At least, that's the theory.

Wonderful thing, theory.

He stopped and raised his hand, and behind him the column bustled to a halt. Slowly he counted to fifty - why fifty? Well, as good a number as any - before dropping his hand and turning the corner back into the Grand Avenue, which was full of people.

It was like a Navy Day parade, seen from behind. In front, in the distance, a solid wedge of people squeezed down the street, followed by the stragglers, the people who couldn't be bothered to walk fast and keep up. We'll have them at any rate, he muttered to himself as he ran forward, quickly selecting a man at random.

Whoever he was, he can't have known very much about it; and then he was down, with Loredan stepping over him and a scrum of soldiers close behind, surging forward and across to fill the width of the street. Only a few of the enemy had turned round to face them by the time they were close enough to make contact, and after that it was sheer hard work, swinging the arms and taxing the shoulders, like digging peat or cutting back an overgrown stream. It was possible to feel the ripples of panic spreading out, from the back of the crush where Loredan's men were cutting out their path, on into the middle where men were packed so closely that their main concern was avoiding the sharp butt-spikes on the ends of the spears of the men in front. It was a little bit like watching something melt, seeing the solid turn to liquid under the heat.

Gods, it was a trap after all, and I fell for it. Temrai tried to look back and see the extent of the disaster, but there were too many heads in the way; all he could see was heads and shoulders and a forest of spears. But he could feel the shock running through his army as the men behind shoved forward to get as far away as they could from the shambles they couldn't see. There didn't seem to be a way out of it; not unless by some miracle another part of his army happened along and took the ambush in rear. For an instant, Temrai's mind was full of a ludicrous vision of the Grand Avenue, crammed as full of men as a sausage skin, alternating strata of them and us, each layer stabbing the backs of the men in front, being stabbed by the men behind, until only the very front and rear detachments were left to fight it out on top of a mattress of corpses.

Someone was tugging at his arm. He turned his head.

'. . . Through the houses,' the man was saying. 'Break through the walls of the houses; they're only wood and brick.'

At first it sounded like gibberish, until Temrai realised what the man was trying to say. More or less opposite where they were standing, on the left-hand side of the avenue, there was a row of dilapidated cottages. He remembered them, recalled hearing that they'd been allowed to go to ruin by the owner, who'd bought them as an investment in anticipation of some development or other along this part of the avenue. On the other side of the cottages, if he'd got it right, there was a long alley that curved round the avenue like a strung bow curling back to its string. More than enough men to push in the walls of the cottages and then they'd be through, and the battle would effectively be rotated through ninety degrees. There might even be scope for an outflanking manoeuvre of his own.

'Do it,' he shouted over the noise. 'Take as many men as you can get. And hurry, for gods' sakes.'

Without tools or equipment, or any real idea of what they were meant to be doing, they threw themselves at the walls of the cottages, kicking in doors and shutters and scrambling through, burying axe-heads in the soft plaster. When the wall began to give the mass pressed forwards like a stampede of horses frightened by thunder on the plains. A few, maybe a dozen, were buried under chunks of masonry; the rest squashed and crushed their way through, like grass forcing its way up through a pavement. As soon as men started spilling out on the other side, Temrai could feel the tension relax, now that the men trapped inside the box had somewhere to go. He had no choice but to follow the flow towards the breach, wondering as he went how many of his people would be left behind, to be massacred as they tried in vain to get past and into the hole in the wall. Too many, he decided, and left it at that. It was a simple form of arithmetic, because no matter what the figures said, the result would always be too many.

Patriarch Alexius woke up to the sound of yells and people running. At first he assumed the building was on fire - it wouldn't have been the first time - but somehow the noise was different. He strained to make out some words among the shouting.

Whatever it was that was happening, it sounded important. Common sense suggested that it would be a good time to get out of bed and put some clothes on, but for some reason Alexius stayed where he was. The confused shouting still wasn't making any sense, and he'd woken up with a migraine. He closed his eyes, just for a moment- -And saw a bench in a long, roomy workshop. He appeared to be at the dark end of the shop, but there was plenty of light near the open door, where two men were hanging what looked like a half-finished bow on a peg fixed to the wall. The younger man, who was little more than a boy, held the bow firmly on the peg with both hands while the older man (who was Bardas Loredan) slipped a hook over the bowstring and attached a cord to it. He fed the cord through a pulley, then looped it over one of the crossbeams of the roof; then he fished about under the bench and came up with a lead weight, marked on the side with tallies representing numbers. It was a heavy weight, because Loredan strained as he lifted it off the floor and held it under the end of the cord, cradled on his forearms, while he tied the cord to it.

