They reach the square just as the bells stop. She hears their echo, a pressure in her eardrums, as she surveys the astonishing scene. It seems the guilds have been emptied, their dancers disgorged into the square, where it all began with that one woman wheeling alone. Hundreds of women dance in the shadow of the cathedral, the exhaustion lifting from them like smoke. In the aftermath of the bells, there is an unnatural silence, only scuffling feet, occasional moans from the afflicted. She sees men with hooks marking out a boundary between dancers and observers, imagines them herding the entranced women like sheep into the square. She searches their faces, but Plater is not there.

Into the anticipatory hush, the cathedral doors open. Inside blazes with the fire of a hundred candles, and into their extraordinary light step five men, dressed richly as burghers. Lisbet recognises one face, for his portrait was toured around all the churches of Strasbourg after the last Bundsuch, so all could see the man who ordered the rebels to hang: Sebastian Brant, the city’s syndic and convener of the Twenty-One. Plater’s ultimate master. Severe in black velvet, red slashes of silk at his wrists, he raises his pale hand into the quiet.

‘People of Strasbourg, you have not known peace for weeks.’

The word ‘peace’ strikes Lisbet like a blow. She thinks of Nethe, who never knew peace unless she was with Ida, of her own serenity at the dance tree. Brant is wrong. Many of them have not known peace all their lives.

‘We have consulted priests, and physics, doctors and empirics. Our own Emperor has heard our entreaties. Every moment, we have worked to restore order. We banished the musicians—’

With no mention they brought them. Lisbet forces aside the welling image of Eren.

‘We have punished the forgerers. The hures and thieves are pushed from the city—’

Into desperation in the forests. Now Lisbet’s anger rises anew.

‘We have reclaimed the guilds. And now it is time to reclaim our city entirely. This shall be the end to it: all who dance are to be taken to the shrine. The plague ends today, on the Feast of St Magdalene. Now we purge ourselves of this chaos. We have the eyes of God upon us, and we shall show Him Strasbourg is His city, the dearest of them all, the most blessed.’

Lisbet could laugh, but it is swallowed by a roar from the crowd. It is not a sound of simple jubilation, but entangled in fear and relief and horror and awe. For now Brant steps aside, and the effigy is carried out of the cathedral, and into the daylight.

Lisbet smells it before she sees it, cutting even through the reek of sweat and sour breath and human excrement. Beeswax, pure as the highest note in a choir. Standing twice as high as a man, higher than the stages, and reeking-sweet, is the effigy of St Vitus.

The saint’s wax double stands in a cauldron, painted with tar to give it the effect of black and tarnished metal. His torso is bare, showing lurid nipples and carved ribs, and though his face might once have been finely carved it is already dripping, melting in the gathering heat, as though the cauldron burns hot and is rending the flesh from his bones. She almost expects to see the clean white of his skeleton emerge.