Demontech: Onslaught by David Sherman Read Free Book Online

Marines and other sea soldiers than were sailors.
    Haft hefted his axe but made no move toward the square. The prisoners were ringed by twenty sword- or pike-bearing guards and a half-dozen archers. As much as he seethed at the sight of the mistreated prisoners, it was obvious that a two-man attack on those guards would be suicide. They moved on.
    Twice they hid in alleyways while strings of prisoners shuffled by accompanied by guards who didn’t hesitate to beat a man for not stepping briskly enough. Once, they passed near a small stone building with two squads of Jokapcul guards around it. Cries and moans came from the building, and through its barred windows they saw it was filled to bursting with prisoners.
    They kept moving, in a generally northeast direction, toward the city wall.
    Without help there was no possibility of freeing the prisoners. All Spinner and Haft could do was try to escape the city without being captured themselves. Then cross a continent. Then cross the Inner Ocean. And find their way back to Frangeria.
    So it was that the only people who saw them up close were the few citizens of New Bally who were about on that day of foreign conquest, most of whom bowed their heads and ducked away at the sight of the conquering uniform. A few, bolder, spat at the two once they were past. Once or twice someone must have looked more closely because they heard muttered words that sounded like “traitors” from the shadows. Fortunately, the only things cast at them were words.
    The straight-line distance they traveled to the wall was little more than twice the distance their journey from the inn to the dock had been the night before, but it took four times as long because of how often they had to avoid enemy soldiers. The New Bally city wall was not as tall as the walls of most big cities, only fifteen feet high for most of its length. As a freeport, New Bally was not often subject to raid or conquest. Its status as a freeport was generally more valuable to would-be conquerors or raiders than its conquest or the fruits of a raid would have been.
    The top of the wall had a fighting step behind crenelations, but it lacked platforms for catapults. Neither did it have the archers’ towers with interlocking fields of fire that marked city walls meant to keep out determined attackers. A New Bally city ordinance decreed that a lane wide enough for a troop of cavalry and a company of infantry to pass each other while marching be kept clear on the inner side of the wall. But as New Bally rarely needed to be defended, the ordinance had long been ignored. Vendors had set up stalls along the lane, and shanties were frequently stacked against the wall. By using the city wall, the poor who built the shanties only had to come up with enough wood or brick to build three walls to their homes; two walls if they also built against another shanty.
    Spinner and Haft examined the wall from a shadowed position in the mouth of an alleyway. Every fifty paces a Jokapcul soldier stood watch on the wall’s top. Most of the guards watched the fields and forests beyond the walls, but many others kept watch on the city itself. To one side of the alley mouth a produce vendor sat cross-legged behind piles of fruit; to the other side, a small merchant hawked the virtues of his brassware. Few people moved back and forth on the lane, the normal cacophony of citizens doing their marketing in the military lane absent.
    Directly opposite their hiding place a row of a dozen shanties leaned uneasily against the wall.
    “You give me a boost there,” Haft said, pointing at the end of the row of shanties—a guard watching beyond the wall stood almost directly above it. “I’ll get on the wall and cut down that guard before he knows I’m there. Then I’ll toss down a rope for you to climb up. We’ll be over the wall and on our way before anybody can reach us.”
    Spinner calmly looked down at Haft. “And what will we land on when we go over the