'Hold it steady,' he said, and gently took his arms away, leaving the weight hanging from the cord. The bow on the peg bent as the weight drew down through the pulley, and Alexius noticed a number of marks scribed on the wall under the peg; the apex of the cone formed by the bent bowstring was touching one of them.

'Sixty pounds at twenty-four,' the boy said, having examined the mark. Loredan nodded, untied the weight and laid it gently down.

'More to come off the belly,' he said. 'Take it down and put it up in the vice, and get me the small drawknife.'

The boy did as he was told, asking, 'Why the belly? The wood's thicker on the back, shouldn't we thin it there instead?'

Loredan shook his head as the boy handed him an eight-inch blade with a handle at right angles on each end. 'You're forgetting your basic theory,' he said, 'about the back and the belly. You'd better tell me again, and remind yourself.'

The boy sighed; then, as Loredan spat on a flat brown stone and started whetting the blade slowly along it, the boy began to recite, 'The back of the bow stretches,' he said, 'and the belly is compressed. It's the stretching and the compression, balanced and in proper proportion, that gives a bow its strength. I know that,' he added in a wounded voice. 'I was just saying, there's an awful lot of wood in the back, so shouldn't you even it up?'

Without looking up, Loredan shook his head. 'You're forgetting what I told you about the heartwood and the sapwood,' he said.

'No, I'm not,' the boy replied, fidgeting with a beechwood mallet. 'Sapwood for the back, because it's young and can be stretched, heartwood for the belly because it's old and remembers its shape, even when it's been crushed up tight.'

'And the sapwood should be thin and the heartwood thick,' Loredan added, 'because what is compressed has more power when it expands again than that which has been stretched when it contracts. And that's the important bit,' he concluded, testing the edge of the blade against his thumb. 'The bit you always seem to forget.'

'Only because it's full of long words,' the boy replied. 'I'm not very good with long words. I'd remember it much easier if I actually knew what it meant.'

Loredan smiled. 'It does help,' he conceded. 'All right, then, think of it this way. Lord Temrai-'

Alexius saw the boy's face change, ever so slightly.

'-is the sapwood, because he was young and he stretched the clan to make them do something they weren't supposed to be able to do. By stretching them he gave them power.'

'I don't like this explaining,' the boy said.

'If you don't like it, it must be doing you good. Now then, the Patriarch Alexius is the heartwood, because he was old and he was crushed up and bent back when the city fell, and all the strength of the Order was squeezed into him; and that's how he got his power, which is much greater than the clan's.'

'Ah,' said the boy. 'Now I think I understand.'

'There's more,' Loredan warned. 'There's the reason why you don't make a bow out of just sapwood or just heartwood; because the same power that stretches the sapwood also compresses the heartwood, and the stretching of the one compresses the other.'

'Now I'm not understanding again.'

'Never mind. Learn now and understand later. Without the heartwood to support it, the sapwood stretches too much and breaks. Without the sapwood to contain it, the heartwood compresses too much and breaks. That's why the sapwood's on the outside, facing away from you as you draw the bow, and the heartwood's inside.'

'I see,' said the boy. 'Or I think I do. We're in the belly of the bow, and they're outside, in the back.'

Loredan nodded. 'Sort of,' he said. 'Right, that'll have to do for an edge. Now, let's let the dog see the rabbit.'

-and opened them again, because someone had opened the door and was shouting something at him.

'What?' he mumbled. 'Speak up, I can't-'

'The enemy,' the boy in the doorway repeated, 'are inside the city. Somebody's opened the gates. The savages are taking the city.'

'Oh,' Alexius replied. 'That would explain it, then.' He frowned, wondering why he'd said that. 'Do we know what we're supposed to do?'

The boy shrugged. 'The precentors and the librarians want to see you as soon as possible,' he said, 'about trying to hide the library or bury it or something.' He shuffled his feet nervously. 'Do you need me any more, Patriarch, or can I go?'

Alexius shook his head. 'No, you run along,' he said. 'I'd get home, if I were you, before your mother worries herself to death.'

The boy nodded gratefully and shut the door behind him, leaving Alexius in the dark once more. He sat up and felt for his slippers with his toes. Next, he should get dressed and go and see the precentors and the librarians; but was there any point, now that the city was about to fall? There was no earthly hope of saving the library, over a hundred thousand books ranged over a couple of miles of shelves. As for saving himself, that would be a sublimely futile effort; the strain of hurrying down to the harbour and trying to jostle his way onto a ship would kill him just as effectively as an arrow or a lungful of smoke. If he thought he'd be able to help organise an efficient evacuation, he'd go to it with a will. But the truth was that he'd only get in the way. If only there was some light, he could spend his last hours, or minutes maybe, admiring the justly famous mosaics on the ceiling and using them as a focus for some final act of meditation. But there wasn't; and he couldn't be bothered to grope around in the dark for his tinderbox. Ah, the hell with it; he'd never particularly liked the things to begin with.

