The inside street was narrower than the third street had been, the buildings on both sides closing to where four people could not walk abreast without their shoulders touching.

Beorn moved through it at the front of what remained of the center squad, twelve men, fewer than what had started at the gate.

Three of their men were at the outer wall ahead. They stood in a loose line in front of a iron gate, armed but with the posture of a defense that knows it will fail and is deciding how long to let that take.

Beorn looked at Harr.

"Left side with your pistols," he said. "They have no barricade." 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

Harr moved left with five soldiers. The volley came from the wall when they had the clear shot.

Five shots in the narrow street, the sound compressing against the stone and bouncing back. Two men went down immediately. One took a shot through the upper chest and went back against the gate and slid down it, and the other took it through the left hip, his leg giving, and he sat down with his hand at the wound.

The third held and drew a sword.

A militia soldier closed on the man with the sword. The exchange lasted four seconds. The soldier took a shallow cut across the left wrist and drove his sword through the man’s throat from below, upward through the soft tissue under the jaw and out through the roof of the mouth. The man went down.

"Through the gate," Beorn said.

The gate wasn’t locked. It opened inward and Beorn went through it himself.

He stopped inside and observed the building.

Heavy stone construction, a foundation that sat higher than the surrounding buildings as though the ground had been raised before the building was placed on it. Iron guttering along the roofline still clean relative to the neighbors’ decay. The front door was wood-and-iron, solid. Two shuttered windows at ground level flanked it.

Along the left wall of the building, at the corner, a service door was visible, slightly mismatched from the surrounding stone in the way service construction never quite matches the main build.

He pointed at it.

"Left wall, service door. You two. The rest follow."

He followed them through.

The service door opened into a working corridor to the kitchen and storage.

Two men had positioned themselves inside rather than at the gate, choosing the interior to defend. The first militia soldier through the door took a crossbow bolt against his flintlock pistol. The bolt hit the weapon and damaged it. His hands went numb from the impact but he kept moving, driving forward with the pistol as melee, and he hit the crossbowman in the face and they went into the far wall together.

The second man brought a knife at the second militia soldier. The soldier caught the knife wrist and turned it outward and his own sword came across and through the man’s side between the fourth and fifth ribs on the left. The man’s exhale in pain and he went down.

Beorn stepped over him. The other man was eventually knocked out by the soldier.

"Keep moving."

The ground floor had three rooms beyond the corridor. The main hall had two men with swords at the far end.

The center squad fired as they came through. The pistols in the enclosed space of the hall, the sound filling the room completely. One man died where he stood. The other took a shot through the thigh and sat against the far wall, still alive, left for the rear force to handle.

The working corridor between the hall and the staircase had one man who saw the militia coming and chose the staircase rather than standing. He was visible on the upper floor, already running.

The study off the main corridor was empty. A fireplace had fresh ash, still warm at the rim when Beorn pressed his fingers to the stone beside it. Papers in the hearth, burned but not fully consumed, the char still holding what had been written on them.

He looked at the hearth for two seconds and turned.

"Staircase," he said to Harr.

Harr led the first two soldiers up. The staircase was narrow, one person at a time, and there were two men at the top. The retreating man from the study and a second who had been watching the militia through the fight and had come here ahead of the push through the block. Both had weapons up.

The one with a crossbow fired when the first militia soldier came into the range. The bolt went through the soldier’s right shoulder at the front of the joint and the arm went numb from the impact. The sword fell. The soldier grabbed the rail with his working hand and stayed on the staircase, not going back down.

Beorn said, "Over him."

The second militia soldier went past the first man on the outside of the rail, one foot on the rail itself, and fired his pistol up through the opening at fifteen feet. The shot took the crossbowman through the chest. He went backward onto the landing.

The second man at the top came down the staircase with a short axe raised. The shoulder-wounded soldier below him drove his working shoulder into the man’s legs from underneath. The balance broke. The axe missed. The second militia soldier on the landing drove his sword through the falling man’s midsection from the side.

The landing was clear. Harr looked back at Beorn from the top.

Beorn came up.

The library was at the end of the upper hall. He pushed the door open and looked inside. Empty. The desk chair stood away from the desk, the position a chair occupies when the person in it stood up quickly. One drawer open. The lamp in the corner still had heat from oil recently burned.

He looked at the room’s dimensions rather than its contents. This wing of the building was a specific width from the outer wall to the interior corridor. He stood in the room and measured it against what he had seen from the street.

The right wall held full-height shelving, well-fitted, running the width of the room. He pressed his thumb into the edge of the near section and felt the weight and resistance.

He removed the books from the lower three shelves of the rightmost section and stacked them on the desk. Where the shelving met the frame, there was a gap of two or three millimeters that was not the gap of wall construction properly seated.

He pressed at the shelving’s lower right edge. The section swung inward on a pivot set into the floor. Cold air came through, stone steps going down.

He took the lamp from the desk and went through.

The passage opened into a low-ceilinged room beneath the library. A table, one lamp already burning on it. Two chairs. A sealed correspondence case on the table and papers beside it. The lamp had not been lit long.

Harvin Coss was seated at the near chair, both hands in front of him on the table, the rings catching the lamp light. He looked at Beorn when he came through the passage. His expression did not change.

One figure in a heavy coat stood against the far wall. The coat covered everything, hood drawn, hands inside the fabric. Beorn could not see the face or build or age. Only the shape of someone standing in stiffness.

Aestrith came through the passage behind him. She saw the figure and stopped. A somber expression flashed through her face.

Coss looked at Beorn. He let the silence hold for a beat, then spoke.

"How unfortunate," he said. "This is how we meet."