Judge sprawled beside him on a monstrous couch in front of a monstrous fire. She wore a tattered robe of bright Suljuk silk that showed a slice of pale, knobbly breastbone and an angry dotting of rash all the way up her neck. Her hair hung in a tangled orange curtain over one eye, the other narrowed, red-rimmed, fixed on Leo.

“If it ain’t Citizen Brock himself.” That black eye darted to Jurand and Glaward. “And the survivors o’ the Young Lion’s Angland boys’ club. Welcome to my parlour.”

An ancient mural covered the walls, or its battered remains, at least. Above Judge’s head, an old man lay bleeding in a forest, five figures walking away from him on one side, six on the other. Leo hadn’t taken much notice of his tutors, so he’d only the vaguest idea what it represented. The death of Juvens, bleeding his last while his apprentices, the magi, marched off to avenge him. He supposed the balding one at the front was Bayaz, but someone had scraped his face off and daubed a red cock in its place.

Probably it had been quite the masterpiece a few months ago, but the Burners had set to work on it like everything else, hacked and hammered at it, daubed bold slogans and crabby treatises and crude horns and tails and childish obscenities over it, adding to Juvens’ wounds until he was bleeding a great dripping flood around the fireplace.

Judge grinned. “Fire, death and vengeance. And my favourite wizard.” She waved at the wall behind Leo and he twisted to frown over his shoulder. Looming above the door he’d come in by, grim, forbidding and untouched by red paint, was Juvens’ brother, and his murderer, the Master Maker Kanedias, spreading his arms wide with a sea of flames behind him. “Now there’s a bastard who knew how to set fires.”

Leo forced a smile over his disgust and limped into the room, feeling like a cockerel strutting into a fox’s den. “Citizeness Judge! I believe you sent for me.”

“You believe correctly. Why don’t you all sit down?” Judge waved to battered chairs. “Just shove that shit on the floor.”

“I’d rather stand.”

She looked down at his leg and wrinkled her nose in a disbelieving little grin. “That’s a funny thing for a one-legged man to rather do. Come on. Take the weight off your foot. Have some fucking tea.” She nudged a teapot across the table through a rattling mass of junk, knocking a stack of books flapping to the floor. “Not a fan of Southern habits myself but a little tea can poke the right hole.”

Glaward righted a toppled nursing chair and perched nervously on its edge. One of the men at the window bared his teeth and gave a strange hiss. Leo winced as he tried to sit with a measure of dignity. Judge had fished a husk-pipe from the rubbish, was sucking on it hard enough to make her cheeks go hollow.