Apollonio stood at the sentinel post before dawn and watched his guards assemble below. Six days ago, three of his men had beaten a dyer's apprentice half to death over a stolen loaf. Apollonio had not been there. He counted that absence as his own crime. He commanded the Veralux guard, and the bruises on that boy's face were signed in his name. He meant to find the men who had swung the cudgels. He could not reform what he could not identify. The trouble was that no guard would name another. He had asked plainly, in formation, the morning after the beating. Forty helmets stared back at him. Forty mouths stayed shut. The code among them was older than his command, and louder than his orders. So he tried a different door. He had a wooden board raised outside the stone inquiry house at the edge of the barracks yard. The house was small and grim, iron bars on the upper window, a plain oak door below. He used the lower room to hear testimony, one person at a time, with no clerk and no second guard present. On the board outside, any citizen could pin a notice: a name, a date, a mark, an account of what a guardsman had done to them. He posted a crier through the market to announce it. He promised in his own hand that no one who left a notice would be touched. For two days the board stayed empty. On the third morning, a woman pinned a strip of dyed cloth with a name written on it. By dusk there were nine notices. By the end of the week there were over forty, and three names appeared again and again: Alboin, and two others under his command. The dyer's apprentice's mother came herself and sat across from Apollonio in the stone room and named all three. A baker named the same three. A girl who sold water named two of them. Apollonio assembled the guard at the sentinel post at first light. He called Alboin and the other two forward by name and stripped them of their spears in front of the rest. He walked them across the yard himself and locked them inside the stone house behind the iron door. The remaining guards stood in their ranks and watched. A handsome soldier in the front row, plumed helmet straight, met Apollonio's eyes and gave a small nod. Others looked at their boots. Apollonio returned to the board and read the notices still pinned there. Most named the three he had just jailed. But four notices named men he had not yet called forward, and one of those men was an officer he had trusted for years. He pulled that notice down and folded it into his glove. The cruelty in his ranks was wider than three men. He had his proof now, and he would have to act on all of it.