the Great Change, not even half-built beside the Four Corners, where the heroes of the Breakers and Burners were being laid to rest. “Let’s move!” she called, trudging on through the slush and the crowds and the frosty cold, past a great heap of burning books, pages occasionally floating on fire into the night, and down the echoing entrance tunnel of the Agriont.

On the street that was once the Kingsway the statues had been replaced. Or, at least, their faces, their hands, their clothes had. Clumsy alterations had turned them from centuries of kings and their advisors into miners, builders, farmers, nursing mothers. Heroes of the common folk. Risinau’s plans, cheaply realised, awkwardly posed, something pained and accusatory in their clumsily carved expressions.

“Bloody hell it’s cold.” Tallow hugged himself, blathering steam into the early darkness. “My sister’s got ice on the inside of her window. She spends half her time queueing. For coal, for bread, for meat. When she gets to the end, often as not they’ve run out. There was some lunatic on the corner screeching long live the king all night, preaching that Harod would rise from his grave and bring order, and Bayaz himself was flying to the city on a great eagle to appoint a new Closed Council.”

“Wish there was a great eagle coming,” muttered Vick. “We could eat it.”

They tramped past the Court of the People, light burning from its windows. They were trying groups of a dozen now, till dusk and beyond, those with evidence against them and those with none mixed together as if their cases were all connected, so the guilt of one would splatter the rest and they all could be dragged down, like swimmers chained together. The only folk who got acquitted these days were those who denounced freely. Those who denounced anyone and everyone. Denounced their lovers, their parents, their children.

The House of Purity was overflowing with bankers and clerks. Traitors against the Great Change, suspected of aristocratic plots, foreign conspiracies, royalist schemes, arrested by the Burners and awaiting trial, had to be squeezed in elsewhere. They’d made the Fortress of the Knights Herald into a prison, then the walled treasury buildings. Families traipsed the courtyards, begging to know where their loved ones were being held, gathered in the snow outside the windows with children on their shoulders for a glimpse of daddy.

“I hear they’re setting up new courts,” said Tallow.

“I guess Judge can’t pronounce the death sentences fast enough on her own.”

“Aiming at one in each district of Adua.”

“In each district?”

“And each town in Midderland. Three in Keln. Two in Valbeck. They say they’ll have to set up more when Forest and his royalists are finally brought to justice. They’re appointing new magistrates to hear all the cases. I hear they’re paid by the conviction.”

“Fuck,” whispered Vick.

“New places of execution, too.”

“I guess they’ll need them.”

“They tried to use the bell tower on the old Spicers’ guildhall, but, well, it wasn’t high enough.”