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 over with the purest white.

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

—

Belot ran behind me as if I were pulling him with a leash. The coming of morning bled into the black surrounding the moon.

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

That cauldron couldn’t, Belot ideated.

My control over Belot was weakening. With a surge, I willed him to stand guard at his open window, while I sweated against his door and caught my breath.

My worry was then confirmed. When I reentered the parlor, I pressed my back against the door, hung my head, and sighed.

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

Walking to the table, I stopped at the cage hanging above. The night was far from a loss. I had the imp, one who had already done for me what it only did for those it deemed worthy. Plus, I’d 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 I saw the imp’s face change.

—

When I came to, blasting pain flowed from a gash somewhere on the back of my head. I was face down, on the floor, in a pool of my own blood. Belot stood above me. Disenthralled from my dominion, wielding one of his ornamental canes that had surely felled me, meat and teeth sneered and his sockets flashed.

Belot widened his stance. Regripping his weapon, “Not the fate for you I desired,” he wailed, “but I haven’t the time!” He rose his cane to, I’m sure, beat me to death in as many strikes as he could before oblivion claimed us 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.