Astonished grumbles carried “Morfil” and “…for who then?” Chair legs squeaked. Hopefuls rushed the desk. A fistfight erupted.

  Irion didn’t need to tear down the aisle or crawl over any cursed heads. He knew it well. This peculiar ornament had been in Maecidion’s possession long before a single Suelan slave had been brought to Rehleian shores. It had also been previously owned by other powerful Ordrid leaders, long returned to oblivion.

  What would it would mean if the Virulent left it to me? Irion leaned forward in his chair. This had to be it. What misery would be deserving to anyone other than I?

  And while he’d been lost in such thoughts, fiddling in his pockets, a name had already been read.

  When it was announced for a second time, the gathering boiled over from gasped vacuum to pure hysteria. Slugging his way forward, Gormorster Toadly, as surprised as his howling detractors, knew now the first announcement hadn’t been a trick. With a rodent’s face sitting on top of several glistening chins, the gormandizer smelling of sweat, sweets, and necrophilia looked to be the unlikeliest of all attendants to receive an invitation, let alone this choice artifact.

  Irion was soon leading the mob, hurling insults and looking for an available chair not bolted to the floor. While an imp was highly sought after, this was an heirloom. It going to anyone outside the House was detestable, and all the more foul to the senses that a flatulent glutton-wretch like Toadly would now own it. Irion had to wrestle down a misfit trying to rise from deep within him. Reappraising the genius of his deceased patriarch was by all accounts an ill strategy, even if he was dead.

  Toadly gloated and giggled, showboating by a series of squinty-eyed sneers. He held the statue like a pageant winner, or a proud new father.

  Irion burst open the doors and marched out into the lobby. Last wishes be damned. That inner-misfit was winning, and it was straight to the coat closest. He pilfered through the dampened garb. It didn’t take long. There was the raven-feathered collar.

  “Belot,” Irion grumbled, “Still wearing lyceum monstrosities, of course.” Irion opened the coal coat and rifled through it. A smile broke free across his face by the second or third pocket. Charm spells were one thing, but Belot loved a single practice above all else; raping the minds of the dying. It took the meeting of two special powders to enact such a spell—two powders Irion then swapped out with two other powders, ones you’d never wish to see conjoined.

  When the crowd hobbled out from the hall, Irion melted back into the swarm. Some were angry, most disappointed, but those were more their ways than any. A few of the more brazen cursed Maecidion before catching themselves.

  Before long the hall and the coat closet were all but empty. The fiends returned to their lairs to, as Chapwyn priests so ardently report, brew their irksome things; slither under the moonlight; and invoke, summon, and fondle the dead.

  *

  From the lower branch indeed, Irion would one day be feared and exalted for this warpath that he’d undertook. Time was of the essence. It took days for an imp to submit to its new master, but once done there was no being undone. And Toadly, that degenerate, that blue hand may already be slotted for the nearest pawn shop.

  Irion kicked the door open and pulled the clerk in by her hair. In a dark corner serving as a residence for spiders and scrolls, he uncupped his hand from her mouth and put a finger to his lips.

  The Nilghorde Hall of Records was monstrous. The main doors towered royal green above and below midsections of ornate glass, but the deeper one journeyed into the hall’s catacombs the more the place seemed to degrade. The central lobby had been a murmuring hive, irate merchants and disputing tenants slammed doors and stamped down stairs. Then packed corridors became dithering shadows and blocks of stone bouncing back distant calls. Further still, broom closets and boarded-up doors gave way to the lone room warehousing the thing which Irion sought.

  He was at the Residency Office; used only by the Ward and magistrate’s apprentices, and maybe that was why it was at the end of such a punitive tunnel. To his good fortune, only one clerk had toiled in lamplight behind the reception desk. To his bad fortune, he’d spent the last of his Ghorlaxium on the potion he’d made for her.

  When boiled in small doses and cut with Leaves of Luka, Ghorlaxium makes the living spew out all they know. He knelt above the clerk in dual dismay. He needed another batch; if all went well, this woman who’d gulped the potion past the edge of his blade would lead him forward. But, more pressing, an overdose didn’t kill—that would at least give him some options. If only Irion had the time. But rather than death, his miscalculation had resulted in a rolling blabber.

