The man began to look alarmed. He had clearly considered this a cast-iron defence. “But… these ledgers prove my innocence—”

“Bastard!” someone shouted. “Liar!”

“Enough numbers,” snarled Judge. “Get rid of the bloody books!”

The thin Burner, Sarlby, seized the ledger. He and the banker wrestled over it, paper ripping.

“But the numbers prove— Ah!”

Sarlby finally tore the book free and started to beat the banker over the head with it. His co-defendants stared in horror, but the public gallery was thoroughly entertained.

“Make him eat it!” Someone screeched with laughter. “Make him eat it!”

“Order in the fucking court!” roared Judge.

Sarlby flung the ledger away, pages flapping, and it spun across the tiled floor. The banker stood gasping, eye-lenses skewed, collar torn, blood running from a gash on his scalp. “The numbers…” he breathed, astonished, “prove…”

Orso put his hands over his face and watched from between his fingers. The poor man had it backwards. Whatever the question, the Great Change was the answer. That was a fact none dared challenge. So the scarcity, the failures, the defeats, must be caused by profiteering, betrayal and conspiracy. If you could only purge all the disloyal, all the unfaithful, all the foreign agents, then there would be victory. Then there would be plenty. That the prescription was killing the patient could only mean that not enough had been administered. It was not a rational argument. Facts were useless against it. It was an argument based on faith. It belonged in a temple, not a court. The irony, of course, was that the Burners had burned the temples. So they had turned the Lords’ Round into a temple and called it a court.

And none are more fanatical in their faith than the convert. Sworbreck strutted across the tiled floor until he stood before the weeping Styrian. “And you!” he screeched. “You were the mastermind!”

The woman stared, her lip wobbling, her bloody hand clapped to the coin wound. Rarely had Orso seen anyone look less like the mastermind of anything. The pink point of her tongue darted over her pale lips, breath coming fast. Blind panic, and who could blame her? Orso felt his shoulders sag. Everyone in the court knew what came next.

“I denounce them!” she wailed, desperately. “I didn’t know what they were doing! They’re guilty! They’re all guilty!”

“I knew it!” shouted Sworbreck, delighted.

“I never met her!” screeched the baker.

“Lies!” said the miller. “Lies.”

The banker pulled off his lenses with a trembling hand and put the other over his eyes.

“Guilty!” shouted Judge, banging dents in the High Table with the smith’s hammer she used as a gavel. “Guilty, guilty, fucking guilty!”

There was no need to pronounce a sentence. The only outcomes here were acquittal or the Tower of Chains. Hildi stared at Judge, and Broad, and Sarlby, and the red-smeared Burners jeering from the public gallery. “They’re monsters,” Orso heard her whisper.

“I almost wish they were,” he muttered. “That would be easier. But they’re just people.”