Orso clung to the rail of his enclosure, his white hands either side of Broad’s.

Judge snapped her fingers again. Gorodets gave a whoop as he was whisked into the air. Pike watched his one-time colleagues dangle, emotionless, eyes glittering.

“Wait!” Matstringer left one shoe behind as he was plucked from the platform by the throat. The surveyor general squeezed his eyes shut, then his counterweight dropped and he was flung up, too.

Hoff swung, his distended neck turning black. The surveyor general did not appear to have been killed instantly. He was still kicking. Perhaps just some nervous impulse. Orso hoped so. Something ran from the leg of his sackcloth trousers and spattered to the platform below.

Curnsbick put his head in his hands.

Rucksted bared his teeth. “Fuck the lot of you.”

Snap. The last counterweight dropped. Rucksted flew up, but something must have gone wrong with the mechanism. Instead of being left hanging high, the noose was jerked all the way into the pulley. His head flew off one way. His body dropped the other, crashing onto the platform, showering blood.

“Ha!” screeched Judge, leaping to her feet in delight.

The crowd gave an almighty roar of approval. A woman danced, pulling off her apron to wave it over her head like a flag.

“Oh,” said Hildi, in a high little voice. Because she was so clever and so tough, Orso forgot, sometimes, how young she was. He wanted to put his hand over her eyes. He wanted to put his hand over his own. But it was far too late.

He had sat horrified through those meetings in the White Chamber where, beneath the blandly monstrous oversight of the First of the Magi, principles were squashed beneath profits, corruption was raised to an art form and justice was reduced to a jelly. He had known it was wrong, but he had thrown up his hands and told himself it was the way things were. The way things had to be. He had failed to protect his people from his councillors. Now he had failed to protect his councillors from his people.

“I have failed at everything,” he whispered.

The four corpses hung limp. Gorodets dangled a little lower than the others, for some reason, twisting slowly one way, then the other. The crowd had turned quiet. Towards the back, people were already drifting away. There was a sense of disappointment. Perhaps they had discovered that when enemies fall, they leave a hole. No doubt they would find new ones to fill it with soon enough.

“Well.” Risinau stood, hands on his paunch. “I for one am glad to have that behind us. Now we can focus on putting things right.”

“Behind us?” Judge growled as she glared up at the dangling bodies. “We’ve barely begun.”

Orso closed his eyes. He realised that, somewhere deep inside, he had been supposing this was all temporary. A passing fad. A nightmare from which they would all soon wake.

But perhaps this was simply how the world was, now.