Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

And a bell began ringing on the east wall, and a moment later bells were ringing everywhere, church bells, wagon bells, chimes like excited parakeets, even just randomly snatched up pieces of metal banged clangorously together. Up on the wall soldiers were shouting orders, and a number of people in the streets were just screaming wordlessly. Rivas felt the dark stuffy room close in on him again.

There was no point in trying to talk over the racket. Rivas took Barbara's hand so that together they could make their way through the surging crowd toward the Dogtown section of the city wall.

The stairs leading up to the catwalk were already jammed with denizens of Dogtown, and it took two burly soldiers to keep them off the catwalk. Every few seconds one of the people fell, flailing and perhaps screaming, down into the crowd.

One soldier was shouting down through a bullhorn. « Get away from the wall! » he was yelling. « There is nothing to see! They are still across the river, at least a mile away! The device they've got is not a cannon! Repeat, not a cannon! »

Then Rivas saw several of the wall-top soldiers stare in sudden startlement out to the east—and a couple of seconds later a section of the wall to his right exploded, the flying stones knocking down people and shacks and then the boiling dust-cloud considerately veiling the view of splintered wood, broken stone and torn flesh.

Rivas felt a flicker of wild elation, the breezy sunshine feeling again, as the wash of sour dust blew over them and he inventoried what he had with him: his pelican, some pocket change, and a girl who wanted—of all the unheard-of things—to share his life.

He gave her a wild, challenging grin. «Leave by the Dogtown gate?»

She grinned back in sheer delight. «High time.»

Hand in hand they ran forward, and hopped and clambered and slid over the tumbled masonry, coughing in the dust and the acid smell of broken stone, and then, out in the sunshine, they ran down the slope toward the river and the abandoned boats.