Fortune provided him with an opportunity: the older fellow-Ruy Sanchez, if Rombaldo’s intelligence was correct-had risen, and staying low, was trying to get behind a larger table. At the same moment, one of Odoardo’s group appeared at the entry to the north wing, shouting “A secret passage, leading to the kitchen. Don’t let them get out!”
Valentino, seeing that Sanchez’s course would put him briefly under the guns of the relief force that had come in the back door, screamed. “Volley and charge: attack into the kitchen!”
He grabbed two of his men as they prepared to pass. “But you two, come with me. We will hug tight against this wall and close on that miserable Catalan, the one giving the orders.”
The larger of the two tossed away his spent miquelet-lock pistol. “Suits me fine,” he grumbled, “Let’s gut that old man.”
Smiling to himself, Valentino let his two eager men lead the way, crouching low behind them.
Sherrilyn heard the enemy bastard scream his orders, ducked as the volley of double-charged miquelet muskets sent smaller projectiles spattering around them, and heard a groan as one of her Hibernians took a ball in the arm. Back by the door, Kuhlman cursed again-but whatever his wound was, it left him alive enough to curse.
She raised her automatic, aimed into the charging pack-and flinched her finger off the trigger as Ruy’s agile shape danced momentarily into her sights. “No, don’t!” she screamed at her troops-and in that moment, almost two thirds of the charging assassins veered off into the kitchen.
What the fu-? And then, eyes widening, Sherrilyn knew: they’d found the secret passage and hoped to trap the escapees in the kitchen cellar between two forces. She bounded to her feet, sagged when her knee almost buckled, and started firing into the rest of the sprinting cutthroats. “Up and fire! They’re going for the pope!”
As Luke Wadding watched, Lieutenant Hastings, who had been moving stealthily toward the door joining the kitchen to the great room, suddenly found himself the apparent target of more than a dozen wildly charging assassins. A long, heavy sword now in his right hand for parrying, Hastings gave ground, firing his pistol as he did so. And, being armed with an up-time pistol he rained ruin upon those approaching agents of Satan.
They went down one after the other, sometimes requiring Hastings to spend two bullets to be sure of stopping them. And even then, about half them were not dead yet. Most were mortally wounded, but some even rose to fight again.
McEgan, similarly armed with a sword in one hand and his pepperbox revolver in the other, came alongside the lieutenant’s left flank, his marksmanship a bit less precise, but he accounted for at least three, killed or incapacitated, before his weapon was spent. Two of the assassins still had charged pieces of their own as they entered; one missed wildly, slain as he fired, and the other put a small pellet through Hastings’ left shoulder. If the Hibernian officer noticed, he gave no sign of it.
But then his own seemingly inexhaustible weapon was spent, and the press of attackers pushed them back.
Wadding’s heart quickened with pride at the courage of the two men, but his throat was tight with the certainty of the outcome: there were too many of Lucifer’s own servitors hemming them in, now. Despite their having killed several of the assassins with their pistols, their enemies now beset them to the front and flanks, and only their agility and training turned aside blows that would surely have slain them. Hastings took off an arm at the wrist; McEgan, parried and pierced a lung before blades hammered him back even further, closer to the basement door.
A rapier went through Hastings’ right thigh; a cutlass rang a glancing blow off McEgan’s capelline-helmeted head. They did not fall, but staggering, gave even more, precious ground-which allowed their foes to press them even more closely.
From behind, Luke Wadding heard the voice of his beloved pontiff. “Can they win, Cardinal Wadding?”
“If God wills it, Your Holiness,” Wadding rasped out. “If God wills it.”
What? They can approach us without making a sound? Larry thought, when, from the secret staircase that led down into the kitchen cellar, there was the rapid clack-flash-boom discharge of a miquelet-lock pistol at startlingly close range.
Fortunately, George Sutherland had kept himself off to the side, partially covered by the edge of the doorway; the ball uttered a sharp screech as it clipped a chunk of the stonework off that corner.
With surprising speed for so large a man-and one with a weak ankle, no less-George was in the doorway, arms working like a bear that had been taught to thresh wheat ambidextrously. The sword hit the gunman with a leather-slicing sound that gave way to a scream — which ended almost as soon as it had begun; the axe landed with the sound of a heavy bone splintering. The exchange was conclusively punctuated by the thud of a limp body.
George leaned halfway back to his cover, said, “Be ready. There will be more than one of them creeping up on us to-”
Larry Mazzare saw a flash and heard a cannon go off just in front of him-or so it seemed, the sound shuddering savagely between the tight, rough-hewn stone walls. Intense pain in both his ears was accompanied by a ringing deafness. Then another gunshot went off-this was not nearly as loud. Something hit him in the legs and he was falling backwards.
And then the darkness of the secret staircase seemed to vomit out men with swords and axes, one after the other. Although hit several times, George seemed miraculously unaffected. The first attacker he caught on the point of his falchion, and with a lithe twist of the hips, re-angled the weapon so the groaning man slid off. That almost balletlike turn imparted extra force to the axe, which he brought around to cut deeply into the next assassin’s ribcage, the blow flinging the man to the side.
More were coming-and George took a step back and to the side, exposing his belly to Larry’s gaze. Mazzare hissed. The front of Sutherland’s torso was a mess, spilling blood from a terrible wound in his belly. There was a bright, manic look in George’s eyes. The man was already dead, for all intents and purposes-and he knew it, and planned to wreak a terrible last vengeance.
Mazzare snapped out of his fog. Grabbing Fleming, he yelled, “Shoot! Shoot! Why don’t you-?” and only then felt that the arm under his scrabbling hand was utterly limp. Peering closely, Mazzare saw there was a bullet hole just above wide-eyed Fleming’s left eyebrow.
That was when the next attacker that George killed-blood spurting vigorously-landed directly across both Fleming and Larry. “Trouble,” grunted George hoarsely. And looking up, almost through the Englishman’s legs, Larry could indeed see what had prompted his warning: three more attackers were coming down. The one in the lead was as lithe and spare as a weasel; George cut at him, the effort showing-and this blow was slow enough that the attacker was able to dodge low and roll. The weasel came up with a dagger, less than a foot in front of Mazzare, who, discovering that he was coated with the last casualty’s blood.
Behind him came another assassin with a cutlass, and behind him Larry was too dry to swallow but felt the reflex tug painfully at his throat: this man was as large as George and carried an immense, although somewhat short-handled, axe and a spent fowling piece. And he was smiling. Unscathed, somehow casual and contemptuous despite his swift approach, he clearly presumed that the next several moments would give him the pleasure of striking his immense adversary down.
George struck a falchion blow at the fellow with the cutlass, who parried and dodged sideways-but that move put him directly into the inbound arc of George’s axe. His neck half severed, the assassin seemed to topple sideways-right alongside where the weasel-like assassin was preparing to lunge, dagger first, toward George’s flank.
Mazzare, his throat too dry to speak, croaked out a warning that emerged as something less than a word; he flung out a hand at the little backstabber.
Who, stunned by Larry’s glancing blow, recoiled-thereby putting him just barely back into George’s field of view.
George, hearing Larry’s sound, possibly perceiving the movement at the low periphery of his vision, wrist- snapped the falchion around into a backhanded cut, even as the little assassin jabbed his dagger into the only target he could reach in time. George’s right knee.
The falchion cut into the murderer at the same moment he tore his blade free in the kind of swiping motion usually used to hamstring an opponent. Blood flew up at Mazzare again; the small body of the weasel crashed into him, rolling him off the right side of Fleming’s corpse, where Mazzare felt his body bruised by a stone. Or a brick. Or
