“Most great victories aren’t worth the sweat of a single dead man,” Ser Hartmut said, “and this is like to be one of them. Do you mean that all your vaunted sorcery is useless against a stone-built inn?”

“You have no idea what you are talking about,” Thorn said. “Beware. When you speak of making war, I have learned that your wisdom is deeper and better than mine. Accept my word on this. I have no sorcery that will breach the Inn.”

“Summon your master,” Ser Hartmut spat. “If the student cannot pass the test, let’s have the master.”

“Beware what you wish for,” Thorn said. “My master is in the west. And all is not well. Storm the Inn with ladders—surely you care nothing for the losses.”

Ser Hartmut growled in his throat. “You confuse the killing of useless mouths who lower the condition of my men with the waste of precious soldiers, without whom there is no victory,” he said coldly.

Thorn nodded. “I suppose I do. They all look the same to me.” In the dirt, he scrawled, As we all appear the same to my master.

At first light the assault went over the ridge. The assault was entirely conducted by men—none of the monsters could be made to carry ladders or even understand them, except the stone trolls, and no ladder would hold one of them. Given time, Ser Hartmut imagined he might use slaves to build a ramp of earth…

Then he was pounding forward, his sabatons ringing on the hard ground of the old road and the Inn’s outer yard.

For this kind of thing, you had to lead from the front.

The brigans had been storming towns all their bloody-handed professional lives, and they were quick and efficient. The great ladders—six of them—went up almost silently in the first light of day, and not a single arrow came down to kill a man.

The garrison was asleep. Ser Hartmut had hoped for some such sorcery from his allies, and he led the way up the first ladder against the lowest wall, the gate wall at the front of the great Inn. Neither oil nor red-hot sand greeted him, and he ran up the ladder in his full harness, and his sword flamed in his hand.

At the top—the first man on the wall—he let loose his mighty roar of battle, a wordless cry, and the brigans and sailors and knights at his back echoed it with a cry so savage that the boglins in the valley below shuddered, and the irks looked away from the savagery of man.

But the defenders didn’t answer his war cry. They didn’t face him on the empty walls, and they were not huddled in the courtyard, and they were not waiting at the Inn’s great doors or in the common room or upstairs, or down.