The walls of the city glow deep orange with the light of the still-raging flames from high up on the Dividing Wall. The remains of Zargon’s exploded statue lie strewn about the city like embers. Gil and Kiddu dart around corners and through dusty alleys, straining to hear the clatter of the hoplite’s armor behind them.
As they pass buildings, shutters slam shut, torches blow out. With the watchtowers in flames and the Dividing Wall in chaos, natives must be pouring through the breach right now—and everyone on the Akkadian side is bracing for a riot.
Kiddu weaves around another corner, her third left in a row. Gil wonders if she is leading them in circles.
Clank-clank-clank. Two hoplites skid around a corner. They instantly spot Gil and Kiddu and raise their spears.
They run, around a corner, down an alley, across an empty street. Another block, and they emerge onto the main street bordering Libri’s canal. They’re on the south of the waterway, but their home, the Temple, is on the north—and there are only so many bridges.
The nearest bridge is two blocks ahead.
The mystics have stopped shooting around the city, so the sorcerers’ lightning has died down. Gil can hear the flowing water of the canal to his left, along with the clanking footsteps of the two hoplites running a block behind them.
Other sounds echo through the air as well: the sound of of hundreds of natives chanting, muddled from the distance but the words still clear:
Death to Akkad!
Other sounds echo opposite the chanting: the sounds of heavy marching, rows of armor and shields, soldiers shouting orders.
Gil pants, trying to keep up with Kiddu, his stomach a knot of pain. He checks behind him. The two hoplites from the Circus are still in pursuit, and now they’re joined now by several other soldiers. One of the new arrivals is holding something out, glowing with a point of blue-white light—
He throws himself down on the cobblestones just as a jagged spear of crackling blue-white light shoots past. The hoplites’ little bolt-wands are not nearly as powerful as the sorcerer’s killing lightning blasts, but they’re strong enough to shock you into a collapsed, vomiting heap.
The bolt’s aim was bad, but it nipped her. She turns around, hoists Gil up off the ground, shaking her shocked arm. Her dreadlocks stick up in frizzy clouds.
They run. The chanting gets louder. So do the sounds of their pursuers, who, Gil realizes, are now more than close enough behind to simply throw their spears. The bridge is right in front of them now, to their left, just a half-block away—
They turn onto the bridge, sandals clacking up the arched cobblestones, and as Gil looks ahead he sees what she’s swearing about: a crowd of torch-carrying natives is swelling on the other side of the canal. It flows like an angry avalanche, funneling as they begin to climb the opposite side of the bridge.
Gil instinctively turns around, considering the bridge effectively blocked. But then he skids to a stop as he sees the source of the rumbling marching: an entire phalanx of hoplites, ten rows deep and spread out across the whole street ahead of him, a wall of shields behind a forest of black spearpoints. The soldiers march forward in perfect lock-step towards the bridge, like a huge weight slowly but inevitably falling against the natives on the other side—and now he and Kiddu are caught in its path.
Kiddu is more decisive than he is. She pulls his arm and they run towards the chanting throng of natives, feeling utterly exposed on the crest of the bridge’s high arch. Some of the natives throw rocks, which whistle past them and clatter uselessly against the shieldwall of hoplites behind.
Gil can see the faces of the closest natives, dressed in rags, mouths wide open, eyes glowing wildly in the torchlight. One holds up a flag emblazoned with abstract circular emblem of Harrappa. The native notices Gil, opens his mouth, points and yells something over the din—
A tremendous flash thunders from the Dividing Wall, and a nimbus of blue-white lightning rips the native man and everyone around him apart.