“This is troubling,” said Sulfur, with towering understatement. Orso noticed he was carefully wiping blood from the side of his hand with a handkerchief. Of the slight smirk he had managed to maintain through the execution of two hundred people outside Valbeck, there was no sign at all.

“The next day there was a strike at the Hill Street Foundry. The day after there were three more. Some guardsmen refused to patrol. Others clashed with the rioters.” The knight herald worked his mouth unhappily. “Several deaths.”

Orso’s father was last in the procession of immortalised monarchs, gazing out over the deserted park with an expression of decisive command he had never worn in life. Opposite him, on a slightly less monumental scale, loomed that famous war hero Lord Marshal West, that noted torturer Arch Lector Glokta, and the First of the Magi himself, glaring down with wrinkled lip as though all men were complaining ants to him indeed. Orso had often wondered which retainers would end up opposite his own statue, in future years. This was the first time he had ever wondered if he would get a statue at all.

“There’ll be order now!” Hoff struggled to lift the funereal mood. “You’ll see!”

“I hope so, Your Grace,” said the knight herald. “Groups of Breakers have taken over some of the manufactories. They march openly in the Three Farms, calling for… well, the resignation of His Majesty’s Closed Council.” Orso did not care for the way he said resignation. It felt like a euphemism for something considerably more final. “People are stirred up, Your Majesty. People want blood.”

“My blood?” muttered Orso, trying and failing to loosen his collar.

“Well…” The knight herald gave a rather limp parting salute. “Blood, anyway. I’m not sure they care whose.”

It was a sadly reduced Closed Council that struggled to its aged feet as Orso clattered into the White Chamber. Lord Marshal Forest had been left behind in Stoffenbeck with the shattered remnants of the army. Arch Lector Pike was terrifying the ever-restless denizens of Valbeck into renewed submission. A replacement had yet to be found for High Justice Bruckel after his head was split in half during a previous attempt on Orso’s life. Bayaz’s chair at the foot of the table was—as it had been for the great majority of the last few centuries—empty. And the surveyor general, one could only assume, was once again out with his bladder.

Lord Chancellor Gorodets’ voice was rather shrill. “Might I congratulate Your Majesty on your famous victory at Stoffenbeck—”

“Put it out of your mind.” Orso flung himself into his uncomfortable chair. “I have.”

“We were set upon!” Rucksted stormed to his seat with spurs jingling. “The royal party!”

“Rioters in the bloody streets of Adua!” wheezed Hoff as he sagged down and began to dab his sweat-beaded forehead with the sleeve of his robe.

“Bloody streets indeed,” murmured Orso, wiping his cheek with his fingertips and seeing them come away lightly smeared with red. Gorst’s handiwork had left him speckled all over. “Any news from Arch Lector Pike?”