Her slumped state made my actions no less nauseous. Nothing was around her neck but a necklace lined with star sapphire. Removed and put in my pocket, I patted her all over, desperately wanting to feel something solid. After running my hands inside her girdle, I fingered through her wetted undergarments. Between her thighs, nestled snuggly against her pelvis, the ring I’d put on my finger came on a sudden ting. My fingers clasped around them. From that unholy perfumed trench I pulled out the keys. Two, one large and one small, dangled on a golden ring.

Dark, thick ribbons of blood trailed off Werlyle’s arms as he reentered the dining hall. Panting, he was still taking excessive and bizarre routes in his search for additional victims. His gut protruded from his ever upward-crawling shirt as he exerted himself to a blissful exhaustion. The keys had found my pocket in a flash, but as I planned on explaining that no such keys existed, he exited to enter a dark nook where apparently someone still lived.

My excitement was incapable of restraint. What vaults those walls would surely contain. What we would pack into the cart together would be impressive, lucrative—quite, in fact—but it wasn’t statues and paintings that had lured me.

“Snier,” Werlyle said, emerging from the nook and brandishing his dripping sword. His boots emitted a mushy sound as he left a remarkable path of footprints. “Okay, think that’s all of ’em.” Restarting his ticks, “One cook wasn’t fully out, drunk on whatever you did, and those big white eyes were so pink and hazy. He thought I was some ghost or god those spearmen worship. You seen those little wooden idols they have up in the kitchen?”

Werlyle had surely earned my attention. The toad, in plum and blood, fooled the eye. He was a plug of some visceral tissue that oozed out of a wound or woman’s loins. But he also killed. As much as I had confidently calibrated him, and at some moments even pitied him, he had transformed before me into a man that was to be treated as a genuine maniac.

“Yeah,” he continued, “I think he thought I was one of those. How he prayed—”

“Let us get to work,” I said, hopefully appearing unmoved.

“All right, all right. No rush as I see it, but I’m not the mastermind here. What shall we do now, sir?” He bowed low, like a butler.

Two hefty table covers later, we were in the library. All six volumes of Poems of the Classics, the legendary Denom Vandahl’s Transient State of Grace and Songs in Regal Twilight, The Embryonic Sorcerer and many more I pulled from their shelves and dropped in Werlyle’s blood-covered hands.

The sight of them made me have to consider: Was this come-to-fruition maniac done with his bloodlust? Was he even capable of splitting the loot and then merrily go about his affairs? Was I, Tymothus Snier, willing to do such splitting?