Irion scanned the room. A place for poor work, surely; Belot stood at the foot of the table. Behind Belot, tall as a man, were shelves heavied by potions and jars. On the other side of this table, Belot faced the material he used when playing necromancer.

  The stack of corpses appeared untampered, having died at ages from elder to infant, and now lay like decomposing firewood. And above everything, attached to a ceiling hook, watching from an iron birdcage, sat Irion’s imp. Seemingly content to forever study the shelves; feet, arms, and nose poking out from the cage, the imp, Irion rejoiced, must have refused to imprint with Belot. Imprisoned until it assimilated to its new master, the little fiend was reduced to sit and watch.

  Strapped down at his wrists and his ankles, purple with fresh death, Toadly could only squirm and weep. “Youuuu,” slid off Toadly’s swollen tongue as his eyes rolled upward against his will.

  “Oh, silence now,” Belot said, hands on his hips. “If you absolutely refuse to tell me where it is, I can’t let you rest. You’re doing this to yourself, you know.”

  Delight and intrigue fought within Irion. It was a delight to witness Toadly being tortured, and even more a delight to savor these moments right before Belot’s big surprise. Irion knew what he was up to, for Belot, if anything, was consistent. Though Toadly’s flesh was now dead, his mind again lived, one Belot had brought back, and now began to dominate.

  Where it is? It struck Irion like lightning. Abducting Toadly had to be for good reason. It—Belot could only be referring to the hand! If Belot didn’t already have it, then where did Toadly have it hidden? Irion glared through the window as he redeveloped his plan. He could usurp minds too.

  Belot began to raise his arms. Toadly howled in accordance. Irion’s luck had turned, for he couldn’t have asked for more perfect timing.

  Baying in protest, Toadly was feeling every thought he’d ever held suck toward his captor like warmed honey dripping from a wooden spoon. Belot, fueled by the frantic kicks and pleas for mercy through a slit throat, inched closer. He was putting Toadly in the state all necromancers feared most. For while what body one could occupy could change form, and the very boundaries of life and death could be hopped over like a naughty child hopping over a line deemed off-limits, the mind itself was the sole source of a being, to be preserved and unmolested at all cost. Belot’s arms raised, he held the separate powders for his spell in each hand. Upon their union, Toadly would divulge all, and go forever to his grave defiled.

  If Irion hadn’t switched out the powders the day of the reading.

  When Belot’s hands met, he lit up as if made of lamp oil. A detonation erupted. Belot became ghastly whistles in a burgeoning gown of flames. Toadly, eyes wide and elated, showed even the undead savored comeuppance.

  Irion kicked open the door. Toadly flopped his head toward the noise, just as soon recognizing Irion and returning to his panic. “That blue hand,” Irion said, looming over the gluttonous wretch, “is in as many paintings in my home as pulseless whores are in yours.” The pleasure of knowing he’d suck up every drop of Toadly’s miserable mind was second only to the joy of hearing Belot’s screams.

  Perhaps Irion owed his late great-uncle an immediate and roaring “thank you”. When Belot was bequeathed what he had been, it was the final spur in Irion’s side to do the world a favor and rid it of him. That Irion would now own the imp, Toadly’s mind for an hour, and, with the latter executed correctly, the family heirloom too: Irion breathed in the smoke as fires died on the charred meat at his boot toe.

  How the zest for a meal is conquered by the desire to couple with a woman for the first time, and how retreating from a crumbling building would triumph over said coupling, his attention had been torn from Toadly to the burning of Belot. Now lamentably over, Irion was able to refocus.

  Toadly lay motionless.

  Irion shook his corpse. A sudden nervousness grew inside Irion, for this wasn’t supposed to happen. The preparatory segment of the incantation had been broken, yes, but experience and experimentation suggested that reanimation waned at a much slower rate. Toadly was now fully dead, the normal dead, and secondary and tertiary reanimations were exponentially more difficult.

  A sudden adjustment from the imp caused Irion to glance in the direction of not only its cage, but the bodies below it. Had that window above the corpse-stack always been ajar?

