We Ordrids are all fond of the moon. I gazed upon it, the great beacon of my House. I thought I’d heard it call my name as I stumbled through all the graves. Blossoming on the vines that grew on elder headstones, Orphedilias opened to vector in its gentle light. Poets and ninnies like Belot would have stopped to ogle at their shape perhaps.

I came to the graveyard’s center, the Maedraderium. I halted and stood before the new obelisk. Black and gold, jutting out of a cluster of pediment tombs, this robust monument to my great-uncle now towered. His Virulence had worked in startling mystery at times, not issuing an immediate and savage revenge on the House of Rogaire was chief among my confusions.

But now this. Of all the places to be buried.

The common man was at best a two-legged dog, and Maecidion had willed his obelisk in a graveyard hardly good enough for such a dog’s dead fleas. What unfathomable nonsense! He could have been exalted a mile high; future generations of Ordrids and wide-eyed gawkers would have been straining their necks. The prattling on about the Maedraderium being City Cemetery’s wealthy centerpiece meant little to me. Most still just called this island of stones, more a small city of venerated dead, “Laugher’s Lot.” If it had any meaning at all, I’d have to guess it derived from the morticians, mirthfully swelling the lot as their coffers filled.

I held in my hand a bottle of that corn liquor, Spiritual Oppressor. I took another pull. “I am sorry, dearest Lord,” I said, “but I cannot see to it. See to it that I leave your wishes untouched.” And why shouldn’t I feel this way? The very man whose will I was rebelling against had once made such bold moves in his own time. Would he—could he—at least appreciate my ambitions, providing the impetus to be so bold? The reading now three days old, it troubled me no less.

Swaying, emptied bottle in hand, I arched my back and stuck out my chest. Behind Maecidion’s obelisk, the moon, a vast orb hinting at tainted cheese, greeted me like a brother.

I hadn’t come to talk to an obelisk; just a thoughtful gesture along the way. I tossed the Spiritual Oppressor and continued to a hamlet on the edge of the graves.

—

I crouched in the hedges like some sneak thief. But such humiliations were necessary. Toadly’s tower wasn’t so much a tower, more a farmer’s silo, complete with thatched rotting top, giving the whole thing the appearance of a giant’s refracting phallus that had caught Thina’s Poxy. It loomed so close to City Cemetery that I couldn’t tell if the neglected hedge, grown wild with weeds and brambers, belonged to Toadly or to Nilghorde.

I’d sobered quick enough, perhaps expedited by having suffered bouts of rain.