by Eric Flint
Ruy, still crouching, crept forward, revolver at the ready.
Giancarlo’s voice was hoarse. “Don Ruy, that is not valor; that is suicide.”
“You wished combat, my lords? Now you shall have it. We shall advance together. Why do you stare? You each have a piece. And you each have longswords and heavy armor. We shall charge them before they may organize to fire again.”
The only reply was from a new voice: a sob. Ruy gritted his teeth; he hadn’t the time to turn again, but he had to.
Von Spee was kneeling over Vitelleschi. The wizened Black Pope had fallen backward, arms out. There were at least five large gunshot wounds in his torso and limbs, and more blood on the marble floor than Ruy believed the vinegary old Jesuit could possibly have still had in his perpetually pale body.
Achille’s voice was thick. “Is he—?”
“He lives,” wept von Spee. “But I think not for long.” Urban looked on, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Ruy gritted his teeth. “Father von Spee, you must leave Father Vitelleschi and escort the pope to the escape tunnel. Go now.”
“But if the assassins are behind us as well—?”
Which Ruy admitted was a possibility: why else had O’Neill failed to show up? But there were no other options left. “If you encounter assassins, then you must fight as well as you can and save the pope. But he may not stay here. Now go—”
Feet pounded on marble behind them. Ruy turned: it was either more assassins or—
Owen Roe O’Neill, Tone Grogan, and five Wild Geese had emerged from one of the two halls that led away from the front of the council chambers in a tee—but from the wrong hallway. “They have bombs and revolvers,” Ruy shouted at them. “Stay low.”
But O’Neill had already motioned for his men to approach at a fast crouch. “I know the feckin’ drill,” the Irishman grumbled when he drew close.
“Do you?” Ruy snapped. “Then where have you been? Napping?”
“No, running like scalded cats.”
“What?”
“Damned ‘dignitaries’ came flooding into the hall as we were trying to reach you. So we had to go upstairs, cross over, come down the other side.”
Ruy smiled. Despite the endless planning, they had never considered how the colloquists might become an obstruction, not merely a stationary body to protect. “Then I am doubly glad to see you at all. They have the foyer.”
“Numbers?”
“We have not seen—”
Eubank, who evidently had not only recovered from two deafening explosions, but possessed extraordinarily robust hearing, whispered loudly. “I saw seven or eight at least. Main doors are shut. Probably no more than twice that number all told, mebbe less.”
O’Neill’s voice was calm but tense. “Stay down, Turlough. You fit to fight?”
“O’ course…now that I’m reloaded.” He cast away an empty cylinder.
“Then you’re with me.”
Ruy nodded his appreciation at the calm courage of the sergeant. “Since the most direct route to the music room is blocked—”
O’Neill nodded. “We’ve got to use the fifth evacuation contingency. Can’t say I like our odds of charging down into the foyer, then up past the landing on the right-hand staircase.”
Ruy shrugged. “At least they will not expect it—any more than they will expect us to charge them.” He glanced at Achille and Giancarlo. “You are ready?”
He did not wait for an answer: he charged.
Chapter 40
Gasquet turned to the others. Everyone had been armed, the hasty attack plan worked out. Nothing complicated: a few more grenades over the top, then a volley from the revolvers and a charge. Swords and pistols at arm’s length was how the day was always meant to be decided.
Gasquet turned to look at them. “Now,” he screamed, “at them and finish the job!”
Howling their approval and blood lust, all twelve of them—the two porters and the ten remaining assassins—rushed up the stairs, two throwing grenades as they went.
* * *
As the smoke started to clear, Hastings got the last of his command gathered on the stairs leading up to the Palais Granvelle’s main entrance.
The last two who had emerged from the mists looked quizzically at the door. “Sir?” they said. Hastings could almost hear what they really wanted to say: Are we waiting for someone to answer the door?
Hastings shouldered his rifle. “They have barred the door against us—at least partially. It may take all of us to break it down.”
“Where’s a battering ram when you need one?” Finan quipped.
