NOW J ACK GOT THE IDEA that it was raining, because of the spurts of dust erupting from the ground all around him. Frenchmen, Janissaries, or both were firing at him from above—feeling free to do so now that Jack had apparently slain all three of the Frenchmen in the alley. Monsieur Arlanc and Nasr al-Ghuráb had made themselves scarce. Jack ran into the stables, which had become the scene of a strange sort of indoor battle. Nyazi’s men, and the Cabal, were outnumbered. But they’d had plenty of time to ready positions among the haystacks and watering-troughs of the stable, and to string trip-wires between pillars. They could have held the French and Turks off all day, if not for the fact that the stables had been set on fire—possibly on purpose, but more likely by the muzzle-flash of a weapon. Jack vaulted into a trough, drenching himself and his clothes, and then scurried back through an apparently random hail of musket-balls to where Yevgeny, Padraig, Jeronimo, Gabriel Goto, the Nubian eunuch, and several of Nyazi’s clan were frantically rifling haystacks for gold bars and piling them into heavy wagons. These were drawn by nervous horses with grain-sacks over their heads to keep them from seeing the flames—a cheap subterfuge that was already wearing thin. At a glance Jack estimated that somewhat more than half of the gold had been recovered.