Fanfare silenced the crowd.

From the Nobleman’s Gallery, with its closest position to the execution platform, to the surrounding Poors, where Lem was standing on his box, squinting to bring the centre of the main square into focus, all excitable mutterings had ceased and an expectant hush had fallen upon the spectators. The quiet was palpable, a mental fog of fear and respect that dulled each man’s sense of self, making him feel individually insignificant, but enhanced his collective involvement in the spectacle to come: a bloodmist fortelling an imminent rain of death—of which they were all a part. They did not make the rain, but it was created in their name and for their benefit.

Lem was no exception, and despite himself he felt his own desire to return home recede for the time being, pulled away like waters by the moon, as he watched in enthrallment alongside the others.

From below the stage—for a stage is precisely what it was—the King ascended a series of steps to the uppermost platform, where the executioner proudly awaited.

The trumpets stopped their playing.

The executioner bowed.

Beside him, half-collapsed and now with a black sack pulled onto his head, covering his criminal face, Blackmoth heaved with sobs and muffled weeping.

Lem wondered if he’d been gagged or whether his tongue had been cut out. In any case, the swollen sounds he made were almost inhuman, and they made Lem’s blood run cold.

The King raised one arm and began addressing his subjects.

He was dressed in a heavy fur-lined cloak, which had dragged royally behind him as he walked but which now framed his figure, making him appear larger than any man should be, and which imbued with even greater weight the gold crown resting majestically atop his head. Lem was too far away to see his features, but even then he understood that the features were unimportant. It was the crown that commanded attention, not the face below it, for it was the crown that was the true symbol of power. Mortals wore it, but mortals would all wither and die. Such was their nature. It was the crown itself that was immortal.

The King’s speech was long and bombastic, filled with flourishes and emotion and calculated pauses for applause, which the crowd rapturously supplied. It was easy to get caught up in the ornate words and sentences—and, most of all, in the grand sentiments that promised peace and justice, security and equity, and many other noble ideas. In fact, Lem noticed, it took a concentrated effort not to be carried away by them. It was an effort that required him to tear his gaze away from the King, to tilt his ears toward something other than the King's mesmerising speech.

So he looked at Blackmoth, lying broken and shapeless on the platform's wooden floor, and he listened to the terrible moans emanating from where he imagined Blackmoth's mouth would be, and he did so until the King's presence seemed distant and his oration but an echo, and it was while doing these things that Lem noticed something odd: a sudden and brief interruption in Blackmoth's lamentations, followed by a faint billowing of black cloth, and a single flash of movement, after which the lamentations resumed at a slightly higher pitch. All nearly imperceptible. All while everyone's attention was squarely on the King. There was a word for this, thought Lem.

Misdirection.

It was what Lem himself had done in the jewelry store: wait until the attendant's attention was elsewhere and take advantage.

The King finished his speech.

The square filled with thunderous applause. Men, women and children clapped and stomped and hooted their approval and their desire to see a man—an evil man, a criminal, a monster—put to death by the sword of the royal justice.

"In the name of the King," the executioner commanded, "bring forth the condemned!"

His two helpers grabbed the sullen hooded figure before them, raised it to its feet, and dragged it to the beheading board.

The King stood, his back to the proceedings and his arms outstretched as if embracing the entire crowd.

The executioner's helpers forced the hooded figure to its knees—taking sadistic joy in every of their violent actions: kicking, pulling, jerking—and pushed the figure's neck into a semi-circular indentation in the beheading board, where it was forcibly restrained.

The executioner picked up his killing sword with both hands.

The spectators delighted.

"Blackmoth," enunciated the King, "tried and convicted thief, enemy of all good people and blight on lawful society, your end has come."

The executioner took up a position beside the beheading board, steadied himself and lifted his sword above his head.

"Off with your head!"

The executioner brought down his sword—

A clean slice—

The figure's detached head fell to the wooden floor of the platform as its dead body slumped behind the beheading board, spurting blood from the exposed cross-section of its neck.

The head rolled forward—

out of its sack.

The King basked in the raucous adoration and respect of his subjects.

But that adoration suddenly waned.

