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.

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

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

Toadly lay motionless.

I shook his corpse as if trying to rouse a lazy wife from her bed. A sudden nervousness grew inside me, 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 me 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 our forbidden world, was not without his craft. There were tricks, hexes, and bedevilments accredited to his name. I was reduced to scratching my head and staring back at my imp.

—

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

A few powders from his cabinet later, I’d poured the appropriate line between me and him. The invocations started, Belot’s smoldering heap began to twitch.