The Cannon Law—ARC(162)

More shots spanged from the breastwork, and a guardsman staggered back clutching his face, blood starting between his fingers. Tom was about to go to the man's aid, dithering briefly between that and reloading his shotgun, when something landed on the parapet next to him. Something small and round and black and shiny, with a fizzing fuse.



He was halfway back to the doorway before he yelled "Grenade!" and Ruy was ahead of him. Naturally faster reflexes and less mass to get moving. It's going to go off any second, Tom thought—and then his back and legs were on fire and he was pressed up against the opposite wall of the stairwell he'd come up and there was a flashing somewhere in front of his eyes and darkness to either side and he could hear a strange noise. He felt, suddenly, very tired.



"—Señor Simpson? Now is not the time to—" Ruy was shaking his shoulder, gently but firmly. "Ah, you are awake, I see."



"What . . . ?" Tom muttered. It sounded like an alarm clock going off, if he could just hit snooze—and then he remembered where he was. Or where he had been. "How long was I—ow!" The pain in his back and legs returned.



"A few seconds, no more," Ruy said. "And thank you for shielding me from the blast. You don't seem badly hurt. Some fragments, no more."



"Feels worse," Tom grunted. He tried to look around to see how bad it was, but his back hurt like hell.



"Some small cuts to your legs, and one in your ass, Señor Simpson," Ruy said. "Your buff-coat prevented the worst elsewhere, and you were already out of the worst of the blast."



"Got to get out," Tom said, grabbing hold of what he decided was the salient point. "Got to get the pope out."



"Yes, but are you well enough to—"



Tom had been here before. It wasn't the first time he'd taken a mild stomping and played on, after all. He stood up, took a deep breath, winced at the literal pain in the ass, and said, "If we've got to, we've got to. How's the wall doing?"



"Hijo de—" was Ruy's only response. There was a sound of metal moving very, very fast. A scream, and a gurgle, and Tom turned round to see that the doorway out to the tower's lower fighting platform was blocked by Spanish soldiers, the first of whom was already collapsing with his face a mess of blood and his crotch bleeding out. Sanchez was holding the door with a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other.



Tom spotted the shotgun he'd dropped, but it was too far away. So he reached for his pistol instead. One of the soldiers in the doorway was struggling to get his halberd through, while another was armed with either a very long knife or a short sword. The kind they called a hanger, Tom recalled. The short blade was no use where Sanchez was concerned. The tip of the saber he had brought licked out like the tongue of a snake and opened the man's gut in a neat thrust-and-twist action after batting the man's blade just fractionally aside. As he hunched forward over the wound Sanchez punched the blade in again, making a neat gouge in the man's throat. The halberd the next man had was now in play, but Sanchez caught the thing with his dagger and, hardly moving his arm, flicked the saber around and across the wielder's face, stepping around the halberd to get in close. The sword came back again to cause the next man to try to get through the doorway to sway back out of reach of the wicked and bloody edge, getting sprayed with drops of his friends' blood for his trouble.



Tom got his pistol up and into the correct stance. He was a lousy shot, but he couldn't miss at this range, and he began to methodically punch away at centers of mass. Effective though the breastplates these guys wore might have been against down-time firearms at any reasonable range, against a 9mm round at not much more than knife-fighting distance, all they did was make a thunking sound as the bullets went through. Tom shot six times, taking five enemies down.



Just targets, he repeated to himself each time he pulled the trigger, trying not to think about it. Sanchez had stood back.



And then men in Swiss Guard uniforms surged across the doorway, taking advantage of the hole Tom had opened in the melee.



"We need to find another way," Ruy said.



"Reckon you're right," Tom said. "Let's get upstairs, go along the wall."





Chapter 44

Rome



"News, Ferrigno!" Cardinal Borja barked as he stared out over the rooftops of Rome. The terrace atop the Palazzo Borghese afforded a fine view of the Vatican, the Castel Sant'Angelo and the district within the Leonine wall that was the focus of effort of the troops he had wheedled out of the viceroy of Naples.



For hours the Castel Sant'Angelo had spat its defiance at the surrounding troops. The ring of bonfires illuminating its walls and the crash of the bombard shells it was firing lighted, by turns, the assorted vile and filthy little alleys around it. Borja had been assured by some military functionary or other—not one of the generals, he was sure, but some under-officer detailed to keep the prelate happy, in the mistaken belief that Borja would not notice the implied slight in fobbing him off with a second-rank myrmidon. Doubtless it was to do with their embarrassment at the fact that this simple assault on a fortress whose defenses had been out of date a hundred years ago was taking hours, that an operation that had been planned to be complete during a single day had now proceeded beyond sunset. The cardinal-infante had managed the reduction of an entire city in not much more time than this, scarcely two years before.