Malden stepped through the doorway and into the trapped corridor, careful to test his footing before he put his weight on the floor. It did not give way. He closed the cover of the hand lamp and closed his eyes tightly, then opened them wide again to adjust them to the darkness. He had expected some small amount of light in the corridor—surely at least a little would spill in from under the door or through the keyhole. Yet his eyes swam with the complete absence of light.

Well, almost complete.

The hallway was pitch-dark save for a blot of orange light high off in the distance. His eyes couldn’t seem to adapt to the gloom otherwise. He pulled back the hatch of his dark lantern, trying to see anything at all. A pale glow emanated from the lamp, but only for a moment before the candle inside the lantern sputtered and died.

Malden cursed silently and reached into his tunic to find his tinderbox. Before he could reach it, though, the distant orange light flared up and he looked toward it. What had been a shapeless glow was now a fiery orb with a black center, surrounded by a burning ring of gold. It looked a great deal like the eyeball of some enormous monster.

It looked at him. It looked into him. It looked through him. And then madness swept through him like a wind howling out of the pit.

Malden staggered and clenched his eyes shut. He dropped the dark lantern but didn’t hear it fall. He clutched at his head with his hands.

’Ware the eye, Lockjaw had said. And nothing more. What had the old thief known? Had Lockjaw broken into this villa once and fallen afoul of the same trap? Or had he only heard tale of it from someone else? Malden had realized long ago that Lockjaw’s silence didn’t only serve to guard his secrets. It made other people feel it was safe to tell him their own. Lockjaw was a great treasure trove of gossip. Yet if only he’d been a bit less stingy with it this time . . . well. What hadn’t Lockjaw told him?

Malden shook himself as if he were cold, though in truth he felt like he’d been singed by a firestorm. He opened his eyes, but shielded them with one hand so he wouldn’t meet the gaze of that hellish thing again.

He needn’t have bothered. The eye was gone. So was the darkness.

He was standing in a corridor perhaps twenty-five feet long. Tall windows stood every ten feet or so down its length, and moonlight spilled in to form pools of silver on the wooden floor. Between each patch of light lay impenetrable shadows. It was as if the hall were one column of a game board with alternating spaces of light and dark.