Then the distant screaming reached him on his balcony, thrust out from the wall of the Citadel, high above the city. A screaming he remembered well from battlefields both old and new. And hardly happy memories. The Gurkish war cry. The enemy are coming. Now, he knew, they were charging across the open ground before the walls, as they had done so many times these past weeks. But this time they have a breach.

He watched the tiny shapes of soldiers moving on the dust-coated walls and towers to either side of the gap. He moved his eye-glass down to take in the wide half-circle of barricades, the triple ranks of men squatting behind them, waiting for the Gurkish to come. Glokta frowned and worked his numb left foot inside his boot. A meagre-seeming defence, indeed. But all we have.

Now Gurkish soldiers began to pour through the yawning breach like black ants swarming from a nest; a crowd of jostling men, twinkling steel, waving banners, emerging from the clouds of brown dust, scrambling down the great heap of fallen masonry and straight into a furious hail of flatbow bolts. First through the breach. An unenviable position. The front ranks were mown down as they came on, tiny shapes falling and tumbling down the hill of rubble behind the walls. Many fell, but there were always more, pressing in over the bodies of their comrades, struggling forward over the mass of broken stones and shattered timbers, and into the city.

Now another cry floated up, and Glokta saw the defenders charge from behind their barricades. Union soldiers, mercenaries, Dagoskans, all hurled themselves towards the breach. At this distance it all seemed to move with absurd slowness. A stream of oil and a stream of water dribbling towards one another. They met, and it became impossible to tell one side from the other. A flowing mass, punctuated by glittering metal, rippling and surging like the sea, a colourful flag or two hanging limp above.

The cries and screams hung over the city, echoing, shifting with the breeze. The far off swell of pain and fury, the clatter and din of combat. Sometimes it sounded like a distant storm, incomprehensible. Sometimes a single cry or word would float to Glokta's ear with surprising clarity. It reminded him of the sound of the crowd at the Contest. Except the blades are not blunted now. Both sides are in deadly earnest. How many already dead this morning, I wonder? He turned to General Vissbruck, sweating beside him in his immaculate uniform.

'Have you ever fought in a melée like that, General? A straight fight, toe to toe, at push of pike, as they say?'

Vissbruck did not pause for a moment from squinting eagerly through his own eye-glass. 'No. I have not.'