The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) by M. Edward McNally, mimulux

the place. They were kept burning day and night by the Ayzant Fire Priests in reverence to their incendiary god. From the ridge top, Zeb could see at least five great columns of roiling black smoke, all feeding the pall that flecked the riverside with dark ashes like falling snow.
    Stepping up onto the barricade of tree trunks and sharpened branches that lay along the ravine’s rim, Zeb wondered how long it would be before somebody returned to haul all of this wood away to feed hungry Ayon as well, and what exactly the men were supposed to do for shelter after that. With the height of the Daulic citadel across the ravine, only the combination of barricade and camps-in-holes shielded the men stationed here to any extent from long, arcing bowshots. Given the distance an archer could scarcely draw a bead on any one man, but they had not needed to do so when the besiegers had been packed close together. Looking to his left Zeb noted that the barricade extending all the way to the manor house was still empty. There had been a battalion of Ayzant infantry posted along there until a week’s worth of losing as many as a dozen men a day to sniping had convinced their absentee commanders to draw them off to the other side of the ridge. This left no one but the Axes on post, but it was not as though the Dauls were about to clamber down their walls, slide down the far side of the ravine, climb back up this one, and actually attack here.
    Such were Zeb’s thoughts as he stepped to the end of a log and started to undo the drawstring of his trousers, looking at the top of the wall across the way with no particular concern. He heard a hiss below his perch and thought - snake? - with more appetite than worry, and leaned out to look down into the blue eyes of a man with a face brown with mud, a tight leather skullcap on his head. He was pointing a gun up at Zeb.
    It was a matchlock. The pan flashed and Zeb had just started to throw his arms forward when the charge flared. There was a flash, a bang, and a lead ball the size of a walnut tore into Zeb’s right elbow, passing out the other side.
    Bone splintered and blood spattered Zeb in the face but there was a brief moment before it hurt. Stumbling back off the barricade he managed to bawl “Handgunners!” before his heel caught a branch and he went over backwards, left arm wind-milling and right flopping at an unnatural angle. He crashed to his back and as his ruined elbow banged the ground a rushing sound filled Zeb’s ears as though he had a seashell up to each. The blue sky above shimmered in his sight like a blanket strung up to have the dust beaten out of it.
    Zeb screamed in no language and cursed in three or four.
    It was a point of more chagrin than pride to Zebulon Baj Nif (“Warchild” in his native tongue), that he had received many, many wounds on as many battlefields over his martial career. This was not Zeb’s first encounter with pain so brutal and absolute that his body wanted to eschew consciousness rather than deal with it. But now, as then, a part of Zeb knew that escape from the moment would likely be fatal. Clenching his teeth against more screams, he centered himself until the sky stopped shimmering, drew in and released a long breath that at least took the roaring in his ears away with it, if not the fire in his arm.
    He could hear again. Shouts from the Axes in the hole and grunting Daulmen dragging themselves up and over the barricade. Then he saw one, maybe the fellow who had shot him but probably not, as this particular mud-spattered figure in leather jerkin and breeches held a still-charged handgun. It was a crude device, no more than a short pipe on a wooden stock, with a pan requiring the shooter to touch it with a smoldering fuse rather than a mechanical lock with a match and trigger. Strange the detail Zeb noted at present, as the shooter pointed the weapon at him. But only for a moment. The half-dressed man turning much whiter than his dirty undershirt