The last street before the plaza was narrow enough that the squad had to move single-file past an abandoned cart that had been shoved against one wall. Harr stopped at the final building before the street opened and moved to the corner to look.
The plaza was irregular, a widening where three streets t. It was paved in grey cobblestones, with buildings on both sides. Empty market stalls stood in the left quarter of the open space, their canvas long gone. In the center sat a stone well.
On the far side, the high quarter began. A retaining wall with steps cut into it rose to the elevated ground, with iron rails on both sides, where the buildings were better and the ironwork was kept up. The steps were blocked at the top by sothing heavy and dark.
On the left side, one of the residential buildings facing the plaza had its second-floor loading shutter standing open. A shadow moved behind it. From the right building, also elevated, ca a second position, the man there staying well back from the opening, though the crossbow was visible at the sill’s edge.
At the steps barricade there were three n.
"Heh, this one won’t be as easy," said the soldier behind Harr.
"No," Harr said, keeping his eyes on the square.
A woman leaned from a second-floor window in the building directly above them, looked at the twelve ard n pressed against her building’s wall, and said, "I knew they’d co through here. I told my husband three days ago."
"Go inside," Harr said.
"I am inside," she said. "I’m in my own window."
She pulled back from it anyway.
From the steps barricade, one of Coss’s n had spotted them. He said sothing short toward the stairwell above him.
From the left building’s shutter, a voice called back down. The crossbow shadow at the right building shifted.
"On it," said a soldier at Harr’s shoulder.
Harr spread the squad along the building wall, placing anyone with a sightline on either elevated opening, and called the signal.
Twelve pistols fired in the sa second. The crack ca back from the retaining wall, the paving, and the stone ring of the well, all of it at once, the full sound nothing in this city had created before the this day. Smoke burst outward into the open space in a grey wall.
At the left elevated position, two balls went through the shutter opening together. One took the crossbowman through the left shoulder at the collar, driving into the clavicle and shattering it inward. The ball carried through the joint and lodged at the back of the shoulder.
His bow arm dropped at once, the signal cut between nerve and muscle, and the crossbow tumbled from his grip and fell from the window onto the plaza stones below with a sound distinct from the gunfire. He hit the wall behind him with his working arm and held himself there.
The man in the right building was already halfway back from the window when the ball struck him across the right side of the head.
It went above the ear, through the scalp and across the skull without penetrating, but the graze tore the scalp from the hairline to the temple and the blood ca out the way head wounds bled, all at once and fast, running down his face in a sheet before he had finished falling backward.
"Move!" Harr called.
They ran.
The plaza was thirty feet of open stone. At full sprint that was four or five strides, and the elevated positions were already disrupted, with the n at the barricade ducked down from the sound.
The man two strides ahead of Harr went down. A bolt ca from the right building. Soone had reached the grazed man’s position before the squad was halfway across.
It caught the soldier through the back of the upper left leg, at the crease behind the knee where the hamstring was close to the surface.
The point went in through the tendon and out through the front of the leg. He drove the leg forward on the next stride, the knee buckled, and he went face-first onto the cobblestones, sliding on his chest with the montum he had built, hands out, still trying to move forward. Then he stopped.
"Man down!" soone behind Harr called.
"Keep going!" Harr said.
Two soldiers split off without being told. The rest reached the steps.
The three n at the barricade fired as the squad arrived. One bolt took the militiaman on Harr’s left through the shoulder, the tip going in at the front and driving through the joint, not clean. The man spun from the impact and caught himself on the iron railing, gripped it, and pulled himself upright.
Harr fired his first pistol into the nearest barricade man from six feet away. The ball went through the left side of the chest at the ribs and out through the back, punching him off his feet and onto the step behind him, one arm hanging over the edge.
The second man took two shots from the soldiers behind Harr and went down. The third dropped below the barrier, worked himself sideways, and went back through the gate opening into the high quarter’s entrance passage.
"Don’t follow him," Harr said. "Secure this position."
Two soldiers went left toward the residential building. The ground-floor entrance was an ordinary door. It opened inward onto a narrow entry hall, with two closed doors on the left and the staircase at the far end.
A woman stood in the hall with both arms pulled against her chest, looking at the two militia soldiers who had co through her door.
"Get down," the first soldier said. He kept his pistol low and pointed toward the floor. "Go to the back of the building and stay there."
"There are n up there," she said in fear.
"I know," the second soldier said. "Get to the back."
She pressed past them into the nearest doorway and pulled it closed.
At the top of the staircase, the crossbowman had heard the exchange. His voice ca down, "Co on, then."
The first soldier went up.
The bolt hit him between the fifth and sixth ribs on the left side at the staircase’s midpoint, where the shot was clean at ten feet. He sat down on the step with both hands going to the wound by instinct, the air leaving him in a long exhalation that was not normal breathing.
He stayed there with his hands against the wound, eyes on the wall.
The second soldier went past him. He took the last four stairs at a run and ca off the landing into the crossbowman before the man had reloaded. He got his left hand on the crossbow barrel and pushed it aside, and his sword was in his right hand, but the space was too small for a swing.
He drove it forward. It went in at the crossbowman’s midsection, through the muscle of the abdon, and stopped at the spine.
The crossbowman’s legs stopped receiving instruction. He went down with the sword still in him, his legs making the slow involuntary movents of a body that had not yet understood what had happened to it. Then they stopped.
The left elevated position was clear.
Harr was at the barricade. The right building’s window still had the crossbow shadow, the man who had taken the grazed crossbowman’s place and was watching the plaza, not firing because there was nothing in the open to fire at.
The plaza was in the militia’s hands on two sides. One soldier was down in the center with a leg wound and two n crouching over him. One was on the staircase with a lung wound that had not been dressed yet.
The shadow in the right building window did not move.
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