“You don’t trust him?” muttered Gorst.

“I don’t trust anyone.”

It was easier to tell herself that, somehow, than to admit she didn’t want to put him in danger. She watched him trudge off hunched through the snow, until he was lost around the corner. Damn, he was like her brother.

She glanced at Gorst, a slit of faint light down his lined face, a slice of scraggy beard and a wisp of greasy hair over his forehead.

“So the two of us are the great hope?” She held her side as she lowered herself gingerly back into her chair. “Fates help the Union.”

A Spicy Denunciation

“The state of these,” murmured Orso as he was herded past the new statues on what used to be the Kingsway. The freezing weather, and now the soggy thaw, had not been kind to them. The nose of one of the giant nursing mothers had already dropped off, broken lumps of it scattered about her pedestal. There were some troubling cracks in her bust besides. Probably that would drop off next, braining some unfortunate passer-by. Crushed by giant tits. It was the way Tunny had always wanted to go.

“Risinau brought some sculptor over from Styria to remake them,” said Hildi, frowning up, “but she was tossed off the Tower of Chains along with him. So they got some masons to do it.”

“Oh. Yes.” He vaguely remembered that being discussed by the Representatives before court one day. Some young firebrand from the provinces frothing up a fury. “An actual sculptor would have been an aristocratic indulgence. There is no task beyond the skill of a proud working man of the Union!” He puffed out his cheeks. “By the Fates, they can’t even destroy things well.”

“You’re saying you miss the old ones?” asked Hildi.

Orso opened his mouth to answer, then paused. As with so many things these days, he had hopelessly mixed feelings. Lord Hoff had once referred to the statues on the Kingsway as the Union’s greatest treasure. A celebration of all that was most noble. A true wonder of the world, if patriotic swagger was your fetish.

Except they had also, of course, been a total pack of lies. A parade of self-serving arrogance in which Orso would one day have taken his place, where rapacious torturers were celebrated for their compassion, vengeful warmongers praised for their forbearance, heedless do-nothings eulogised for their painstaking care. As if to set the tone for this shameless distortion of history, Bayaz, the world’s most shameless thief, had been literally raised up on a pedestal at both ends for all that he had given the Union.

“Which do you prefer?” asked Orso, with a shrug. “Grand lies or ugly truths?”

“Reckon we might be better off with neither,” muttered Hildi.

Orso had even more mixed feelings about the changes to the Square of Marshals. He tried to keep his chin up and walk with that careless swagger that so annoyed his many guards, but could not seem to prevent his eyes from drifting down. Could not help reading the names carved into the flagstones where a parade in his honour once ended. Here and there, melted mounds of candle stubs, and decaying wreaths, and sodden letters of gratitude had built up, impromptu shrines around the names of the most admired martyrs. So many names. Thousands upon thousands, and each one a person dead so that he could sit on a golden chair and seem to be in power.