  “Kornard kept coming on to me,” she said, looking beyond him with her bulging eyes. “My sister couldn’t pla…please him after having the baby. The baby that woulda been ours coulda never have been.” He considered killing her. “Mother woulda never…” She trailed off into a string of inaudibles. Somewhere in this mess of boxes, scrolls, and wobbling towers of books there was a name, and with it an address. “Mother woulda killed all four of us!”

  After an eternity, the abortion confession ceased.

  “Are you scared?”

  “Terrified.” The clerk’s voice was flat as her hair matting the floorboards, in a way that amused Irion. She lay like an open-casket funeral, even when he took his hands off her wrists.

  “Are barristers designated by duty?” Her mouth opened but said nothing. “Here, in this office?” Irion added.

  “Why…yes, by specialty you could say.”

  “Good,” Irion said, petting her head. Then, spacing his words out to eliminate any more blunders, “Where can I find magistrates in charge of probate? In charge of wills?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Irion pressed down on her wrists. “Then who does?”

  “Yodïor, my boss.”

  “And he comes?”

  “Soon.”

  He’d heard of a trick back at the lyceum for keeping them quiet. “Make a noise now only if you’ve never lied.”

  It worked.

  *

  To Irion’s relief, not one larval lawyer or single member of the Ward approached the reception desk. Having deprived the clerk of her apron, he sat behind the slab and watched the lamp oil burn. He felt as silly as someone dressed for All Malevolent Masquerade. But he had to wait.

  The lamp smoke grew thicker, his back ached, and then a silhouette appeared. A black dot approached, growing, soon emerging through the lamplight, having turned into a lumpy man whose glasses reflected the shifts of orange and yellow.

  “You must be my supervisor,” Irion said, putting down the sheet of parchment he’d picked up to pretend he was reading. “Yoddy, Yodi.”

  “Who—where is Loona?”

  “That was her name, Loona. She went home, sick.” The little man’s face glistened with sweat he’d worked up while walking down the hall. But that wasn’t the only reason he was sweating. Looks over his shoulder and nervous scratches to his crotch and ass told Irion everything. “I’m a temp.”

  “A temp? We don’t—”

  Irion leapt over the desk. The sheet of parchment balled and shoved in his mouth, Irion’s blade to his chins, Yodïor kicked as he was lifted off the floor. The Residency Office door with swung open for a second time.

  “No!” Yodïor screamed right before Irion kicked him in the gut. Gasping to regain his breath, he lay in Loona’s blood, which by way of an unfortunate slip, Irion too felt: cooled and congealing. He’d slit her throat when the potion had worn off. A means to an end no driven man has time to worry over. Though she was on her stomach and this Yodïor lay on his back, Irion mused for but a moment how they lay locked in a stare, unifying two on opposing sides of the grave.

  “As you wish to live,” Irion crawled on top of him, “cease your whimpering and answer me.” He nodded, emitting squeaks that sounded like a girl’s. “Where can I find magistrates in charge of probate? In charge of wills?”

  *

  Given the vastness of the room, and of the rat shit, they’d be gnawed-on bones by the time anyone found them. But Irion’s thoughts were elsewhere. The will reading was only a day old; Irion clutched the top half of a municipal parchment. The top was all he needed. The choices were an insult, almost arbitrary, as if the barrister had written the will the day of, just to see the crowd’s reaction.

  Irion found the barrister. In his bedchambers the lawman frantically swore that he’d merely read the will as it had been written, a conviction that remained unwavering up to the last dagger slash.

  *

  Ordrids are fond of the moon. Irion gazed upon her, the great beacon of his House. He’d thought he’d heard her call his name as he stumbled through the graves. Blossoming on the vines that grew on elder headstones, Orphedilias opened to vector in the gentle light. Poets and ninnies like Belot would have stopped to ogle at their shape perhaps.

  He came to the graveyard’s center, the Maedraderium. Irion halted and stood before the new obelisk. Black and gold, jutting out of a cluster of pediment tombs, this robust monument to his great-uncle now towered. His Virulence had worked in startling mystery at times, not issuing an immediate and savage revenge on the House of Rogaire was chief among Irion’s confusions.

