Dakto, who still found time to talk to Lilla each day as the long lines of bound prisoners weaved through the naked, open farmland. The others must have been enslaved for years, because they weren’t roped. Lilla watched them walk ahead on the road with a mix of horror and incomprehension, wondering why they didn’t run from the tiny number of people leading them. But he knew why. He’d known why ever since he first heard the song.

The music was in his heart now, a worm twisting inside him, threaded through every limb and muscle and nerve. He knew the Pechaqueh were no better than him, but there was a small part that was grateful to them for bringing him under the song so that he might know its majesty. The song he’d sworn to die before hearing.

He worried that small part would grow like a cancer and eat away at who he was, so he sang songs under his breath as they walked, focusing on the old tales set to music he’d learnt as a boy. Yet always, within only a few lines of verse, he’d fall into the same rhythm as the song. It was as if it moulded his chants and hymns to itself so that even they became a part of it. So that his worship of Malel and the ancestors became worship of the song – and by extension, he realised with a sickening lurch, of the Singer, the Empire, and the so-called holy Setatmeh. He stopped singing after that.

‘Those dog warriors feared you,’ Lilla commented.

‘As they should,’ Dakto said, proud and haughty. ‘I could kill any of them in combat without breaking a sweat.’

‘What would happen if they disobeyed you?’

‘They would die. Disobedience of superiors is not tolerated.’

‘What if their disobedience saved your life? In battle, for instance? What if you told them to move away and then your life was in danger and someone came back and saved you? Would you still kill them?’

‘Glory is won in the Melody in three ways: by capturing slaves, by acts of bravery, by saving lives. If a dog disobeyed me but saved my life, they would be rewarded. You will learn all this soon enough.’