Malden’s blood curdled in his veins. He knew he’d never been closer to death than this exact moment. His brains turned over in his head, desperately trying to imagine what to do next. He could think of only one thing: obfuscate. Stall for time. “I beg to disagree,” he said. His mouth was so dry he had trouble forming the words. Hazoth had not given him leave to speak, but he knew it no longer mattered. Silence at that moment would have been his death warrant.

“What’s that, rodent?”

“You suggest that my logic was faulty in some way. That I made an irrational decision by attacking you. I would say instead that my information was merely incomplete. I did not try to stab you before, when you caught me. I did not try to do so when your back was turned. I waited until your magic had drained you and distracted your attention to the point where an attack might logically succeed. You see, I thought very carefully before I struck that blow.”

Hazoth looked upward, as if consulting a higher power. “Almost clever,” he said. “There is one flaw, however. One place where your logic falls apart.”

“Yes?” Malden asked, in the tone of a scholar asking for a gloss on a particularly thorny text.

“You,” Hazoth said, “are the human equivalent of a cockroach. I am a being of extraordinary power. You should have recognized that someone like you could never, under any circumstances, harm me. The intelligent thing to do in this situation would have been to curl up and die. It would at least have saved you from what comes next.”

Hazoth walked a few yards away from Malden and looked up again.

For the first time, Malden saw what had changed. When the sorcerer had cast his spell, Malden did not know what effect it might have. Now he understood. He had been transported from one place to another, without traversing the intervening distance. He was no longer in the sanctum.

Hazoth had delivered the three of them to his grand hall. They stood in the shadow of the iron egg.

“Now, I’ll ask again. Who sent you here?”

Malden looked away. “I came on my own—this was all my plan,” he insisted. Why implicate Cutbill? It wouldn’t save his own life, and it would only make trouble for the guildmaster of thieves. If he could spare Cutbill that, then perhaps he could earn a little something with his death. “I need the crown or Anselm Vry is going to kill me.”

Magic buzzed through the air toward Malden like an angry insect. An invisible stinger jabbed him in the chest, causing a bright blossom of pain to stretch its petals all the way around his rib cage.

“Impossible,” Hazoth said. “You lack the will for something like this.”