She crossed the room and held up a clenched fist. ‘There is no peace we can weave that will preserve Yaloh and Tokob autonomy – only violence can do that. So that’s what we give, side by side, offering violence for freedom. As your council promised us.’

Tayan didn’t answer her. Instead he stared out at the Spear’s estate, filled with people and gardens and small plots of crops. It seemed so normal, if you discounted that every person was a slave and the estate had been built with, and was maintained by, their blood. Not even the most fevered journeying had ever shown him something like this, so subtly, nauseatingly wrong.

The Pechaqueh sat in these grand stone houses and ate food they hadn’t planted, tended, harvested or killed. They wore clothes they hadn’t made themselves or traded their own skill for, ate from plates they hadn’t created, took medicine they didn’t know how to gather and prepare. They did nothing but accumulate wealth and enemies and buy people to tend to them, as though they were helpless newborns.

Their actions tilted the world beneath their feet, destroyed the harmony of nature, the delicate pause between plenty and poverty, life and death. The ancestors cried out at the indignity, at the brands of ownership, the bowed heads, the fearful silence. Surely the lords of the Underworld stirred, restless and secretly pleased with the turmoil – as if the Pechaqueh were calling to them through their monstrous intermediaries, the Drowned.

The Empire was sick, Tayan realised, feasting on its own flesh and bones for sustenance, unable to see the poison for what it was. There were rivers out there, rivers curling through the city. Infested with Drowned so bloated and gorged on human flesh that they did not sing, did not need to. Slaves were thrown into those rivers every new moon.

And we are going to see it.

Hundreds of sacrifices to placate the so-called gods – though really just to feed their bellies. In an Empire that prided itself on its song-magic, the Pechaqueh lived in terror of theirs. The irony was so thick Tayan could taste it.

Under the song. The blessing and valediction, words that were both a promise and a threat. And the song itself, a low, voiceless melody filled with emotion and power and yearning and comfort, pulling at his spirit, bleeding into his ears, his mind, never to be expelled. He’d miss it when they returned to Tokoban, just as Enet had promised. It’s poison. But so sweet, so gloriously sweet that my skin drinks it like nectar.