Arqa POV

The riders pushed to within a hundred meters of the ditch before the front rank stopped. There was nothing to stop at, no wall and no order, but the people at the lead had reached the point where the ditch was directly ahead and going forward meant stepping down into it.

They stopped there on the near bank, pressing together, the people behind them pushing and the people at the front not moving.

"Forward!" a rider shouted from somewhere behind the front rank. "Move them forward!"

Arqa drove his horse into the east flank of that packed mass and the riders around him did the same from the other sides, pushing the people at the rim inward and forward until the first of them went over the edge. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

An old man went in first, stepping down sideways because there was no room to jump. He hit the clay floor of the ditch and went to his knees. The sacks he’d been carrying dropped around him.

The riders kept pushing and more people went over, some jumping, some falling, some carried over by the bodies pressing behind them. They hit the ditch floor and some got up immediately and some didn’t, and the ones who got up had the material in their hands and nowhere to go but to start placing it.

The towers were still firing at the reduced rate.

A man in the ditch took a shaft through the back of his shoulder and went face-down into the ditch he’d just laid out.

"Keep laying it!" someone screamed from inside the ditch.

The man beside him grabbed the edge of a sack and kept dragging it into place, stepping around the man on the ground, because there was nothing else to do.

Meanwhile, the steppe riders had been shooting fire arrows at the gate since the captives reached two hundred meters. The first shafts to find the right spot went into the lower-left of the gate, where the pitch coating ran thick between the timber and the door sill.

The pitch caught and the smoke went from a thin thread to a real burn that widened with each new arrow that found it.

Then the walkway archers started to retaliate.

No warning nor buildup. The decision had been made somewhere on those walls and the result came all at once.

The first full volley hit the front and sides of the captive mass and people went down across a broad cluster, not one or two but eight or ten together, folding or dropping or spinning sideways depending on where the arrows went in.

A young woman took a shaft through the base of her throat. Her hands went up to it and she sat down in the dirt, making a wet sound each time she tried to breathe.

An older man in front of Arqa’s position took one through the chest and dropped straight back, knocking down the two people behind him.

The cluster of people broke open at the front.

People tried to push back through the mass behind them, shoving against the captives still moving forward, and some of them got two steps before the riders cut them off with horses and crops.

"Back!" one of the riders shouted, striking at the crowd with the flat of his crop.

Some took walkway arrows in the back as they turned.

A girl took a shaft between the shoulder blades at thirty meters and went down on her face with her arms at her sides, and the woman beside her stepped over her and kept running south.

The assault formation was closing behind them. Eighty meters, then seventy.

The riders were pressing forward while the captives absorbed the walkway fire, the garrison’s arrows split between the cluster of people and the formation closing from behind.

Arqa was at the flank keeping the captives from breaking east. He watched the east tower archer reload and release into the mass thirty meters in front of him, watched the shaft go in and a man fold, and he kept his position.

The ditch was being filled.

The people in the ditch were still working because they had nowhere to go.

"Timber here!" a voice shouted from below. "Push the planks forward!"

Dead captives lay across the wood and the living worked around them. Some of it was bodies, some was packed earth sacks and some was timber planks.

The section grew from right to left across the ditch’s width, uneven and loose where the timber hadn’t seated, but there.

The lower gate was fully burning. The bar across it was dark from the heat rising below it.

When the ditch reached passable width the assault wedge came through.

The first horse stepped onto it and its front foot went through a gap in the timber, the animal lurching sideways, the rider’s leg catching the ditch rail before the horse scrambled up.

"Easy!" the rider snapped at the horse, hauling the reins hard.

They made it across.

The second horse and the third crossed with more care, watching where the footing was, and the horses behind them followed the ones in front and came through at a walk, slow enough to choose where they stepped.

Axemen reached the gate face. Two of them started on the lower post while the third took a shaft through the upper arm from the east tower but kept swinging.

The post was charred at its base from the pitch fire and the axe went in faster for it. The bar across the gate’s center had been eating heat from below since the fire started, and it had no real strength left when the first horse hit the gate leaves from the near side.

The gate was breached.

A roar went up from the riders behind the breach.

The garrison had the interior prepared. A line across the lane twenty meters back from the gate, spearmen at the front with their points set at mounted height, archers on the roofline of the left building.

"Hold the line!" someone inside the city shouted in another language.

The first rider through took a spear through the shoulder from the right side of the line and his horse drove forward anyway, carrying him into the formation and breaking the right flank, and the riders behind him came through into the gap.

Another spear went into the next horse from the left, not through anything critical, and the horse backed, screamed and blocked the gateway for five seconds before the rider drove it forward through the press of defenders below the roofline.

An arrow from the roof hit a rider through the side of the neck as he cleared the gate. He went down from his horse’s left side and the horse ran on while the riders came through around him.

The spear line was gone in forty seconds.

The archers on the roofline were still shooting as the riders swept past below them, shooting at the backs of men already beyond them, and the streets ahead were open.

Arqa went through the gate in the second wave.

A man on the ground inside the gate had an arrow in the side of his neck. The dead horse was against the left side of the gateway and the riders were going around it.

Arqa went around it on the right, his horse’s shoulder brushing the gate frame, and came through into the streets.

The garrison fighters were falling back north in formation and keeping their spacing, using the cross-streets to manage the retreat.

Riders from the gate were pressing after them and gaining, and from somewhere to the west, from inside the city, came the sound of horses and men fighting in an enclosed space.

The east and west posterns.

"They’re inside from the west too!" a rider shouted as he passed Arqa at a gallop.

Arqa hadn’t known until right now that they were coming through too, but the sound of it was inside the walls and it meant the garrison was fighting in two more directions.

The garrison fighters ahead kept their formation and kept moving north.

Toqa-Timur POV

The south gate’s smoke was heavy and black at the breach. Riders moved through it in a continuous flow and the walkway archers above had nothing left to shoot down at because the assault was already inside.

Two relays arrived within a few minutes of each other.

The south gate was breached. The east and west posterns had both been pressed during the south assault, the garrison having pulled defenders to manage the captive mass and the gate fire, and the reduced watches on both posterns hadn’t held against the axe crews waiting for that window.

Three breach points.

The walkway was cut into sections now, enemy archers on each segment cut off from the others by the gaps the breaches had opened, and the garrison’s ability to move defenders along the walls was gone.

Toqa gave his orders to the mingan commanders as they came to him.

Enemy defenders inside the city were killed. The main granary found and secured before any burning started. The population was gathered at the central market area, counted, and restrained. Buildings weren’t looted until the granary was counted and its contents removed.

In that order.

Then the city was theirs.

He looked at the south ground.

Some captives were in the ditch still, some were on the open ground between the perimeter and the gate, some had been pushed through with the assault formation and were inside the city now, nobody having stopped to sort them out.

He gave no instruction about them.

The four mingan commanders went with their orders and the riders moved into Bilyar.