"What?" Redd whispered, his body tightening beneath Ludwig's grip. His foot hovered inches above a patch of floor that looked exactly like every other patch of floor.
That was the problem. Things that looked harmless in places like this were usually waiting for someone to trust appearances.
Ludwig stared at the bricks ahead, then at the faint line where the mortar shifted. He could not fully see the spell, but he felt the arrangement in the air. Too neat. Too quiet. The sealwork in the walls seemed to gather near that section of floor, not visibly, but in pressure. A place where the tunnel's breathing changed.
The Malvolume Codex pulsed at Ludwig's hip. Its pages shifted without wind, and the air beside him bent inward.
Kaiser emerged from the book with that unpleasant smoothness of someone stepping out of a space that had no right to contain a person. Under the lantern's illusion, he looked human enough from a distance, but there was no making that entrance normal.
