The inner gate had barely crumbled away when Sybyll charged forward, her crimson armor catching the wavering blue-green light from above as she shot across the snow-covered ground, reaching the gatehouse in less than the blink of an eye as she rushed toward the West Gate Plaza.
Under Loman's orders, the roughly square marketplace, where three roads converged in a space little more than fifty paces on a side, had been transformed into a hastily prepared battlefield intended to stall the advancing army like rats caught in a kettle. Tables where men would once have haggled over the price of a wagon-load of timber or a cask of grain had been overturned and piled up as improvised barricades between the sides of warehouses and across the roads.
