The Cannon Law—ARC(155)
Tom carefully kept his face straight as he joined them. "His Holiness tried to order the Guard to surrender while we escape," Ruy said. "Their commander has refused the order. They will fight to the last to cover our flight."
The pope began to say something.
"No, Holy Father," Ruy said, cutting him off, "do not waste this. These men serve the Church in their way, serve her in yours that they do not do so in vain."
The laughing adventurer, making light of every difficulty, was gone of a sudden, Tom noticed. Ruy's face had set hard into the mask of a conquistador, intent on deadly purpose and grim slaughter to all who stood in his way. A far cry from the joker who'd simply waltzed in to a fortress under siege simply by asking nicely.
Oh shit, Tom thought, if Ruy's getting serious, we are in deep, deep shit.
Chapter 42
Rome
Frank looked at the gun on the shelf under the bar in front of him. He'd been halfway to giving the thing to the guys upstairs for the last hour. He'd kept it in case he needed it, but made sure it wasn't actually in his hand in case the assault started. He wanted to be down and in a posture of abject surrender immediately and with no possibility of being mistaken for a threat by even the most nervous musketeer. Which meant that it was pretty silly to have it here where it was guaranteed to be no use whatsoever. And it wasn't like he was in any shape to fight either. What with splinters in various bits of him, cuts and bruises and the pain from his hand, he really didn't feel like fighting at all.
The street outside was getting dim, and inside the bar it was almost pitch black. Frank had allowed one small candle, and made sure to stand well away from it. Maybe that Captain Don Vincente was a reasonably decent sort of guy and wouldn't order a massacre. That didn't mean that the musketeers across the street wouldn't do their level best to make sure there wasn't any resistance inside. The end of the bar where the candle was flickering and dancing was taking all the musket fire, with balls crashing into that part of the room a couple of times a minute. Piero, who was doing his level best to look nonchalant on a kicked-back chair with his heels on the bar, had tried running bets on how long it would take for the musketeers to succeed in shooting the flame out, but the joke had got old an hour ago.
Frank cringed again as the cannon along the street banged—where, Frank wondered, did all those guys writing about old battles get the notion that cannon roared? This one made a huge bang and then shook the building and Frank's teeth. A roar was more drawn out, kind of. He tensed up for the crash, not that he ever did so in time, and then relaxed as he realized they'd missed again. That had made him giggle at first. Missing the broad side of a building was the standard of bad marksmanship. And then Frank had remembered what the captain had said; if he didn't want to simply smash up the cannon, he had to fire from along the street and make a hole in Frank's wall by bouncing cannonballs off it at an angle. A lot of that façade was wooden paneling between brick arches, and a fair proportion of that was already pretty busted up. Only the door was closed completely, although there was a chunk of the brickwork missing from one side of it already.
It wouldn't be long, anyway. They were getting a shot off every three or four minutes. Frank had no idea whether that was quick or slow for three guns, but they'd kept it up for two hours now. They'd only missed a few shots, and the ones that had hit had got in between the columns of the brick arches that made up the front of the ground floor of his place and smashed the woodwork out of its supports. Frank wasn't too happy about what was happening to the brickwork, either. He wasn't an engineer, but there was one column that looked like it had had most of its outer face smashed away. And this building had been standing hundreds of years on those columns; Frank wasn't sure about how well they'd hold up with one of them shot away and all the others battered by a couple of dozen cannonballs.
Piero coughed on the falling dust. It was pretty constant now, although when the cannons hit they produced a massive shower. Which was damn strange, actually. Given how much housework Giovanna had them all doing upstairs, it wasn't like there was any dust left in the place. "Seems like cannon are harder to aim than they look, eh?" he said.
"Looks like," Frank said. "That makes, what, three or four misses?"
"I count five, with that. I don't like the look of that wall, either."
"I was wondering about that, too." Piero's presence was helping a lot. If he'd been on his own, he'd have gone completely nuts by now. One or two prisoners, the captain had said, and they'd decided on two. Piero was the only other realistic candidate. The Inquisition had to have Frank, no question. Of everyone who was left, Piero was the one with the most family connections and money and so had the best chance of getting off with the aid of a good lawyer and a little luck, probably with no more than a dose of intimidation by being shown a fully stocked torture room. Which was, apparently, standard procedure before questioning anyone. Piero planned to confess to a couple of years' worth of drunkenness, adultery and general misbehavior to keep them from torturing him because they suspected he was hiding something. He'd joked that if he was lurid enough in the details he could get the Inquisition to boot him out just to keep him from killing the priests with jealousy.