The district smelled like man who had been living in it for weeks without keeping it. Sweat. Old food. The sour, stale reek of people sleeping in the streets.

Hod shrugged that from the corner where the squad was hidden and set it beside everything else the avenue had told him in the last half hour.

Four, maybe more men at the near checkpoint behind a barricade of stacked loading crates. Two crossbows already aimed down the length of the street. An elevated position at the second warehouse’s loading floor, where he could see the open door and the silhouette of one man just inside it watching the street.

Another elevated position at the third warehouse that he could not see directly, but a shadow at its loading aperture made the position obvious enough.

Twenty-six defenders, by his count, split between the a near and far checkpoint and both raised floors. Give or take.

Ric crouched to Hod’s left with his back against the alley corner.

His hand rested on the grip of the loaded flintlock pistol at his belt with the ease of three days’ practice. His ribs still complained on the deep draw, something he was not going to mention, and Hod had not asked.

Col’s voice came from behind them, low and flat. "On my mark."

The squad tightened.

Twelve pistols ready, one already in hand for each man, the second at the belt. Hod had his first in his right hand and the second within easy reach.

Col’s mark was a short two-count tap against the stone.

Twelve pistols fired in the space of one second.

The avenue between the warehouse walls took the crack of twelve shots and threw it back from every stone surface at once.

It was not twelve separate noises. It was one noise, arriving from every direction at the same instant, so loud and sudden that the chest felt it before the ears sorted it out.

Grey-white smoke burst from the squad’s line and rolled forward down the avenue in a spreading wall.

At the checkpoint, the man on the right side of the barricade had his crossbow halfway up when the ball struck him just below the jaw on the left.

It punched through the tissue under the jaw, clipped the edge of the larynx, and exited the right side of his neck, taking a disc of the fourth cervical vertebra with it.

His head dropped forward and right before the rest of him understood what had happened.

The crossbow discharged as his hands jerked. The bolt buried itself in the crate beside him, and he slid sideways down the barricade, leaving a broad wet drag of red across the planking.

The man beside him took a ball through the left side of his chest, between the third and fourth ribs.

The impact punched through the intercostal muscle and into the lung beneath.

He did not feel pain so much as the lung collapse and the sudden empty space where air should have been.

His mouth opened for a breath that did not come.

He looked down at his chest, then at nothing in particular, and pitched forward over the edge of the barricade, arms out ahead of him, face-first into the cobblestones.

At the elevated position on the second warehouse, the man in the loading-door opening caught a ball through the shoulder of his bow arm.

The shoulder joint opened inward, the ball driving through the tendons and the deltoid before stopping against the back edge of the scapula.

The arm dropped. It simply ceased to be useful, hanging from the shoulder by skin and shredded tissue, the crossbow clattering onto the loading bay floor below.

The man screamed, which was the first sound any of them had made, and grabbed the doorframe with his good arm because his legs were already trying to fold under him.

Four remaining men at the near checkpoint were still alive.

Two had the look of men who had not moved because nothing in their lives had prepared them for movement after that sound.

One was at the back of the position trying to reload a crossbow whose string he had already slipped.

One had run.

Col’s voice cut through the smoke. "Move."

The squad moved before the haze had fully cleared.

Hod ran through the grey-white wall of it, cobblestones hammering under his boots, the barricade resolving ahead of him out of the haze.

The man frozen at the left edge of the position had finally brought up his crossbow, but the smoke sat between them and his bolt went a foot wide.

Then he had nothing left to shoot with.

Hod reached him over the top of the barricade.

The man had a knife out by then, grip reversed, held like he meant to punch with it rather than cut.

Hod caught the knife wrist with his left hand, turned the arm outward, and struck the man across the temple with the pommel of his sword.

The knees went out from under him and he hit the cobblestones in a heap.

The man who had been reloading was still fumbling with the string when Ric got through the gap in the barricade and brought the pommel of his own sword down across the back of the man’s neck.

The reloader went flat.

His face hit the stones, his nose spread sideways, and blood poured from it in a sheet.

The running man was thirty feet down the avenue, making for the side passage.

A militia soldier behind Hod fired his second pistol.

