My armourer turns and looks up at me, her dark eyes wide in the lambent light cast by my sword’s power field. Wyllo’s pale face is streaked with blood. Darker than darkness.

None of it hers.

‘M-my lady,’ she says, prostrating herself before me, hands flat on the frozen deck.

‘You needn’t bow,’ I say softly.

Wyllo sits back on her bended knees and looks up at me. ‘The Geller field. It–’

‘Flickered,’ I say. ‘I know. Did you see it? The abyss that waits beyond?’

Wyllo nods. A muscular tic pulls her lips back from her teeth. ‘It saw me,’ she says. ‘Saw all of us.’

Wyllo looks to her left, where Dallia lies, broken.

‘She wouldn’t stop screaming,’ she says absently. ‘On and on. I had to make her stop.’

My heart more than sinks then. It collapses slowly, like fuel at the heart of a fire.

‘You killed her,’ I say.

‘I can still hear it,’ Wyllo says. ‘I shouldn’t be able to hear it.’

She looks up at me again, tears spilling from her edgeless eyes. She gets to her feet, unsteadily.

‘M-make it stop,’ she says. ‘Please.’

That tic is worse now, baring her teeth for her. Her hands are curling into tight, shaking fists.

‘Inventi sumus in fide,’ she stammers, looking at my blade. ‘In faith, we are found.’

‘Yes, we are.’

And then I take hold of her and plunge my sword into her chest. A heart-strike. A clean kill.

A mercy.

Wyllo coughs blood. Struggles for air. Then the life goes out of her eyes. I pull the blade free and lower her to the deck gently, so that she is lying beside Dallia. I hear footsteps at my back. Slow, and uneven. Ashava kneels beside me, though it must hurt her to do it. She does not speak, and nor do I, but something breaks the silence in our stead. The solemn, distant tolling of the Vow’s bells.

‘Eight bells,’ Ashava says, when it stops.

I look down at the sword in my hand. At the blackening of the powered blade.

‘I would have called it later,’ I say softly.

Ravara

RAVARA

I wake, for the first time in a long time, without a dream clinging to me. I am lying flat on my back, as I was when the darkness took me, but there are no false stars overhead now. The light that shines in my eyes in their place is bright and stark and flickering. It makes my eyes stream and I have to blink to clear them. The walls around me are clad with whitewashed flakboard panels that are blood-spattered and scuffed, marked with the distinctive scorching patterns left behind by las-fire.

The hospitaller’s ward, then. I take a deep breath and smell incense and counterseptic. Blood and metal. And second-hand lho-smoke.