Everywhere the walls were hacked and scored, carvings scarred where the sun of the monarchy had been torn down, chiselled out, scraped away. Slogans had been sloshed in their place in red paint. Rise up. Equality. Midderland for its People. And finally, across the tiled floor at the foot of a stairway crusted with gilded leaves, Fuck yourselves.

Jurand raised his brows. “I never yet saw the Burners’ philosophy so succinctly expressed.”

“That gets to the heart of it,” muttered Leo as he struggled up the steps. Flat, he could almost manage now without a cane. Stairs were still an embarrassment. He had to take them one at a time, slightly sideways. Cane first, then the false leg, then the good one. There was always a moment, when the weight went through his stump, through the socket, through his iron foot, when he’d feel like he was about to fall. Always a moment when he gritted his teeth against the pain and simply refused to go down.

He realised Glaward was lurking at his elbow, as if to catch him. “Don’t hover,” he grunted.

“He’d rather you didn’t brain yourself,” said Jurand, trotting past.

Leo paused at the top of the steps to catch his breath, let the pain in his throbbing stump subside, mop away sweat with the back of his good sleeve, wedge the other more firmly into his jacket. He became aware of a regular creaking of furniture through the closed door beside him. A noisy grunting, groaning, moaning. At least four different voices. One might’ve been crying.

“They’re either fucking or killing each other,” muttered Jurand.

“Or both,” said Leo, setting himself as proudly as he could for the last few steps to Judge’s door.

Her office was a huge domed chamber choked with rubbish. Empty bottles. Full bottles. Bent cutlery. Axes and flatbows. Stained and ripped-up bundles of documents. A half-picked chicken carcass. Antique vases used as ashtrays. An ornate bed the size of a small warship had half its silk curtains hanging in tatters, one of its pillows split and spilling feathers across the floor, dancing in a draft. Jurand was staring at something with a vaguely horrified expression. Leo followed his gaze. He hoped he was mistaken. He very much hoped. But it looked as though someone had done a shit on the floor.

Through an open door, Leo glimpsed limp, bare limbs. Burners sleeping off their revels, maybe, but he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find they were corpses. A woman bound up in bandoliers of little knives squatted against the wall, rolling dice. A pair of scarred men watched the snow fall outside one of the narrow windows. An ill-favoured bastard with a badly broken face sneered at them, arms folded.

Gunnar Broad stood in towering silence, sipping from a bottle as he watched Leo limp in. He’d changed as much as the palace, and in much the same direction. No trace of the careful guardian who’d watched over Leo and Savine that day in the slums. His eyes, tiny behind those thick lenses, had an awful blankness Leo didn’t want to meet. As if the only reason he hadn’t exploded into violence was that he couldn’t decide whose head to crush first.