“Leonault dan Brock, you are found guilty of High Treason and open rebellion against the Crown and sentenced to death. Have you anything to say?”
The whole while, as he listened to the others rage, blurt, weep, reason, all to no purpose, he’d wondered what he’d say. Now the moment came, the last moment, he found he had nothing.
He looked up at Orso and shrugged. “I’m sorry.” He hardly even recognised his own voice any more, throaty and weak. He looked over at Savine. “I’m sorry, that’s all.” If he stood much longer, he’d fall. If he looked at her much longer, he’d weep. He shook his head as he was offered the hood. “Let’s get on with it.” And he did his best to lift his chin so it was easy to tighten the noose about his throat.
“Most kind,” murmured the executioner.
Hoff rolled up his list of names and tucked it in the pocket of his robes. Rucksted brushed dust from his shoulder. An ordinary-looking, curly haired fellow leaned forward to murmur something in the king’s ear. Something familiar about him. Could he be the man who’d come to the docks with Leo’s mother, begging him not to go? By the dead, his mother. Why hadn’t he listened to her? King Orso gave the executioners a quick nod and they pulled the first lever.
Leo flinched as Mustred dropped with a clatter and a thud, and a set of crows that had gathered on the bare beams of a fallen roof flapped outraged into the sky.
Once they’d started it went shockingly fast. Bang, and the second man was gone, rope trembling. Bang, and the third vanished. The young lecturer in governmental theory was next. He squeezed his face tight before he dropped, like a boy jumping into a cold millpond. By some freak chance, his eye-lenses must’ve bounced off at the bottom, spun back up through the trapdoor to rest on the platform. One of the executioners bent and slipped them into his pocket.
Leo’s life was measured in moments now. In breaths. In heartbeats. He didn’t want to look, couldn’t look away, winced as the executioner pulled Lady Wetterlant’s lever—
She didn’t drop.
He pulled the lever again, and again. The trapdoor refused to open.
“Damn it,” came muffled from behind his mask. Orso squirmed in his chair. Hoff rubbed at his temples.
Another executioner stepped forward to mutter with the first, pointing angrily at the trapdoor. Lady Wetterlant growled into her gag. Four ropes stretched taut. Seven prisoners still stood, waiting helplessly for the end.
One of the executioners started kicking at the trapdoor while another dragged pointlessly at the lever again. A third had ducked under the platform and could be heard scrabbling with the mechanism below.
Leo bared his teeth. An agony of waiting. Each moment a horror, but still a moment he was grateful for. The onlookers coughed and narrowed their eyes as a gust of wind swept grit across the ruined square. A few nooses down, one of the conspirators sobbed inside his hood.
“Fuck yourselves, you bastards!” Lady Wetterlant had worked free of her gag and now started screaming insults again. “Damn you all, you vultures! You worms!”
King Orso jumped up. “For pity’s sake, just—”
Her trapdoor sprang suddenly open. She had been turning, fell awkwardly, scream suddenly cut off as she caught her arm on the edge of the platform and slithered through. It soon became clear that the drop hadn’t killed her. The rope twitched wildly. A kind of spluttering groan came from below. Everyone stared as it became a spitty gurgle.
Leo saw piss run from the trouser leg of the man who’d been sobbing to pool on the platform around his boot.
“Proceed,” said Hoff, angrily.
The next man swooned, knees giving and dropping to the platform. One of the executioners dragged him up, slapped his hooded face, stood him straight on his trapdoor. Clatter and thud as he dropped.
As if making up for lost time, they rushed from one lever to the next. Thud, thud, thud, each sending a faint vibration through Leo’s own noose.
The canvas over Barezin’s face flapped faster and faster with his desperate breath. The executioner grasped his lever. “Wait!” came muffled from under the hood. “I—”
He dropped under the platform and with a snap his rope jerked tight. So it seemed great lords of the Open Council meet the long drop just like other men.
Leo looked up at Savine. She gave a desperate smile, tears in her eyes. Meant to give him strength, maybe. He’d never loved her like he did at that moment. Perhaps he’d never really loved her until that moment. He tried to smile back. To leave her with something good. Some glimpse of who he used to be.
He felt the executioner step up beside him. Heard him grip the lever that worked the trapdoor under his feet. Under his foot. Still wasn’t used to having just the one. He closed his eyes.
Time stretched. A breeze came up and kissed his sweaty face. He took a long breath out, and held it. His last breath, he realised. He waited for the end.
“Stop.”
He thought it was Orso’s voice.
He wasn’t sure.
He opened his eyes again. Had to squint, somehow, as if into a wind.
The king wasn’t looking at him. He was looking sideways. At Savine. And she was looking back. Everything was still, time chopped up into stretched-out moments by the thudding of Leo’s heart. Someone cleared their throat. One of the crows, gathered again on the naked beams, flapped its wings. Barezin’s taut rope still hummed faintly. The executioner’s hand shifted on the lever.
Then Orso slumped back in his chair and gave a sharp wave of his hand. “Leo dan Brock, I commute your sentence to life imprisonment.”
There was a collective gasp. Savine closed her eyes, tears running down her face.
“Your Majesty,” that curly headed man was saying, a warning note in his voice, “my master will not—”
“I have made my decision!” Orso nodded towards the scaffold. “Take the rope off him.”
And Leo felt the noose loosened, then slipped over his head. As if that had been the only thing holding him up, he slumped, crutch clattering down. The executioner was ready and caught him, lowered him to the platform.
Now he did cry. He couldn’t help it. He huddled on his one knee, shoulders shaking with sobs and the tears pattering from the tip of his nose onto the rough-sawn boards. He couldn’t even raise his useless left hand to wipe them.
He heard the king’s chair scrape as he stood. “Lady Brock!” he snapped. “For pity’s sake, get your husband down before he embarrasses us any further.”
Loyalties and Sympathies
It was a bright autumn day when Vick rode back into Valbeck. The place looked nothing like the last time she was there, in the final chaotic days of the uprising. No rubbish choking the streets, no burned-out shells of buildings, no sounds of distant violence, no unattended corpses. Only a few pink smears showing through the hastily applied whitewash, reminding the careful observer that these buildings were once daubed with Burners’ slogans. There was even a pleasant breeze, carrying the smog of the rebuilt manufactories away inland and leaving the air halfway clean.
All quiet and orderly. Almost too quiet, the few people in the streets scurrying off to stare from alleys and doorways. But then cheering crowds might be too much to ask for when the Arch Lector of the Inquisition arrives in your city with thirty armed Practicals. Pike’s last visit, after all, had left the road out of town decorated with hanged men.