On the other side of the guard room, the door rattled and thudded. The youths were in the gate tunnel, trying to break through it.

Tannhauser shoved aside a table, curse and kicked aside some fallen tankards, then strode over. The key, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

More thudding. Also clanging. People yelling.

“Go home!” shouted Tannhauser.

Nobody heard him.

“Your friends,” said the seeress.

“It’ll take too long,” said Tannhauser.

“What about your magic shoe?”

“This door needs an actual key,” said Tannhauser. “Come on.”

Tannhauser turned and jogged up the narrow spiral stair rising from the corner. Each step jolted his aching head, set his teeth on edge.

The winch room above the gate tunnel was divided by the two raised portcullises. Three wide murder holes commanded the passage below and let in the sound of axe on wood. Each blow made Tannhauser’s head throb.

He glanced down as he crossed the room.

As expected, Hans had assembled a mob of young men from those attending the morning practice of the Cult of Mars. Some had found tools and were hacking and bashing at the stout cross-laced guardroom door.

Glimpsed through the murder holes, they could have been Tannhauser’s fellow countrymen. When he’d stumbled on merchants who spoke German and dressed in German fashion, it seemed he’d found his way home without passing through Venusberg. It’s hard to keep one’s faith when you’ve bedded a Goddess, so he had not been so much shocked as disappointed to find a country where men swore by the Old Gods and worshipped them under their Roman names. So it was that Mars was the patron God of the fencing brethren, who proudly wore longswords slung on their hips.

Those weapons wouldn’t do them much good in what was to come. Tannhauser considered another attempt at getting their attention, but instead checked they were clear of the outer portcullis and yanked the lever.

It didn’t move. Somebody had padlocked prison chains through it.

He should have spotted that.

Tannhauser let out an inchoate cry of rage, as if that could drive off the hangover. All it did was make his head hurt worse.

“Same problem here,” said the Uta, from where she stood by the inner portcullis. “Are you perhaps going to try the drawbridge?”

“God’s Teeth of course.” Tannhauser worked the winch. The handle turned too easily. The ropes emerged from their hole in the wall and flopped on the floor. Tannhauser winced. He should have also expected that.

“Hung over,” he muttered to himself. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.”

He checked through one of the slit windows facing west.

Dawn had come to the mountains on the other side of the River Wyrd. Already the snow on the mountaintops glowed white like the furs Venus liked to drape over her soft shoulders. Behind the ruined walls of the fort on the opposite bank, armoured men mounted horses. Lances waved.

Still, the gatehouse resounded to the sound of Hans and his friends trying to break in. “The enemy are here,” said Tannhauser.

“You have to stop them.”

“I have to stop my friends dying, more like.”

“It’s same thing.”

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“It need not be.

Tannhauser reached for his sword, closed his fingers on empty air. Damn. Where had he seen weapons? “The Armoury Tower!”

“What?” said the seeress.

Ignoring her, he strode across the Winch Room and into the first floor of the Armoury Tower, the second of the pair of big drum towers making up the Bridge Gatehouse.

The round room was cluttered with wooden cots and the debris of mercenary life. Without breaking stride, Tannhauser grabbed a jug of small beer and poured the liquid into his mouth. It had the meaty vinegar taste of having been left uncovered overnight. However, it quenched his thirst and brought his aching limbs back to life.

He reached the head of the stair, dropped the jug. As it shattered, he plunged down to the ground-floor level.

In the gloom he made out rack upon rack of mildewed weapons assembled for defending the walls. He dismissed the long-poled halberds, and cast around for any kind of sword.

He found a rack of a dozen heavy two handed swords — battlefield monsters too ponderous for subtle fencing technique, but good for cleaving through shields and crushing armour. He brushed his fingers over them. Just one was still tacky with grease. The edge was promisingly sharp. He hefted the weapon off its hooks, headed for the door.

That one was also locked, the key gone. The lock itself, however, was a cheap replacement for the original, and not embedded in the thick door.

Outside, the hammering reached a fever pitch. The youths started shouting. They must have finally spotted the cavalry column filing out of the fort and onto the bridge. If they left it too long to flee, or God-forbid, stood their ground, they would be mowed down.

Tannhauser propped up the sword and took up a morningstar — a crude two-handed club with an iron shod end. “Stand back!” He rammed its top-spike into the lock, once, twice.

The sheet iron casing split, fell away.

He set aside the morningstar, grabbed the heavy sword and opened the door to the din of the young fencers, who still hammered away at with their backs to him.

“Thank you, sir,” said the seeress. The priestess kissed him lightly on the forehead and slipped away.

Tannhauser blinked. Uta. Her name was Uta. Suddenly that seemed to matter.

He inhaled properly for the first time since waking up. The builders had placed both doors on the inside of the gatehouse’s tunnel. The outer end of the tunnel framed a good view of the bridge. The mounted column was halfway across now, helmets glinting dully like so many scales.

Tannhauser realised it was only a small army. They had come to seize the Five Temple, not destroy it. Whoever they served couldn’t be worse than the corrupt Lords Merchant. There really was nothing here worth dying for.

Tannhauser raised his voice so that the Sword Brothers would hear him. “Gentlemen! Go…”

The youths turned, lowered their borrowed tools. Their eyes blazed with excitement. Tannhauser’s gut lurched and he knew he could not persuade them to stand down.

Hans grinned and opened his arms. “Tannhauser! You look like shit.”

Tannhauser ignored him and pointed to the bridge. “Look, you bloody fools!”

Hans whipped out his sword. “For Five Temple!”

The others drew and took up the cry.

So many toothpicks!

Tannhauser sighed. He grabbed the broad-shouldered young man with the hammer, a low-born apprentice blacksmith who’d nevertheless found his place in the egalitarian Cult of Mars. “Jed. Take your hammer up to the Winch Room. Free the portcullis. You’ll see the problem.”

Jed ran past him into the Armoury Tower.

“The rest of you — you want to hold the gate?”

The chorused, “Yes!”

The shout kindled a fire in Tannhauser’s heart. His qualms fell away like ashes.

Tannhauser drew himself up, squared his shoulders. “Whatever the cost?”

“Yes!”

“In there,” he ordered. “Take up halberds. Hans is in charge.”

The rushed past. He caught the youngest by the shoulders. “Not you, Gilbert. Go rouse the Crossbowmaker’s Guild. Presumably some of them know how to use the weapons they make. Don’t sound the alarm until they’re on their way. Let’s not clog the streets, eh?”

Gilbert nodded, scurried off.

A commotion erupted in the armoury. Apparently getting the long halberds through the door was going to be a problem.

Hans’s voice echoed from the hollow interior; “Come on, come on. Into the gateway. Save the city!”

The cavalry rumbled closer across the bridge. Now individual coats of arms were visible, as were the components of the armour they wore; good field plate with the crinkles and folds favoured by German smiths.

Hans emerged. “Tannhauser, it’s a damned shambles!”

Tannhauser didn’t bother to look back. “Take your time, Hans,” he said, “get them lined up.”

“But…”

“Pointy end toward the enemy, Hans.” Tannhauser laughed. Still laughing, he hefted the two handed battle sword over his shoulder and strode out onto the drawbridge to greet the attackers, whoever they were.

A little voice in the back of his mind chattered away, “This is a bad idea this is a bad idea…”

But his veins burned with battle joy, and nothing really mattered any more.