Hastings almost grinned. “Sling arms. Line up here. Finan, you stay back. No, not because you’re small, but because I need someone with a gun already out who’s got the sense and the aim to pick off any assassins who might be trying to hold the door against us when we come through.”
Finan snapped off the safety on his Winchester. “I’m yer man fer that, Lieutenant.”
“I knew you were. Now, men, altogether—”
* * *
Ruy heard the charge coming up the stairs, sprang forward, heard Achille and Giancarlo keeping pace with him on either side.
“Why not wait for them?” Giancarlo panted; not as heavily built as Achille, he found the armor more tiring.
“They’ll throw grenades, and throw blind. Which means long.”
Sure enough, by the time they had closed half the distance to the stairs, two grenades came arcing high over the top riser, landed behind them, continued rolling.
He could hear O’Neill’s men following close behind, speeding up as the grenades went past. They had to get clear before—
The grenades detonated, distinctly smaller blasts than the first one, but enough to make them duck. Ruy felt a single fragment smack the back of his cuirass weakly.
That was the same moment that the first wave of attackers came over the stairs, pepperboxes firing wildly as they came.
Ruy stopped, slipped into a sideways profile and raised the .357. He hated wasting ammunition, but right now it was more important to buy time than take lives. He began squeezing the trigger.
The thunderous discharges of the heavy up-time handgun had an immediate effect: the charge slowed. One man went down on the second round, another was wounded by the third. Ruy let instinct guide him: one more round should do it. He fired, missed—but the attackers crouched down, returning fire almost blindly as they did.
Ruy looked back. Achille was taking a hand away from his breastplate; it was stained red. Seeing Ruy’s look, he shrugged. “Flesh wound.”
Ruy hoped he was right, had no time to do anything but glance at Owen Roe O’Neill’s group, who were rushing over the edge of the stairs. “Now,” said Ruy calmly to the armored cardinals on either side of him, “it is our turn.”
* * *
As Turlough Eubank fell in behind Owen Roe O’Neill, his feeling of regret at leaving Ruy and the two cardinals alone to clear them a path vanished instantly.
The flying wedge the Wild Geese had formed around the pope came over the crest of the stairs straight into the front rank of the assassins. Fortunately, the flank closest to the left—the pathway to their escape up the main stairs—was now the weakest: the man Danny O’Dee had wounded had been killed by the trooper who had died during the first fusillade, and evidently, Ruy had wounded another on that side. But now, rising to plug that gap were the assassins in the second rank.
Pepperboxes discharged on both sides. Bodies fell. Some were Turlough’s mates, some were the bastard assassins. Then they were through, just as it sounded like a giant was knocking at the double doors to the outside. Owen himself was bleeding from a wound to the leg and the Jesuit—von Spee—was half carrying Urban despite a ball going through his own arm.
But getting through the second rank of attackers did not mean they were free and clear. The assassins veered after them as they raced around the corner to the main stairs and made their way up. B
ut, slowed by the pope, the Wild Geese had to turn, and a second furious exchange of sustained volleys dropped one of the attackers, wounded several more on each side.
The escape had slowed, which meant, if Ruy and his two paladins were not able to hold the other flank in place, they might still be overwhelmed.
Turlough glanced back in their direction—
* * *
Ruy let his empty .357 drop on its lanyard, pulled at his main gauche. Firearms also empty, the four remaining assassins of the first rank surged up the stairs, pushing away from Giancarlo. Two pressed Ruy back just as his second blade cleared its sheath, but neither of them came within range of an easy riposte. The better and older of the two—von Meggen’s evidently traitorous lieutenant Eischoll—was competent enough not to fall for any of Ruy’s attempts to appear unprepared.
However, that was enough to keep Ruy from intervening on behalf of the weakened Achille, whom the other two rushed, hacking fiercely.
Normally, they would have been quick work for the Frenchman, but his armor slowed him and his wounds weighed upon him even more. He fell back before them, managed to slash one’s leg before a heavy blow to his helmet laid him out. Jumping into the opening in the line, the assassins turned Ruy’s flank.
