Xessa lit every candle she had and then made him strip and washed the sweat from him and lent him a shirt and kilt, though he couldn’t get his shoulders into the former and sat with a blanket around him instead. She pegged the door curtain shut against the wind, fussed with food he didn’t want and beer he did, and then finally sat opposite him. Ossa put his head on her thigh; Ekka was squeezed onto Toxte’s lap, head and legs spilling across his knees.

She snapped her fingers and Toxte looked up, eyes dark with a haunting that had nothing to do with the spirits. She had so many questions, but she asked the most unexpected one she could think of to take his mind off what he’d seen – and done. She tapped her ear. ‘What did it sound like? The song. Show it to me.’

Toxte paused, swirling beer in his cup, and reluctant wonder slid across his features. He put down the cup and rubbed both hands over his face. ‘It was … You know how sometimes you can sit on the steps to the council house and watch the sun set, unobscured by the city? Just you and the sky and how any clouds there are turn gold and the rest of the sky is pink and red and orange? You know how sometimes it’s so, it’s just all so big and you’re so small and yet it feels as if it’s there just for you? And it’s all you can see, it sweeps you up in it until you become the sunset? Until you’re gold and pink and orange and as vast as the sky herself?’

He put a gentle hand on her chest, between her breasts. ‘You know how it makes your heart hurt that it’s so beautiful?’

Xessa nodded convulsively, bitter, wondering tears stinging her eyes.

‘That’s what it sounded like. It sounded like the sunset looks. It sounded like all the world is there just to make you gasp with wonder, to open your heart so wide that it can absorb all that beauty and hold it and be it and never lose it, no matter what. That’s what the songs of the Drowned sound like.’

He had tears in his eyes too, but then the wonder in him vanished and the moisture was burnt away in dark fire. ‘And that’s why they need to die. Every last one of them. Forget studying them; just kill them.’ He seized her hands. ‘We just have to kill them, Xessa. All of them.’

ILANDEH

The Neck, Xentiban, Empire of Songs

184th day of the Great Star at morning

Ilandeh was exhausted, but everything lifted – her mood, her fatigue, the constant anxiety of discovery and failure – when she crossed the border into Xentiban and heard the song once more.