“Oh, it’ll be a real firecracker,” said Hildi. “I’ll make ’em shit in the galleries.”

“Maybe stop short of that. The place smells bad enough as it is.”

“Let’s go,” grunted Halder, nudging Orso up the steps to the Court of the People. There had been a time when access to the royal person was governed by a book of rules four fingers thick. Now any fool could poke him with impunity.

Judge was getting comfortable in the high chair as Orso was manhandled into the sovereign’s cage, but there was a gap on the front benches where Citizen Brock and his Anglanders would usually have been preening themselves. Orso rather hoped they might have been spicily denounced and dragged off to the House of Purity themselves, but that was probably too much luck to hope for. Luck had really not been falling his way the past couple of decades.

“Silence in the court!” And the murmur of voices dropped away as Sworbreck strode forwards. He had acquired a blood-red suit of clothes now, having been appointed Chief Prosecutor for the Great Change. Since the proceedings were less about law than consolatory fantasy and cheap melodrama, no doubt the writer was uniquely qualified.

“After weeks of painstaking investigation,” he shrieked, meaning a night spent hauling the latest crop of unfortunates from their beds at random, “the loyal servants of the Great Change,” meaning the drunken, drugged and murder-addicted Burners, “have ripped a most sinister conspiracy up by the roots and into the light of justice!”

Always new conspiracies. Always the most sinister. Ever more elaborate, fiendish, impossible to disprove. Intrigues that somehow involved Styrians, Gurkish and Northmen all at once. Schemes that required the enemies of the Great Change to be inscrutable puppet masters and utter idiots simultaneously. Orso wondered what would happen when they had killed everyone. Would Judge try herself last of all in the empty Court of the People, sentence herself to death and fling herself from the Tower of Chains? He gave an entirely inappropriate splutter of laughter at the thought. The shame was he would not live to see it, having been pulped in the dry moat years before. Unless his friend at the House of Purity came through sooner rather than later…

His eyes flickered to the latest wretched group being herded to the dock by Captain Broad, and he sat bolt upright.

Most prisoners strove to appear humble. It was hard not to after a few days with meagre food and no bath, in some chilly corner of the Agriont hastily converted into cells. But the woman at the back of this trio had done the exact opposite, costumed as if for the Summer Contest at the height of the old regime, all piled red wig, dramatic black silk and bosomy flounce.

“Selest dan Heugen,” murmured Orso. He knew the woman was nobody’s fool. So why had she dressed as the villain of this particular pantomime? She stood proudly in the dock, in defiance of the boos, catcalls and obscene suggestions from the public galleries, but there was a waxy pallor of fear under her over-heavy blush. She glanced at Judge, and the ringleader of this demented circus grinned back as she propped her dirty feet on the High Table and nodded at her prosecutor to get the righteous work underway.