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Liu Haranu struggled to hang onto his lucidity. At this point the fever was endless, and he found himself flailing through consciousness like a man drowning in shallow water. Sweat-drenched, he tumbled to the floor, his body damply slapping against the boards. With his son gone to town, the manor was empty, and he would have to wait, huddled on the floor, maybe for hours, until his return.

The island of Haranu had been ruled by his family for generations. Bureaucrats, merchants, soothsayers, warlords had all stood before its cherry forests, their word the only law necessary to buoy their command. Now, the Haranu grasp on power was weaker than it had ever been. Servants and advisers had been abandoning Liu left and right since his illness had worsened, and his subjects were becoming restless. Where there had once been four heirs in his house, there was now only one, the weak-willed and anemic boy who bore his name. Would Liu be the man who killed the Haranu dynasty?

Osu Haranu, firstborn of the Haranu Khan, had wept bitterly and ceaselessly for forty days before she was pledged to wed the Khan of Hanto. And yet, on the morning of her wedding, her face was dry, her manner was austere, her eyes betrayed neither sadness nor rage. She said not a word to her family, nor her betrothed, and took not a single memento of her life on Haranu when she sailed away to her new home. Khan Liu never saw his daughter again, but did see a large trade vessel from Hanto, which moored in Har***'s harbour every month to deliver a vast shipment of gunpowder.

The Khan of Hanto was a notoriously cruel and paranoid man – the only way to establish this trade monopoly was to bring him into the family. Osu would eventually understand – these were the things a Khan had to do to ensure the safety of his people. She would probably be far happier on a wealthy industrialized island like Hanto than she'd ever be on Haranu. Besides, the Khan of Hanto was a reasonable man. The stories of him killing his own people, torturing innocents for sport * surely these were no more than rumour.

Akira Haranu, eldest son of the Haranu Khan, had never paid his father the respect due to a Khan. His adolescence had been characterized by challenge – challenge of Har***'s mandatory conscription, challenge of the overbearing taxes that kept the common people in poverty, challenge of the random interrogations by his father's guard force. Ak Haranu ultimately challenged his own birthright, and forfeited his successorship for a merchant's license from the Halls of Reckoning and passage to the west. Liu promised his son nothing but shame for living as a commoner, and made good on the promise by excommunicating his eldest son. Ak Haranu would never return while his father lived.

Jeh Ni Haranu, second daughter of the Haranu Khan, idolized her older brother. When Aki would storm from the estate to smoke long draughts of snakeweed from some den of ill repute, Jeh Ni would maintain his argument from wherever he'd left off, and Khan Liu would have the unenviable task of justifying the harshness of his methods. Explaining that other Khans would gladly see his whole family drowned just to expand their own meagre holdings. Or describing the sea orphans, those strange beggars of fin and tentacle, who might be kidnapped, beaten, or slaughtered without his watchful eye.

When Aki took to the sea, Jeh Ni soon followed, but unlike her wayward brother, she eventually returned home, a full-fledged privateer in the service of the Council of Khans with a crew at her disposal. Liu had moved to embrace his daughter, but her response was cold. Her allegiances lay elsewhere, and she could never move through Haranu as more than a visitor.

Liu Haranu, youngest child of the Haranu Khan, was the only survivor of his birth. Khan Liu, watching the light fade from his wife's eyes, knew no other woman could ever share his duty or his bed, and resolved himself to this truth even before the midwife admitted the failings of her ministrations. As the aging Khan held his infant son, the bawling face gleaming with a light film of gore, he recognized in the tiny visage his last chance at legacy. This child would bear his name. If no one else, this child would keep the Har**** alive.

Now this child scrambled to put his father upright. The Khan surveyed his heir's straining limbs, his shortened breath, his mawkish assurances. He was weak. Far too weak to do what must be done. Too weak to mete out justice to those who had dishonoured their law. Too weak to repel the seasingers who threatened to unleash great serpents on their isle at the behest of any Khan that might promise them fortune. Too weak to quash the occultists that loosed hordes of demons merely to flex their power. Too weak to protect the sea orphans with no other recourse from slavers, purists, and bigots. But there was no other choice.

Another youth entered the room, Shiro, the younger Liu's personal valet and lifelong friend. The two young men finally righted the Khan, and, in his unsettlingly high pitched voice, Shiro inquired to the Khan's health. An inquiry that could be neither heard nor answered.