Sig crouched over the man with the leg wound and kept one eye on the right window. The soldier opposite him had his back to the plaza, watching the barricade.

The wounded man had stopped making noise after the first minute, which meant he had found the position that kept the pain manageable without speaking about it.

The right window had not fired since the sprint across the plaza. The crossbowman inside had a clear line on the center of the open ground and had chosen not to use it. Sig considered that information and kept his head down.

From the left building’s second floor, a voice called across the narrow alley gap, "I can see his window from here. He comes forward I’ve got the shot."

A pause. Then Harr’s voice from the steps barricade, "Hold position. Don’t fire first."

The crossbowman in the right building said something to whoever was behind him. A second voice from inside answered, louder, carrying across the gap, "Move back from the window and let them come to us." The crossbowman’s reply was shorter and did not carry.

The man with the leg wound said, his face close to the cobblestones: "I’m good here. Go deal with something."

"We can’t move you while that window is looking this way," Sig said.

"I know why you can’t move me," the man said. "Leave me here and fix the problem."

"Working on it."

The other soldier crouching with Sig looked at the right window and then at Sig. "He’s as far back in the room as he can get and still see the plaza. That’s why he’s not firing. He can’t aim cleanly from there."

"Which means he’s waiting for something to get close enough," Sig said.

That matched what the left building staircase had shown them. The crossbowman there had held until the soldier was at midpoint before firing. Close range was the preference, and the right building man was working the same logic.

At the left building’s doorway, two soldiers were helping the staircase man down the last risers to the entrance hall floor. His feet found each step slowly, one hand against the wall, his breathing a controlled draw that rationed between what both lungs should share. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

They put him in the entrance hall. The woman who had retreated from the landing was already there, checking him with the quick Ashmark efficiency that decided whether something required action and then mostly decided it did not.

One of the soldiers who had helped him down came back through the doorway and rejoined the second floor position.

The two soldiers Harr had sent to the right building’s rear had slipped out through the side alley during the first volley’s smoke. Sig had tracked their movement and lost them around the corner.

The gate counter-push came earlier than he expected. Men running hard down steps from the high quarter, committed from the first sound of boots on stone.

From the barricade, "Gate! Gate!" And then from somewhere along it: "Reload! Who’s got a reload!"

Four men came through the high quarter entrance in rapid sequence. The first took a pistol shot from the militia soldier posted at the gate-side of the barricade. The ball punched through the right side of the pelvis, into the iliac crest, and drove out through the gluteal muscle at the rear. The right leg ceased to work at the moment of impact.

He went sideways into the retaining wall and hit it at a slant, the left leg still trying and the right leg hanging useless from the hip, and he scraped down the wall face until he stopped at the bottom. He screamed in short rhythmic bursts, the sounds of a body that had not caught up with what had happened to it.

The second man made the barricade top before anyone brought steel up. He came off it swinging at the nearest militia soldier with a heavy blade and the height of the steps behind him.

The sword caught the soldier’s forearm from wrist to elbow along the underside, the edge opening the skin the full length of the bone. The blood ran down the hand and onto the cobblestones.

The soldier went backward from the impact and Harr stepped into the opening. His second pistol was at four feet. The ball went through the sternum, through the right ventricle, and out through the back in a spray that hit the retaining wall face.

The man’s palms went flat on the barricade top, both arms locked, the sound from his chest labored and full of the wrong things. Then the arms gave and he came forward off the barricade onto the steps below.

The militia soldier with the forearm cut had pressed the arm against his chest and was watching the gate. The sleeve was soaked through.

The third man was through the gate and pressing toward the barricade. The fourth held inside the tunnel opening.

"Back!" the fourth man called, to the third, not toward the militia. "It’s done, get back!"

The third man looked at what was on the steps and at Harr. He stopped.

The fourth man looked at Harr directly. "There’ll be more."

"Then bring them," Harr said.

The man at the retaining wall base had stopped screaming. The sound had dropped to something lower, less rhythmic, the kind a man makes when he has numb to a condition. The fourth man watched him for a moment. Then he turned back through the gate. The third man followed.

From the left building’s second floor, "Window’s off the plaza. He’s watching the barricade."

Sig was already moving. He got his arms under the wounded man’s shoulders. The other soldier took the legs. The wounded man made a sound when the leg was lifted, a tight involuntary noise from the movement of a joint that had nothing holding it anymore.

They crossed the remaining distance at the fastest pace the combined load and the need to stay low allowed. Sig could not watch the right window while he was carrying.

The wounded man told him afterward the bolt had skipped off the cobblestones six inches from his trailing boot.

They came in behind the barricade crates.

"Six inches," the wounded man said.

"I heard," Sig said.

From the side alley, one of the two soldiers who had gone around appeared at the plaza’s edge. "Door’s barred from inside," he called. "We can’t shift it."

"The back window," the soldier in the left building’s second floor called down.

"One floor up," the alley soldier said.

"I know where it is."

A pause. Then the sound of someone going up the exterior stonework at the right building’s rear, boots finding purchase on the facing stones, a brief check in the rhythm where a handhold came up short, then resuming. The right window shadow had returned to watching the plaza, turned toward the barricade and the gate.

It did not see what was coming from behind.

The back shutter gave inward. A held moment. Then footsteps on the floor above, moving toward the center of the room, and the shadow in the right window turned away from the plaza.