  How much time had actually elapsed since Belot had been a crawling bonfire? But this wasn’t the only pressing question. Toadly, though a low carcass in comparison to other practitioners that speckled the world, was not without his craft. There were tricks, hexes, and bedevilments accredited to his name. Irion was reduced to scratching his head and staring back at the imp.

  *

  After kicking Toadly one last time, Irion sat down to give it all a laugh. It was all he could do. “Irion Ordrid the Poor Planner” may one day be chiseled into his own obelisk, but he would at least enjoy this next improvisation. Belot would live again.

  A few powders from his cabinet later, Irion had poured the appropriate line between himself and Belot. The invocations started, Belot’s smoldering heap began to twitch.

  The waiting was gruesome—not the visuals, but the agony of waiting for reanimation to fulfill. All people, bodies, and species were different, and in time-sensitive moments such as this, all Irion could do was pace about and kick convenient objects. It was when he looked up at his imp once more that from Belot there burst the grimmest consecution of cries. No less the sounds of Hell, in this was concentrated a hatred in life ripened one thousand fold through death, and by treacherous events of the trip to and back from those shores.

  “What causes thee wakening of the Great Denoreyph Belot?” the grizzly skeleton wailed, rising to meatless feet.

  “You were always so lousy with components,” Irion said. Belot’s skull cocked back. “Laying them about the room, labeling them in that thick gaudy ink, like a man going blind.”

  “For thissss, you summon me? To reminisce about dead lyceum days, and the women who juiced my bed next to your celibate cot?”

  The skeleton, draped only in charred flesh, stepped closer, ribs stuck out and balled, bony fists cast back. In eyeless sockets, Irion saw an immaterial glimmer.

  “Where is the blue hand?”

  “That’s no concern to me now,” Belot hissed. “Let us ask our dear friend—Oh, Gormorster. Oh, look—he’s dead, deader than I.”

  “If he still has it, I’ll get it from him. We both know it,” Irion said. “Professor Fryte did it with that stitched-up fuck she had locked up in her closet. We both were there. You remember. You may be,” his smirk broadened, “excuse me, used to be an overrate, labeling your childish jars and cheating on tests, but you know how usurpation works.”

  Belot blew out a laugh that paralleled his recent cry in both volume and hysteria. “That may be. But I always remembered to close my windows.” Everything in the parlor that could move stared at the lone open window. “My old freights looking a wee light there, Irion.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Belot cackled. “Toadly is goooone, Irion.”

  No, Toadly was laying on the table. Yet as Irion listened to Belot hiss, practices that he’d heard of but had never seen himself began to encroach his mind. Casting one’s essence into another form was a feat Toadly had been persecuted over and heralded for. It would have taken time to weave, but in Irion’s savoring of the fire, he had given him such a vital commodity.

  Irion looked once more at the stack of corpses. “Ah, yes, yesss. Good, Irion. Toadly is now,” Irion heard Belot saying. There had been a body there, one that was there no longer. It had been—Belot’s words then seeped into Irion’s ear, finishing the dreadful thought: “a babe.”

  “You’re going to help me find him!” Irion shouted. “Fire has seemed to have forgotten you the craft, Belot! This,” Irion flapped his hand at Belot’s hilarious state, “this is just the beginning. This living mind of yours, being used to mock and riddle as wasteful as done in life, it just came from me. Me!” He took a hard step forward. “We both know I can just as easily extract from it, as you were about to do to that fat lump of shit over there.”

  As best a skull with sporadic rigging can, Belot quivered. Irion opened his coat and withdrew a vial. Belot’s bony hands made for his neck as Irion opened up the vial and drank down its contents. The bitter syrup was exactly what Belot had drunk to own the mind of Toadly. Irion felt his will wrap around Belot’s like a chain. The effect would not last forever, but maybe long enough.

  Whether to pose a less startling silhouette, or maybe the damage of flame had made open night air feel like dancing razors, or maybe the vanity of Belot in life somehow held in his state of chattel-undead—for whatever reason, he draped himself in one of his black silken cloaks and followed his master out the door.

