Nameless Kipchak Rider POV

The garrison was forty meters ahead when they stopped.

They’d been moving north in a tight body since the gate, keeping their formation through the street’s full length, and when they stopped they did it all at once, the whole group turning to face south with the spearmen dropping their points to mounted height.

The archers from their flanks climbed to the nearest building corners, and the street was blocked across its full width.

His horse felt the spear points and checked its stride. He drove his heels in, but the horse slowed anyway, unwilling to push straight into the line, so he pulled left, to the far edge of the formation, looking for where the wall ended and the corner of the side street appeared. Two more riders broke left with him without being told.

An arrow came from the building corner above and to his right, driving down from the height it had, going through the neck of the rider one position to his right.

That rider’s hands went to his reins and then dropped, his horse turning east on its own and carrying him away from the engagement.

He kept going left.

The garrison’s left flank ended two meters from the building wall, and he came around the end of the spear line with his saber already up. A garrison fighter at the end turned to face him.

The man had a short sword and he used it well, getting the first cut in on the downstroke before the rider could find a window to retaliate, the blade going across the horse’s shoulder and making the animal flinch left.

On the return stroke the rider drove the horse’s shoulder directly into him, a full sideways push with his heels, and the garrison fighter hit the building wall behind him. The rider stabbed down before he could get up.

The left flank broke from the pressure, then the right.

The garrison pulled back, still in formation, moving north at a steady pace, and thirty meters further the main lane opened into a wider square. They stopped there again.

A second group arrived from the east at the same time, fighters who’d been retreating from one of the postern breaches, folding into the garrison’s formation in the square.

A handful of garrison fighters put their weapons on the ground, hands out. Most did not.

The square fight was short and brutal, the garrison professionals kept their formation until they couldn’t anymore, fighting with discipline, and the square floor drenched with blood from both sides.

When it was over, eight garrison fighters were on the ground at the square’s center with weapons down and hands visible. The rest were also on the ground, but lifeless.

He rode the square’s perimeter checking the cross-street alleys, looking for anything still moving at fighting pace.

Nothing was.

The street north to the city’s center was open.

Nameless Steppe Rider POV

His horse was too wide for the postern door, so he went through on foot with seven others.

The interior of the earthwork was cramped and smelled of packed clay, the stair rising single-width ahead of them, timber treads cut steep into the earthwork’s inner wall.

A garrison archer was at the stair’s top, a shadow against the open sky.

He went up first.

The archer waited until he was eight steps from the bottom, then released. The shaft went past his left ear close enough to feel the air of it and hit the step below his back foot with a flat crack.

He kept climbing. The archer had no time to reload at that range and the rider got both hands on the man’s coat at the top and drove him backward along the walkway, all his forward momentum from the climb going into the push.

The archer went over the outer rail. The drop to the city interior was four meters, he hit the ground with a wet splash and didn’t get up.

The walkway ran east from the stair point, sixty meters to the tower. Dead garrison fighters lay on the planks from the suppression fire during the assault, men who’d been at the rail and hadn’t gotten below it in time.

Two were alive.

One had his bow up and released before the riders had covered half the distance, but his draw was weak, the shaft falling short. When the riders reached him he swung the bow as a club, both hands on the grip.

He was cut fast and went down onto the walkway planks.

The second grabbed a knife from his coat when his bow was knocked away and got a cut across the rider’s right forearm, a clean shallow slash from wrist toward elbow, before the rider closed the distance and put a saber thrust through the man’s chest. He went against the walkway rail and slid down it.

The east tower at the walkway had one archer left.

The man had been on that platform since the breaches happened below, trapped on all sides, the west closed by the postern fight and the east leading to nothing but more wall.

He was looking down at the city when the rider arrived.

He turned, saw what was coming, let the bow hang from his hand, then put it on the platform floor and raised both hands in surrender.

The rider cut across his throat and the man went down against the tower’s inner wall with his hands still up.

He took thirty seconds to scan the platform and the walkway in both directions.

Nothing moved on it.

From the tower height the city spread below. Smoke rose thick from the south gate, black at its base and gray above. Riders moved in the streets, some at a canter, some stopped. The granary roof was at the city’s north district, long and broad.

Outside the walls, on the open ground to the south, bodies lay where the captive mass had taken the garrison’s fire. The ditch had its rough cram across the gap, uneven, and the gate’s remaining timber was still smoking.

He looked at all of it for a few seconds. Then he turned and started back along the walkway toward the stair.

Arqa POV

Arqa’s arban reached the granary with the street fight still happening somewhere to the west.

The building was intact, the wide doors closed but not barred.

He pushed one open and looked inside.

Grain sacks stacked floor to ceiling along both walls and through the center, the scent of stored grain dense and cool in the enclosed space.

He came back out and posted four riders at the main doors.

The city was changing around him.

From every direction the contact sounds were dropping, the concentrated noise of fighting thinning into something further apart, individual pockets instead of formations.

Seven garrison fighters came out of a side street east of the granary, moving slow, throwing their weapons on the ground ahead of them, hands visible.

Arqa’s arban bound their wrists with tether rope and walked them south toward the market.

The market square was already overflowing with people. Riders from multiple arbans had been bringing people there since the breaches, women and children and men too old to have been in the garrison, the workers and traders the city had carried through the siege.

They stood or sat in the open space and watched the riders around them.

Arqa walked his horse through the market, watching the crowd and the cross-streets coming off it.

Nothing came out of the streets at fighting pace.

The main avenue ended to the north at the square where the garrison had made its final stand. From where he was he could see riders on horseback in the square, standing their horses, nobody moving quickly.

He stopped at the granary side of the market.

Bilyar was taken.