“Nonsense,” he said. “Just giving the boy a nudge. He’s useless when he isn’t trying to show off for me—those weeks when he thought he had the assistant’s position sewn up were miserable. He’s a better officer when he has somebody to compete with.” He took Marasi by the shoulder and steered her away from the seated conventicalists. A junior corporal had just shown up with blankets and mugs of warm tea. Hopefully Reddi wouldn’t be too put out at having that job stolen from him too.

“I,” Aradel said, drawing her attention back to him, “can’t fight mistwraiths and spirits in the night. I’m a watchman, not an exorcist.”

“I understand that, sir,” Marasi said. On their ride over here, she’d told him what Waxillium had said about Bleeder. She wasn’t about to keep information like that from her superior. “But if the criminal is supernatural, what option do we have?”

“I don’t know,” Aradel said, “and that frustrates me to no end. I’ve got a city dry as a pile of autumn leaves, Lieutenant, and it’s about to go up in flames. I don’t have the manpower to hunt down a fallen immortal; I need to have constables on the streets trying to keep this city from consuming itself.”

“Sir, what if the two are related?”

“The two murders?”

“The murders and the unrest, sir.” She closed her eyes, remembering the chapel with its dome and pews, and tried to imagine it as it had been earlier. Larskpur standing in front and waving his hands, horrified parishioners fleeing and bearing the story that the Pathian leader had murdered a Survivorist priest…

“Bleeder, or whoever is behind this, has distracted the government with a scandal,” Marasi said opening her eyes. “Now she strikes at one church leader in the guise of another? Sir, whatever her real motives are, she’s obviously trying to strain Elendel. She wants this city to break.”

“You might be ascribing too much to one person, Lieutenant.”

“Not just a person,” Marasi said. “A demigod. Sir, what started the worker strikes?”

“Hell if I know,” Aradel said, patting at his pocket and taking out his cigar case. He opened it and found only a little folded note. He grimaced and showed it to her. There’s a banana in your drawer. “Damn woman will be the death of me. Anyway, I suspect the strikes have been building for a while. Harmony knows I sympathize with the poor fools. Get paid like dirt while the house lords live in mansions and penthouses.”

“But why now?” Marasi asked. “It’s the food, right? Suddenly spiked prices, worry that even when the strikes end, there won’t be food to be bought?”

“That certainly hasn’t helped,” Aradel agreed. “Those floods are going to be a strain.”

“A broken dam. Did we investigate that properly?”