Draped across the low tables, piled in heaps among the pillows, scattered across the mats, tumbled in the shattered, torn gardens, and even floating in the offering pool, lay the dead. Courtesans, slaves, stewards, and Chorus. Even the councillors, piled and draped and tumbled like kindling, like wet washing. Like massacre. Everyone. Every. One.

In its midst the Singer, red from head to heels. He sat against a wall, arms limp at his sides, legs splayed before him. Expression empty. As she watched, he lifted a hand and licked blood from his fingertips.

He’d killed the pair of courtesans and craved more. He hadn’t waited for Enet’s return, it seemed. He must have sent runners for the council and then summoned his courtesans and then the stewards and administrators and slaves, and here in the source, where the song was at its most irresistible, he’d held them in its grip and slaughtered them all. Slaughtered them as they begged, slaughtered them as they fucked, as the song drove them and rode them and broke upon them. And then drowned in their blood.

But not Enet. He hadn’t sent for Enet.

The Great Octave’s legs gave way; she knelt with a thump and little grace. ‘Holy lord?’ she ventured. The Singer’s head moved with ponderous slowness at her words.

The slaves and guards she’d brought with her were on their faces in obeisance. She could hear a steady, low stream of curses from one, sobbing from another. Fear had them all in its scarlet claw.

The Singer held out a red hand and beckoned. Enet summoned every shred of nerve and rose to her feet; she crossed the space between them without flinching, blood oozing around her toes out of the saturated mats. She knelt before him, hands on her thighs, eyes downcast.

‘I needed more,’ he whispered, his tone slurred and yet almost childlike. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Of course, holy lord,’ she murmured. ‘You are the Singer; you are divine. Nothing you do is wrong.’

He gestured and she flinched, then followed his pointing finger to one of the courtesans, young and beautiful – before. He was naked and his ribs had been shattered and ripped from his chest, exposing the smashed remains of his heart and lungs. ‘Is that wrong?’

The finger moved to others, dead as they took their song-driven pleasure from each other. ‘Was that?’

Enet licked her lips. ‘It was not wrong, holy lord. But it was, perhaps, a little hasty. It may be you will feel better if you rest now, while I … tidy up. And … perhaps such levels of indulgence should not be repeated.’

‘But I needed it. I only had the two and you were gone. You left me.’ Bewilderment leached through the haze in his face. ‘Don’t ever leave me again. I command it.’

‘I will never do so, my love. Never again.’