Spearmen crowded the door in front of Mohammed and he fell back, staying out of reach of the metal tongues. He tried rushing the man on the right side, but the others covered too quickly. Mohammed snarled at the men. "Uri, finish him and get back to the next room!"

Behind the Quryash merchant, Uri and the Hashim were struggling on the floor, each trying to gain position. Sweat spattered off the Hashim into Uri's eyes. The Hashim's knife hand ground lower, the blade reaching for Uri's face. The ben-Sarid wrenched to the side, escaping the bite of the knife, which scraped on the floor next to his head. Mohammed backpedaled past the two men, jumping over their legs, and- in passing- slashed down with his saber. The curved tip cut into the side of the man's head and blood fountained. The Hashim screamed and tried to roll away. Uri cracked the man's knife hand against the floor, sending the knife skittering away, and drove his own blade sideways into the man's chest.

The Hashim at the door howled in rage and pushed through, filling the room. Uri scrambled past Mohammed, who threw the next door closed. The Hashim were at it in grains, axe blows raining against the decorative ash panel. It began splintering immediately. Mohammed looked around for something with which to reinforce the door.

His daughter's handmaidens had a beautiful sleeping and sewing room, but it was woefully lacking in large heavy objects to block doors with. Uri looked back at him and shrugged his shoulders.

"Back to the next room," Mohammed wheezed. The battle was wearing on him; he was not so young anymore. "Has Sayyqi cut a hole to the roof yet?"

Jalal jogged up the street, twenty or thirty Tanukh and Quryash at his back. Around him Makkah was burning as the pent-up hatreds of thirty years of quiet conflict erupted into open battle. Great mansions on the hill above and below him burned, their windows gaping wide with rushing flame. Clouds mounted to the dark heavens above, lit from below with ruddy light. As the Tanukh had ascended the hill, they passed scattered fighting and many bodies left to lie in the streets. Now they neared the residence of the Lady Roxane, and Jalal slowed. He turned a corner and stopped, raising a hand in warning. Behind him the other Tanukh came to a halt. Some of their number passed the word, even to the clansmen who had joined them in their exodus from the Quryash quarter in the city below.

The banner had done its work, as had their war cry. The clan, apprised of the danger to their favorite son, had risen fiercely against the Hashim, and now the green turbans hunted the black through dark streets and abandoned buildings. Steady streams of people were fleeing the city through the gates left open by the departure of their Hashim guardians. Jalal peered around the corner, his face wrapped in a long green cloth. Distant fires gleamed in his eyes. A street with three great houses on it lay before him. In front of one, where a gate had been broken down, a crowd of Hashim was loitering about, talking. Torches illuminated the scene, showing indistinct lumps in the street.

Jalal signaled behind him for Shadin. The other man hurried up, a great long sword in his hands.

"There are Hashim at the gate," Jalal whispered into Shadin's ear. " Send the archers forward. Everyone else in two columns- we will go far left and far right, running to the attack. The archers will fire down the center. We must take the gate quickly."

Shadin nodded sharply and moved back down the line of men, whispering commands. At the corner, Jalal drew out his bow and strung it, keeping one eye on the Hashim. Very faintly he could hear the sounds of men shouting in the house. Perhaps there was still some resistance. No matter, he thought, if there is no one left alive, then the captain's funeral pyre will be lit by a mound of foreskins. Jalal grinned unpleasantly at the thought. Shadin returned to his side with a group of men close behind him.

More shouting came from within the great house, and the men at the gate turned to look inside. Jalal chopped his hand down and jerked it forward. The bowmen fanned out past him into the street. Shadin was hard on their heels, and the Tanukh split into two horns, rushing silently forward. Jalal drew his bow in a smooth, violent movement and sent the first arrow hissing away.

The night suddenly filled with the flashing passage of arrows, and the first man at the gate was gasping in pain, clutching at the sharp sensation in his back, then his neck, before anyone had even turned at the sound of the running feeet. The Tanukh flooded past Jalal as he fired and fired again. Half the men at the gate were thrashing on the ground before Shadin leapt through the gateway, his huge long sword whirling around his head. Screams pierced the air from within, and the clash of steel on steel followed.

Jalal swung his bow over his shoulder and drew his saber. "On!" he growled at the other bowmen. "This will be sword work now."

Mohammed spun sideways, his saber catching the downstroke of a Hashim blade. The shock rang up his arm like a hammer on an anvil. He ignored it. The blood fire was burning in his veins, and the whole world had shrunk down to a gray tunnel filled with the angry faces of his cousins. Blows rang against his guard, and he pushed his muscles to greater and greater speed. A tickling began at the back of his mind, creeping along his spine as three and then four of the Hashim came against him. Their swords flickered and rang harshly, and he parried, spun, and struck again and again. He drove pommel to pommel with one, then threw the man backward with a powerful surge. The other three piled in, raining cuts and thrusts, but his hand was a blur and his old sword slipped two strokes and then blocked the other with the flat. His riposte tore one man's arm open from wrist to elbow, and the Hashim fell away, gasping with pain.

Very faintly, through the enormous sound of blood hammering in his ears, he could hear someone shouting at him from behind. But the Hashim came on again, more men pushing through the doorway to get at him. The floor was slick with blood, and the delicate cushions and silk draperies of his daughter's bedroom were torn and scattered. He had picked up a dagger for his left hand somewhere and when the Hashim came at him again, he blocked one blade into the floor with it, then circle-parried to the right, tangling a man's weapon. The man fell back, freeing his weapon, but Mohammed jumped into the break in the line, taking two blades on his own, and slashed the dagger across the throat of the first Hashim warrior. Blood blinded the other man, and Mohammed gutted him without thinking.

The gray tunnel filled the world, and Mohammed spun and parried and danced at the center of a whirl of steel and blood. More Hashim came at him, screaming curses and oaths, and he chopped them down, or shattered kneecaps with his iron-shod boots, or left their faces a bleeding ruin.

The shouting came again, and this time it registered. His daughter was screaming at him from the hole in the roof, begging him to follow them out. He beat aside the weakening attack of a Hashim spearman, chopped the spear haft in twain, and sank his saber into the man's armpit. Wrenching it out, he leapt backward and swung up onto the great pile of furniture that led to the rudely hewn exit in the roof. Above him he could see Roxane's face and her arm reaching down at him.

A chair toppled away under him, and he grasped at the edge of the opening. Roxane grabbed onto his shoulder, her long nails digging into the torn shirt. Her face contorted as she strained to pull him up. Mohammed's feet scrambled for purchase, and he caught the edge of the other chair, boosting himself up. Roxane managed to catch his belt and heaved, pulling him halfway into the opening. For a moment he was blinded, his head caught in her gown.