The Maggiore did not seem to be actually listening as he complained, "Don't they know that we have His Majesty with us?"

Sergente Rossini was shielding King Seleuceus with his body, holding down the King's head with his offhand while holding his pistol at the ready with the other. How had it come to this?

When the Imperials withdrew their hand, the King wanted to return to the heartland and conduct the war from there, take to the sea or to the sky. Anything but remaining stuck in Harsouk, but his advisors—who were likely dead now—thought it was a trap to lure him out, so he continued to scurry about in the shadows like a rat. As the Harsouki rebellion spread, he found himself with fewer and fewer places to hide until at last he came to his current position, cut off from his army with a rapidly dwindling bodyguard, surrounded by a hundred or so rebels showering their mud brick hideout with lead.

At least half of the Royal Guard with the King were dead or wounded at this point. The walls and the overturned furniture used for cover did little to stop bullets, even from those cheap gaspipe guns the Slanoans poured into the region.

Another man went down, Caporale Marzetti if the King recalled. Soon there would not be a single able-bodied man among them. The situation was so dire that no one even went to the Caporale's side in the off chance he could be saved.

A Guardsman looking for one such opening by peeking through the gaps in their barricade took a bullet to the head for his effort.

Looking at the body of the dead Guardsman, Tenente Mattei replied, "If you wanted to do that, sir, we should've done it from the start. There are too many of them now and once we run out of ammo, they'll be on us like ants on a honeycake." He ejected the magazine from his pistol to check his remaining ammo before reloading it. "It won't be much longer now."

The Maggiore cried out as a bullet went through his arm. As he moved to hold the wound despite still having his pistol in hand, another bullet caught him in the shoulder, then a third in the neck. The blood gurgled in his throat as he dropped his pistol and his quaking hand clumsily tried to hold back the inevitable.

When he collapsed, Tenente Mattei told Sergente Rossini, "Time for our last resort, Rossini. Your Majesty, forgive us. We have failed you."

King Seleuceus said nothing. He was not feeling so generous as to speak any words of encouragement, but he saw nothing to gain by berating them for their failure either. If he was being honest with himself, their share of blame for the current situation was not so great. If they were deserving of punishment, the fact that they were going to be killed to the last man—to say nothing of the indignities their corpses would be subjected to when the Harsouki savages got their hands on them—ought to be more than sufficient.

Sergente Rossini dragged the King along while low crawling to a space in the dirt floor that looked like a shallow grave. The King was placed in this hole and Sergente Rossini placed a pistol on the King's chest.

There may have been some fragment of what men call a conscience that felt a measure of guilt that valiant young men such as this had to die needlessly, but it was far too late for the King to regret all the lives scattered like dust in the wind. There was only one life he was truly concerned with and that one was probably not long for this world. If he were a religious man, he might fear some manner of cosmic justice, eternal torment and the like, but instead he quite firmly believed his suffering would be brief and there was nothing waiting for him beyond but oblivion. In which case, he knew exactly how he would spend one of his eight shots. There was no need to be hasty, though. Unlikely though it was, there was still a slim chance he might survive this.