The eight spread fast.
Paul moved left, away from the desk, putting distance between himself and the window. Two came at him immediately, the third hanging back watching, and Paul recognized the formation, pressure from two directions while the third reads the response and adjusts.
He had seen this in the vision.
He let the first one commit.
The blade came in fast and low and Paul stepped into it instead of away, the way Jessica had drilled into him years ago, inside the arc where the shield was weakest, and drove his crysknife up into the gap beneath the arm. The Sardaukar went down hard.
The second adjusted immediately, no pause, already angling for Paul's blind side.
But Paul wasn't there.
He had moved before the adjustment finished, reading something he couldn't have explained, a half-second of knowing that came from somewhere he still didn't fully trust. The blade passed close enough that he felt the air of it.
Duncan appeared from nowhere and finished that one.
Paul hadn't asked for the help. Duncan hadn't waited to be asked.
They moved apart again without speaking.
Three more came at Paul simultaneously and this was where the vision hadn't been fully clear, the angles overlapping in a way that made sequencing difficult. He caught one block wrong and took a hit across the shoulder, not the blade but the hilt, hard enough to send him into the desk.
The desk edge caught him in the ribs.
He pushed off it immediately.
Duncan shouted something from across the room, a single sharp word, a direction, and Paul understood it without processing it consciously, dropping low as a blade passed over him, then coming back up inside the guard of the nearest attacker.
Two more down.
Duncan was handling four on his side of the room with the specific controlled fury that was uniquely Duncan, not flashy, not dramatic, just efficient in a way that made it look like he had done this particular thing a thousand times before. He probably had.
Paul circled back toward the one in the back.
That one had not moved.
He had watched the entire fight from the same position, letting the others work, reading Paul the way Paul had been reading everyone else. His eyes tracked movement rather than action. He wasn't watching where Paul was. He was watching where Paul was going.
Paul stopped moving the way he had been moving.
He went still.
Just for a moment. Long enough to change the read.
Then he came forward fast and direct, no angles, no technique, just forward, and the Sardaukar reacted to that instead, stepped to meet it, blade coming up.
Paul took the hit on his forearm instead of his torso, felt the shield give slightly, and drove his crysknife into the man's midsection.
Not deep but precise.
The blade found the shield generator at the belt rather than flesh and the shield collapsed with a sound like something exhaling.
The Sardaukar froze, suddenly exposed, suddenly aware.
Paul met his eyes and held them.
The man did not move again.
...
The office was wrecked and quiet.
Paul and Duncan stood in the middle of it breathing hard. Duncan had a cut along his jaw that was bleeding steadily. Paul's shoulder ached and his forearm was going to bruise badly. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Duncan looked at the bodies.
Then at Paul.
Then at the one still breathing in the corner.
"Get Thufir," Paul said.
...
Thufir arrived and took in the room in approximately one second.
"The surviving one," Paul said. "Keep him comfortable. Unharmed. Treated well."
Thufir nodded once.
"And then send him back to Kaitain."
"Should I draft the letter?" Thufir asked.
"No," Paul said.
He sat down at the desk, which was now missing one leg and leaning slightly, and pulled a sheet of paper toward him.
He wrote for several minutes.
His expression did not change while he wrote. No anger in it. No satisfaction. Just the face of someone doing something that needed to be done and doing it carefully.
He folded the letter.
He reached for the seal.
Duncan watched from across the room.
"What does it say?" he asked.
Paul pressed the ring into the wax.
He handed the sealed letter to Thufir without answering