“You’re going to help me find him!” I shouted. “Fire has seemed to have forgotten you the craft, Belot! This,” I flapped my hand at his 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!” I 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. I opened my coat and withdrew a vial. Belot’s bony hands made for my neck as I opened up the vial and drank down its contents. The bitter syrup was exactly what Belot had drunk to own the mind of Toadly. I felt my 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 I discovered a baby’s footprints. They had scampered into the wet lawn of City Cemetery.

—

We’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 me by veering a sharp left. It led us through an embankment of streets and buildings that met a corner of the graveyard. We 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 I now owned his mind.

Absorbing ourselves into the darkest corners of a nursery bay was easy enough. In the moonlit middle, a row of cribs cooed stirs and kicked up 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, I thought at Belot.

Start at the far end, Belot ideated.

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

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