Ring of Fire III Read Online Free PDF

in cuirass, was staring up at him, blue eyes bright and angry. “The Franciscans who came in with you—do you know them? Personally?”
    “No, but—”
    Hugh wasn’t looking at him anymore. His strong neck corded as he shouted: “First platoon, down the hill! Guards: take hold of those monks. Immediately!”
    Owen Roe O’Neill was, by all accounts and opinions—including his own—excellent at adapting to rapid changes on the battlefield. But this was not a battlefield, or rather, had not been one but a slim second ago. And that change—from common space to combat space—was not one he easily processed.
    Stunned, he saw the nearest monks pull wheel locks from beneath their robes and discharge them into the second set of pickets at murderously close range. Further down the slope, one monk pushed the handcart into Tyrconnell’s staff tent while his partner drew a pistol on the guards there.
    In the same moment, the grimy soldiers who had been skulking to and fro in the trenches came boiling out, not bothering to dress ranks. But stranger still, they seemed in perfectly good order, operating not as a mass, but in groups of about five men each. This chaotic swarm of small, coherent teams streamed downhill, several tossing aside practice guns and pulling real ones, others drawing sabers and short swords. O’Neill’s own guards retracted, clustered tight around him, weapons drawn, as the leading infiltrators drew grenades and shortswords from beneath their robes and closed in—
    Just as the first teams from the trenches caught the assassins in the flank with a ragged chorus of pistol fire. Snaphaunces and wheel locks barked while a strange, thick revolver—a “pepperbox?”—cracked steadily, firing five times. When the fusillade was over, only one of the monks was still on his feet; a few on the ground moved feebly. A second wave of soldiers—sword-armed—closed the last few yards and finished the bloody execution. An alert trooper kicked the one lit grenade down the slope and away from the cart-track, where it detonated harmlessly.
    Down at the staff tents, the monk who had drawn a pistol had evidently not done so any faster than one of the guards. The two weapons discharged simultaneously and the two men went down—just as the monk who’d trundled the hand cart into the staff tent came sprinting back out. The other guard who’d been slower on the draw went racing after him—and went airborne as the tent exploded in a deafening ball of flame.
    By the time O’Neill had his horse back under control, the whole exchange was over. Almost twenty bodies lay scattered along the cart track, small fires guttered where the staff tents had been, and men of the Preston tercio were carrying two of their own wounded off to where the Tyrconnell regiment’s young surgeon could tend to them. With his ears still ringing from the explosions, and his veins still humming with the sudden rush of the humor the up-timers called “adrenaline,” Owen could only feel one thing: that he was glad to be alive.
    Then he turned and saw Hugh O’Donnell’s eyes—and wondered if his sense of relief was, perhaps, premature.
    * * *
    “Why did you bring John O’Neill’s colors, Owen?” O’Donnell’s voice and eyes were calm now. But most of the others in the commander’s tent—those belonging to the staff officers who would have been blown to bits if they hadn’t already been summoned here—remained far more agitated.
    Owen relied on the tactic that had always served him well: when your adversary has you on the run, that’s when you turn and hit back—hard. “Maybe you should be asking yourself that question, Hugh O’Donnell. A Sassenach”—he glared at Preston, who glared right back—“tells the earl of Tyrone not to come to a council of the colonels? Well, let me tell you, even if John O’Neill is not ‘permitted’ to sit and talk with the regal likes of Preston—or you—I will come bearing his standard, and with