  But now this. Of all the places to be buried.

  The common man was at best a two-legged dog, and Maecidion had willed his obelisk in a graveyard hardly good enough for such a dog’s dead fleas. What unfathomable nonsense! He could have been exalted a mile high; future generations of Ordrids and wide-eyed gawkers would have been straining their necks.

  The prattling on about the Maedraderium being City Cemetery’s wealthy centerpiece meant little to Irion. Most still just called this island of stones, more a small city of venerated dead, “Laugher’s Lot.” If it had any meaning at all, Irion guessed it derived from the morticians, mirthfully swelling the lot as their coffers filled.

  Irion held in his hand a bottle of that corn liquor, Spiritual Oppressor. He took another pull. “I am sorry, dearest Lord,” Irion said, “but I cannot see to it. See to it that I leave your wishes untouched.” And why shouldn’t he feel this way? The very man whose will he was rebelling against had once made such bold moves in his own time. Would he—could he—at least appreciate Irion’s ambitions, providing the impetus to be so bold? The reading now three days old, it troubled Irion no less.

  Swaying, emptied bottle in hand, he arched his back and stuck out his chest.

  He hadn’t come to talk to an obelisk; just a thoughtful gesture along the way. Irion tossed the Spiritual Oppressor and continued to a hamlet on the edge of the graves.

  *

  Irion crouched in the hedges like some sneak thief. But such humiliations were necessary. Toadly’s tower wasn’t so much a tower, more a farmer’s silo, complete with thatched rotting top, giving the whole thing the appearance of a giant’s refracting phallus that had caught Thina’s Poxy. It loomed so close to City Cemetery that Irion couldn’t tell if the neglected hedge, grown wild with weeds and brambers, belonged to Toadly or to Nilghorde.

  He’d sobered quick enough, perhaps expedited by having suffered bouts of rain.

  Shadows conjoined and shifted behind Toadly’s windows. With-in, long bouts of silence would rip open in an instant with bellows of ignoramus mirth. Of all the nights for such a home to play host to the living. But as Irion adjusted a troublesome root for the third time, Toadly’s door swung open and out poured the filth.

  Though the departing gaggle was of several classes, they struck him as acquainted scoundrels, tarrying under a lone lamplight before finally leaving.

  Irion froze. A pack of other men scrambled out from a hedge across from his own. The moment he began to rise he’d been put back down, reduced to peering out through leaves. The pack moved from one shadow to the next, then broke down Toadly’s door.

  Toadly had enemies like snakes have scales. It would have been amusing, Irion gleamed, if a brood of brothers with their stone-cutting father at the helm had burst in to avenge the lamentable state of one of the many concubines that had made Toadly famous. But the pack’s look of intent villainy disallowed such fantasies. The thumps and sounds of breaking glass and feet pounding up and down stairwells were at the bidding of, he knew beyond a doubt, some other fiend who’d also attended the will reading.

  “If it is gone—” the rest Irion hissed into his hand. A sudden headache needled his skull: Someone had beat him to it. He’d sat around, pitying himself with a liquor bottle, and it may have just cost him everything. He felt a shame that his conscious would not fully allow. An image of brewing tricks and potions on the lowest branch in all Necrodom faded, and the part of his mind where words were found refit itself. The puma who slept through the deer migrating while dreaming of idle sheep. Irion gripped his dagger’s handle. Rain pooled on leaves and ran down his neck.

  After some while, the thugs reentered the street, and with their reappearance the vice-clamp around his head loosened. On the ground, behind one of the larger men, was a mammoth bag, sowed tight and soaked with blood. He’d never quite experienced disappointment and elation at once, until just then.

  One of the oldest Ordrids ever to be penned to a scroll, Prince Basofial had enjoyed a parade of carnage, yet was denied the blood dipping of his own morning star. Seeing Toadly dead and stuffed into a sack, Irion couldn’t help but wonder if this is how the long-dead prince had felt when the droves of poor had killed the aristocracy over in Quinnari?

  He was frozen again. The grunting shadows were dragging Toadly right toward him.

