How many women had she known who died giving birth?

“What’s wrong?” stammered Leo, leaning against the wall beside the bed.

The surgeon was behind her now, frowning, his cold hand pressing at her belly. “Lord— I mean Citizen Brock, you might be happier waiting outside—”

“Who cares a shit whether he’s happy!” hissed Savine through her gritted teeth. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” The surgeon looked up at her over his glinting lenses. “But I fear you still have some work to do.”

She felt a kind of cold horror, then, along with the pain. “What is it?”

Zuri had the baby in the crook of one arm, but she slid her free hand under one of Savine’s and squeezed it. “Twins.”

A Little Public Hanging

As a child, Orso had delighted in the sound of distant crowds. Crowds meant spectacles, festivals, excitement: the thrill of the Summer Contest, the pomp of a parade. As a young man, he had begun to find that noise tiresome. Crowds meant functions, rituals, responsibilities: the disappointment of grand banquets, the tedium of state visits. Now the sound of a crowd filled him with horror. In the new Union, crowds meant riots, terror, random violence. The baying of the mob.

Lost in the anonymity of a crowd, people would commit horrors that would have sickened them alone. That no doubt sickened them afterwards. But their regret was scant consolation for the victims.

“What’s going on, Hildi?” he murmured.

“Don’t know.” And Hildi bit her lip, as if steeling herself for bad news. She always looked that way, these days.

As soon as they stepped out into the Square of Marshals the nature of the occasion became clear.

“Oh, damn,” said Orso, his shoulders slumping. “I bloody hate hangings.”

It was a new kind of gallows. Progress, he supposed. Instead of a cross-beam with ropes, five tall spars stuck up at an angle behind the platform, like the fingers of a clawing hand. There were pulleys at the tips, a counterweight of iron plates behind each one. Instead of rope, steel cables had been looped into five nooses. Orso noticed, as he was herded by his guards towards an enclosure where, as usual, he could be made an exhibit for the curious, that there was a life-sized dummy hanging from one of them.

Chairman Risinau sat at the very front of the crowd, Judge on one side and Pike on the other. The leaders of the Great Change. That bloody writer, Sworbreck, was leaning towards them, waving up at the towering gallows. “The trouble with the previous system was that the bodies fell beneath the trapdoor. Justice was done, but justice was not seen to be done. Now, with a counterweight released…” He gave a showman’s flourish. Nothing happened. “Go on, then!”

There was a clatter of machinery, weights dropped, cable whizzed and the dummy was jerked up by the neck to flop about in the wind some five strides above the platform. The crowd gasped, then began to applaud, to cheer, to hurl good-natured abuse. A carnival atmosphere. Orso winced and tried to loosen his collar with a finger.