  At the base of the open window Irion discovered a baby’s footprints. They had scampered into the wet lawn of City Cemetery.

  *

  They’d stalked clear across City Cemetery. The footprints cut through those of Belot’s thugs, darted for Toadly’s tower straight through the Maedraderium, but then surprised Irion by veering a sharp left. It led them through an embankment of streets and buildings that met a corner of the graveyard. They now lurked inside a large nursery, having found the final footprint at its lanterned door. Toadly, the clever little rat.

  Toadly, the clever little rat, Belot ideated, reconfirming that Irion now owned his mind.

  Absorbing themselves into the darkest corners of a nursery bay was easy enough. In the moonlit middle, a row of cribs cooed and stirred and kicked up little blankets.

  The moon came through the bay’s elongated windows, stretching shadows of the cribs long against a back wall.

  Start at the far end, Irion thought at Belot.

  Start at the far end, Belot ideated.

  Belot moved off, drifting through the moonbeams and then out of Irion’s sight. Irion began searching the nearer cribs. Toadly needed to be “alive,” but Irion would certainly sever a fat little leg. Possessed bodies are impelled by stamina and dexterity far greater than the living. Irion knew it, as did Toadly.

  He peered, cradle after cradle, looking to see if the miserable trickster had occupied an empty. After scanning the spaces underneath, he stood to keep an eye on Belot, slowly sailing through the rows.

  What is that? Belot and Irion thought at the same time. Lamp-light approached, flat-footed plods coming right behind it. A narrow passageway that until then had remained hidden now bore an attendant.

  Irion had Belot coil under his nearest crib. Irion pressed his back against the nearest wall.

  A nursemaid, lamp cast out in front of her houndish nose, hobbled in.

  Legs. Walking. Words Irion felt Belot think freely, almost whispering right over his teeth. From his obscure angle, it appeared the woman was passing the crib he hid under. I’m on the ground, Belot thought, making Irion’s heart leap, for his dominion over him was already beginning to wane. Making matters more perilous, Belot must have said it aloud. The woman had stopped. The lantern shook.

  If Belot was discovered under a crib like some hideous snake, the woman’s shrieks would startle every babe and armed guard within a mile. Dagger honed, using each passing crib to conceal himself, Irion made his way to them.

  “Smoked pork?” the woman said. A lone crib now from her back, Irion saw her shrug her shoulders then resume her rounds. He sheathed his dagger.

  They continued searching, and they may have done so all night if it weren’t for the imp flashing Irion a sudden vision.

  Irion first elated, for this meant the imp knew it belonged to the House of Ordrid. The greatest of familiars, when one is joined with such a little fiend, it allows its master its cunning, to hear through its ears, and, Irion now gaped, the horrid sights seen through its eyes.

  It showed him a scene unfold in an instant:

  Toadly was climbing through the open window back at Belot’s. His new hands he must have loathed, but they grasped the window superbly, as did his new legs, having bursting up from the ground below. His laughter while in his obese true form had sounded to Irion once like a creature being boiled alive. But now the infant, mottled and blue in decay, emitted its squeaks and giggles.

  Irion had been tricked! He must have double backed as Irion made a fool of himself in the damn nursery. The giggles made their way into Belot’s parlor as Toadly scaled down the stool and apron and jumped nimbly to the floor.

  It gave Irion some reprieve to see that Toadly stood over his old body, lying there dead and humiliated. Irion was sure in some singular way he thanked him too. For Irion had given to Belot a fate that any captive would dream to see their captor suffer. But more than that, cringing at the laughter that had been aimed at him, by killing Belot Irion had freed Toadly’s mind…and had given him time to escape.

  Toadly walked around his body, his current head no higher than the plateau of the rack that held his former self.

  Toadly stopped and picked up a chunk of blackened flesh. He then dropped it and sprang from the floor like a cricket, landing on his own bloated corpse.

