That left no room for the soldiers who hadn’t gone to hold the door to form a shield-wall. In an open field they would have been more than able to hold the Rangers and the Mormons both until help arrived, even outnumbered; they were strong, picked men, beautifully trained and equipped. The problem was that they were trained and equipped for one type of fighting and only that, each man a part in a single many-legged machine. This brawlmêlée left them in isolated ones and twos facing Dúnedain whose war-style brought a malignant perfection to a tumbling slashing stabbing scramble from ambush.

The Mormons simply swarmed those facing them under, showing a reckless disregard for consequences. The Thurstons kept screaming, a needleedge of distraction, and those trying to drag them away snatched up their shields as the swarming fight staggered near. Ritva forward-rolled around her sword-hand under the thrust of a gladius and came to a knee, hammered the edge of her little steel buckler down into the man’s foot in a grisly crunch of small bones breaking, then thrust upward into his throat and killed him as he bent over in swift involuntary reflex.

A leap forward, across a tile floor already slippery with blood, and she found herself facing the last soldier of the Sixth still standing. He’d lost his helmet and was flicking his head to get the blood out of his eyes from a cut on the forehead. He was a young man, younger than she, with bristle-cut red hair and a freckled face whose skin was tight over the bones and wet with sweat and blood. The green eyes were utterly steady as he set himself to die.

A flickering long-lunge towards a foot brought the shield down; Ritva knew somewhere far from the present all-consuming moment that she was moving to ten-tenths capacity in an impossible blur of speed, almost as fast as Astrid. She turned the lunge into a feint with a skip and a beat, and drove the sharp point of her long sword into the upper part of his arm, just below the spot where the leaves of the lorica segmentata stopped. The point ripped into meat and glanced off bone, and the soldier gave a muffled cry of despair and pain as the shield dropped out of his hand; the Boise type were held by a central grip, not loops with a forearm thrust through.

Two more lunges drove him back towards the Thurston family as the point flickered in faster than thought. He still had his short sword, but the gladius was not meant for fencing. As he felt the family at his back the soldier suddenly threw the sword at her and turned, grabbing Shawonda Thurston in his arms and wrestling her around by main force, putting his back between her and the blades of the attackers he thought menaced them for one last sacrificial moment.