His eyelids were beginning to droop as he slipped back into a doze when the door flew open again, and light flooded in from the stairway behind. But it wasn't the pageboy, or even a plains warrior with a dripping knife in each hand; it was someone he knew, if he could only fit a name to . . .

'Patriarch Alexius? Patriarch? Excuse me, are you there?'

His eyes snapped open. 'Hello?' he called out. 'Who's that?'

The glow of the lantern fell across the man's face. 'It's me, Venart. You remember, we met a while ago when you were . . .'

'Yes, yes, of course.' Alexius peered at him, wondering if this was another of those dreams. 'Please, come in,' he added. 'What can I do for you?' An incongruous conversation to be having in the middle of the sack of one's city, he reflected, but any interruption to his own death vigil was welcome enough.

'My sister,' Venart said. 'She - well, she sent me to fetch you.'

'Oh.' It would have made much better sense if it had been a dream, but it patently wasn't. He could smell the oil burning in the lantern, and Venart, pale-faced with embarrassment overlaid on terror, was quite obviously both here and now. 'That was - very thoughtful.'

'She insisted,' Venart replied. 'It's really quite unnerving, as if she somehow knew.' He stared at Alexius for a moment. 'Patriarch,' he said, 'I'm sorry if this is a rude question or against your ethics or whatever, but I'm worried. Is she a witch? It'd never have occurred to me in a million years; but all those things you said the first time we came here, and now this-'

She isn't; but perhaps I know who is. 'Please,' Alexius replied, 'don't ask me. The one thing I've learned in my recent studies into the subject is that I still know next to nothing about it.' He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles and added, 'Actually, if we're going to escape from the city, shouldn't we be making a start? I imagine it isn't going to be easy.'

'What? Oh, gods, yes, we must leave at once.' Venart half-turned, then stopped. 'You, um, don't want to take much stuff with you, I suppose? Only I don't think we ought to load ourselves down with heavy bags and parcels.'

Alexius considered for a moment. 'I don't think there's anything I actually need,' he said. 'If you'd be kind enough to hand me my coat; it's just there, on the stool.'

'No books or anything like that?'

Books of spells, grimoires, magical instruments, a brass jar or pottery lamp containing my familiar demon. 'No,' Alexius confirmed. 'There's all sorts of things I'd like to take, but nothing I can't do without. It's rather wonderful to be able to say that at my age, don't you think?'

As they set out, Alexius confidently expected he wouldn't survive as far as the second-city gate, let alone beyond it. But the streets were remarkably quiet; in the distance there were vaguely disquieting noises, but no recognisable shrieks of agony, no red glow over the lower city. He led the way from the gate, hoping his twenty-year-old recollections of back ways to the harbour were still reasonably accurate and valid.

'How did you manage to get here? To my lodgings, I mean. Did you arrive before it all started, or . . .?'

'Yes,' Venart said (he was actually puffing, having to make an effort to keep up), 'I was having a late meal at my inn when I heard the first rumours, so I came over straight away. Actually,' he added, 'I'm going to have to leave you at the docks - there'll be a boat to carry you to the ship, assuming they haven't both been stolen yet - because I've got to go back and pick up someone else. Or try to, at any rate.' Venart was close to tears, Alexius noticed as they passed under a lamp. He wore the expression of a man who's in desperate trouble not of his own making, trouble he knew was coming and could so easily have avoided, that it's-not-fair kind of despairing rage that feels so much worse than ordinary fear or anger.

'Loredan?' Alexius prompted him.

He nodded. 'Though how I'm supposed to find the General in the middle of a battle, let alone persuade him to drop everything and come with me . . .'

'I'm sure you'll do your best,' Alexius said with a trace of firmness, as if encouraging a child to do something he didn't want to, but which would be good for him. 'I expect you'll manage,' he added, truthfully.

They were no more than a quarter of a mile from the harbour; but now they had no choice but to leave the back alleys and join the surge of people in a main thoroughfare. It wasn't a pleasant walk, by any means; Alexius was reminded of excessively boisterous festivals, a student riot from his youth, the panic that had attended a fire, other similar precedents. But there were far more people here; women and children as well as men, all shoving and jostling, while on either side of the street the inevitable opportunists were indulging in some last-chance-to-steal looting of the better class of shops, and a few overturned carts and collapsed loads didn't help the flow of traffic. Witchcraft, he muttered to himself as the crowd crushed and compressed all around them without ever actually impeding them, without anybody so much as treading on their feet. There wasn't anything he could point to and legitimately call a supernatural effect; it was just that there were gaps and air pockets in the crush precisely where they wanted to go.

