* * *
The fields stood empty. No slaves worked their softly undulating waves of ripening grain.
The water in the irrigation canals was already low and getting lower, the water ways steadily dropping down to unprecedented levels. The silent compound stood with it's great gates closed tight shut and cross-barred through the heavy iron rungs. No confident soldiery patrolled it's upper walkways. They were all dead.
At the top of the front steps of the House proper, no great Master stood confidently facing the world on it's own terms as a favorite of the gods.
Master Rababull was dead.
Prut was dead. Geth the Fieldmaster was dead. All of their able-bodied male slaves were dead, their blood spilled in the fields surrounding the hotly contested sluice gates.
It was not a pretty sight, with the vultures already at work on what the corpse-strippers and ritual mutilators had left.
The compound was filled with quiet groups of motionless women, solemn-faced and terror-stricken. Their children clustered anxiously around them, some quiet, some crying, but none laughing. The few innocent toddlers who occasionally frolicked were quickly spanked into confounded wailing obedience, if not outright silence.
In the long and seemingly vacant cypress bungalow of the field slaves, one sang wordlessly, and almost inaudibly.
Close beside the cooking fire, Si'Wren, forbidden to form words, hummed and sang in sweet soft crooning sounds.