This Empire that I have created resounds to my song, my name. The people are mine to use as I need. It is my will that drives them, my rule that cows them, my desires that shape them. I exist in the blood of them and they will give me blood in return. It is I who allows them to sleep and I who rouses them to war. I who strengthen the weak and discard the useless.

I will feed from them and my song will grow.

I am their strength and will, and they are the knife and club of my retribution and we will sweep through the Yaloh and Tokob and batter them into the ground. Their fields are mine, their homes are mine, their lives are mine.

Their blood is mine.

The Melody will bring these ejab to me and I will peel their flesh for the Setatmeh to feast on. I will cut their spines from their bodies. I will roast them over coals from the feet up and feed their meat to my council.

My song will drive them to ruin. Those who live will do so in the agony of their wrongdoing.

I am the song and it is bloody.

I am the song and it is war.

LILLA

Southern Yalotlan, near the border with Xentiban

196th day of the Great Star at morning

So thirsty, and throbbing pain in his head and jaw exacerbated by dehydration. All around him the groans and mutters and low, hopeless laments of Tokob and Yaloh.

As he had for the last however many days, Lilla woke and tried to remember what had happened. Just fragments, scattered, parts of it coming to him at odd moments or out of sequence, other parts of it lost, maybe forever.

There’d been darkness and then arrows, he knew that. Shouting orders, one of them for someone to stay low and hidden, but he didn’t know who. Couldn’t remember their face or name. Warriors in the dark, and a dart that went into his elbow, sharp and hot like fire, and then he was running and fighting, but his arm was going numb and his tongue was getting thick in his mouth. Warriors, more fighting, and he couldn’t find a clear space to stop and identify the poison or the medicine to counter it. His throat was a thin hollow reed that whistled and his tongue flopped over it, blocking it, and he couldn’t breathe and he was on his knees and there was a club, arcing into the sky above him and then falling, falling, falling.

And then nothing.

And then pain in a band around the back of his head, in his ears, and his jaw that clicked whenever he worked his mouth. Pain that made it hard to think, that made him slow to hear and to respond and to move, his limbs not under his control.