  Grunts became words. Soon, shadows became scowls and leather gloves. Leading them, an over-muscled lug stowed a severed petite arm into his belt. All it would take is one alley-grade wizard among them to route Irion out, one of the lugs then pulling him up by his neck like a chicken. His crouching became a curl, his dagger blade tight against his palm. If he were one of the Ordrids who prayed, Irion would have done so as legs burst open his hedge.

  The trail of boot prints and a sweep like a crocodile’s slide met the grass of City Cemetery. “Even split” and “not this rutterkin, ya pansy nob” became grunts once more, and soon, save for pats of rain, there was silence.

  “It’s been invaded by a pack of gorillas,” Irion spit, having entered Toadly’s trash heap. Knowing him, this parlor had always probably been a clogged artery of trinkets and spoiled meat. But whatever stage of slow explosion it had once been, it had burst like a zit. All was everywhere. Everything but the remaining army of candles; hung about on sconces, stuck into cracks, resting on frames of draperies that had somehow been spared.

  The last Irion had seen of the invaders, they were making their way toward the other side of the cemetery. In front of him now were the remnants of their night’s work: furniture upended, books torn to pieces, rather insignificant parts of the home mangled beyond repair. Irion would never be sure what a fire prodder, broken in three, could have ever hoped to contain.

  Still, this mangling may mean that they never found what they were looking for.

  He rushed up the first stairway. Near the top it was the swaying legs that he saw first, and behind them a large and well-lit room.

  Without the command of their master, the female slaves exhibited all the fuller their state of unlife. Dull, lidless eyes, nestled in sallow faces, alive but not alive, dead but not dead, stared at him as Irion summited the stairs.

  Passing between them was like walking through a forest where all the seeds had been planted in exact, nauseating little rows. Behind the last row of slaves was a giant bed. It was covered in blood; reflecting the halo of candles that hung above.

  That he’d been killed right before one of his wretched orgies delighted Irion. From a new angle, Irion now saw that concubines closer to the bed had been sprayed by his blood. Their resemblance to a military formation suggested this was their position of maintenance when not bringing up a pot of cooked sea slugs or performing their sexual duties. Toadly’s reputation for incessantly leering at the female backside was all the more confirmed, as the swaying columns faced away from where he’d slept and self-fondled.

  Not a cauldron was left unturned. Irion shimmied up chimney shafts, settling for stretching a crawling arm up the ones that he couldn’t inspect further. Irion ended up mimicking the prior stampede up and down the stairs in a fever. He turned the place end over end—thrice over what the goons had done—but Maecidion’s lapis lazuli hand was gone.

  After he’d found a surviving vase to shatter to dust, his fury cooled. Irion gave the undead slut who’d had most her arm hacked off a prompt smack on her ass. The leathery cheek gave in all the way to the bone. Irion was soon staring up at the candles. Their shafts were hardly shorter than when he’d entered. It hadn’t been long.

  Toadly’s killers had been thorough in their search but careless in their escape. He followed their boot prints and spilled keepsakes all the way through the heart of City Cemetery. He was led right between Maecidion’s obelisk and the bottle he’d tossed. Picking up the trinkets and smearing the mud and blood of heavy boot prints would keep the Ward out of this—in the rare chance an investigation into someone like Toadly’s disappearance caught the fancy of an aspiring shift-lead. That concern, however weak or strong, evaporated when Irion saw where the boot tracks had ended.

  *

  “Theee revenge!” Toadly moaned from inside Belot’s parlor. “I shall enact upon you.” His curses didn’t come so much from his mouth, but gurgled from the slash that ran across his throat. Blood and lung-froth spilled over and ran down to the table he was bound to.

  Irion stood outside Belot’s window, moon and graves to his back. It was a matter of convenience that Gormorster Toadly and Denoreyph Belot chose to live on opposing sides of City Cemetery. For those privy to such skirmishes, it created a sort of chess board between the two, rumored to have been encouraged by a committee of Scepters to maintain low property value in the surrounding areas. The demands of the dead had leveled entire city blocks to make way for new rows of headstones and cheap tombs. Yet these domiciles of the two corpse-diddlers remained: paragons of tradition.