A quick patter of raindrops from above told her Beyt was in position, hidden by the canopy. The woman could put six arrows in six targets in six heartbeats. She’d take out most of the guards before Ilandeh’s team even reached the perimeter, clear their path to make a quick ending to the Tokob and Yaloh shits who thought to seize Empire land.

She scanned the camp again and the trees around her; the enemy she could see, but not her Whispers. Ilandeh wiped the mud off her hands and the spear shaft so it didn’t slip in her grip. The obsidian tip gleamed green-black in the early light. She touched belly and throat and then gave a single long whistle. Beyt’s arrows, and those of other Whispers in the canopy, flew before the note ended and Ilandeh followed them in as shouts and screams erupted in the camp, warriors leaping to their feet and snatching up weapons, staring blindly into the gloom and clearly outlined by their fires.

A dozen were down with arrows by the time she cleared the tree and lunged into the clearing to take a man in the belly just below his armour. The spear tip rammed in, scraping off his pelvic bone before sinking deep and he whooped in a breath, choked, his own weapons falling as he clutched, one hand on her spear, the other on her upper arm, as if unsure whether to pull it out or push himself further onto the blade. Ilandeh solved his dilemma, ripping the spear free and jabbing it in again, lower this time, down into the groin.

The Tokob legs gave out and the Whisper stepped back, spinning the spear and clubbing him in the head, sending him into the dirt. She skipped over his body to the next, a woman, blood already sheeting down her arm from an arrow wound and a shaft falling from her hand as she tore it out. Black paint from the bridge of her nose up to her hairline made her eyes disappear, only the gleam of firelight revealing where she was looking. Yaloh. Ilandeh saw the woman’s feint too late; a club slammed into her sternum and sent her over backwards, lungs paralysed, mouth gasping, but no air left in the world for her to breathe.

Pain exploding through her chest, knives of agony shooting front to back and her spear lost by her side somewhere and the Yalotl approaching, mouth yelling something Ilandeh couldn’t hear through the roaring hurt. The club went up, slivers of obsidian set into its length gleaming golden in the firelight – the last sight she would ever see.

Under the song. May Setatmeh and Singer bless me and keep me. May the ancestors …