Well, they were the masters now.

They carried Risinau in on a gilded chair they must’ve torn from some chamber, some office, some hall. Adnes grabbed at a leg of it, one in a forest of hands, helping it pass, and Risinau laughed, and they laughed, and the joyous crowd cheered as they carried him bobbing down the aisle between the curved benches, and set him on the great table.

Folk had got up to the public gallery and were singing and clapping, the echoes of their joy bouncing about the great space and bringing it alive like it couldn’t have been since that dome was raised. There was a flower girl up there and she had a sack of petals and was throwing handfuls down, fluttering like butterflies through the shafts of coloured light to carpet the tiles below, and Adnes had never seen so beautiful a thing. Made her think of her husband’s grave, and her sons’ graves, down in the wood where the wildflowers grew, and that brought a blur of tears to her eyes. So much joy and so much pain together she thought her chest would split with it.

“You have brought the dream to life, my friends!” roared Risinau, and there was a cheer so loud it made Adnes’s teeth rattle and her ears ring and her heart throb.

“Risinau!” people squealed. “Risinau!” And Adnes made a great sobbing, meaningless wail, reaching out towards him.

“Equality, my brothers! Unity, my sisters! A new beginning! A country governed by all, in the interests of all. You will say on your deathbeds, with a smile, that you were here! The day the Lords’ Round was made the Commons’ Round! The day of the Great Change!”

She was crying, and all about her men and women were crying and laughing, all at once.

It was the day their dreams came true. The day their new Union was born.

The soldier caught her hand, and there were tears on his face, too, but he was smiling. He’d a fine smile, she thought. “I don’t know your name.”

“Who cares a shit?” And she dragged his helmet off so she could push her fingers through his sweaty hair, and started kissing him again.

Ettenbeck slipped from a side door of the Lords’ Round and into a narrow street behind the building. He had thought he would be safe in there. Where could be safer than the very heart of the Union? But now the Breakers were inside. He could hear them cheering. He could hear them crashing through the buildings all about him!

Perhaps this was how it had been when the Gurkish invaded, and the Eaters broke into the Agriont. He remembered his uncle telling him the story, his watery eyes fixed on the far distance, as though at horrors beyond imagining. But these were not cannibal sorcerers, not inhuman and unknowable demons, not the wielders of forbidden powers. Just ordinary people.

A window shattered in the Commission for Land and Agriculture and a desk came flying through, crashing to the ground not far away. Ettenbeck could feel the sweat running down his scalp. Leaking out of him as if he was a squeezed sponge. It took every vestige of self-control he had not to break into a desperate sprint. The walls of the palace compound might still hold firm. Perhaps if he could make it there—