“Then you condemn Passe a’Fiume to slow torture, Commandant”
ca’Montmorte answered. “I hope A’Offizier cu’Garret and U’Teni cu’Bachiga fully understand that, because they’ll be here with us to experience it, along with many innocents.”
Sergei ended the conversation not long afterward, and directed one of the archers to wrap the challenge around the shaft of an arrow and shoot it over the bridge. Ca’Linnett himself rode forward to pluck the arrow from the ground and glance at Sergei’s scrawled refusal. Hoots of laughter and derision cascaded from the Firenzcian chevarittai to assault the walls of Passe a’Fiume, but the jeers and taunts did not tear down the battlements.
Sergei was satisfied with that, if the chevarittai in the city were not.
Worse news came that night. Stragglers from the troops he’d set out along the north bank of the Clario came rushing back to the town in full retreat. Two battalions of Firenzcians, using war-teni to cover their crossing, had forded the Clario in darkness and attacked the Nessantico troops, overrunning their encampment. Sergei ordered all gates to the city closed; by predawn light, they could see from the walls the colors of Firenzcia surrounding Passe a’Fiume entirely.
By dawn of the next day, the assault had begun in earnest.
It began with the war-teni. A dozen great spheres of enchanted fire rose into the dawn, arcing across the sky like huge, roaring meteors. The teni of Passe a’Fiume, along with the war-teni left behind by Archigos ca’Cellibrecca, were waiting on the walls. Their chants began as soon as they saw the spell-fires flicker into life, their hands moved in counter-spells and return-spells, turning aside a hand of the spheres and sending them back to where they’d originated-their efforts were rewarded by faint screams and black smoke rising from the Firenzcian encampment. But far too many of the fireballs rushed past the walls in waves of blistering heat and blinding light, crashing into houses or onto the streets where they rolled and broke open and sent spatters of thick flame flying. Now the screams were close and frantic behind Sergei and those on the walls, as the townsfolk rushed to aid the injured, to put out the fires, and pull the dead from the rubble.
There was no time to rest. Siege engines in the Firenzcian encampment flung boulders toward the walls, their impacts shuddering the ground and tearing great chunks of rock from the ramparts and crenellations. Only a few strides away from where he stood, Sergei saw a soldier in the livery of the Garde Civile shriek as a huge rock tore his arm entirely from his body before the stone crashed into the street beyond, killing three men and a horse. Now came the rain of arrows from archers moving under cover of the barrage to the far bank of the Clario: as the siege engines continued to hammer at the walls, as more teni-fireballs flared overhead.
Through the smoke and noise of the assault, Sergei glimpsed movement: soldiers massing on the bridge and pushing a battering ram in its sling; others placing rafts in the river. “Archers!” he shouted, and arrows rained out from the walls, a furious and thick hailstorm. The Clario frothed with men falling into its waters, flailing in panic or motionless, dead before the water took them. The ram squad was better protected with their shields turtling over them-the ram continued steadily and slowly across the bridge, and more soldiers came behind it to replace the fallen.
“Chevarittai, to the gates!” Sergei called, and hurried down from the walls himself. His horse was there, stamping and nervous as the page held him. Sergei calmed the stallion as he put on his helm and adjusted his mail. The page helped to hoist him astride the destrier.
Mounted, he pulled the Hirzg’s sword from its sheath as the other chevarittai gathered before the gates. The weight of the blade was heavy and comforting in his hand. “Drive them back across the bridge!” Sergei shouted. “O’Offizier ce’Ulcai, you will take a squadron of the Garde Civile and push that ram into the river once we have the bridge clear.
Archers, make certain that the bridge
Sergei thrust his sword high. “For the glory of Nessantico and the Kraljiki!”
The chevarittai and Garde Civile around him echoed the cry, a throaty challenge. They rode out in thunder.
The destriers, clad in armor and trained in close combat, cleaved through the front ranks of enemy soldiers boiling around the ram. Sergei swung his sword down at a thrusting spear, breaking the weapon in half and hearing the scream as his mount trampled the man underfoot.
