‘Oh yes, I knew. After the weather, the favourite topic of conversation in Veren was “things you should not do”. In my defence, at first I did just look, then I tried prodding the corpses with the toe of my boot, but that didn’t tell me enough. I needed to know what had happened, to understand what these things were. Maybe that’s why the Wild is so good at tricking people, we aren’t very good at following instructions.’ His expression didn’t change much but Sa-at felt he was hiding a smile. He is so strange. He sees the same things as me, hears the same things, but they are different to him.

‘Could I trouble you for some more water?’

Sa-at provided some and helped him to drink. ‘You said you touched the dead Flykin with your hands.’

‘Yes. The patches of skin were fused with the carapace, as much a part of them as their wings.

‘I knew little of hunts back then, but I knew that a handful of dead demons was the normal result. Half a dozen was considered unusual, more than that and it would be a story for the ages. Here there were countless bodies. Hundreds, thousands. It was conflict on a scale I’d never imagined.

‘There was a circular mound of dead Flykin where the fighting had been at its worst, as tall as you are. I had to climb the corpses to see what was inside it. The smell was …’ Rochant shook his head. ‘I can still taste it on my tongue.’

‘And,’ said Sa-at, unable to contain his excitement any longer, ‘what was inside?’

‘More Flykin. Three of them, maybe four. They’d been so badly savaged it was hard to tell. The sight of it, the stench … it was too much and I was just turning to go when I saw it.’

Sa-at was leaning forward now. ‘Saw what?’

‘The Flykin had been protecting their young. I hadn’t noticed because they were beneath the bigger ones, but there were tiny bodies too, mashed into the ground. One of the young was moving. It wasn’t making any noise, but I could hear it. Not in my ears like you’re hearing me now, but in my head. And not words either, just pain. I could hear its pain.’

‘Was it dying?’

‘Yes. The front of its head was missing. Its antennae were high enough to survive, but its eyes were gone and the meat of its brain was exposed. The rest wasn’t much better, its legs were broken and its carapace cracked all over, like an egg that had been rolled too hard on a stone.

‘But worst of all was its grief. The closer I got the more I could feel this … loneliness.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t have the words for it.’

‘What did you do with it?’