Chapter 70: Storm the Cart-Gate

Toffolo beat him to an answer.

"Only two men, Ser Barozzi."

He kept his voice down to a thread and tipped his chin toward the gate, where the torches burned lazily, fat with oil and confidence. "The whole company’s behind us in the dark. Give the word and we walk straight through before they’ve decided what they’re supposed to do about us."

"And when those two become a dozen the moment they find their tongues?"

Vito’s eyes moved past the gate, forty paces west, to where the torches stopped and the stone disappeared into darkness. "There’s a wall there, ragazzo. We go up quiet as a confession, and we’re behind those two before they’ve decided whose turn it is to take a piss tonight."

He started to count the paces toward that darker stretch of stone when the shadows behind them began to spit out soldiers.

The detachment footmen came back with ease, slipping free from the rooftops, emerging from between the houses. A hand rose here, a chin dipped there, and nobody wasted breath on a report.

Within a few dozen heartbeats, the whole crouched detachment had assembled beneath the shadow of that low wall. The soldiers breathed hard and waited for the command.

There was none.

A voice suddenly tore loose behind them in the lower town, high and cracked. Then a bell took up the cry and hammered out a rhythm no bell-ringer would ever have practiced in daylight.

Then a second bell answered farther away, thinner now, half-eaten by rooftops and distance. The third followed so faintly that it might have been a dog mistaking iron for its own voice.

Vito had no way of knowing which of them had raised that alarm.

Perhaps their infiltration hadn’t worked as well as he imagined, and the previous incident with the watchmen had woken up civilians, or alerted the militia.

Perhaps Zaccaria, Orso, Pellegrino, or Domenego, scattered through this same cursed town, had brought to themselves a similar mistake.

There was no breath left to waste guessing.

Vito was on his feet before the third bell had finished dying.

"Avanti!"

The word burst out of him louder than the whole night had permitted until then. Every man behind him came up with it as though the ground itself had suddenly told them to stand.

"Take the gate! Take it now, and God help the fool who trips over his boots doing it!"

At the gate, the two retainers had heard the alarm and shouted over their shoulders into the district behind them.

<anno data-annotation-id="ddbf66b2-3c86-a463-1bae-a38ed5061973" data-title=""Βοήθεια! Βοήθεια!"">"Βοήθεια! Βοήθεια!"¹</anno>

No reinforcements were coming quickly enough to make a difference.

The guards rushed for the gatehouse, their blades still sheathed at their hips.

Vito was swallowed by the charge the instant it began, folding him into a wall of shoulders and hammering breath.

He caught one guard and drove the man’s skull into the gatepost with the momentum the charge had put into his arm. The scalp split beneath his knuckles.

Three more soldiers came through behind him and buried steel in whatever was still standing.

The other guard managed three strides toward his gatehouse door before a blade slashed his back from shoulder to spine. He fell thrashing beneath boots that never slowed long enough to notice him.

The company poured through the gate like water finding a crack too small to hold it, shoving, cursing, and dragging one another through a passage built for a cart and asked tonight to swallow soldiers at a charge.

The last man through seized the gate with both hands and dragged it shut, the old iron screaming on its hinges loudly enough to make Vito’s teeth ache.

Then it was done. The district’s front door had been slammed and barred from the inside by the very men it had been built to keep outside.

Vito dragged air into lungs that felt as if he had swallowed the torches whole.

Lamps appeared behind glass windows all along the street, one after another, while shutters banged open just long enough for some frightened face to look out, take in the situation, and slam them shut again. Doors cracked open on men still wrestling with their buckles, two here, three there.

More trouble arrived a hundred heartbeats later, five household guards spilling from a guardhouse tucked into the corner where the avenue widened toward the heart of the district.

Their blades were bare, and one retainer was still pulling a strap tight across his chest as he ran. Household men stayed close for exactly such an hour, roused from warm beds to save a gate that had already fallen without them.

It was an unfortunate time to discover how quickly a position could be lost.

The company met them where the avenue narrowed again, just near the gate. There was no room in that street for five trained men to do anything except die badly.

Vito went into the crush with the footmen, and the fight broke apart too fast and too close to follow as anything but noise and impact.

A blade scraped down his vambrace hard enough to numb his wrist, then one shoulder slammed past his hip as somebody went down beneath three sets of hands.

Screams stopped halfway through throats so close that its spray struck his cheek.

Vito drove his sword into whatever enemy pushed back against him. One blade whispered past close enough to stir the hair above his ear, and he never learned whose it was.

By the time the street became silent again, the whole affair had taken longer to describe than it had to happen. Not a man left standing in mail answered to anyone but the Lion.

"Cazzo."

Vito snickered, once his lungs permitted speech again. "And here I thought a gate was built to keep men out. This one has spent the whole night helping them in instead."

He peeled off enough soldiers to hold the position. Their weapons were still wet, their eyes on both ends of the street with flat patience.

The remaining detachment fell in behind him with discipline.

Beyond them, the noble district parted into streets wider and better kept, some houses standing behind their own walls and gardens.

Somewhere inside that maze of fine stone and locked doors sat the city senior archon, along with whatever other men had chosen a prison over silver.

Not one soul walking beside Vito had the slightest idea which of those handsome, shuttered houses actually held them.

That problem would have to answer for itself as they went.

<annotations style="display: none;">"Help! Help!"</annotations>