Ser John was an old, hard soldier, and he had Count Zac separate them from his own people by a wide margin. He sent them food and blankets and hot coals to make fires.
When morning came, he ignored their pleas and made them cut trees, and dig. He pushed his scouts as far north as they dared go, so far that they were in constant contact with the boglins and worse creatures suddenly loose across the hills.
He sent a steady stream of mounted messengers back to Albinkirk.
Morning wore on, and still the Moreans came in-more than two thousand already.
“Time to go,” Sauce said.
Ser John shook his head. His mind was made up, now. He knew what he was about. “Not as long as we can cover these poor bastards, Sauce. Two days or three, and we’ll have saved enough to make an army.” He pointed at a file of Morean women who’d stolen horses in the rout and ridden for two days. “That woman says they were saved by what they called ‘the rearguard.’ So out there somewhere is a formed body, still fighting.”
“An army of wretched men who ran away?” she asked with contempt. “And a handful dying…”
“Sooner or later, everyone runs, even you.” Ser John made a face. “They lost everything. That makes them very dangerous. And every day that the sorcerer doesn’t come down this road is a day we get more of them. And then…” He paused. “There’s your Ser Milus. Where is he?”
Sauce chewed on the end of her hair. “That’s a very good question,” she said. “Two hundred lances, and they wasn’t in the rout. Where are they?”
The second full day at the Hole, and the insects were the worst they’d ever been-clouds of mosquitoes and some black flies rising like an evil miasma off the swamp water. From the north, no news. More refugees, and a steady trickle of desperate routiers, looking for salvation beyond hope and finding it in Sauce’s hard-eyed pickets.
At noon, a single rider came in from the west, moving at a dead gallop with three riderless horses behind him.
“Galahad D’Acon, as I live and breathe,” Ser John said, offering the boy a glass of the diminishing store of red wine.
The young man took the wine, drank it straight off, and sat rather suddenly. “The Queen is one day short of Albinkirk. She’ll reach it tonight,” he said. “She’s raised the Royal Standard at Sixth Bridge, and the Red Knight’s got five hundred lances. He says, he asks all your intelligence and all your guidance.”
Sauce leaned in. “He didn’t say, get your arse back to Albinkirk?”
Galahad managed not to smile. “He said that as a veteran captain, Ser John doubtless had his reasons, and would he be so kind as to communicate them. The Queen adds she has made you Count John of Albinkirk.” D’Acon reached into his belt pouch and took forth a chain, which he deftly put over the older man’s head.
Ser John was struck dumb. A life of the comparative indifference of princes had not prepared him for any kind of promotion.
“Go to bed, son,” Ser Ricar said to the young man, “and we’ll send a rider-”
“Saving your pardon, my lord, but I’m magicked, or hermeticized, with some working that makes me-unseelie the enemy. And I’m under orders to take your best reports and return.” D’Acon shrugged. “Certes I was little troubled on my way here.”
Ser John snapped his fingers. “If there’s an army behind us,” he said.
Even Sauce looked different. She grinned. “Now we’ve got something.”
Strong in the knowledge that the company was behind him, Count John of Albinkirk threw his best knights forward in the early afternoon, and by the fortune of war they rescued the imperial rearguard-two hundred Hurans under a war chief and an imperial officer, and another hundred mixed imperial cavalrymen. It was a small victory, but they stung the pursuers, charging into an open rabble of boglins and enemy Outwallers on both sides of the road and sending them, in turn, running. But the woods behind them were alive with monsters, and Count John had no reserves to spare.
Fifteen minutes’ fighting sufficed to break the rearguard, exhausted but suddenly full of the energy of hope, free from the enemy. It also sufficed to teach Count John that he lacked the power to fight in the woods without either a mage or a lot of archery.
He had his knights and squires each take up one of the imperial Hurans on his saddle, and they trotted back to safety.
“Anyone behind you?” Count John asked Ser Giorgos.
“Not still alive,” the imperial officer said.
The Outwallers were useless for building anything. They expressed disinterest and wandered away. None of them-except Orley’s warband-could be made to build ladders except by force, and even then, the ladders they built were useless.
“Animals,” Ser Hartmut spat.
But the sailors had a more proper view of work, and they produced a dozen heavy siege ladders in short order-wood being in abundant supply. The wreck of the Morean camp was stripped for lumber, and trees were felled-not without some anger on the part of the creatures of the Wild. It was a long day, and an exhausting one.
The men on the walls of the Inn mocked them. They were loud and Ser Hartmut was curiously tender to it.
As the light began to dim and it became clear that early morning would mark the first assault, he went to find the sorcerer.
“We could save a good deal of time if you’d drop a rock on the castle,” he said.
Thorn stirred his great limbs. “It would,” he admitted. “But it is protected beyond my ability to affect it. It would take less time to send for your siege train from Ticondaga.”
Ser Hartmut’s temper exploded.
“That will take weeks,” he said. “Weeks we do not have.”
“We have won a great victory,” Thorn intoned.
“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.