Toxte’s net settled over her Drowned, wrapping it more securely, and he began to haul it away from the riverbank. She stepped closer to it, and when he paused between pulls, she crushed its other knee with the club. It curled in on itself like a spider, mouth wide. Hurt. Trapped.

A weary, bone-deep satisfaction began to spread through her, a righteous, hard-edged, foul sort of vengeance, which lasted right up until the magic failed and Toxte tried to give himself to the Drowned.

It was only a few seconds before the dogs were driving him backwards and Xessa clubbed it in the head to silence it, but those seconds were an eternity that scrubbed her raw and salted her with fear. Because she hadn’t thought this far ahead, had she? So consumed with grief, and the coward part of her hoping she’d die too, just to stop it hurting, she hadn’t thought of the ejab who’d need to help her with this next part.

Xessa made the dogs guard Toxte, because now he’d found her – now he’d been so stupid as to approach the river at the end of the magic’s effectiveness – he wouldn’t leave her alone. When he was a hundred strides away, she grabbed the two nets and rolled the Drowned more securely in them, then hauled it into the cage. The rope to tie the lid shut fed through a clever combination of hollow sections of bamboo so the Drowned couldn’t reach it with its fingers or claws and unpick it.

And then it was done. Captured. And they had until the sun had moved a finger’s width closer to the horizon to get it somewhere with a water source, or it would die and everything – all of it – would be for naught.

LILLA

Pyramid clearing, southern Yalotlan

180th day of the Great Star at morning

He’d worried that things would be awkward with Dakto after the kiss, but the Xenti had accepted his rejection with only minimal hurt. If he volunteered for most of the advance scouting missions, or made himself scarce when Lilla stripped off to scrub sweat and dirt from his skin in the evening, then the Fang didn’t stop him. If anything, his absences were a relief and in the last days, as they moved deeper into Yalotlan, things were easy between them again.

Their three hundred warriors in ten Paws had so far evaded two patrols, been forced to annihilate a third, and destroyed one partially built pyramid. The force of slave and dog warriors they’d encountered had been almost fanatical in their commitment to the Empire of Songs, and Kux and Lilla had had to give the kill order, leaving none alive.