Gal POV

The wedge was at a canter when the arrows start to rain from watchtowers.

It came down on the line that tower height gave it, nearly vertical at this range, and found the neck of the horse two positions ahead, the point driving into the muscle at the base of the skull.

The animal’s legs stopped.

There was no stumble, no recovery step, the horse’s full mass going directly to the ground at speed, and the rider went over the neck and into the open ground in front of him.

The riders immediately behind split around the fallen animal and kept their pace.

Orkhon was still to Gal’s left, with the shaft on his forearm.

He was watching the gate.

Gal looked at the gate.

One hundred and sixty meters.

The bar’s char was visible across its full face now, the dark spreading outward toward both ends from where the fire below had climbed it.

The sill connection had burned through and it was held only at the top by the remaining upper hinge, and the pressure behind the gate’s face was pushing it forward.

A man in Gal’s rank took a shaft through the upper chest, entering left of center, the point driving through the third intercostal space into the lung.

He folded forward over the horse’s neck and the horse carried him north for the next twenty meters before his grip released and he went sideways and off.

At one hundred meters the heat from the burning lower sections started to reach the riders.

Gal kept the gate in his vision.

The right tower was still firing and a shaft came in from above and went through the shoulder of a rider in the rank ahead, entering at the joint’s highest point and driving downward at the line the tower’s height forced it.

The man bent forward but stayed in the saddle.

His horse kept its pace.

The left leaf was bowing enough at its lower section that a gap showed between the two leaves at the bar’s attachment points, the bar charred dark across its full length and the leaves no longer aligned evenly below it.

At fifty meters he watched the vanguard reach the gate, the heat from it was across his face.

The first horse hit the left leaf at its lower third.

The sill connection was gone and the leaf rotated inward on the upper hinge and went down against the interior ground.

The horse stepped across the fallen timber and through into the city.

The right leaf took the next horse in its center and the impact drove the right lower connection past what remained of its strength, and the third horse’s impact brought the right leaf down, and the gate was open.

The wood edges were burning at both sides of the passage.

The breach between the timbers and the riders going through was narrow enough that one man’s coat found the right edge and caught fire for three strides before the motion and speed extinguished it.

He continued.

Gal went through between the burning gate.

The heat was through his face and hands at the moment of passage.

Then he was inside.

Ten meters back from the breach, organized, using the fallen gate leaves as a low barrier, the first defense was waiting.

Spearmen in the front rank with their points set at the height of a mounted man, archers behind them.

Sixty or more, the garrison’s professionals who had held their positions while the gate burned around them and had not gone back.

They knew what was coming through that gate and they had their answer for it ready.

The first rider through after Gal hit the spear line at its western end.

His horse took the point in the chest at the shoulder, the shaft bowing hard under the horse’s momentum and the defender holding it going backward into the second rank with the force transmitting through the shaft’s length.

The horse did not stop.

It pushed forward onto the shaft and into the defenders behind the man who had held it, and what had been the western end of the spear line was trampled over.

The second rider found the gap.

He had his saber out.

Gal came through as riders fed in on both sides and the spear line was already losing its integrity from the western end inward.

The archers in the second rank released into the breach at a close range.

A shaft went through the face of a rider coming through on Gal’s right, entering below the eye at the cheekbone, the point driving through the jaw.

He went off his horse’s near side and his horse continued north.

Another shaft caught a man in the throat as he passed the breach and he went down from the saddle and the riders behind him came through and past him.

The riders through the gate were continuous.

The line’s eastern end began pulling back before the center had broken, the men there making the decision individually at the moment each of them made it.

The archers in the second rank found hand weapons when the riders reached their position.

The line broke.

Gal drove north into the open lane beyond it.

The lane ran straight toward the city’s interior, buildings on both sides, the sounds of the gate fight behind him and the city opening ahead.

There were more defenders somewhere north of this first position, the garrison’s depth, and the granary were somewhere further in.

He observed the streets for what it gave him and that was open ground ahead for two hundred meters before the first cross-lane intersected.

Orkhon came alongside from the left, still with the forearm shaft, right hand on the reins.

"How far north?" he said.

"Find the wheat smell and follow it," Gal said.

They kept riding.

Batu POV

From the command position, the gate was open and visible through the smoke at the wood, the riders going through in a continuous sequence.

The sounds from inside the city through the breach were the sounds of close fighting in a confined space, different from the open-ground character of the previous days, the tight space carrying it outward through the gate in a compressed form.

The south wall’s walkway fire had thinned.

The defenders nearest the gate had turned their attention to what was on their interior lanes, and the coherence of the walkway defense around the gate section had broken apart into individual men making individual choices.

The watchtowers were still firing.

Both of them.

Their platforms sat above the walkway height and above what the encirclement’s suppression could reach effectively, and the archers on those platforms were still doing their job.

The towers would not go down until the assault riders inside the city reached the wall’s interior and came at the tower stairs from behind.

Dorbei’s smoke was still rising from the western region, the raiding operation continuing through the city assault without pause, albeit in fewer numbers. Six of his mingans had joined Torghul’s tumen for the siege.

Sixteen thousand riders held the encirclement around Suvar’s perimeter.

Batu looked at the open gate, the riders still moving through it and at the city’s timber walls above the gate lane. The riders inside would work north until they found the granaries and after that the city would start to burn.

The towers were the remaining problem outside the walls.

Inside, his men were somewhere north of the gate.