He cut again, and again, no longer thinking but only reacting to the bodies around him. He could hear screams and cries; he felt a spear tip jab through his mail to bite deep into his thigh, the shaft breaking off with the onward rush of his horse. He screamed himself then, taking the pain and anger and letting it flow through his arm.
“Back! Back!” he heard someone cry, and suddenly the Firenzcian soldiers were no longer holding their ground but fleeing, and Sergei was past the ram and across the bridge entirely, hacking at the retreating soldiers, running them down under the destrier’s hooves. The other chevarittai surged around him, savage and relentless. Sergei pulled on his mount’s reins, glancing back-on the bridge, soldiers in blue and gold were streaming out from the city and pushing at the ram. Arrows streaked overhead, so thick they seemed to dim the sun. His wounded thigh throbbed as he clamped his legs around the saddle, holding back his mount.
“Form up!’ he called the chevarittai. “Hold here!” Most of them obeyed, though not all: a few continued beyond the bridge, chasing the soldiers. In the field ahead, he could see the Firenzcian chevarittai readying to charge: the Red Lancers. “Return to the city!” Sergei ordered.
There were protests from the chevarittai, and Sergei scowled. “I am commandant here. Inside! There will be time enough for fighting. Inside!” He turned his horse; reluctantly, they followed. The bridge had been cleared; soldiers from the city were bringing in their own dead and wounded.
Sergei slid from his destrier as he passed the gates, handing the reins to one of the waiting pages. His leg buckled under him from the shock of hitting the ground; he forced himself to stand, though he allowed the page who rushed over to help to wrap a binding around his leg to staunch the bleeding. He watched as the chevarittai passed, then the remainder of the Garde Civile on the bridge. He gestured to those around the gate; the portcullis rang metallically as it slammed back down, the hinges groaned as the men pushed the gates closed and replaced the bracing. Sergei limped to the wall. Around the town was smoke and destruction and bodies. Crows were already flapping to the ground. A lone chevaritt rode forward to the far end of the bridge, with a white flag on his spear.
“The Hirzg asks for a brief truce to give us time to recover our dead,” he called up to Sergei.
“Tell the Hirzg he has the Kraljiki’s permission to do so if he wishes,” Sergei replied.
The chevaritt gave a salute and rode away. In time, soldiers approached the walls from the encampment with carts and began to haul away the dead. In both Passe a’Fiume and in the fields outside, the flames of pyres would light the evening sky.
The second day of the siege of Passe a’Fiume ended.
On the third day, the teni redoubled their assault on the city, striking from all sides of the wall, not only from beyond the Clario. The bulk of the teni-fire passed through the defenses of the town’s few and exhausted war-teni, reaching even into the city center. There were few buildings left whose roofs were untouched or that didn’t show some damage; the casualties, civilian and military, mounted quickly as the siege engines again began their merciless barrage, also from all sides.
All five city gates were under assault, not just the Clario Gate, and Sergei directed the chevarittai in sallies against them, but they were spread too thin now, and the enemy rams battered at the gates. Arrows rained down on the besiegers; those war-teni who were still able cast their spells; heated oil cascaded down from the battlements and was set afire.
The smell of smoke and blood were thick in the air from morning until dusk.
When the day finally ended, the sun falling behind a hundred columns of smoke and ash, the city walls were pockmarked and gouged, the gates cracked, and fires burned unchecked, but the city had held.
Sergei knew she might not hold for another day under the ferocious assault.
“Two hundred or more dead of the Garde Civile; fully half the force injured so badly they can’t fight.” Ca’Montmorte read the tallies tone-lessly as Sergei and U’Teni cu’Bachiga and A’Offizier cu’Garret listened.
“Of the chevarittai, three double-hands have fallen, most are injured, and three quarters are unhorsed. I’m told that the wall of the west gate is nearly broken through. There are fires burning everywhere, and no one is able to say how many of the citizens of the city who remained behind have been killed or injured.”
