Grunts became words. Soon, shadows became scowls and leather gloves. Leading them, an over-muscled lug stowed a petite arm that had been severed at the elbow into his belt. All it would take is one alley-grade wizard among them to route me out, one of the lugs then pulling me up by my neck like a chicken. My crouching intensified to a curl, my dagger blade tight against my palm. If I were one of the Ordrids who prayed, I would have done so as legs burst open the 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,” I 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 army of candles; hung about on sconces, stuck into cracks, and resting on frames of draperies that had somehow been spared.

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

Still, this mangling may have only meant that they never found what they were looking for.

I rushed up the first stairway. Near the top it was the swaying legs that I 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 me as I 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 me. From a new angle, I 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.