The ball took the man low in the back on the right side, into the kidney region.

He kept running for three strides because his body had not yet realized the pain.

Then his legs broke down and he went down sliding on his front, hands splayed, trying to drag himself forward with his fingers.

His mouth was open against the cobblestones and the sounds he made were not screams. They were lower than that, the involuntary noises of a body trying to understand an injury with no answer.

He did not stop moving for a long time. No one went back for him.

Then the second elevated position opened up, the one Hod had inferred from the shadow.

A bolt struck the soldier on Hod’s left.

The point went in under the arm as the man turned to check the alley mouth behind them, entering just below the armpit and driving through the side of the chest between two ribs, puncturing the lower lobe of the lung.

The sound he made was involuntary, a wet, strangled exhale, almost startled, as if the air had been taken from him in the middle of a sentence.

He sat down against the warehouse wall with one hand pressed to the entry point under his arm, came away dark, pressed back again, and his breathing became rough.

Wex went to one knee, caught himself on both hands, and stood again.

He said something short and specific and kept his sword in his hand.

Col pointed at the ground-floor bay of the second warehouse.

Four men peeled off with him.

Hod and the rest formed the crossfire line in the avenue, keeping the elevated aperture covered and giving the men below the window the room they needed to move.

The staircase inside was narrow.

Two of their men were at the top of it, and one fired a crossbow bolt straight down at the first militia soldier through the bay door.

The bolt struck the doorframe an inch from the man’s ear and quivered there. He did not stop.

He fired his second pistol up the staircase from the bottom.

The ball went through the lower abdomen of the man at the top, and the man folded forward over the wound with a sound that was mostly surprise, one hand grabbing the railing, staying upright only because his grip held him while his legs decided whether they still worked.

The second man above him already had a loaded crossbow aimed down at the soldier below.

Col went up the exterior ladder on the side of the warehouse.

The window was large.

He came through it into the second-floor loading space and found the crossbowman ten feet away, still aimed down the stairs.

The ball from Col’s pistol entered the man’s chest at that range.

It went through the sternum, through the right ventricle, and out through the back in a spray of blood that struck the wall behind him.

He went backward into the man on the stairs, who was still folded over his stomach wound, and both of them went down the staircase in a tangle of limbs.

The elevated position was clear.

The second checkpoint was harder.

They had heard every shot in the avenue and were braced for the attack, and they had more men. Nine visible, two of them carrying spears as well as the crossbowmen, the barricade doubled.

One crossbowman caught Hod’s last shot through the mid-torso at thirty feet as he stood to draw, and the ball went through the stomach cavity.

The man sat down inside the barricade with both hands pressed to the entry point, pressing and pressing while blood still pushed through his fingers.

One spear came over the crates and through the left forearm of the militia soldier on Hod’s left, the point entering between the radius and ulna and protruding four inches from the other side.

The soldier stopped and looked at the point coming out of his own arm, then looked at Hod, then grabbed the shaft with his right hand and shoved himself off it, pulling the arm backward free.

The wound opened wide as the point came out and blood ran down the arm in a sheet.

He pressed the arm against his chest and held it there.

Harr’s squad came through the single-cart-width secondary passage to the flank of the checkpoint.

The sightline from there was clean on the men behind the barricade.

A pistol shot from the alley took the second spearman through the right side of the chest while he was still watching the front.

He made a sound like something had been knocked out of him, the spear dropped, and he sat down against the inside of the barricade and stayed there.

The first spearman turned to find the new threat and left the front open.

Col’s men went over the barricade.

One man’s boot caught the edge of the top crate, the crate shifted, and he came down at an awkward slant, driving chest-first into the remaining crossbowman.

Both hit the cobblestones together.

The crossbowman’s head struck the stone hard enough for the sound to carry.

He lay still after that.

The second checkpoint was taken.

The main avenue was clear ahead of them.

The bodies stayed where they had fallen.

The smoke from the first volley had mostly drifted away.

The man who had taken the ball through the lower back had finally stopped trying to drag himself forward on the cobblestones twenty feet from where he had gone down.

Hod stood at the second barricade and looked down the length of the avenue toward Ald’s primary bay at its far end and said nothing.