'The boat's not actually down by the docks,' Venart said in a loud, hoarse whisper. 'That'd be inviting people to come and grab it. So I told the boatmen to hide up under the arches of the long jetty, where I reckoned nobody'd see them. Mind you, I wasn't expecting a wholesale panic like this.'

Fortuitously the current of the stampede swept them directly towards the long jetty. Some fool had started a fire, accidentally or deliberately, in one of the warehouses, and its light reflected off the water was good enough to see by for some way. 'There,' Venart hissed. 'Oh, gods, there's people trying to get on it, just as I feared. Come on.'

Alexius saw a small longboat, six oars each side, standing off about fifteen yards from the jetty. Around it in the water men and women were swimming; some of them were trying to scramble over the side of the boat, and the oarsmen were hitting them with boathooks, the butt-ends of oars, even the wooden clogs from their feet. Venart shouted and waved; by chance one of the oarsmen looked up and saw him, and shouted to his fellows. They dislodged the remaining swimmers with difficulty and quite a lot of force, and rowed towards the point where Venart and Alexius stood.

'This'll be the tricky part,' Venart muttered. 'I don't suppose you're up to swimming.'

'Not really, no.'

'Pity.' Quite a few people were watching the boat coming in, others were scrambling to get to the front. It was the pushing and shoving behind them, in fact, that launched Venart and Alexius unexpectedly into the water, solving one problem but creating another.

Alexius felt the water close above his head. Ah, well, he thought, it was worth trying, I suppose. But I knew it wasn't going to do any good. Then he became aware of something pinching hard on his arm, and he was moving, being towed (still under the water) in the direction that he seemed to remember the boat being in. Since he was effectively dead already, of course, he could afford to be relaxed about the whole thing- -Until he felt the first mouthful of water enter his lungs, and the panic, which happened at almost precisely the moment when his head broke through the water back into the air, and many hands grabbed him and hauled him upwards; then a bump as he hit the planks of the boat, and someone pushing down on his chest - trying to kill him? No, this was something to do with getting water out of his lungs. It was all rather unpleasant, and he wasn't entirely sorry when his eyes blacked over and he lost consciousness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

The Prefect wiped the blood out of his eyes and looked down the wall, towards the bridgehouse, and then up, to where Loredan's bastion used to be. On both sides, he could see large contingents of the enemy, each party outnumbering the force he'd managed to rally around watchtower sixteen.

Under different circumstances, he could justifiably claim to have done enough. Four simultaneous assaults from both directions by superior forces had been repelled, at minimal loss to the defenders. Enemy casualties had been heavy, not that that signified particularly; what did it matter how many were killed when they still kept coming?

Having assessed the situation and made what preparations he could, the Prefect took stock of his own condition, which wasn't good. He'd taken a blow from an axe just above the rim of his helmet; the axe hadn't penetrated, but the jagged edge of a crumpled piece of helmet trim had sliced deeply into his forehead, and the blood from the cut was making it hard for him to see. A short-range arrow had hit him in the ribs; again, the mailcoat had turned it, but the baffled impact had cracked at least one rib, possibly two, which made breathing a painful matter. He'd turned his ankle, which didn't help, and pulled a muscle in his shoulder parrying a sword-cut from a much stronger man. As far as he was aware, none of the handful of offensive strokes he'd managed to make had done anybody any harm, but at least he was still alive.

He'd known for the last half-hour that he was going to die. Defeat is a gradual thing; it begins with the apprehension that things could be going better, develops into the perception that the situation is not favourable and that action must be taken to redress the balance; then, gradually, the emphasis shifts from they would appear to have an advantage to we might still win this if we pull something special out of the hat. Then, one by one, the possibilities for salvation are cancelled, until a point is reached where the brain acknowledges that realistically there can only be one outcome. After that, it scarcely matters whether the vanquished party fights bravely to the last or stands still and allows itself to be slaughtered. If they fight on, it's for revenge (or spite, at any rate), or the instinctive feeling that falling in battle is somehow preferable, in some strange way better for you than being made to kneel in rows until someone yanks your head back by the hair and cuts your throat. And, even at the end, there's a misguided glimmer of hope. The beating of the heart and the action of the lungs are a comforting prevarication, giving an impression of options being kept open.

