The flag of the Kalif was unfurled on the stage. The moat created by the orchestra pit became so cluttered with the most unmusical of things—dead, hacked-apart people and the remnants of the set, cleared with methodical precision—that it was no great leap for some of the soldiers to bridge it and start firing into the audience.

Now, in the most orchestrated event of the entire evening, House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe & Lewden gave their reply. It was animal, guttural, and in almost perfect unison. With a great shout of both outrage and fear, out came guns previously hidden. Out came the knives, the swords. While the neutrals—I saw Martin and Merrimount running for an exit—tried to extricate themselves from their now utterly indefensible position, Hoegbotton and Lewden, Hoegbotton and Frankwrithe, came together in a unity of purpose. You could see it in their eyes, that, for a time, all differences would be laid aside to defeat a common enemy. They poured up toward the stage, firing, stabbing, while the Kalif’s soldiers, under the calm command of their leader, laid down a murderous fire. Bodies fell in the aisles, cut to pieces. The smell of blood and gunpowder rose from the stage. Billowing smoke, caught and distorted in the green light. The utter panic and dissolution of those who had never thought their night might end like this, some in their distress running back and forth as if caged, unable to find their way out.

Those of us in the balcony seemed to have a better chance than most, unless the front entrance lay blocked. We began to make our way to the stairs and down. We were much calmer than those on the ground floor. Just as the stage had, during the performance, been remote from our rarefied location, so too the violence. We had the sense of it spreading slowly, the stain of the Kalif’s soldiers like some natural force, one that had its own rhythm of invasion, one that would allow us to casually take our leave.

Lacond had pulled his pistols from their ankle holsters. Sybel wielded a particularly deadly looking knife so long I wondered how he’d managed to conceal it. My brother had, in his protectiveness for Mary, let his fungal disease overtake him further, so that one eye lay clear and blue while the other had become overgrown with a green curling substance that magnified its intent and size. His right arm he had allowed to become a kind of fungus club, black and shiny. The look on his face told me he was ready to die for Mary, right there, right then. (And perhaps endure a minor maiming for you and Sybel.)

We took cover behind the battering ram of Lacond, who cleared a path for us by shoving people out of the way. My last glimpse of the stage showed that the Kalif’s soldiers had advanced farther into the audience, the Ambergrisian resistance becoming more of a rearguard attempt to let the majority escape, rather than anything resembling an offensive.