David Chandler - Den of thieves

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.

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.

’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.

He didn’t like the look of that tongue either. If he jumped over the dark sections of the hallway floor-a tactic that had worked admirably in the palace-could he be sure the maw wouldn’t open anyway? That tongue could grab him out of the air and pull him into its teeth before he reached the next spot of light.

This was going to take some care and thought. He knew he didn’t have a lot of time left. He would have to be quick about this. But if he was too quick, it would be his doom.

He wanted to see just how close he could get to the maw in the floor without causing it to open. Keeping near the wall by the windows where the light was best, he walked out into the first patch of moonlight. He watched the darkness beyond quite closely, looking for any sign that it was aware of him. Thus, when his feet started sinking into the floor, he thought only that he was walking on a thick carpet.

He didn’t notice that the moonlit floor was not solid, but as yielding and viscous as porridge, until it had already sucked him in up to the ankles.

The floor did not ripple or shimmer like liquid. It looked as solid and flat as stone. Yet it sucked him downward, little by little, and Malden could feel its substance filling his shoes and sticking to the hairs on his legs.

He tried to pull his left foot free of the floor and found only that this threw him off balance-his right foot had nothing to brace against. He kicked and flailed, but that only sped his descent until the floor sucked hungrily at his knees. He started to fall backward, and knew that if he didn’t stop himself he would be sucked down into the floor until his face was covered, until the silvery moonlight stuff filled his nose and mouth and he drowned.

Up and down the hallway the patches of darkness between the pools of moonlight came alive, toothy maws opening and quivering with laughter while long tongues snaked and licked at the air. The hallway was mocking him.

Malden refused to let a patch of floor think him a figure of fun. He had no real honor, as he’d told Croy, and he’d never let pride get in the way of a job before. But no gods-damned inanimate object was going to laugh at him and get away with it.

Desperate for anything to hold onto, his hands shot out and his fingers latched onto the sill of the window. He was embedded in the floor up to his waist, but he could hold himself up if he used all the strength in his arms. That strength was not, unfortunately, enough to haul him free.