"Maybe you'd better let him go," a bareheaded, shock-haired 'prentice said, his hands balling into fists.

"Maybe you'd better bugger off, sonny," a redcoat answered. He had a corporal's stripes on his sleeve and a scarred, weasely face that warned he'd give trouble no matter the mess in which he found himself.

"Maybe I'd better not." The 'prentice set his feet. Several other Atlanteans ranged themselves behind him.

More English soldiers came out of the cookshop. The sun glittered off the sharp edges of their bayonets. "Last chance, boy," the corporal said, not unkindly. "Otherwise, we'll stick you and we'll gut you and you'll end up dead never knowing why."

"What do we do?" Blaise asked in a low voice. "Try to keep the town from blowing up," Victor answered. "The time's not ripe."

No matter what he thought, his opinion turned out not to be the one that counted. One of the men behind the bushy-haired 'prentice stooped to grub a cobblestone out of the ground. He flung it at the redcoats. It caught a soldier in the ribs. He said "Oof!" and then "Ow!" and then "Fuck your bleedin' mother!"

A split second after the curse passed the redcoat's lips, muskets leveled at the crowd of Atlanteans. "Fire!" the corporal shouted. Triggers clicked. Descending hammers scraped flints on steel. Sparks fell into flash pans. The guns bellowed, sending up clouds of acrid gunpowder smoke.

Most of them bellowed, anyhow: flintlocks were imperfectly reliable. The English soldiery's muskets were also imperfectly accurate. Some of the shots went wide; one of them shattered a window well off to the side of the crowd. But men screamed.

Men fell.

And men who didn't scream or fall hurled more stones at the redcoats. One of them had a pistol, which he discharged. The ball hit the weasely corporal in the arm. What he said made the other soldier's obscenity sound like an endearment.

The sound of gunfire brought more redcoats at the run.