"Not before he got one of us—probably you," said Anse tonelessly. "Anyway, he needed killing. He shot Alonzo."
He added, after a moment: "A man has to stand by his comrades."
Janazik nodded, very slowly. "Give me your sword," he said.
"Eh?" Anse looked at him. The blue eyes were unseeing, blind with pain, but he handed over the red weapon. Janazik slipped his own glaive into the human's fingers.
Then he laid a hand on Anse's shoulder and smiled at him, and then looked away.
We Khazaki don't know love. There is comradeship, deeper than any Earthling knows. When it happens between male and female, they are mates. When it is between male and male, they are blood-brothers. And a man must stand by his comrades.
Ellen came in, pulling her way along the walls by the handholds, and Anse looked at her without saying a word, just looking.
"What happened?" she said. "What is the—Oh!"
Carse's body floated in midair, turning over and over in air currents like a drowned man in the sea.
"Carse—Carse—"