The room was smaller than it looked from the plaza. The ceiling was low, a cot sat against the far wall, crates were stacked two deep along both sides, and one window had served as a firing position for the better part of two days.

Ulf had come through the back shutter with both pistols loaded and the ringing silence of who had spent fifteen seconds outside on stone with nothing between him and a thirty-foot drop, and he was still catching up to the fact that he had made it.

The crossbowman was three feet from the window, facing into the room. The companion was between them, and he was already moving.

Ulf fired his first pistol.

The ball went through the center of the companion’s chest. It entered through the sternum and drove into the right lung and stopped somewhere against the muscle of the back without exiting.

The man went down, not backward, down, the legs failing all at once beneath him, and hit the floor on his side. He put both hands to his chest. He opened his mouth.

The air that should have come out did not come out the way it was supposed to. Something wrong was happening in there and his body was trying to find a way around it.

His chest moved in short rapid motions that pulled nothing in and pushed nothing useful out.

He was still doing this when the crossbowman’s knife came out.

"You damn bootlickers think yourselfs tough, huh," the crossbowman said.

Ulf kept the spent pistol in his left hand. The second was in his right. "What about it," he said.

He shifted his weight once, keeping his eyes on the man’s hands.

"Bastard."

"The pot calling the kettle black," Ulf said.

The crossbowman stayed at the wall beside the window for three seconds. His eyes moved from Ulf to the companion on the floor and back to Ulf.

The companion was still trying to find a way to breathe. His heels pushed against the floorboards. Both hands were flat against his chest as if pressure from outside could fix what was wrong inside.

It could not.

The sounds he made were not words. He had been making them since Ulf fired. They had not changed. They would not get better.

The crossbowman lunged from the wall.

Ulf fired the second pistol at four feet. The ball went through the throat.

At that range through that tissue the ball punched a channel through the larynx and the trachea and stopped somewhere at the back of the neck.

The crossbowman’s forward momentum carried him one full stride with the wound already in him. His knife arm completed the swing it had started.

The handle, his grip had failed and only the handle remained, glanced off Ulf’s shoulder with the force of a stumble.

He went down at Ulf’s feet.

He got his hands flat against the floor, both arms straight, and had his weight on them the way when he does not know yet that he cannot hold himself up.

Then the arms buckled and he lay still.

The sound from his throat continued for a short time, the specific bubbling passage of air through destroyed tissue, and then stopped.

The companion on the floor had stopped moving during the crossbowman fight. Ulf looked at him once and did not look again.

The room was full of the sound of two pistol shots fired inside stone walls.

Ulf’s ears had a high-pitched continuous note since the first shot. The second had added another, slightly different one.

The two tones sat on top of everything.

He crossed to the window and watched below.

The plaza. The barricade. Harr’s position. Sig near it. The leg-wound man behind the crates.

He called down.

From the left building’s second floor, a voice arrived across the narrow gap between buildings, "Took your time."

Ulf did not answer that.

He kept his eyes on the plaza while he listened.

Harr’s voice from the barricade confirmed the call.

The second push came through the gate while Ulf was still at the window.

More men this time.

Five of them. The fourth man back at the front, who had been the last one through the gate and had watched two of his companions fail.

He had learned something from watching.

He did not come over the barricade.

He came through the gap between the barricade and the retaining wall. The fit was tight enough that only one man could pass at a time.

The barricade’s front pointed the wrong way to stop him.

The militia at the barricade was watching the gate, not the gap.

The fourth man came through the gap with his sword already raised.

He took the militia soldier directly ahead of him across the left side of the neck.

The blade went in at the ear and drew across to the jaw in one pulling motion. It opened the skin and the muscle beneath it and caught the external carotid branch where it ran through the jaw’s interior.

The soldier went down sideways with both hands at his neck.

Blood came through his fingers in a rapid pressurized flow that did not slow when he pressed harder.

He hit the cobblestones and stayed there.

He did not get up again.

Sig was two feet to the left.

He fired his first pistol into the fourth man’s chest from the side. The shot went through the right side of the ribcage between the fourth and fifth ribs, through the right lung, and out through the back.

The fourth man turned toward Sig with a single step. His expression showed he had not yet accepted what had happened.

He sat down in the gap.

His head lowered once and he was still.

Sig adjusted his stance, covering the opening.

From the left building’s second floor, a pistol shot went into the second man through the shoulder.

He turned back.

The remaining three men withdrew through the gate.

Ulf left the window and went down through the right building’s interior.

He passed a back room. One of the militia had the collarbone man against the wall.

The man’s arm was useless. His face was pale. He said nothing.

Ulf continued to the ground floor and stepped out onto the plaza.

The plaza was theirs.

The neck-slashed soldier was dead. Both hands were still at his throat. The blood formed a wide dark circle on the cobblestones around him.

The fourth man was dead in the gap.

The hip-shot man from the first push was still against the retaining wall. He breathed in the low, steady way of who had decided this was where he was stopping.

The leg-wound man was behind the barricade crates. He was alive and watching with focused attention.

The staircase lung-wound man was in the entrance hall of the left building. Someone was with him.

The forearm-cut soldier stood at the barricade. His sleeve was soaked through.

A woman looked out a window on the plaza’s far side.

She watched the state of things below her.

Then she pulled the shutter closed.

Ulf stood in the plaza and looked at the gate in the retaining wall.

The steps went up through it into the high quarter.

It was theirs now.

Whatever Coss was doing inside it now knew this way out was gone.