“I can hear you.”

“Can you see me?”

A pause. A tiny slot slid open in one of the doors. “I can see you,” came considerably louder from the opening.

Vick ground her teeth again. They were going to be down to the gums by the time this door was open. “Then why didn’t you open the bloody slot before?”

No answer.

“You see we’ve got a cannon pointed at you.”

No answer.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” There was a puff of sparks as one of the Constables finally got the match-cord to splutter into life, and some of their growing audience took nervous steps away. “I’m going to count down from ten. If this door isn’t open when I get to nothing, I’m going to open it the hard way.”

No answer, but she thought she saw a pair of eyes behind the slot blink.

“Anything within twenty strides of that door’ll get opened the hard way, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“You,” said Vick. “You’ll be open. You’ll all be wide fucking open.”

“Perhaps we could—”

“Ten.”

There was a clattering of keys, a rattling of bolts, one half of the double doors opened and a balding head stuck around it into the chill autumn air. “We surrender,” it said.

Vick looked over at the lead Constable. Something she would rather have done as little as possible. “Well, then?”

“Oh. Right.” And he pulled out his stick and stomped forwards, beckoning the others after him.

“Why’s the Commissioner so interested in banks, anyway?” muttered Tallow. “Why not, I don’t know, the armouries, or the barracks, or the granaries?”

“Daresay we’ll get to those.”

“But why banks first?”

When Arch Lector Glokta was in charge, Vick had found it helped not to waste too much thought on the whys. She guessed the same applied to Commissioner Pike. Probably it applied double. So she just shrugged.

“Better raiding bankers than Breakers, I guess,” said Tallow.

“Is it?”

“On the right side of history, maybe.”

Vick snorted. “The thing about history is you don’t know what the right side is till long afterwards, and by then it hardly matters.”

“That’s the sort o’ thing you hear from folk who know they’re on the wrong side.”

Vick conceded the point with a weary grunt. “I daresay.”

“Safe!” bellowed the Constable from inside and, with care, Vick stepped through the open front doors of the Adua headquarters of the Banking House of Valint and Balk.

The knot of employees inside hardly looked like a threat to the new Union. They looked like a set of very scared clerks with a cannon pointing at them. Vick picked out the best dressed. A balding man trying to hide behind the others.

“You’re in charge?” she asked.

“Well…” He glanced about nervously, but no one fell over themselves to take responsibility. “I suppose I am the longest serving member of staff on site. I am Ario Matterno, senior over-clerk for loans—”

“Styrian?”

“Is that…” he swallowed. “A problem?”