I find Zoric and Yumia in the mid-level training suite. It is an open space made from the same muted stone as the rest of Meridia. It almost swallows the sounds of Yumia’s movements completely as she runs through her blade rites on the rubberised mat in the centre of the room. Stretches, handsprings and balance poses. Zoric is sitting cross-legged on the floor at the edge of the chamber with his kit arrayed in front of him, etching prayer words into the solid shells he uses with a microtool, a lho-stick hanging from his lips. When I enter the room, he stops working and looks up at me. His left eye is circled with a darkening bruise, and his nose looks even more broken than it did before.

‘What happened to you?’ I ask him.

Zoric exhales a thin coil of smoke and nods towards Yumia. ‘Your Illithian doesn’t know what the word sparring means,’ he says.

Yumia drops out of the hand-balance she is holding with easy grace and wipes her chalk-dusted hands on her training clothes. ‘We do not spar on Illithia,’ she says, with a pointed smile. ‘We only fight. Perhaps if you were quick enough to avoid being hit, it would not matter. Perhaps you would have fewer scars.’

Zoric snorts a laugh. More smoke. ‘Perhaps,’ he says.

Yumia laughs with him. Perhaps under other circumstances I would too, but not today. My blood is still burning too badly from seeing Sofika.

‘Enough,’ I say, and they both stop.

‘What’s the word, lord?’ Zoric asks. ‘Did you find our mark?’

I nod, and tell them what DiCrimio told me about Sister Evangeline and her imminent arrival on Terra. They both become very still. As muted as Meridia.

‘How long do we have?’ Zoric asks, when I have said all I have to say.

‘Until the night cycle,’ I tell him. ‘The commandery won’t be here for long, and we must be ready to go into the darkness with them.’

‘Through the darkness,’ Yumia says, and she puts a hand to her side absent-mindedly. It’s the place she was cut badly on Hellebore. I remember the way the wide circle of blood grew wider on her dun-coloured tunic as she helped Zoric and I carry what was left of Sofika back to the Crypsis in the wake of my mistake.

‘We will find the Conduit on Dimmamar,’ I tell her. ‘Then the darkness will have to answer for everything it has done to us. Everything it has taken.’

‘Aye, lord,’ Zoric says.

He gathers up his ammunition kit and gets to his feet, before grinding out the stub of his lho-stick on the training suite’s floor. Yumia doesn’t move, though. She just stands there looking at me, the flat of her hand still pressed to her side. I don’t need my gifts to sense that she has something to say.

‘Speak,’ I tell her.