I saw a fellow, aflame, running below, beyond the wall, then he fell and rolled in the dirt.

The pounding of the ram below continued. It had a different sound now than before. I did not understand why.

Men leaped back from towers to the wall, their work done on them. Two swung back on ropes and climbed through the crenelation, almost as though they might have been Cosians.

I thought I heard the scraping of a ladder against the wall near me. This startled me, as the battlements here, in the vicinity of the gate, were higher, surely, then even the long, bending single-pole ladders used along the wall. I saw more Cosians spew forth from a tower, over its bridge, and fall into tarn wire, and meet the pikes of defenders. From where I stood I could see, outside and below, hundreds of Cosians, and their mercenaries and allies. These fellows were back about a hundred yards. Many seemed at their ease, watching the walls, the ladders, the grapnel men, what they could see of the fighting.

In places along the wall defenders sought to get their poles under the bridges, between them and the crenelation, and, using the wall as a fulcrum, to lift the bridges back up. Sometimes Cosians and defenders, fighting, were on the very bridges being pried upward. At two towers the poles had thrust the bridges up and back. Men tried to hold them braced. But other men, Cosians, within, dozens, some with axes, half breaking the bridges apart, from the inside, forced them down again.

I heard the bellowing of an agonized tharlarion from below, and saw some led from burning towers, their harnesses cut. One, tearing itself free, heedless of the cries and blows of its keeper, ran blindly back toward the city, the men among the engines breaking apart, or climbing on the engines, to let it pass.

To my amazement then I saw two uprights of a ladder, a two-upright ladder, not one of the single-pole ladders, suddenly appear but feet from me. I ran to the place and thrust through the crenelation at a fellow, his hand already half over the wall. He tumbled back, into space. The next fellow had his shield before him. I could not get at him, nor he, because of it, at me. I crouched in the crenelation, bracing myself with my left arm. He climbed another rung and I kicked out, turning the shield to the side. He was half pulled from the ladder by the shield straps but he slipped down a foot or two, recovering himself. He looked up. I could not reach him. something, slipped past, hardly sensed, like a snake, leaving a thread of sound in the air. another thing cut the mask at the side of my face, like a knife.

One fellow was trying to climb past the nearest fellow on the ladder. This fellow, in one hand, grasped a spear. He was then on the same rung with the fellow with the shield, and then one rung higher. The spear blade thrust up, scratched the inside of the crenel. I seized the shaft behind the head. He held it with both hands. I wanted the spear. I could not get leverage from where I was, to move the uprights. He would not release it. Then he was pulled free of the ladder and hung in the air. a quarrel struck the outside of the wall a foot or so from my face. It was like an ice pick suddenly driven into ice, but what burst forth was not ice but stone. He hung tenaciously to the spear. Did he not truly, in that moment of terror, I wonder, comprehend what was supporting him, that it was not the spear, but I? Despairing of gaining the spear I released it. His hand reached out wildly then, belatedly, for the ladder, but his hand could not close on it. I drew back. Another movement sped past, like a puff of breath passing my ear. Below I heard yet another fellow trying to climb higher, and another. There were shouts. I looked through an adjacent crenel. The fellow with the shield hung half off the ladder. Another fellow had passed him and was almost up. I returned to my original place to meet him, but suddenly, just as he was coming within reach, I heard a sound like a fist striking leather, it came from his back, and he looked surprised, and then stiffened on the ladder and threw back his arms and head, and, twisting, plunged downward. I caught sight of a quarrel's fins protruding from his back.

Another fellow was behind him, and I met him. He blocked my blow with his blade. He blocked my blow again with his blade. Then he did not block my blow. Clutching the uprights, grimacing, coughing, spattered with blood, he slipped back some rungs, until he was a few feet below me. I looked about, wildly. I thrust my sword through my belt, to which were attached my pouch and knive sheath, both on the left side. I raced to the impaling spear, hoisted it up, some five feet, from its mount. The slave who had been Lady Publia, it burden by means of the ropes, the sheath and sword belt, twisting wildly, throwing her head about as though bewildered, as though she would try to see through the hood, uttered a tiny, terrified, questioning, miserable, helpless noise, her oral orifice, of course, remaining subject to the closure I had imposed upon it. I leveled the spear, then cast it to the ground. I was in a hurry. She was a slave. I then, lifting the spear up a bit, her head down, thrust her with my foot, in her ropes, with the sword belt and sheath, from the spear.

I then hurried back to where the ladder was. Another fellow had just appeared in the opening in the crenelation and I pushed out at him with the long impaling spear. Its point is a dull one, designed for an unpleasantly lengthy penetration. Even so with the force I slid it across the stone it jammed between his ribs, entered his body, and carried him out from the ladder. He dangled on it and then slipped from it, unable to cling to it with his hands. I think he struck the ladder again, some feet further down. I heard another man cry out, a few feet below. There was then a scream.

Armed with the spear, which is some fifteen feet in length, like a third- or fourth-rank phalanx spear. I reached over the wall and managed to get it behind the top rung of the ladder. No one was close to me then. Then highest fellow was the man with the shield, who had withdrawn earlier. He looked up, discarded his shield, started to climb madly toward the spear, then stopped. The ladder leaned out, a yard or so from the wall. I pried back further, and the ladder straightened, and then it leaned back further, held in place only by the friction with the spear. Some men leaped from it. Others tried to throw their weight against it, to force it forward again. Some dared not move. I slid the spear back and up. The ladder tottered. It must fall backward! But it did not. It crashed forward, against the wall. I pried at it again, and the top rung broke. I wished that I had had one of the tridents or one of the sharpened, steel crescents fixed on a metal pole, useful in such work. The fellow who had had the shield now climbed toward me. This time, however, the ladder leaning out from the wall, I managed to get the point of the spear free from under a rung and on one of the uprights itself. I could now push back. He tried to dislodge the point from the wood but I shifted and caught him under the arm and pushed back more. I hoped to use his own fear against him, his unwillingness to release the ladder, but before I could push back enough, past the center of balance, he released one hand and twisted, hanging to a rung with his free hand. But then, again, I managed to get the point on an upright. The ladder straightened, and I thrust out another foot, and then another, moving my hands on the spear, my hands sweaty, and then the ladder seemed, for an instant, to lean oddly back, away. For an instant I was not clear that it would fall. But then men were screaming and leaping from it, up and down its length, and I saw it turn on one upright, doubtless more from their movements and the shifts in weight than from anything of my doing, and then it fell back, and I heard it snap and break. At the same time I drew back, as a pair of quarrels flashed past. I think it probably that some had been fired at me when I had struggled with the spear for I saw at least one new, irregular scratch in the stone near where I had labored. Yes, oddly enough, though there must have been noise, I had not even noticed it at the time. it was only now, oddly, in recollection that it seemed to me I might have heard something there, cutting at the stone, and other things, too, like hissed whispers about me.