“The banker lent the money,” bellowed Sworbreck, “so the miller could adulterate his flour, so the baker could sell bread at inflated prices, causing hunger and discord in the service of a Styrian plot to manipulate the markets and undermine the Great Change!”

Shrieks of horror from the overflowing public galleries. Grumbles of upset from the Representatives’ benches. Orso wondered how the accused had been picked. What terrible roll of the dice had nudged them over the invisible line from being the people to being enemies of the people? Citizen Brock was carefully silent, Orso noted. He had developed a fine sense for when to speak and when not to. What to say and what not to. It was coming to something when one wished one could have the Young Lion’s good judgement, as well as his wife. Orso frowned. Had he really just thought that?

“I never met them!” the Styrian woman was wailing, wringing her hands. “I never even met them before now!”

Orso winced at her strong accent, which drew instant jeers from above. Any hint of difference aroused suspicion. Be watchful! screamed one slogan hacked into the wall in letters twice the height of a man. Freedom means Punishment, roared another in streaky red. Conspiracies are everywhere! Gurkish Eaters sent by the Prophet Khalul to debase the coinage. Imperial ruses to weaken the People’s Army and annex the Near Country. Styrian plots to spread the rot through infected whores. Even Angland, Starikland and Westport were filthy with regression, royalism and treachery against the Great Change.

Orso had intimate personal experience of government and felt petty selfishness, incompetence and bad luck were far more likely explanations for its shortcomings than intricate webs of malice spanning the Circle of the World. But then they were far less satisfying explanations, too. He rather wished the wilder theories were true. Had there been half as many secret monarchists as people claimed he would never have been deposed. Then he might have been sitting in that gilded chair presiding over his own, more polite brand of rank injustice. The crowned puppet for Bayaz to dangle before the nation with one hand while he picked its pocket with the other. The grinning figurehead of a ship crewed by ruthless torturers like Old Sticks, self-serving embezzlers like Lord Isher, brutal users like Lord Wetterlant.

Orso winced and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

Sworbreck was dealing with the baker first. He was a chubby man, which made him look guilty of eating well, and he was sweating profusely, which made him look guilty of being warm, both of them capital crimes in this lean winter of the Great Change.

“I been a baker twenty years,” he was saying. “My father was a baker.”

“Hoarders!” someone screamed.

“Take ’em to the Tower!”

“Take ’em all!”

The Styrian woman clutched her face with her hands as if she wanted to crush it between them. “Mercy!” she blubbed. “Mercy!”

The court was not without it. Judge was the voice of the mob. She was their bitter rage, their envy and their greed, but she was also their sentimental forgiveness. When the mood turned for some well-spoken old man, some innocent-looking young woman, first Judge’s chin would crinkle, then her lower lip would tremble, then her black eyes would well with tears. Sometimes she would vault from behind the High Table, kiss the accused, clasp their head to her rusted breastplate. Then they would be embraced by weeping guards, applauded on their way out of the hall while songs were sung and slogans chanted, free Citizens and Citizenesses, enemies no more!