He turned around and saw that the door he’d come through was gone. The wall there was smooth plaster and wood.

A corridor lined with windows, letting in moonlight—he knew this place. He’d been here before. It was the same corridor he’d crossed to reach the tower room where the crown slept, guarded by its tentacled horror. It was the twin of the moonlit corridor from the palace. A place of traps that he had bested through his skills, and this its perfect double, as if a team of dwarves had worked at copying that hallway down to the placement of each dust mote, the angle of every beam of light. It was as if he’d been transported bodily back to the palace, back to the place of his greatest success—and worst blunder—as a thief. He could almost believe that this was exactly what had happened.

Except—it couldn’t be. That hallway had been severely damaged in the demon’s magical enlargement. That hallway probably didn’t even exist anymore. Surely the Burgrave had no reason to rebuild it exactly as it had been. Which meant he was still in Hazoth’s house. Yet there was no way such a hallway could exist in the villa, in this particular location.

There could be no windows in this hallway. The trapped hallway in Hazoth’s villa was surrounded on both sides by thick-walled chambers. There was no way the moon could come into this place.

So the moonlight, at least, was an illusion. A phantasm conjured by Hazoth’s sorcery. And yet—why did it look so maddeningly like the corridor in the palace? Why would the magician choose to make this place the replica of a corridor that only a handful of people had ever seen? It made no sense.

At least he knew the secret of the hallway. The shadows between the pools of moonlight would hide pressure plates that caused spring-loaded spears to shoot down and impale anyone foolish enough to step on them. The final patch of moonlight would have a collapsing floor, which opened on a shaft that led to the Burgrave’s dungeon, or its fell equivalent in the villa. Or—would it? Malden reviewed the plan of the villa in his head. The hallway lay at the center of the third floor. Below it was the gallery that overlooked the grand hall on the ground floor. So the shaft at the end of this hall would drop an unwitting thief onto the iron sphere.

Perhaps there were other differences, too. Perhaps that was the point.

Ah.