Gal POV
The main avenue ran straight north from the gate, and the city was being swarmed behind him.
Every rider coming through the gate fed into the avenue and into the cross-streets branching east and west.
By the time Gal and Orkhon had covered two hundred meters from the gate's interior, the sound of several hundred horses moving through the city was all around them, coming from the east and the west as much as from behind, the scattered percussion of riders spread through multiple streets at once.
The first cross-street defense was forty meters ahead. Twenty-five men, perhaps thirty, using a stack of building timber as a barrier across the road's center. Spearmen at the front, two men with axes behind them. They had set themselves appropriately for one direction.
