Zoric sounds tired, as if this is a conversation they have had before. It’s a possibility. They spend a lot of time together, my bladeward and my marksman. Time they try to hide from me, without success. No matter the mess that mind-wiping makes of their memories or their personalities, they are always drawn back to one another. If I didn’t already know the truth of predestination, watching them re-establish the same strange combative affection for one another over and over again would be enough to convince me.

‘I remember some of it,’ Yumia says, and her eyes go back to me. She is even more tense than usual. As tightly wound as the killcords around her wrists. Her hand goes to her temple.

‘I remember the sight,’ she says. ‘The sound. But I do not remember the feeling of it. Was it cold? Was there wind? Rain? Was there earth between my toes, or stone beneath them?’

The answers swell in my head, though I say none of them.

No, it wasn’t cold, I think. It was warm as blood. Wind, yes. Rain, no. It was neither earth nor stone, but glass. Multi-coloured, fractured glass.

Yumia lets her hand fall away. ‘I remember seeing Sofika swallowed by the storm. By darkness.’

‘What you remember is true,’ I say, and it is, in abstract at least. It was the detail of it that I had Efrayl take from them. The sorcerer that I could not allow my retinue to remember any more than I could the gateway and the unliving storm of daemons he had summoned. I resist the urge to shake my head. I had been so wrong about Hellebore.

So wrong.

‘If what I remember is true, my lord, then what did Thul’s words mean?’ Yumia asks.

I blink, and push Hellebore back under the surface of my mind. I try not to think of what came after. Of Sofika’s agonised whisper as she spoke my name through the blood in her mouth.

‘Thul merely saw what happened to Sofika when he joined me in the dream,’ I tell them, because all of the best lies are sewn together from truths. ‘What he said were the spiteful words of a dying man, and that’s all.’

Yumia watches me for what feels like a long moment. I can see from her face that she doesn’t believe me. For a moment I think that she might even challenge me. I almost want her to. There’s certainly a part of me that deserves it. But then Zoric speaks.

‘Yumia,’ he says, patiently. Carefully. ‘You knew how this life would be when you swore the oath.’

She takes a moment to answer, and when she speaks it sounds a little sorrowful.

‘I did,’ she says, and then the sorrow disappears and her face sets again like a mask. ‘I meant it only as a question, of course.’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Will there be anything else?’

She shakes her head. ‘No, inquisitor. No more questions.’