Tallow huddled even deeper into his scarf. “I reckon I’ll stay here.”

“Lucky me,” said Vick. Though if she was honest for once she was glad of the company. A sad indictment of the life she’d chosen. The one person she trusted was the one she’d blackmailed into betraying his friends.

Pike came striding from the cellar, pulling on his gloves. “Fine work, Chief Inspector Teufel,” he rasped as he watched the Constables file up the steps to dump armloads of papers into the cart, the odd one floating free to stick in the half-frozen mud. “A bank hidden in a wine-merchant’s cellars. We have driven them underground, like rats.”

“A bank of a sort,” said Vick. “They loaned money to pimps and fences here in the slums, ran pawn shops and jerry shops, invested in gambling houses, husk houses, doss-houses, whorehouses.”

“A criminals’ bank,” muttered Tallow.

Pike narrowed his eyes. “All banks are criminal. The loans here may have been smaller, the interest higher, but the profits flowed into the same coffers. The same ledgers. The same bottomless well of greed. This cellar was a branch of the Banking House of Valint and Balk, as much as the grand building on the Four Corners.” The one in which that vast vault door was still frustrating every effort of locksmiths, engineers and Gurkish Fire.

“The roots of these vile institutions have dug into every part of Union society.” Pike’s lip curled as he watched more paperwork flung into the cart. “A web of debts and corruption that stretches from the lowest to the highest. Their rot must be hacked away.” Two Constables had dragged a squealing clerk into the street. “Without doubt.” Sticks rose and fell, black against the fire. “Without hesitation.” A limp body was hauled away, head hanging. “Without mercy.”

Pike’s war on the banks was starting to look fanatical, but there was no denying fanaticism was in fashion. “What about everything else?” asked Vick.

The Commissioner turned, his breath a smoking cloud about his high collar. “What about everything else?”

“No riots lately, I’ll admit—”

“Too cold for it,” Tallow whispered, trying to cup the warmth of his breath in his pale fingers.

“But robbery, burglary, violence, just as bad as when Risinau was Chairman.”

“Worse,” muttered Tallow, “if anything.”

“Lot of homeless on the streets. Lot of desperate people. They’re coming in from all over. Looking for work, when there’s less work than ever. Mills closing. Manufactories shuttered. No coal. No food.” Vick licked her sore lips as she watched the shackled employees of Valint and Balk hauled from their cellar. “No money.”

“We must focus on the grand crimes. Let the Burners worry about the petty ones.”

Vick winced down the street towards the bonfire. They weren’t burning people on it, as far as she could tell, but only because Judge wanted the proper show of pushing them off the Tower of Chains later.

She should’ve kept her mouth shut. She always kept her mouth shut.