  Toadly was going to try to not only reanimate his old body, but reassume it! If so, and if he were able to seal himself off and repair his manglings to a semblance of function, Toadly half-alive and enraged could be worse than ten normal men.

  Small arms were cast skyward. His baby mouth began to open. What would have been Toadly’s booming moan was something quite different. The rites, though uttered perfectly, filled the room with that of a sprite’s. The baby’s head whipped down. Dollish eyes gazed. Then he cast his head back. Its eyes glossed pure white.

  The imp flashed Irion this—its vision, sending him scrambling back toward Belot’s.

  *

  Belot ran behind as if Irion were pulling him by a leash. The coming of morning bled.

  That cauldron of shit couldn’t have, Irion thought.

  That cauldron couldn’t, Belot ideated.

  His control over Belot was weakening more each moment. With a surge, Irion willed him to stand guard at his open window, while Irion sweated against his door and caught his breath.

  His worry was then confirmed. When he reentered the parlor, Irion pressed his back against the door, hung his head, and sighed.

  The dismal worktable at the center of this dismal room was bare. Near his feet lay the baby, now limp and contorted, as if thrown.

  Walking to the table, he stopped at the cage hanging above. The night was far from a loss. Irion had the imp, one who’d already done for him what it would never do for Belot. Plus, Irion had killed the Great—ornate—Denoreyph Belot, and even fulfilled an adolescent fantasy of commanding his corpse around. Toadly would be addressed later, once reorganized and a better plan made.

  It was right then that Irion saw the imp’s face change.

  *

  When Irion came to, blasting pain flowed from a gash on the back of his head. He was face down, on the floor, in a pool of his own blood.

  Belot stood above him.

  Disenthralled from Irion’s dominion, wielding one of his ornamental canes that had surely felled the Ordrid, meat and teeth sneered.

  His sockets flashed.

  Belot widened his stance. Regripping his weapon, “Not the fate for you I desired,” he wailed, “but I haven’t time!” He rose his cane to, Irion was sure, beat him to death in as many strikes as he could before oblivion claimed them both. But before the first one fell, Toadly came barreling out of nowhere. In Toadly’s hands was a colossal iron spoon from one of Belot’s cauldrons.

  Though Irion had managed to roll over, he was still unable to stand. Separated only by Irion lying at their feet, the two then clashed like pit fighters.

  When Irion rolled up onto his side, his head exploded in such pain he’d thought for a moment that the damned spoon had found him instead. He watched the melee as an emerged worm would. The skeleton was dodging the slow, skull-crushing swoops while hissing his curses. The fat man, almost a light green, gargled through the slice under his bottom-most chin, while his engorged stomach jostled with his violent wiggling. With a loping swing of the spoon, something fell out from between the glistened roles of Toadly’s stomach.

  Landing upright, as if placed by a servant, the lapis lazuli hand stood before Irion. Toadly’s feet and Belot’s bones danced as he clasped onto it.

  He had it! It was done! Soon Belot would fade, and if Irion were lucky, while he waited on the floor unnoticed, maybe Belot would use that cane to break Toadly’s fat head.

  Confusion penetrated his euphoria, for right then the imp opened its cage.

  Irion’s eyes were pulled from the fight when the imp reached out and stuck its scorpion-stinger fingernail into the lock that had been—or so Irion had thought—preventing its flight.

  Flew it did, to a shelf to latch its small hands around a small black jar. Little bat wings gliding, the imp flew over Belot, Toadly, and Irion, and dusted them with its contents.

  It didn’t take long.

  The blue hand began to thrum. It began to burn Irion’s fingers, but he only held it tighter. A moment later he had been pulled to his feet, but by what he could not say.

  He was standing between both enemies. Belot’s bones flew against him, sticking to his arms and chest as if attached by paste. Belot’s teeth chattered in his ear while Toadly’s head was slung back and a fountain of noise and bile erupted from the gash.

  It was as if the three were standing still while the room spun at a terrible speed. Toadly was smaller now—his eyes glaring up at Irion while his arms hugged his leg. What looked like maggots squirmed where Belot’s large bones had been just a moment before.