Giancarlo, panting under the weight of his armor—more a would-be warrior than an actual one, are you?—swung around Ruy to defend his other flank more directly, pushing back Eischoll and his companion. Now, rather than the three defenders holding the top of the stairs against four attackers who were several steps lower, the line of engagement ran down the middle of the stairs, top to bottom.
One of Ruy’s new opponents—the one who had felled Achille—leaped in, swinging savagely. At last, an easy kill: Ruy parried the cut, rolled his wrist, his rapier ready to skewer the fellow, saw that it was the disfigured porter. But it was also a familiar face. From the day the Swiss had arrived. It was the supposed ironmonger and trader. The bent fellow whose nose had resembled a squashed turnip. The one who had intervened on behalf of von Meggen. “You!”
The man used Ruy’s moment of distraction to pull back. His mouth a rictus of animal hatred, he spat, recovered his footing, and brought his blade around for yet another cut.
Ruy had less than a second. He did not need to glance around the foyer to know what the rhythm of this combat signified: war to the knife. Men who would do anything to kill the pope facing men who would do anything to protect him. There was no pause, no quarter, and each side had already started to steal a moment here or there to deliver a coup de grace to a fallen foe.
But this enemy was, in all probability, too important to kill.
Ruy reaccelerated the swing of his rapier, turned his thrust into a wholly unnecessary feint. The man with the squashed nose was an enthusiastic but wholly untrained killer and changed his cut into an attempted parry.
Ruy almost smiled as he dropped out of the feint and ran his blade through the man’s right outer thigh, then twisted outward. The bent man shrieked as the steel bit through skin and muscle to rip free, dropped his sword to clutch the welling wound; bloody, but not arterial.
But the extra fraction of a second that it cost for Ruy to check his first blow and shift to inflicting an incapacitating wound instead, was all the opening the other attacker needed. A competent swordsman, he waited for the Catalan’s rapier to sink deep into Turnip-Nose’s leg, feinted with his sword, and as Ruy caught it with his main gauche, he brought up the dagger he held low and ready.
Ruy twisted away from the upward thrust aimed at the open left armpit of his cuirass, managed to get his body out the way, but not his arm. The dagger left a deep seam from his tricep to his elbow even as his rapier was clearing the turnip-nosed man’s thigh. He slashed then, rolling his wrist into a backthrust at the arm holding the dagger: clipped it enough to inflict a wound that was almost the match of the one he’d just suffered.
For a moment, the men on the stairs stared at each other, panting: Giancarlo and Ruy, guards up against the three remaining assassins, who were less wounded and exhausted.
This, Ruy reflected was about to get very interesting.
Possibly in the very worst sense of the word.
* * *
Turlough Eubank’s stomach sank, seeing the three assassins on the stairs, and the big oaf with the meat-cleaver mounting the stairs, apparently meaning to get overhead, maybe behind them. “M’lord,” he grumbled at O’Neill.
The colonel turned, eyes measuring the scene as he did. As he drew his sword—even he, with two pepperboxes, was dry—O’Neill shrugged a slung rifle off his other shoulder. “Use this. First to help them, then us.” And he turned away to parry an assassin’s blade as the weapon slid into Turlough’s rough hands.
It was the SKS that the Hibernian commander, Thomas North, had gifted to Owen in respect for what he had achieved during the seizure of the Castel de Bellver in the Balearics, less than a year ago. And almost identical to the one with which Eubank himself had gunned down more than a dozen of the Spanish defenders.
Turlough brought the weapon up quickly, breathed deeply: not the right weapon for these tight quarters, really. But with a momentary knot of his mates keeping the enemy off him…
Eubank squared the sights. He had to fire over the heads, or even the shoulders, of Ruy and Giancarlo in order to get at the enemy. Whispering a silent and shockingly profane prayer, he sighted on the attacker who had just cut a bloody groove in Colonel Sanchez’s arm. He cheated the sight a little higher, saw Ruy step backward, giving ground—
He fired three fast shots into the top of the sniper’s triangle in the moment before the assassin could once again close with Ruy.
