’Ware the eye. Malden thought he understood a little now. The eye had seen into his mind, and made this place from his memories. That was the only explanation for how it could look so exactly the same. It was a subtle spell, and a shrewd one. It could have made him think he was standing in a field of flowers, or at the bottom of the ocean, or in the pit itself. But he would have known instantly that those were illusions. The eye knew he expected to find a hallway full of traps—so it provided one. The illusion was so complete, and so convincing—the color of the moonlight was a wan silver, the air smelled of old stone and the clean air of Castle Hill. If he had not known better, he might have thought that the disorientation he felt was simply his eyes adjusting to the moonlight. He might have believed utterly in the hallway before him. Without Lockjaw’s warning, he probably would have thought all those things. The old man might just have saved his life.

The hallway was based on his memory of the place. There was no reason it would play fair with those recollections. He looked around him for his dark lantern but could not find it. Perhaps it was still there but the illusion concealed it.

In a pouch at his belt he had three of Slag’s most reliable creations. Leaden balls, wrapped in leather to keep them from clinking together. He drew one out of the pouch and hefted its weight, then tossed it down the hallway. It landed in a patch of moonlight with a dull thud, then rolled into the darkness beyond where he couldn’t see it. If this hallway obeyed the rules that Malden remembered, a trio of brass spears should drop downward from the ceiling like a portcullis and impale the ball in place.

Except that wasn’t what happened at all.

Instead the darkness opened wide, and enormous white teeth flashed in stray moonlight. The teeth crashed together on the ball and shredded it. Then the teeth flew open again. A tongue as thick as Malden’s arm, forked at its end, flopped out of the mouth/pit and licked at the floor around the teeth like a hungry dog searching for a stray morsel of food. When it found nothing, it flicked back inside the teeth, which closed together and disappeared until only darkness remained on the floor.

Malden thought of the teeth inside the lock he’d just picked, which had chewed at his rake and wrench. Those teeth had disappeared as soon as the lock opened, but they’d left very real marks on his tools. So whether this set of teeth—many, many times larger—were illusory or not, they would certainly make short work of him should he fall into their grasp.