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

After I’d found a surviving vase to shatter to dust, my fury cooled. I 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. I was soon staring up at the candles. Their shafts were hardly shorter than when I’d entered the tower. It hadn’t been long.

Toadly’s killers had been thorough in their search but careless in their escape. I followed their boot prints and spilled keepsakes all the way through the heart of City Cemetery. I was led right between Maecidion’s obelisk and the bottle I’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 I saw where the boot tracks had ended.

—

“Theee reeevenge I shall enact upon you,” Toadly moaned inside Belot’s parlor. 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.

I stood outside Belot’s window, moon and graves to my back. It was a matter of convenience that Gormorster Toadly and Denoreyph Belot chose to live on opposing sides of City Cemetery. For those of us 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.