Gal POV

The main avenue ran straight north from the gate, and the city was being swarmed behind him.

Every rider coming through the gate fed into the avenue and into the cross-streets branching east and west.

By the time Gal and Orkhon had covered two hundred meters from the gate’s interior, the sound of several hundred horses moving through the city was all around them, coming from the east and the west as much as from behind, the scattered percussion of riders spread through multiple streets at once.

The first cross-street defense was forty meters ahead. Twenty-five men, perhaps thirty, using a stack of building timber as a barrier across the road’s center. Spearmen at the front, two men with axes behind them. They had set themselves appropriately for one direction.

Riders from the eastern cross-street appeared on the far side of the barrier at the same moment Gal’s group reached the near side, and six riders from the western street cleared the barrier’s eastern end before the defenders had finished thinking where to face.

The line broke faster than the gate defense had broken.

A man with a spear set toward the main lane took a shaft through the neck from a rider coming in from the east at close range, the point going clean through the muscle on both sides. He went down and the spear went with him, and the riders from the main lane pushed over the barrier before the man behind him could fill the gap.

Gal went over the barrier and kept north. Orkhon rode beside him.

Orkhon glanced ahead and said, "More ahead."

Gal kept his eyes on the lane. "There always is," he said.

The street opened into a wider section two hundred meters further in. The buildings on both sides were residential, timber-framed structures with clay packed between the beams, close together with short alleys running between them. A well stood at the center of the open space.

Women were running from a building on the eastern side, pulling children with them toward one of the side alleys. A man stood in a doorway to the north with a wood-splitting axe, watching the riders come. Two riders from the western cross-street passed through the open space ahead of Gal at a canter. When Gal reached the building’s door, the man with the axe was not in it anymore.

The wheat smell was stronger in this area than it had been near the gate. Gal read the city’s layout the way he read terrain, and the granaries were somewhere ahead.

Torghul POV

The watchtowers were still firing, their platforms carrying archers shooting into the encirclement line and into the riders still going through the gate.

The interior of the city had smoke now, thin columns rising from two or three points inside the walls, buildings that had caught on fire from something close to the fighting. The granaries were not burning yet.

From his position on the south, he could see the gate breach and the continuous flow of riders going through it. They were not stopping at the gate’s interior. They were spreading into the city’s streets, and the sounds coming back through the gate were the distributed sounds of fighting and shouting in an urban area.

He turned to the nearest relay rider.

"East wall. Move the suppression fire."

The relay rider carried the signal, and the encirclement’s eastern arc redirected, the fire going into the east wall walkway in a sustained volume.

The defenders on the east walkway compressed in the same way the south wall defenders had compressed earlier, still shooting at intervals but at a fraction of their previous rate.

A shaft from the east wall came through the arc and caught a rider in the side between the ribs at the right flank. He pulled his horse out of position, and the riders on each side of him closed the gap.

The east watchtower was the remaining problem. Its platform projected above everything the encirclement could reach. When the assault riders reached the wall from the city interior, the tower stairs would be accessible from inside.

Gal POV

The first large granary was at the end of the main avenue, a long structure set against the north wall with three sets of wide doors and a loading platform running along its south side. Two smaller structures flanked it on each side. The wheat smell was specific and strong.

The organized defense was in front of it. A hundred and fifty garrison soldiers arrayed across the full width of the avenue and the loading platform, some of them on the platform with height above the road, archers at the corners of the flanking structures, spearmen in the avenue itself four ranks deep.

A man at the center of the platform in a commander’s coat was directing riders to positions at the flanking buildings’ corners. These were the professionals, the garrison’s core, and they had had the time to place themselves for defense.

Behind Gal, the city was full of riders. He could hear them in the cross-streets, the residential section behind him and in the side roads running along the walls. Everything the encirclement outside had pushed inward was converging on the same point.

Gal pulled his horse to a stop forty meters from the defensive line, and the riders behind him spread into the avenue and the cross-streets on both sides.

"How many behind us?" Orkhon said.

He was looking at the line at the granary.

Gal turned in the saddle. Riders as far back down the main avenue as he could see, and the eastern and western cross-streets were filling too. He turned back to the front.

"Enough," he said.

An arrow from one of the archers at the eastern flanking structure came in from the corner position and found a horse two positions to Gal’s right through the upper neck. The horse went down fast, its front end giving first, and the rider came clear before the animal finished falling.

More archers at the flanking structures were finding their range now. The riders in the avenue spread wider into the cross-streets on both sides, and the garrison commander on the platform was calling something south, pulling men back from the flanking positions, tightening the line toward the platform and the wide doors of the granary.

The line had not been built for riders coming from three directions, and the commander knew it and was responding to it.

Gal looked at the platform, the main defensive line and at the cross-streets filling with his riders on both sides of it.

He raised his arm and dropped it.

The riders moved.

Batu POV

From his position outside the south wall, the interior smoke was visible above the wall’s top.

Three columns now, thin in the morning light, rising from points the city’s structure determined. The watchtowers were still working, both of them, their archers still finding the encirclement line at intervals. The interior push was running without him in it, which was what it was supposed to do.

Dorbei’s western columns were still rising, the raiding continuing through the city engagement without pause.

The towers would stop when the assault riders reached the walls interior.

Batu looked at the gate opening, at the riders still going through it in a continuous line, and waited.