The marquess's army did not look like an army when it entered Blackthorn. It looked, in the pale morning light, like a migration.
A hundred magisteel carriages. A dozen war golems folded down to their dormant configuration, carried on flatbeds like sleeping giants. Supply wagons, forge carts, a mobile infirmary that smelled aggressively of camphor and old blood. And the soldiers themselves — around three hundred in total, professional and unhurried, moving through Blackthorn's mud-slicked streets with the practiced ease of people who had done this in worse places.
Blackthorn's residents watched from the walkways overhead. Nobody ran. That alone was progress.