The enemy came on for the fifth time; and as the Prefect shouted the order to form lines, his voice was weary. Before this night, he wouldn't have believed it was possible to feel tired during a battle; there would always be the rush of excitement and terror that would damp down the pain in the arms and knees, compensate for the shortness of breath and the pain of wounds and injuries. Well; the first four times, possibly. The fifth and last time, no. Perhaps when the outcome is so patently obvious, the body can no longer make the effort.

Why haven't they used archers to clear us off? he wondered. True, it was dark, not enough light to make out individual targets; but a line of men jammed close together on the walkway presented a target any archer could hit with his eyes shut. There were various possible explanations; archers more urgently needed elsewhere, run out of arrows, an unimaginative captain or an intimate-combat fetishist. Made no odds, really.

As the enemy came in - walking, not running, which gave the whole thing an unnaturally calm, almost serene feeling - the Prefect tightened his grip on his sword-hilt and promised himself he'd do his best, this being his last opportunity. All his adult life he'd dealt in honour and service, the way a furrier deals in furs or a vintner in wine. On his lips the terms had had specialised political meanings, and he'd long since stopped thinking about what the words stood for in the world at large. Now, unfortunately a little bit too late, he'd been granted a little gleam of insight; service is what makes you stand in the line when nobody would try and stop you if you ran away, and honour is what's left when every other conceivable reason for staying there has long since evaporated.

Oh, well, here we go. A man loomed up out of the darkness, a shape under a leather cap, an arm thrusting with a halberd. The Prefect parried, realised the thrust was a feint, found it was too late to do anything about it. Now he was slumped against the parapet, still alive but suddenly too weak to move. The man had moved on, stepping over him and preparing to engage the next man who got in his way; he was no longer concerned with the Prefect, who was as good as dead and therefore no longer a factor needing to be taken into account.

I don't think I'm going to be all right this time.

I wonder if . . .

I . . .

It's going to be all right- It had been close. Another ten minutes or so and the enemy would have rounded them up like sheep in a pen; but the counterattack by Ceuscai's men (who must have finally cleared the wall, or else they wouldn't be here) had come, not perhaps at the last moment, but fairly close to it. Now the enemy had fallen back; they'd lost fewer men and inflicted an alarming amount of damage, but the important part of it was that they'd been forced to retreat. In effect, it was an admission that they could no longer defend the landward side of the lower city. Which meant, in turn, that if Ceuscai's people now controlled the wall, all exits from the city apart from the docks were cut off. The number who could escape through the docks was strictly limited by the number of ships and the space available on them, and the rest had nowhere to go but uphill. It's going to be all right.

Temrai wrapped a strip of cloth around the cut on his arm, using his teeth to draw the knot tight. It was a scratch, nothing more; the jagged edge of a damaged shield, dragged across him in the squash as they bundled through the hole in the wall. So far, he hadn't come within arm's length of the enemy, and for that he was extremely grateful.

'All right,' he said, raising his voice to make himself heard. 'Heads of companies to me, now. Captains, you've got five minutes to sort yourselves out and then we're moving on. Anybody seen Bosadai? No? Oh, right. In that case, you two are in charge of arrow supplies; get some squads organised to pick up what you can find and pass them around.'

The heads-of-companies meeting was short and to the point. Now that the hard work had been done, it was almost time to wrap it up; in fact, by the time the carters had returned to camp, loaded up the stuff and come back, it ought to be time. And then it would be finished.

Loredan stepped forward, putting his weight on his front foot and lunging. The other man was off balance and couldn't have made an effective parry even if he'd known how to. The first seven inches of the blade went in just below his throat, in the gap where the collarbones meet. He slid off the blade and dropped, making way for the next one.

It's all very well killing people, but we're losing this. They weren't just coming in twos and threes; the flow was continuous, and as soon as one went down there was another behind him and two squashing through on either side. Loredan stopped using the thrust and switched to slashes only; less risk of getting the blade stuck, and what he wanted was wounded men still on their feet and impeding the scrum rather than more corpses getting in his way and upsetting his balance. No place for finesse or precision in a ruck; hard swipes off the back foot, keep the blade moving fast, as close to the body as possible to make it harder to parry effectively, and, if possible, hit them around the face and neck, where it hurts and frightens most.

Dimly he was aware that the man next to him in the line had gone down, which meant his right side was exposed. He stepped back three paces, covering his retreat with a powerful slash that connected with something soft. He realised that he was resigned to the fact that the counterattack, which was more or less their last realistic chance, wasn't going to happen now; the wall had definitely fallen, so even if they did somehow push the enemy back down the hill, all that'd happen would be that ultimately they'd be enfiladed by archers on the wall, pinned down and surrounded. The plain truth was that there were too many of the enemy now inside the city for his forces to push out again.