Hey Everyone,
No updates here really, just editing and researching. I swear every time I turn around at the moment its Wednesday.
We are getting to the end of winter here in Australia, and I can’t wait for warmer, brighter, and longer days. I’m pretty useless by this point because I’m so over the cold and rain lol.
Any way, onwards with Chapter 18. There are only a few more weeks left, and then I’ll look at getting a pretty polished version up on Amazon, but more on that when we get to it!
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Chapter Eighteen
Two and a half hours before dawn, Alexis stood on the inner wall above Saint Romanus Gate with his hood low over his face and his back against the stone of a merlon. The bombardment had stopped for the moment, and his ears were ringing in the silence.
At the postern, he bribed the captain to keep his key long enough to make a copy, and had the door glamoured so no enemy soldier coming that way would see anything but a blank wall.
Alexis was leaning against a wine-cart when Con walked past with three captains and didn’t turn his head. Con would know he was there anyway. He had been a soldier for a thousand years and the second-longest-reigning emperor in Rome’s history. He had a cat’s situational awareness and a fox’s cunning. He didn’t look at Alexis or try to send him away, and that was probably the only thing that stopped Alexis from losing his nerve.
The ringing silence broke at the eastern edge of the Mesoteichion, where the Lycus valley fell away from the wall. It was the long ululating cry of the bashi-bazouks. Mehmed was sending them first because they were the meat for the wall to break its teeth on before the regulars came.
The bombardment started again, the big guns firing, and the ground beneath Alexis’s boots shuddered. Stones came loose from a section thirty paces north, and a man fell off the parapet without making a sound.
The first wave of men came in. Alexis gritted his teeth and stayed against the merlon as the carnage began.
They died in the hundreds against the outer wall and the moat. The Greeks and Genoese on the inner curtain shot down at them, threw rocks, and poured out what was left of the Greek fire.
Giustiniani’s deep voice carried up the parapet from the lower bastion, calling encouragements. Con’s voice came from the same direction, sharp, calm, telling a Greek captain to stop wasting bolts on men already dead.
The first wave broke, and the second wave came in. Anatolian regulars. Better armored and disciplined. They reached the outer wall and brought ladders. They came over the outer wall in places and were thrown back from the inner curtain by Giustiniani’s Genoese, who fought from the breach in the outer wall as if their lives ended at the line of their swords.
The second wave broke, and the defenders scrambled to rally. There was no use.
Now, Alexis thought, he will send the elite to finish the job.
Unlike the first two waves, the Janissaries came in unnerving silence. They were over the outer wall before the defenders on the inner curtain understood that they weren’t the second wave returning. They put ladders to the inner curtain and came up to meet the Greeks and Genoese.
Alexis walked along the inner curtain toward the bastion, his hood low, whispering to the spell that built in his right hand.
Con was at the corner where the curtain bent toward the lesser bastion. He was on his feet with his sword in his hand and his other hand on a Greek captain’s shoulder, shouting something that was making the captain straighten.
Behind them, at the breach in the inner wall, Janissaries were coming up, and Genoese were going down to meet them.
Something was wrong. Giustiniani wasn’t in his place at the breach.
He is down, and bloody Con will take his place. Alexis swore and hurried the spell.
Con was so focused on taking control of the flagging defenders that he walked past Alexis without seeing him for the first time in his life.
Forgive me.
Alexis came up behind Con, placed his right hand onto the back of Con’s neck just below his helm, exactly the way he had practiced on Phaidros.
Con didn’t have time to turn as his knees gave out. Alexis caught him under the arms before he fell.
He hooked Con’s sword arm over his own shoulder and lifted. Con’s head lolled against Alexis’s neck. A captain turned and saw them.
“Strategos is down, I’ve got him!” Alexis called to him and didn’t wait for a reply.
The smoke was thick, and Alexis brought up a glamor around them to hide their retreat. The Greeks and Genoese around the breach went on fighting. They wouldn’t last much longer.
Alexis hurried past men running the wrong way, others screaming for their mothers and their god. He was almost knocked down by a horse with no rider.
The Janissaries hadn’t reached the inner streets yet, but they weren’t going to be far behind. He wrapped another spell around Constantine to make him lighter and picked up his pace.
He passed a small church where the bell rang in a frantic, uneven rhythm that meant the monk in the tower had been told to ring and not stop.
The postern was unmanned when he got there, blood staining the street around them, but no bodies. Maybe it had been how they got Giustiniani out? Alexis went through it, trying not to think about the carnage he’d left behind.
Beyond the wall, the cleared ground was full of Ottomans, all running toward the gate, not away from it. Swearing, Alexis followed the base of the wall north three hundred paces, to the small stair into the dry moat where the wall turned. He went down, across the moat, and up the far side until he was on the road that ran along the shoreline of the Horn.
The road was empty of soldiers but full of civilians. He let the glamor drop in favor of feeding more magic into leveraging Con’s weight. No one in flight looked twice at another fleeing man with a wounded comrade over his shoulder. He went north along the shore to where his boat was hidden from everyone’s eyes.
He laid Con in the bottom of the boat and had to catch the side to steady himself.
Alexis ignored his screaming shoulders and pushed the boat out before getting in and rowing through the smoke toward Galata. Everyone was awake, listening to the fall of its neighbor. No one looked at Alexis as he carried Con past men who stood in doorways with their hands over their mouths and women weeping.
Alexis’s legs were shaking by the time he reached the church. Phaidros and Arslan were waiting. Phaidros took Con’s legs and helped Alexis get him through the doors.
“It’s fallen. It’s fallen,” he panted, slumping to the floor. He stared at Con, lying unconscious and filthy on a pew under Anubis’s watchful gaze. He waited until Con’s chest rose and fell a few times before he buried his head in his hands and sobbed.
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Thanks so much for reading this week!
As always, if you want to catch up on the other chapters Click here for where I’m compiling them every week.
If you haven’t read Alexis and Penelope’s adventures yet, you can check them out here. Or if you are curious about who Arslan is, then click here.
Hope you all have an amazing week!
Ames xx