He had visited several times in the past, for unpleasant interviews with Arch Lector Glokta, but he had never before had cause to go below ground level. He worried that the interviews conducted down here were a great deal more unpleasant yet. It was dim and chill as an ice house. No romance to the place. A cheap, workmanlike feel, and it smelled of damp.

Halder knocked on a heavy door, bound with iron. Orso wondered how he would respond to torture. Badly, he suspected. Who responds well? And what possible preparation could a life of cosseted indulgence be, after all, for expertly and ruthlessly applied pain? He closed his eyes, trying to find that breezy courage that had somehow welled up in him at Stoffenbeck.

“Come in.”

The room was a sparse white box, plaster speckled with mould in one corner. There was something that looked like a badly scrubbed bloodstain on one badly whitewashed wall.

There was a battered table with two battered chairs. One was empty. In the other, regarding him coolly with those hard eyes that never gave anything away, was Inquisitor Teufel. Or Chief Inspector Teufel now, he supposed. Everything had a different title than before the Great Change. Well, not quite everything. He had the same title, but it meant the opposite.

Teufel looked up at Halder. “You can go.”

“Reckon I’d better stay.”

Her forehead showed a beautifully regular set of creases as she frowned. “What’s your name?”

Orso only wished he had been able to so easily unsettle the man. “Why d’you want to know that?”

“So I can tell Commissioner Pike who’s putting themselves in his way.”

Halder swallowed noisily, lump on his throat bobbing. “I’ll wait outside.” And he shut the door ever so politely behind him.

“Chief Inspector Teufel!” called Orso. “What a lovely surprise, and what a fetching uniform. This has been a delightful outing so far, I must say. Are we touring all the cellars of the Agriont? There must be miles of—”

“I found a letter, Your Majesty. In your bread.”

There was a brief and highly uncomfortable silence. Orso struggled to stay upbeat, in spite of the yawning pit of panic that had just opened beneath his chair. “You must be in desperate straits if you’re stealing my bread, Inspector, it’s positively horrible.”

“We’re all in desperate straits.” Teufel slid out a stained slip of paper, very like the ones Hildi had been bringing him since Tunny’s visit to his attic. “Royalist traitors are pressing the People’s Army hard, out there in the east of Midderland. And from what I read, it looks like you’re in contact with Lord Marshal Forest.”

So, there it was. He had been very much looking forward to seeing the murderous smile wiped from Judge’s face, preferably by a fall from the Tower of Chains, but he supposed the chances of discovery had always been high. “I’ve told him to desist but you know how hard it is to stop an admirer once they have the bit between their teeth.”