“Henrik Jost!” Sworbreck roared at the first prisoner, a portly man with a double chin and a patched waistcoat. “You stand accused of grand usury and conspiracy! Have you anything to say?”

The man struggled up, looking punch-drunk, a large bruise above his eye. “I admit to serving for a dozen years as a senior lending clerk at the Banking House of Valint and Balk—” Hisses from above. “But it was considered a respectable trade, entirely respectable! I arranged loans for worthy enterprises. Mills and manufactories the breadth of Midderland. Establishments that gave employment to many—”

“Including businesses and establishments,” hissed Sworbreck, as though they were the worst excesses of witchcraft, “owned by this woman, Selest Heugen?”

A chorus of boos. Some rotten piece of vegetable matter tumbled from above and sprayed juice across the tiles. The banker stared at Selest. She stared back, breathing hard through flared nostrils. “Well… yes, but in those days, no one thought of it as a crime—”

“Time’s no shield from punishment,” growled Judge. “Guilty!”

Jost was about to protest, but Sarlby leaned over the dock to cuff him across the head and knock him back into his seat. Sworbreck had already swaggered to the next prisoner, a trembly man with a nimbus of wild hair, his eyes bloodshot behind cracked lenses.

“Piater Norlhorm, you stand accused of disloyal pronouncements, royalist sympathies and conspiracy to incite riot! Have you anything to say?”

“Absolutely!” He sprang up, waving a fistful of flapping papers, scrawled on both sides. “I have established a watertight defence!” Grumbles from the galleries as he perched his lenses on his wispy pate and began rummaging through his mismatched pages. “I fear there was some damage caused by damp during the last search of my cell…”

“I thought it was watertight?” some wag called from the upper gallery. Laughter.

“Ah, yes!” The old man cleared his throat, puffing up his chest to read from notes scrawled on an old shirt, declaiming in an orator’s wail, “Was it not Juvens himself who spoke unto the Samnites, ‘Justice is more than punishment, more than vengeance?’ Er…” He shuffled his papers again, a couple of scraps fluttering to the floor. “And was it Bialoveld, or no, my mistake, one moment, I think it was Verturio who said—”

“We’re not here for a fucking history lesson!” sneered Judge, hammering at the table. “He’s guilty, too!”

“But I have scarcely commenced my preamble—” Broad tore the sheaf of scrawlings from Norlhorm’s hands and shoved him back down. He missed his seat and sprawled on the floor, paper bags, candle-wrappers and scribbled-on sheet music drifting about him.

“Selest dan Heugen!” snapped Sworbreck. She rose, an ill-looking blotchiness across her collarbones, but her fists clenched like those of a prizefighter about to enter the ring. “You stand accused of profiteering, speculation, exploitation and conspiracy.” Charges vague enough to be impossible to prove or disprove, as they always were. “Have you anything to—”

“I wish to make denunciations!” she blurted, as though desperate to get in before she missed her chance. She did not even bother to protest her innocence. In that, she was probably wise. Innocence was wasted on the court these days.