"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, Senor 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.
Borja had grown weary of the excuses some hours before. The just execution of the Barberini was now long overdue and the final prize, the completion of God's holy work in righting the wrongs done Holy Mother Church was close, tantalizingly close. And so he had bid Ferrigno shut his weaselly little mouth and hold the reports this half hour past, while Borja watched the shells fly and prayed furiously for calm.
Now, though, something seemed to be happening. Only a small part of the outer defenses of Castel Sant'Angelo was visible from this vantage, but there seemed to be movement there.
"Well?" he barked again. What was keeping the man?
"Your Eminence," Ferrigno said, coming to his side, "word reached us some moments ago that the ladders required for the escalade on the inner ward were prepared and the assault would proceed momentarily. The courier assured Colonel Don Pablo and myself that the first ladders would be reaching the walls only a few moments after he himself arrived here, and indeed-"
"Enough!" Borja held up a hand. Ferrigno was a good enough secretary, if kept well-whipped by his master's tongue. But the man's besetting sin was a tendency to prattle when nervous. Raised to the priesthood from a family barely removed from the common sort of folk, the man had not had the proper composure of a gentleman under fire. Nor, he being from some middle order of persons, did he have the brute indifference to peril that marked the true lower orders. Thus, with the fire of great guns echoing over the tiled roofs of Rome, the man seemed in near danger of soiling himself.
Christian charity bid Borja silently recognize that his own impatience had contributed nothing to helping the man's temerity. Still, it was unseemly. He sighed. "Fetch this Don Pablo"-it was a help, at least, to know the man's name; since Borja had not troubled to remember it past the initial instruction-"and bid him explain to me, as will undoubtedly be the case, why the Barberini will not be in our hands before dawn."
"Yes, Your Eminence," Ferrigno said, his relief evident. Where Don Pablo might be was anybody's guess. Borja had made his boredom with the technicalities of the man's explanations-excuses, to give them their right name-entirely plain some hours before.
Borja turned and looked again over the rooftops of Rome. To the east, the seven hills of Rome rose away from the river, their shapes lost amid the nighttime shadows and the shifting light from the explosions of shells and the fires burning round the city. The hills seemed to burn themselves, great rolling waves of fire like ocean swells of dark flame. Here and there, a house, some great palazzo or the town residence of some prelate, burned. There seemed to be no way of preventing it, unfortunately. The confiscation of the worldly goods of those heretics who had thrown in with the Barberini would have done much to defray the costs of this business. God's work it might be, but much of it was done by men who expected to be paid. A company of soldiers sent to ensure that some cardinal was arrested seemed to turn into ravening bandits the instant they were out of sight of responsible oversight. Quevedo was quite clear on the orders he was giving to these men, but deeply regretted, in his every report to his master, that the houses were being looted and the looters giving in to incendiary impulses.
The demise of so many cardinals would doubtless become convenient later. Some would have had to be released from prison in order to see to it that the canon lawyers were satisfied. Sinceri had been quite clear on the forms that would have to be followed to assuage the narrow, pinched consciences of such men. Doubts would otherwise be raised, he had said, and although nothing overt would ever be said and nothing printed that named him specifically, there would be lingering doubt about what had taken place. So there would need to be forms observed to ensure that once Barberini was in custody, he could be kept there without any whispering.