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?”
Aradel paused, little paper half folded to return to his pocket. “You think that could have been sabotage?”
“Could be worth checking,” Marasi said.
“Could be indeed,” Aradel said. “I’ll see if I can spare some men. But if you’re right, what’s this creature’s endgame?”
“General mayhem?” Marasi asked.
Aradel shook his head. “Maybe it’s different for mistwraiths, but men who do things like this, they do it to prove something. They want to show how clever they are, or they want to stop an injustice. Maybe she wants to bring someone down. Isn’t the governor a Pathian?”
“I think so.”
“So this murder tonight could be an attempt to discredit his religion.” Aradel nodded. “Kill his brother, expose a scandal, undermine his faith, cause riots during his tenure … Rusts, this could be about making sure that Innate doesn’t just die, he gets stomped to the ground.”
Marasi nodded slowly. “Sir. I … might have proof that the governor is corrupt.”
“What? What kind of proof?”
“Nothing definitive,” she said, blushing. “It has to do with his policies, and when he’s changed his mind on bills, when he’s voted irregularly following visits with certain key individuals. Sir, you said you hired me in part because of my ability to read statistics. I’ll show you what I have once it’s all arranged, but the story the governor’s record tells is of a man who is offering himself up for sale.”
Aradel ran a hand through his hair, red flecked with grey. “Harmony. Keep this quiet, Lieutenant. We’ll worry about it another time. Understand?”
“Yes, sir. And I agree.”
“But good work,” he noted, then jogged over to take crime scene reports. Marasi couldn’t help feeling a thrill that he’d listened to what she said, even when all she could offer was half explanations. At the same time, however, a disturbing thought struck her. What