He’d been close, right there as soon as Lilla entered the clearing. Where had he come from? He hadn’t been one of the patrolling guards. Tokob and Yaloh were screaming and slaughtering people in or near the hammocks and the perimeter, people who put up little resistance, while flights of arrows and darts rained down from the pyramid itself and the shadowy figures perched there. Not carvings after all. And they had been watching him. They’d watched them all and allowed themselves to be surrounded.

Fuck.

‘Trap!’ he bellowed. ‘Look to the pyramid!’ As he spoke the enemy warriors, concealed on and around the structure – Shit, so those in the hammocks are slaves, we’re killing slaves – began shooting darts and arrows and throwing javelins of their own. The slick, co-ordinated attack by the Paws faltered and then a woman slammed into Lilla and they went down in a tangle of limbs and weapons, Lilla’s spear trapped between them and her knife arcing for his face. He seized her wrist in his left hand, but she had weight and momentum and the blade edged closer to his eye.

Lilla snarled, thrashing his legs and trying to throw her off, straining to get his other hand onto her wrist. She smacked it away and landed a clumsy punch into his throat that stole a little of his breath. He grabbed the back of her neck in his right hand to pull her sideways, but his grip slipped and the knife lurched closer. Lilla bellowed and slammed his hand into her face, pushing her head sideways and up until she couldn’t see him and her balance shifted. He bucked his hips and threw her off, rolled with her and tried to prise the knife from her grip, but she lunged up off the dirt and her teeth closed on his ear.

Lilla screamed and punched her, trying to keep the knife out of his ribs and her teeth out of his flesh. He worked his hand around her face, nearly losing his thumb to her teeth this time and then jamming it into her eye. She shrieked, twisting her head away as his thumbnail popped through the yolk of her eyeball, and he pulled the knife from her hand and stabbed it into the side of her neck two, three, four times until her hands fell and she shuddered beneath him.

Lilla spat out her blood and slid off her, then retrieved his spear and used it to regain his feet. He kept the knife and spun in a circle, looking for the next attack, the next enemy, the next kill. In the confusion and beneath the constant rain of arrows and darts, the fight had become a slaughter on both sides, slaves falling alongside warriors in an orgy of bloodletting.

‘Stop!’ Lilla shouted. ‘Stop. Spare the slaves!’