The executioner had let go of his sword—the reverberating sound of heavy metal hitting wood punctuating the engulfing silence—before wilting to his knees, picking up the decapitated head, staring at it…

By now it was clear that something was wrong.

Unsure what to do, the executioner stood, holding the head above his own.

The King had turned.

He saw:

That it wasn't Blackmoth's head the executioner was holding. It couldn't be, because it wasn't the head of a man at all!

The executioner began to weep, his arms shaking.

It was a woman's head.

"The Queen!" somebody yelled. "They've killed the Queen!"

A thick trail of her blood was snaking a crimson path across the platform—dripping off the side...

The King faltered.

He moved his lips but no sound came out. The realization that he had just ordered the execution of his own wife attacked his body. His eminence, which had just minutes ago seemed so grand, now resembled a crumbling mountain. The King had eroded.

But he had only moments in which to drown in the horror of his knowledge—

Before a blade erupted from his stomach.

Blood soaked his clothes.

He flailed his arms and death liquids bubbled and spewed from his mouth.

The executioner had frozen in place, and could only watch—with Lem and the rest of the crowd—as the King's knees buckled, then gave way, and the man toppled forward.

Only his crown remained aloft:

Held in place by the hand of a tall, black-haired man holding a bloody dagger, which he now wiped clean against his shirt.

The crowd gasped.

Among them, a name resounded in whispers and disbelief:

"Blackmoth."

—placed the crown upon his own head.

It rested decidedly aslant.

On the other side of the platform, the executioner, having regained his wits, sprang toward where his killing sword lay.

Almost nonchalantly, Blackmoth loosed his dagger.

It caught the executioner in the back of the neck, and he grabbed frantically at his throat, unable to breathe, as his two helpers jumped off the platform and disappeared into the stunned crowd.

The executioner crawled forward.

Blackmoth strode toward him, using his foot for leverage retrieved his dagger, then knelt on the executioner's back and sliced open his throat.

He died quickly.

Blackmoth wiped clean his weapon for a second time and surveyed the execution platform, adorned with blood and corpses. "Whoever holds the crown," he said, but his sentence trailed away without finishing his thought. His voice was thin and agile, like a serpent sliding across sand. He laughed. "I suppose that now I hold the crown." He spoke as if to himself, as if he was holding a conversation within his own mind. "It was a beautiful speech—full of decay and emptiness—and I admit I lack the knack for such oration."

Blackmoth jerked his head up and Lem nearly fell off his box. The man's eyes, visible for the first time, seemed to bore into him.

Blackmoth continued: "So let me say simply: whoever holds the crown holds the power. Today this power flows through me, and with it I abolish all laws of property and replace them with a single principle: if you want it, take it." He slipped the crown off his head and played with it as if it were a mere trifle. "And if you have it, guard it. No longer will the law protect those who have from those who want. Let each protect himself—or lose." He spun the crown on his dagger. "As for history, let it speak the truth about today. A few died, a few thrived. The gears churned and with their churning came a changing of the times. The Age of Law has passed."

For the first time in a long time, Lem scanned the crowd around him. There was a profound realisation happening. The Poors was bubbling with the meaning of Blackmoth's actions. While closer to the centre of the main square, near the periphery of the Noblemen's Gallery, a commotion was brewing.

A surge of people pressing forth—

A human sea frothing beneath a gathering storm.

A call: "The King is dead!"

And a response: "Hail to the Thief!"

On the platform, Blackmoth watched it all unfold. The Noblemen's Gallery with its finery and jewelry and ostentation surrounded by the hungry and wretched in The Poors. The panic of the rich ensnared by the suddenly unchained desire of the needy. The mix was explosive, and the fuse had just been lit.

"Hail to the Thief!"

"Hail to the Thief!"

"Hail to the Thief!"

Screams. Ripping cloth. Metal against metal against flesh. The tearing of something. The Poors pressing forward as one, and Lem left behind standing on his box. Soldiers trying to separate the people. Soldiers with the people and against the people. Fists hitting bone. Bones cracking. Coins spilling on the ground.

"Welcome," pronounced Blackmoth, "to the Age of Thievery!"