A week passed in fire and ruin.
By then, the outer wall was nothing more than a scar crowned with Romanus banners, its battlements reshaped into firing platforms for trebuchets that hurled stone and death without ceasing.
The ruins of the commoner district lay flattened into open approaches, and in their place rose Roman siege works.
Engines creaked forward across cleared lanes, ladders lined the base of the inner wall, and from the rooftops of half-demolished tenements, carpenters raised wooden dropbridges that spanned the gap from house to parapet, turning the cities own houses into siege towers from which to invade the inner wall.
It was as though the city itself had been turned against its own defenders.
At dawn, the assault began.
Trumpets blared, horns answering from the camps and the wall alike.
Cohorts surged into the lanes, shields lifted against arrows that blackened the sky.
