Maralah moved first. Hers was the only order of movement Roh was certain of afterward. She and Kadaan leapt up as if attached to a string, like they knew one another’s movements three heartbeats before they began. She fell back out of her seat, tucked into a backward roll, and Kadaan leapt over her, hurling a twisted skein of blue mist at the nearest attacker. Only then did the other sanisi move, a fraction of a second later than Maralah, a full second after Kadaan, but enough time for the strange men to note their detection and leap for the Patron at the center of the high table.

Everything changed in the space of a breath.

Someone clipped Roh’s ear; he felt the kiss of a glowing blade. Then he was on the floor, gasping. Abas lay against the wall, the skin over his skull split, oozing blood. His eyelids flickered.

Roh looked over at Abas’s broken chair. One of the women lay heaped next to Abas. A dark pool was forming beneath her. Roh’s head spun. A slow spread of blood moved over the stones toward him. He was shivering. Someone was next to him, making rasping sounds, the way Lilia did when she had trouble breathing, only these sounds were wetter, choking, as if he did not drown on air but blood.

Roh tried to see who was making that sound. The Patron’s chair was overturned, empty. Crumpled beneath the table was the inert form of his son, the sanisi. Chaigaan lay four feet from Roh, cheek pressed to the stones, staring at Roh with wide, glassy eyes. It was dark beneath the table, but Roh saw a wet, glistening mound heaped against the sanisi’s belly – the spill of his insides, leaking onto the floor. Roh’s hands were sticky with blood; the blood of the Patron’s son, flowing along the runnels in the stone, mingling with the blood of Abas, and the dead woman, bleeding past Roh.

He heard muted cries, the scuffle of boots, leather, and above that, the hissing of infused weapons. He looked under the table, toward the main room, and saw wispy tails of Para’s breath streaking through the air. He tried to find Kihin and Dasai, Nioni, Chali, and Aramey, but he saw only a mass of fighting figures, a stir of fleeing slaves.

Roh crawled toward Abas and cradled Abas’s head in his lap.

Abas murmured something but did not move. Cold sweat stung Roh’s eyes. He heard the rasping breath of the Patron’s dying son.