“Sorry,” he muttered, trying to get his foot up on the box but it was trembling so bad he couldn’t manage it. “So sorry.”

“Here you go.” Sarlby gave him a shove and he tumbled straight over, then beckoned for the next one.

“I’m just a sculptor! I’m just a sculptor!” She was saying it over and over, in a Styrian accent, which wasn’t helping. No one liked a foreigner any more. “I’m just a sculptor!” Like a prayer. Higher and higher, faster and faster, more and more desperate. “I’m just a sculptor!” She’d pissed herself. A trail of spatters across the roof, hem of her dress dragging through it. “I’m just a sculptor!”

“You’re a sculptor found guilty o’ treason,” said Sarlby, and he pricked her up onto the box with the point of his knife.

“No! I am only here to help carve new statues! I’m just a—”

And over she went. It was the way he didn’t even let ’em finish a sentence. Like nothing they could say would matter. Like they were rubbish tossed in a ditch. And those behind just stared. Like it was nothing to do with them. Even as they were herded closer to the parapet. Even as Broad helped.

Brint was next. They never had found anything to put that other cuff around, on account of his one arm, so when one of the Burners caught hold of him he shook the man off, waved the others away, walked without a word towards the box. He took a breath, stepped up himself, and stepped off himself, and made no sound on the way down.

Broad blinked. Brint had been a good man. He was reasonably sure of that. He’d tried to do the right thing, when everything fell apart. But good or bad, right or wrong, the fall is still the fall.

Some went off flailing, like they were trying to find something to catch hold of. Some dropped, limp. Some made no sound. Some made strange ones as they were pushed. A shocked gasp. A surprised little hoot. A scared whimper. A lot of ’em screamed. Screamed all the way down. They were the worst. The scream, and the way the scream suddenly stopped. The sound at the bottom. A sharp smack. But with a kind of wetness to it. And then maybe a distant spatter. Like slops thrown from an upstairs window.

A crowd had gathered now. You could hear them whooping and cheering and gasping down there in the city, beyond the dry moat. You didn’t see a thing like this every day.

Broad looked at the smear of red paint across his breastplate. Had he been forced to do this? Had he chosen to do it? Had he wanted to do it? Was he one of them, like Judge said? Had he always been? He took off his lenses, rubbed his eyes.

“You all right, Bull?” asked Sarlby.

Broad swallowed as he hooked his lenses back on, nudged them into that groove where they belonged. Helped to have a routine. “Aye,” he lied. “Fine.”