The forearm-bolt soldier was at the left building window, crossbow stock tucked under his one good arm, the bolt nocked, waiting.

Beorn looked at him. Then he looked at Harr. Then he dropped his hand.

The center squad broke from the corner at a run.

The barricade crossbowman had been waiting for exactly that, and he came up from behind the crate with his weapon to his shoulder.

The forearm-bolt soldier fired from five feet before the draw was complete. The bolt took the crossbowman through the left bicep and snapped the bone. The arm dropped. The crossbow discharged as the arm went down, the bolt striking the cobblestones in front of the advancing militia and bouncing off sparks into the air.

Harr was first over the left crate. He came down inside the barricade and drove his sword through the crossbowman’s neck at close range, a push rather than a strike, the blade going in through the right side of the throat and the blood coming out of the wound in a pressurized stream that hit the crate face in a dark arc before the man’s hands reached for it.

The second militia soldier over the crate took the watcher by the collar and drove him into the crate stack, hard enough that the whole thing shifted and one of the lids bounced to the cobblestones. He pinned the man there brutally.

Beorn was already through the gap in the barricade, stepping over the crate base and into the interior street on the far side.

He looked at the three building, two on the left, one on the right. Doors closed.

From the left-near building he could hear organized movement, two or more people inside, not panicked. From the right building, nothing.

"The spear," he said to Harr.

Harr looked down. The spear man was still kneeling with his working hand at his shoulder wound, and the spear was on the cobblestones three feet from him.

Harr reached down, took the spear, and broke the shaft across his knee without looking at the man. The spear man watched this happen.

Beorn turned to the center squad. "Hold this street. Nothing moves without my word."

He pointed left at the far building. "You two, left-far building, alley access."

To the right squad, "Right building. If it’s locked you pull back and report. Don’t force it."

The right building door opened from the inside before the squad reached it. Two men in the doorway, hands visible, nothing in them. One had a knife at his belt and a militia soldier took it before the man had a chance to think about it.

Both were bound at the barricade crates.

The left-far building gave them a staircase.

Two soldiers went through the alley door, one flight up, a landing with one door.

The crossbowman inside had his window position facing the front side and was turned the wrong way when the door opened from behind. The first militia soldier drove his blade through the crossbowman’s forearm against the windowsill, the edge going through the tissue and pinning the arm to the wood frame.

The scream came down to the street and Beorn heard it.

The second man in the room had a short axe raised but the ceiling was low and there was nowhere to bring it down effectively. The second militia soldier’s pommel caught him across the jaw and he sat down against the back wall.

"Left-far is done," Godric said, relaying the call as it came down.

The left-near building’s door opened. Three men in a line, weapons forward. The first had a spear leveled at chest height, working it for distance. The second had a short sword. The third had a crossbow aimed over the second man’s shoulder and he fired as soon as the door cleared the line.

The bolt went through a militia soldier’s upper chest, left side, below the collarbone. It punched through into the top of the left lung. The soldier went down with his hands going to the entry point and his breathing already changing to rough. He was alive but he was out of this fight.

Beorn stepped left to clear his line on the spear man. The spear was the problem. At this range it would be through someone before the militia could close the distance and it had the reach to keep them from closing.

He brought up the pistol and fired.

The ball took the spear man through the lower abdomen, below the ribs on the right side, through the ascending colon and out through the back. The man folded over the wound, the spear dropping as his hands went to his stomach, and he went to his knees on the door threshold.

He did not fall. He knelt there with both hands pressed over what the ball had done and he made no sound.

Beorn stepped back and ran the reload sequence without looking at his hands.

He noted as he worked that after this charge was seated, he had one reload left. One shot after this one.

He finished the process and brought the pistol back up.

The sword man had been taken by two militia soldiers while Beorn’s attention was on the reload.

One had the sword wrist, the other had gone shoulder-first into the man’s chest. All three were against the building wall, the sword on the cobblestones beneath them.

The crossbow man, his bow empty, ran left toward the alley where the left squad held the mouth. He went in and did not come back out.

"Inside," Beorn said to four soldiers from the center squad. "Ground floor first."

He went in with them.

The first room off the entrance hall was cleared in ten seconds. Furniture moved, nothing behind it.

The second room had two people.

One stood against the far wall with both hands visible and his face telling the story of someone who had decided several minutes ago that this was how it was going to go.

The other came through the interior door at a run with a knife in one hand and a length of chain wrapped around the other.

The chain swung at the first militia soldier and caught him across the left forearm in a bruising impact that left the arm numb. The knife came in low. The soldier got his sword across his body and the knife skidded up the blade and took off the tips of the first and second fingers on his left hand at the second knuckle. Through bone. Clean.

The soldier behind him fired his pistol over the first soldier’s shoulder at four feet. The ball took the knife man through the left cheekbone, through the orbital, out through the back of the skull. He was down before his body understood it.

The man against the wall was bound without anyone speaking to him.

The staircase was narrow.

One flight to a landing. The left door was wedged from inside. The right was open, room empty. From behind the wedged door, a voice gave brief instructions in a low volume.

Beorn looked at the nearest soldier. "Exterior wall, second floor, left side. The window."

Two soldiers went back down and out into the street. A drain pipe, a window ledge. They went up the exterior face.

The sounds from behind the wedged door shifted. A shout, a collision, a second heavier impact. The wedge scraped the floor on the far side. The door opened.

Two men on the floor inside. One with a sword wound through the shoulder, the blade having gone in from behind through the left deltoid and come out the front. The other with his nose broken and his lip split from where the exterior soldiers had come through the window. Neither was Coss.

A writing desk. Papers, unorganized, pulled from the drawers and left in piles as though someone had gone through them quickly. A bag on the floor beside the desk, packed, the drawstring tied. Someone had planned to leave with it and had not.

Beorn looked at the room for two seconds. He picked up one of the papers from the pile on the desk, read what was on it, set it back down.

He went down the staircase, through the ground floor, and out onto the third street.

The militia held all three buildings. The alley mouths were theirs. The watcher from the barricade was bound against the crates with the right building’s two prisoners. The third street was in militia hands and Coss was not in any of these rooms.

At the far end of the deeper street behind the address cluster, at the narrow gap where it turned toward the high quarter’s interior, a door was closing.

Beorn watched the door until it stopped moving.

Godric was at his right.

"The observation post man," Beorn said. "Where did he go."

Godric looked at the third-floor window of the center building, which had been empty since before the barricade was taken.

"Deeper," he said.

Beorn looked at the street ahead.