A hundred strides further and there were only empty plinths, one with broken legs still attached. A strange group were clustered around them. Withered-looking. Somewhere between dead and alive. A man sat on a block of stone, staring numbly as he pulled handfuls of hair out of his head. Another was coughing into a bloody rag. A woman and a man lay side by side, gawping at nothing, faces shrivelled to little more than skulls. Her breath came crackling short and fast. His did not come at all.

Another hundred strides and it was as if Logen walked through some ruined hell. There was no sign that statues, buildings, or anything else had ever stood there. In their place were only tangled hills of strange rubbish. Broken stone, splintered wood, twisted metal, paper, glass, all crushed together and bound up with tons of dust and mud. Things stuck from the wreckage, strangely intact—a door, a chair, a carpet, a painted plate, the smiling face of a statue.

Men and women struggled everywhere among this chaos, streaked with dirt, picking at the rubbish, throwing it down to the road, trying to clear paths through it. Rescuers, workmen, thieves, who knew? Logen passed by a crackling bonfire high as a man, felt the kiss of its heat on his cheek. A big soldier in armour stained with black soot stood beside it. 'You find anything in white metal?' he was roaring at the searchers, 'anything at all? It goes in the fire! Flesh in white metal? Burn it! Orders of the Closed Council!'

A few strides further on, someone was on top of one of the highest mounds, straining at a great length of wood. He turned round to get a better grip. None other than Jezal dan Luthar. His clothes were torn and grubby, his face was smudged with mud. He barely looked any more like a king than Logen did.

A thickset man stood staring up, one arm in a sling. 'Your Majesty, this is not safe!' he piped in an oddly girlish voice. 'We really should be—'

'No! This is where I'm needed!' Jezal bent back over the beam, straining at it, veins bulging from his neck. There was no way he was going to get it shifted on his own, but still he tried. Logen stood watching him. 'How long's he been like this?'

'All night, and all day,' said the thickset man, 'and no sign of stopping. Those few we've found alive, nearly all of them have this sickness.' He waved his good arm towards the pitiful group beside the statues. 'Their hair falls out. Their nails. Their teeth. They wither. Some have died already. Others are well on the way.' He slowly shook his head. 'What crime did we commit to deserve this punishment?'

'Punishment doesn't always come to the guilty.'