Hui and Kyky set off after Qen, the three of them running together as they had done since they were boys. These were the ones Hui trusted more than any in the world, the only men he’d been prepared to tell about this great adventure. They’d barely spent a day apart all their lives. Once they’d raced through the streets of the Upper City with their whip-tops and bickered over skittles. Now they were would-be thieves and heroes. How right it felt that they were here together this night.

Ahead, Qen slowed his pace and came to a halt at the beginning of a track along a gully between two towering rocks. His brother looked up.

Hui followed Qen’s gaze. Silhouetted against that starry sky, shapes hovered, six of them, seemingly floating above the ground. They fluttered in the wind blasting across the high land.

At first Hui struggled to understand what he was seeing. Kyky, though, released another strangled moan. He glanced up at that sight as if praying he had been mistaken before wrenching his head away in horror.

Hui edged forward beside his brother. Bonded in silence, they stared.

Six bodies hung on a rope strung between the two rocks. The buzzards and kites had already feasted on the soft flesh of the faces. Picked clean, the cheekbones and jaws gleamed in the moonlight, and rows of yellowing teeth grimaced. But it was those hollow sockets, deep and black as the pits of Duat, looking down upon them, judging them unworthy, that filled them with dread.

Kyky slumped to his knees and wrung his hands.

‘The Shrikes have little regard for the souls of their victims,’ Qen muttered. He was staring into the shadowed sockets of the nearest vision of torment.

‘A warning,’ Hui replied.

And the message was clear. For strangers, only death lay ahead.

Golden sparks swirled towards the twinkling constellations in the sky. Though the night wind whipped up the campfire in one final roar, the flames were beginning to die down, the embers glowing red in waves of grey ash. In the wavering amber light, a jumble of tall, square tents billowed. Sobbing was heard from among them, no doubt from one of the girl captives, stifled as suddenly as it began.

Under the lamp of the full moon, the camp of the Shrikes was slumbering.

Hui’s eyes watered from a stray wisp of smoke. He could taste the sweet fragrance of the sheep dung and straw that provided the fire’s fuel. How long had he been lying on his belly on this slab of rock scrutinising the bandit camp, with Kyky and Qen barely daring to breath beside him? An age, it seemed. But the time had to be right, even though his ribs were sore, and his knees and elbows ached from sliding across the hard ground like vipers to avoid being picked out by the moonlight.