Everything I do, everything I am, is for the Empire of Songs. I am a tool of the holy Setatmeh, honed and working to awaken the world spirit. It is my sole purpose.

A sob broke from her throat as Enet rose onto her knees, reached behind her back and withdrew a sheathed knife from the waistband of her kilt. A blade of pale quartz; a hilt carved from the leg bone of a jaguar. Sacred and magical and obscene.

As the song had begun to grow in hunger and the Singer in aggression, she’d taken to bringing it with her, praying it would never be needed but unwilling to risk his wrath if it was. And here, now, in the darkest and cruellest of circumstances, when the very Empire hung by the thread of Enet’s fraying power, it was needed.

Xac stiffened.

‘Upon your word, I have no status among your council or within the source. I do not raise my voice in protest but offer you the stone knife for your glory. Do not take Pikte from me.’ Enet splayed her left hand on the mat and drove the blade down before she could change her mind. The quartz edge bit into her little finger and she let out a hoarse scream, working it back and forth in the joint, severing muscle and tendon, popping apart the bones with a wet crack, pain like lightning arcing all the way up her arm to her shoulder, into her neck. Sweat ran down her cheek and she screamed again as she focused on the hand – not my hand, not mine – and kept cutting until her finger was severed at the middle knuckle.

She blinked against sweat and tears, snorting through her nose and packing the screams back inside with the pain, and then met Xac’s dumbfounded gaze. Pikte was shrieking and writhing in the Singer’s grip. Would it be enough? The song thrummed with darkness, a bloody need unsated by her pain. Enet looked at her hand and wondered if she had the strength to take another finger. The Singer has that strength and he can have them all if I can have my boy.

Shuddering, Enet stared at her blood so bright against the pale stone blade. Then she held it out to the holy lord. ‘Spare my son and I gift you my—’

‘Not one word or you join him,’ the Singer repeated, excited now. Calculating. His strange amber eyes, product of the magic, glowed almost like a jaguar’s in the dark.

And yet there was nothing but emptiness in his expression. Emptiness and a terrible hunger that Enet knew, like a twist of a knife in her heart, that she had put there. And it was her fault, just not in the way he thought. She had blooded the song. Now she could do nothing but drink deep of its crimson depths and pray not to drown.