Sharpe's Gold by Bernard Cornwell

gambler's last throw, and he reasoned that she had been kept a

    prisoner and that made her important to the enemy, and so important to him.
    The rationalization lasted to the bottom of the stairs. The stairway was four-sided

    and he knew it had plunged below ground, into the cellars, and he was still hurtling down,

    almost out of control, with the candle flame blown out, when a white arm shot out and her

    voice hushed him. They were by a door, light leaking through its gaping planks, but there was

    no point in pretending that anyone on the far side had not heard their feet on the

    stairway, Sharpe pushed it open, ignoring her caution, and in the cellar a lantern hung

    from a hook, and beneath it, fear across his face, was a lancer holding a musket and

    bayonet. He lunged at Sharpe, thinking perhaps that he could kill with a blade point more

    easily than by pulling a trigger, but Sharpe had cut his teeth on just such fighting. He let

    the bayonet come, stepped aside, and used his enemy's own motion to run the sword blade

    into his stomach. Then Sharpe nearly gagged.
    The cellar was spattered with blood, with bodies that showed death in a dozen horrid

    ways. Wine-racks stood by the walls, looted empty, but the floor was black with Spanish

    blood, strewn with mutilations obscene as nightmare. Young, old, men and women, all

    killed horribly. It struck Sharpe that these people must have died the day before, as he

    watched from the hilltop, killed as the French pretended the village was empty. He had

    lain in the gully, the sun warm on his back, and in the cellar the Spanish had died, slowly

    and with exquisite pain. The bodies lay in the crumpled way of the dead, their number

    impossible to count, or to tell the ways in which they had died. Some were too young even to

    have known what had happened, killed no doubt before their mothers' eyes, and Sharpe felt an

    impotent rage as the girl stepped past him, searching the shambles, and from far away, as

    if across a whole town, Sharpe heard a volley of shots. They must get out! He grabbed the

    girl's arm.
    'Come on!'
    'No!'
    She was searching for one person, pulling at the bodies, oblivious of the horror. Why

    would there be a guard on dead men? Sharpe pushed past her, took the lantern, and then heard

    the moaning from the far, dark end of the old wine cellar. The girl heard, too.
    'Ramon!'
    Sharpe stepped on dead flesh, flinched from a spider's web, and then, dimly at first, he

    saw a man manacled to the far wall. He did not ask himself why a wine cellar should be

    equipped with manacles; there was no time. He took the lantern closer and saw that what he

    had thought were chains were blood trails. The man was not manacled but nailed to the stone

    wall, alive.
    'Ramon!' The girl was past Sharpe, pulling ineffectively at the nails, and Sharpe put

    down the lantern and hammered at the nail-heads with his sword's brass hilt. He knocked them

    left and right, hearing the thunder of hooves outside, shouts and a volley, and then the

    nail was loose, blood trickling afresh, and he pulled it out and started on the second hand.

    Another volley, more hooves, and he hammered desperately until the prisoner was free.

    He gave the girl his sword and heaved Ramon, if that were his name, on to his shoulder.
    'Go on!'
    The girl led him past the doorway they had come through, past the welter of blood and

    bodies, to the far corner of the cellar. A trapdoor was revealed by the lantern she was

    holding and she gestured at it. Sharpe dropped his moaning burden, reached up, heaved, and

    a sudden breeze of welcome night air dispelled the foul stench of the blood and dead. He

    pulled himself up, surprised to find that the trapdoor emerged outside the house walls, and

    then realized it was so supplies could reach the house without being trampled through the

    courtyard and kitchens. He looked round and there was the Company, marching steadily in

    three