As always, the holy lord sat behind a rippling curtain of pale pink cotton, the weave so fine that his bulk was visible through the translucent material, enhanced by the tall headdress of feathers and jade that crowned him. Here, in the innermost of his chambers, the music from which he made his song was constant – the liquid trilling of captive birds, the happy chatter of a small streamlet over carefully placed pebbles, the thumping of a dog’s tail on the rugs. In the distance, children shrieked with laughter as they played.

A woman sang in a sweet, high voice, a hymn of praise for the Empire that listed all 174 Singers from the founder, Tenaca, all the way to Xac. Pilos remembered the hours he’d spent as a boy learning those names, the slaps when he got the order wrong. He rubbed his neck and brought his mind into harmony.

‘High Feather, you are welcome back in the Singing City,’ the holy lord rumbled, the strange harmonics of his voice sending flutters of anxiety and reverence through Pilos’s gut. The councillors fell silent. ‘You have had some recent successes in the war against the Yaloh, and you have had some failures. The first I applaud, but not the second. You will explain.’

The council turned flat, blank gazes on him, calculating, weighing, assessing.

‘Great Singer, the Yaloh are a wily and courageous people and as you know they have convinced the Tokob to join them, swelling their numbers. They fought long and hard, and pushed us back several times, it is true. Their lack of civilisation means they have no great cities we can take and so win a decisive victory, and there are no limestone roads to speed our movement. They conducted small, fast raids on our camps or as we marched and then faded into the jungle again. We have not yet brought sufficient numbers of them to bay to force a decisive reckoning.’

He paused, but there was only attentive silence from behind the curtain.

‘So determined were they to withstand us that when they knew they had lost the southern half of Yalotlan, they burnt their stands of bamboo and water vine, to make it useless to us. Our shamans advised against fighting through the Wet, since the rains have come heavy and early. I brought back the bulk of the Melody to rest, though I have left a Talon of three thousand warriors in Yalotlan. They will protect the builders I have sent there, who will construct pyramids to carry your song through the land. We have taken three and a half thousand prisoners. It is perhaps a fifth of the Yaloh population, and consists mostly of warriors or other adults. So far.’

Pilos took a breath. ‘The war has had one other outcome. The holy Setatmeh of Yalotlan have begun taking offerings again in the old manner. Some of my warriors have been lost.’