He was stuck facing the window. He looked out through the glass and saw the palace grounds—the wall of Castle Hill no more than a hundred yards away, the moon high in the sky. A thin finger of cloud was nearly bisecting the full moon. As he watched, though, Malden saw that it never moved. The stars around the moon never twinkled.

This was all an illusion. The moon, the viscous floor, the mouths that gibbered and guffawed. All created by that orange eye he’d seen in the darkness. It could affect him—it could kill him, he was certain—but none of it was real.

Heaving, pulling with all his might, he managed to lift himself a few inches. Enough to get his right elbow up onto the windowsill. He braced himself there, resting most of his weight against the wall. Then he released the fingers of his left hand from their death-grip on the sill. He nearly fell back into the liquid moonlight, but just managed to keep steady. The window, he saw, was made up of a dozen long panes of glass leaded into a frame of solid wood. He reached up with his left hand and bashed at the closest pane. It did not shatter (for which he was somewhat glad—he’d worried the breaking glass would shred the flesh of his hand), but instead splashed away from him, as fluid as the floor. He reached through the opening he’d made and felt the air outside. Except it wasn’t really air. It felt the same as when he tried to shake Kemper’s hand. Cold and clammy, a nothingness that could not exist according to his other senses. His mind could not accept that absence and thus made of it a presence, gave it texture and sensation where none existed.

For all the misery and misfortune he’d experienced since agreeing to steal the crown, Malden was grateful then for the education those misadventures had given him. Most thieves, he knew, avoided magic and the supernatural like the pox, and for good reason. A common man no matter how deft or agile had little chance against even the simplest wizardry. But he was a fast learner, and because he’d had no choice, he learned something of magic in the last week or so. He learned it operated by rules. Not—by definition—the same rules the natural world obeyed. Magic was a perversion of those fundamental laws. Yet like any perversion, it must mirror the original, if only in a distorted fashion. Magic was never just arbitrary, though it could seem that way. There had to be an inherent logic to it, a set of boundaries beyond which it would not pass. Light and glass might act like liquids here, but they would always act like liquids. Solid objects here seemed as strong as steel. For the nonce, at least, he thought he had the hallway’s measure.