Turlough Eubank didn’t know how many shots hit, but at least one had; the man slumped over as the weapon’s distinctive up-time report—sharp and reverberant—seemed to paralyze both sides for the space of one eyeblink.
Then the giant who’d been knocking on the front door smashed it in.
* * *
Hastings pushed through the gap between the doors, the rest of the shattered cross-bar splintering where it had been incompletely slid into the retaining hooks on the right-hand side. For a second, the crash seemed impossibly loud, then Hastings realized it was rifle fire. Up-time. SKS, from the sound of it.
The room, filled with gunsmoke, was a tableau of carnage and weary men. More than a dozen bodies were already on the floor, and there was no telling how many were friend or foe. But it was clear enough that the Wild Geese on the stairs, with Owen Roe at the point of a reduced wedge, were almost all wounded, holding back their attackers while one priest—von Spee—helped a man up the stairs…
A man in a cassock…
The pope!
“Rifles!” Hastings screamed. “Flank right!”
In less than a second, three had leaped to the right, drew a bead. But didn’t fire. “Blue on blue!” shouted Kuhlman.
Damn it; still no clear field of fire. “Further. Fire when clear!”
One second, two more leaping steps, and the first of the Winchesters began to fire.
Half of the assassins pressing O’Neill’s knot of defenders went down like sacks of grain. Another tried running for the kitchen. Finan, weapon raised to cover that flank, fired five times, working the level so that it sounded like a triple-time metronome. Three red holes appeared on the assassin’s back, the last ugly crater erupting even as he fell.
The remaining assassins—a mere handful—broke in all directions.
Except for Sergeant Eubank, O’Neill and his men ducked low; Ruy and Giancarlo did so a moment later. Now with a clear field of fire, the Hibernians’ Winchesters and Eubank’s SKS spoke again in combined, remorseless thunder. Invisible bolts of death cut through enemies only a few yards distant. Then, there was only smoke and silence—
—until the moaning of the wounded began.
* * *
When Otto had seen his friend Heinz fall, his leg butchered like an Easter lamb, his only thought
had been to kill: to kill the small, fast man with the mustaches and quick sword, the man who had cut Heinz so badly. Heinz was Otto’s only friend. Heinz fed him, clothed him, scolded those who teased him for being slow-witted. So, kill. Otto happily forgot the other plans. They were no longer important.
But before he could get to the top of the stairs, and maybe sneak around behind the swordsman who moved as smoothly as a traveling acrobat, a loud gun began shooting from near the foot of the other stairs. It was a bad sound, and it killed one of the not-Swiss men, went through his body and blasted out a big chunk of the stone wall behind him.
And then the big doors crashed open and more men came in: the dangerous ones with the long guns. Otto wanted to weep; now if he stayed to kill the fast little swordsman, he would probably die. Besides, although the swordsman’s arm was bleeding, he did not act like he was hurt at all. He was still looking around, very alert, like a fox making sure that there was no trap nearby.
So Otto ran. Because what else could he do? He couldn’t run back out through the kitchen, because the bad-sounding gun could shoot him if he went back down the stairs. He had only one choice: to run toward where the pope-lovers had come from.
He ran past a dead-looking man who had been a priest, but probably not one of the really bad ones, because his black robes were plain, as was the cross that was covered with blood from the many bullet holes in him.
When Otto got to the end of that long hall, he found big double doors sealed before him. He looked right and then left. A hall either way. Then, sound: voices, speaking with the same accent used by the pope-loving men that Heinz said came from Ireland—wherever that was. The voice came from the right, so he ran to the left—and heard more voices coming from that direction.
Trapped! Otto felt sweat under his arms, saw what looked like a small cave in the wall to his left, jumped for it, stumbling over a trestle table filled with table cloths and dirty napkins, like after a big meal at a fancy inn. He fell forward, crawled quickly into the little cave, the linens falling on and around him, and then curled up. There were too many to fight. And since he had come to kill the worse of the two popes—Heinz said so!—they would surely kill Otto if they found him.