"Up," Rama said, already pulling Sekar toward the narrow stairway they had first descended. "We hold the choke point, not the open floor. Whoever's coming, I want them funneled through one gap at a time."
Pramono barked the order before Rama had even finished saying it, his soldiers falling back into the workshop chamber and forming a line across the stairway's mouth with spears leveled. Ki Branggah dragged the wounded man behind the shelter of a heavy crate with more strength than his soft merchant's hands looked capable of. The frost from the warden's death was already receding, the rime on the walls sweating back into ordinary damp, but the cold it left behind lingered in Rama's chest regardless, a memory of the thing his fractal mark had recognized as kin.
