Kael entered the central hall without weapons and without the expression that weapons' absence should have produced in a chieftain walking into the space where his warchief's body lay beneath the banner that his warchief's killer's subordinate had placed over it.
The expression that Kael wore was the expression that analysis produced when the analysis was the analysis that survival demanded and the survival's requirements were the requirements that the analysis had been processing since the moment Garrok's aura extinguished and the central hall's marble floor absorbed the final vibration of the warchief's fall. The expression was calm. The calm was not the calm of acceptance. The calm was the calm of calculation, the specific composure that a mind engaged in the arithmetic of four thousand four hundred lives produced when the arithmetic's variables were the variables that the central hall's current occupants controlled.
