Haudh-Gwenn garrison

The garrison is the Haudh-Gwenn guard’s hard fallback, sited along the river where the east can reinforce it and well away from the town, so that there is no good ground to come at it from. The derelict buildings left standing beside it are cover its own defenders would use rather than cover against them, and when anyone approaches in force the answer is to fire the neighboring tenements.

It was the resistance’s main objective in the rising. One dawn nearly cracked it, at heavy cost and with the hospitals taxed past anything they could carry, and it fell the following day. Whoever had held it left more supplies in it than the garrison itself had needed, which made it a better hold than anything the rising had of its own, and it became Lady Talia Salahaudhi’s forward base and the Valiant Few’s with hers.

Then it was drunk into uselessness. Twenty hours after the victory most of the barrel and a good deal of the food stores were gone, most of the men were unconscious, a handful of half-sober ones kept a nominal watch, and nobody at all was in command. It was watched from outside the whole of that night. Had Beltran’s army come that evening the place would simply have been lost again.