When the heavy mahogany gates had been pushed open and Lilla followed the line of warriors in, he’d tried to summon the effort needed to look, to notice the placement of guards and memorise the route from the gate to the slave barracks. But when the shadow of those walls had fallen across him and the gates had rumbled shut, a piece of his spirit had died.

They hadn’t been taken to the slave barracks. They’d been led into a small plaza and to a pit dug into the ground. The ropes had been loosened – removed for the first time since their capture – and they’d been shoved down the steps and a bamboo gate dropped to lock them in. Hundreds in each pit, crammed together in humid, fetid gloom. And here they’d stayed.

For four weeks.

Tayan was going to come for him. Lilla knew it as surely as he knew how dawn looked on the first dry day after the Wet, when it bled across the grand plaza’s steps, gold and gleaming. Tayan was going to come, despite the danger, despite not treading the jaguar path, because he was a fool and he loved Lilla and one of the promises on their marriage cords was that they would always find the other and bring them home. A foolish promise when Lilla was a warrior, perhaps, but the promises cut both ways, so when Lilla had pledged always to find Tayan – because how could he not? – the shaman had pledged it straight back, full of love and without hesitation. How Lilla regretted that promise now.

He stood in the filth and the perpetual gloom of the pit, crushed shoulder to shoulder with nearly a hundred Yaloh and Tokob, and he knew despair. The song had a resonance down here somehow, a weight and potency, though Lilla hadn’t seen any pyramids built within the fortress as they’d shambled towards it.

On the other side of the pit a fight broke out, words becoming shoves becoming a scuffle and then fists were flying. Lilla and Kux and a few others broke it up, wrestling the fighters away from each other and through the press of captives, though in that moment he, too, craved the release of violence.

‘Don’t give them what they want,’ Lilla yelled instead of giving in. ‘They’re trying to break us down and break us apart. Don’t let them. We are Tokob and Yaloh. We are allies and we stand together against our enemies. Calm yourselves; don’t let their madness affect you. Remember your ancestors. Remember Malel.’

The man he’d been holding broke his grip and Lilla readied himself to fight, a small vicious part of him glorying in it, but the warrior just scrubbed his hand over his mouth and then spat, turned away and shoved deeper into the crowd until he was lost.