Perhaps Judge liked seeing the hope in the eyes of the accused, so she could see it crushed. Perhaps she truly believed she was doing the good work and rejoiced in those righteously acquitted as much as those rightfully convicted. Perhaps—surely the most terrible possibility of all—she was doing the good work, and somehow he could not see it.

The baker was trying to defend himself, but how to prove false what was self-evidently absurd? “I charged the lowest prices I could and still stay in business! But flour’s gone up so high—”

“And so we come to you!” roared Sworbreck at the miller. He was bony and severe, with a habit of peering up shiftily from under his brows that did him no favours.

“There was a poor harvest!” he barked out. “Now the cold weather’s frozen the canals, snarled up the roads. It’s hard to get goods into the city.”

“Ah, so the government is to blame?” Sworbreck spread his arms towards the benches behind the dock, where the Representatives gravely shook their heads at such a slander. “And since the government consists of those chosen by the people…” Sworbreck leaned back, raised his arms to the balconies. “The people are to blame?”

“It’s not a question of blame!” shouted the miller, hardly heard over the insults pouring from above. “It’s about facts!”

But it was not about facts at all and was very much a question of blame as far as the public galleries were concerned. Someone threw something. A coin? It missed the miller and hit the Styrian woman on the forehead. She gave a shriek, slumping in the dock.

“Who fucking threw that?” screamed Judge, veins bulging from her rashy neck. Captain Broad, who’d been lurking behind the High Table sipping from a hip flask, now burst forth, flinging a chair out of his way and sending it bouncing across the tiled floor, making everyone within twenty strides, including Orso, shrink back.

“Who fucking threw that?” he roared, the tendons starting from his great fists, made furious by Judge’s fury as surely as a dog by its master’s. In the guilty silence that followed, the banker’s efforts at a defence could finally be heard.

“I merely worked for the Banking House of Valint and Balk, I never profited personally from any—”

“Usurer!” someone screeched. No doubt there were profiteers and speculators everywhere. Before the Great Change they had simply called that business, and the worst offenders had been celebrated as society’s greatest successes.

The banker’s cracked lenses flashed as he glanced nervously upwards. “As you see…” He balanced a heavy ledger on the rail so the densely written numbers were angled towards Sworbreck. “The loans I handled were mostly to mining interests, mineral exploration, some foundries.”

Representatives craned forwards to squint at the figures. Judge wrinkled her nose. Evidence in general was of little interest to her, but paperwork she treated with particular disdain.

“This one typical, you see, six thousand marks—”

“The court has not the time to indulge in this trivia,” grumbled Sworbreck, waving it away.