“There’s one!” He heard footsteps clapping from the buildings. “Stop him!” Now he ran, but not far. Someone caught him under the arm and threw him down. A flash of a bearded face, armour that looked new-forged. He was dragged up again by the elbow. A strange gang. Like the people you might see at one of the cheap markets. Only furious.

And Ettenbeck realised that ordinary people can be utterly terrifying.

“Where you going, fucker?” growled a man with a scar on his chin.

“There’s no escaping the people’s justice!” squealed a woman and slapped him across the face.

“We’re in charge now!”

He could hardly understand their grinding accents. He did not know what they wanted. Did not know what he could possibly give them. “My name is Ettenbeck,” he said, for no reason that made any sense. They shoved him onwards. His cheek was burning.

There were other prisoners caught up in the crowd. Administrators. Bureaucrats. Clerks. A couple of soldiers. Herded like animals. Prodded along with spears. A grinning coachman was flicking at them with his carriage whip, making them howl and whimper. Ettenbeck knew one man’s bloody face, but his name had gone. All their names had gone.

“Profiteers!” someone was screaming in a broken voice. “Speculators!”

A dark-skinned fellow was being kicked along the street, and he would stumble up, and be kicked down again, up, and down. Ettenbeck thought he was an ambassador from somewhere. Kadir, maybe? A charming, cultured man. Ettenbeck had heard him speak very movingly to the Solar Society about closer cooperation across the Circle Sea. Now they had knocked his hat off and were spitting on him.

“Bastard!” snarled a man in soldier’s clothes who had stripped his jacket off, his shirt spotted with blood. “Bastard!” And he stamped on the ambassador’s head.

Something hit Ettenbeck on the side of his face and he fell. The ground cracked him hard. He wobbled up to his hands and knees. His jaw was throbbing. “Oh,” he muttered, blood pattering on the cobbles. “Oh dear.” A tooth fell out of his numb mouth.

He was caught by the elbow again, dragged up again, pain shooting through his armpit, and sent stumbling on.

“Profiteers!” a woman shrieked, spit spraying, eyes bulging, pointing at him with a rolling pin. “Speculators!”

“He’s one o’ those Closed Council bastards!”

“I’m just a clerk!” Ettenbeck’s voice was a desperate squeal. It was a lie. He was one of the senior under-secretaries for Agricultural Taxation. How proudly he had murmured the title to himself when he received the promotion. His sister would finally have to take him seriously. How he wished now he had never even come to Adua, let alone to the Agriont. But you’ll buy nothing with wishes, as his mother always loved to say.

He kicked and twisted as they dragged him across the little square in front of the Land Registry Building towards the fountain. An ugly thing, a wide, waist-high stone bowl of water with a twisting mass of spouting stone fish rising from the centre. It was by no means improved by a corpse draped over the rim, arse in the air and the pointed toes of fashionable shoes scraping the flagstones.