"Remember. They ain’t expecting attacks, but the Clypeans are tough. Each of you’ll be told exactly what you have to do. Understood? Remember how you get in, and what you do, and how you get out. And-listen to me-don’t alter your plan no matter what you see. Understand me? You do what you’re told, let others do what they’re told."

Are we a cell? Ori thought. Are there others we don’t know of? Ori’s companions shifted.

Baron drew more and more lines on the plan, repeating instructions until they had become mantra. His cadences did not alter; he was like a wax recording.

There was a cache of new weapons. Repeaters, blunderbusses, firespitters. Ori watched his comrades cleaning and oiling them. He saw whose hands shook. He saw that his own did not.

Baron taught them how to take point, secure areas, with the instrumental efficiency of the militia. They walked through their parts as if blocking a play. Step up, swing, step, step, raise, secure, two three, say two officers, two three, step, turn, nod. Ori recited his strategy to himself. How are we going to do this?

"We got surprise," said Baron. "Get through that one moment, that chink. They got nothing to hold us back. Tell you something though, Ori." He leaned in without even gallows humour. "Won’t all of us get out. Some of us’ll die there." He did not look afraid. He did not care if he came out.

You can feel it, can’t you? Ori thought. His untethering. Ori was stretching out as if on a stem. It might snap. He still felt in that strange nightscape with Spiral Jacobs, his valedictory to the old man, when he had walked unmolested through a city turned into some psychotic, louche, broken thing. That was where he was.

There was no urgency in him. It was not a bleak feeling. Ori was only untethered. Things troubled him distantly. Uncertainties rose in him, distantly.

There were commotions. On the warming street, criers and journal-boys ran past, far from their usual grounds, called headlines. Convocation in Dog Fenn, they shouted. Demands to Parliament. Xenian Gangs, Seditionist Caucus. The Toroans sat in the house they had bought from the estate of those they had killed. They ignored the news-vendors, the anxiety on the streets. They began to spread mess, to live in a kind of aggressive squalor. They hung their cesti on their belts; they sharpened the horns.

Magisters, even the top-rank doges, were citizens, it was always stressed, citizens like anyone. They worked masked for justice’s sake, for the anonymity of justice. Any dwelling, in any part of town, could house a servant of law. The Flag Hill house next to the gang was elegant but nondescript.