The top of the wall surrounding the park made a narrow avenue winding through half of the Stink and all the way down to the common of Parkwall. Malden ran along its top, where an endless row of wrought-iron spearheads stuck up from the capstones. One slip and he’d be impaled, but Malden never slipped.

When he reached the end of the wall he squatted down and peered through the darkness. A sliver of moon lit the scene, while vapors of mist curled on the grass of the common where a few stray sheep slept on their feet. Beyond the Ladypark’s south wall a hundred yards of open ground surrounded a grand villa. Parkwall was known for its enclosed houses, which belonged to those citizens rich enough to afford mansions yet willing to live so far away from the crowded merchant neighborhood of the Golden Slope. This house was the largest of them all: a massive three story pile of white stone, busy with gables and flying buttresses. Its walls were pierced in a hundred places by broad windows of clear, smooth glass—expensive—and in the front by a twenty-foot-wide rose window of stained glass, worked with cabalistic symbols—ruinously expensive. It would look very much like a cathedral, Malden thought, had it possessed any spires.

Smaller outbuildings clustered the forecourt, while in back of the house was a broad and meticulously tended garden of topiary and fountains. The whole was surrounded not by a wall, but by a simple fence of iron bars, pointed at the top to discourage anyone from climbing over. The fence looked imposing, but Malden might have laughed at the security it provided (had he not been trying to stay quiet as a mouse). A boy, or even just a very thin man, could slip between those bars by turning sideways.

He was not a fool, of course. He knew whose house this was, and that the fence would be the least of its defenses. It belonged to Hazoth, the only sorcerer of real power in the Free City of Ness. Malden knew of the man by reputation. Growing up in the city, unruly children were often threatened with a visit from the sorcerer, and even some adults used his name as an oath. Though Hazoth was accepted as a leading citizen (the only prerequisite of that status being gold), he was a reclusive figure who only came out of his home for grand public occasions. Such a character naturally attracted his share of attention and superstition—a reputation that was worth a dozen walls and moats and palisades. Whether Hazoth was truly as powerful as the legends made him out to be, no thief with natural survival instincts would risk drawing the man’s attention.