The next ten minutes were filled with anxious chatter.

  Sophia picked up a few tidbits that seemed interesting. The message box was apparently made by one specific shop in Izel that also made the messenger bird pearls that actually carried the messages. They had limited range, but that was enough to reach anywhere in Izel. They could stick around and repeat the message a few times, but they could only manage verbal messages and they could only fly once. The messenger birds actually sought the message box they were keyed to, so if you wanted more pearls you had to bring in the box or buy a new box. Amy wasn’t certain how many pearls were keyed to her box.

  Amy’s second pearl was keyed to her mother’s message box. She didn’t want to use it, but would if they didn’t get a reply from her uncle. This was what the message boxes were for.

  Marcie knew only a little more about the situation in Izel than she’d said. The attack on the Registry started a couple of hours after Sophia’s team left. With the time it took to get to the Challenge, it was possible it had started shortly before they entered, but it was more likely that it started while they were already inside the Challenge.

  Either way, the Challenge explained why Amy hadn’t gotten a messenger bird: they couldn’t find their keyed messenger box if it was inside a Challenge. That meant that anyone who’d tried to send Amy a message knew she was inside a Challenge, because it would work even if the box wasn’t with someone; it just wouldn’t deliver the message until someone had the box in their possession. Amy didn’t know exactly how it defined that, but she knew that was how it worked. She’d seen it when she was younger.

  Marcie hadn’t seen fighting in the rest of the city, but she was certain it was happening. Almost everyone in Izel had a connection to the Registry, even if they didn’t actively use the Challenges. The only other thing Izel had going for it was the high mana density compared to elsewhere, even elsewhere in the Skylands, and to safely take advantage of that required Called … who were almost always contacted through the Registry.

  Once Marcie got on that topic, she had more than enough to talk about. She hadn’t always worked in the Library; while her Profession was Librarian, she’d worked as one of the receptionists and administrators for the Registry while she tried to decide if she wanted to accept a Calling or not. She knew all sorts of funny stories about things Called were hired to handle, and was in the middle of telling them about an infestation of animated cleaning supplies when something landed on Amy’s shoulder.

  “Mihandrel’s Marvelous Mixtures, side door, follow the green star upstairs.” Los’en’s voice came from a black swan that Amy caught as it seemed to melt into a dull ovoid. She tucked it into the box she’d taken her pearl from. The lid clicked as she closed it.

  “We can listen to that again if we need to, but only if I trigger it. I think we have what we need for now, if we can find it. Mihandrel’s Marvelous Mixtures sounds like an alchemist’s, but I don’t know it.” Amy bit her lip as she tucked the box back into her pack, then stood. “Any ideas, Marcie?”

  Marcie seemed a little pale, but Amy’s question got her attention. “I know Mihandrel. He lives near where I grew up, Mom kept trying to set me up with his son. Didn’t work, for some reason.”

  Sophia snickered.

  Marcie glanced at Sophia and chuckled. She looked a little more relaxed, too. “Yeah, well, I didn’t know then. Anyway, I’ve been to his shop but it’s been years. Uh. I think it’s on Comet Lane, maybe near the Temple? Why would you be sent there?”

  “Because that’s where Los’en is,” Dav answered quickly. “It may also be pretty safe as long as we don’t show the pyramid; a lot of Called have to be neutrals. They can’t be attacking everyone.”

  “A lot of Called support the Temple,” Amy added. “It has to be a real mess. No one knows who’s on which side. I bet a lot of people don’t even know which side they’re on, much less everyone else. That’s part of why Uncle Los’en didn’t think anything was going to happen any time soon.”

  “Maybe that’s why the attack happened?” Dav speculated. “If whoever’s in charge of the Temple-”

  “The Hilt,” Amy supplied.

  “The Hilt, then. If the Hilt thought that his side was losing support or that attacking now would somehow sway the undecided to his side,” Dav waved a hand near his head, “that’s a good reason to attack. And everyone likes a winner.”

  “Shouldn’t we be going?” Sophia prodded. “And maybe talk about something else while we go. Uh, Marcie, we haven’t told you about the Reflection Challenge yet. Did you know it has some serious weaknesses in what it can duplicate?”

  Marcie stopped at a friend’s to ask for directions once they were close. Mihandrel’s Marvelous Mixtures was indeed on Comet Lane not far from the Broken Lord’s Temple. The Broken Temple, however, was not on Comet Lane; it was on a wider street that they took to reach Comet Lane. Despite being wide, it was absolutely packed with people, which made travel slow, even without the carts and animals that filled the middle of the street in what was effectively a traffic jam.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  The reason for the traffic jam became obvious as they got near the Temple building. People streamed in and out of it constantly, while a line of wagons waited off to one side and disrupted the main street’s movement. Sophia was certain the building wasn’t designed for as much traffic as seemed to be headed there; it wasn’t that big and with the cliff falling into open space behind it, there were apparently only two actual entrances.

  The only thing about the building that said “Temple of the Broken Sword” to Sophia was the fact that there was an awfully good, if gigantic, version of a sword plunged into the peak of the building’s roof, right where the cross would have been on a church. There was also a motif of things that almost looked like tiny wings rising near the corners, but Sophia couldn’t make heads or tails of that; they weren’t really wing-shaped and a couple of them really looked more like piles of worn rocks than anything else.

  Other than that, the building looked a lot like the others around it, made of either stone or adobe and covered in a red-brown layer that was probably smooth when it was laid down but that had since cracked. Numerous carvings covered the surface, many of which were filled with red or blue pigment, the same colors that decorated the buildings around the temple.

  There didn’t seem to be any guards, but there were an awful lot of people wearing armor and weapons with auras stronger than Sophia’s walking in and out of the building. That made Sophia nervous; these people might not be monsters, but they were still enemies, and she didn’t like being surrounded by enemies that were stronger than her.

  Amy was confident no one would recognize her as Los’en’s niece, but Sophia wasn’t so sure; in her experience, there was always someone who figured out who you were if you tried to go somewhere quietly as a public figure, and people always followed their relatives, too. Los’en was definitely a public figure after the mess his actions caused in Izel.

  “Sophia!”

  Sophia blanched as she heard the last voice she’d expected or wanted to hear. She turned slowly, hoping she was wrong.

  She wasn’t.

  “Aric.” Sophia tried to smile politely. She very badly did not want to make a scene directly in front of the Templars’ home base. “I wasn’t expecting to see you today.”

  “Can you handle him while I get Amy and Marcie out of here? If I stay, it’ll only attract attention,” Dav sent silently. “I don’t think he knows who Amy is, but if we get too loud, someone who does might notice.”

  Sophia smiled to herself at the confirmation that Dav was on the same page she was. She didn’t like the idea at all, but dealing with Aric was better than drawing attention to Amy. She quickly answered him telepathically, “Yeah, I’ll delay Aric. He’s not going to try anything too unpleasant here and you can come back once they’re with Amy’s uncle.”

  “I didn’t think I’d see you, either,” Aric echoed the last words Sophia said out loud. “You had a Challenge scheduled today, didn’t you?”

  Sophia tried to suppress her frown at the confirmation that someone was sharing information with Aric. There was no real reason that whoever it was shouldn’t share the schedule.The fact that Sophia didn’t like it was because she didn’t want Aric to follow her around, not because she specifically cared about people knowing where she was.

  It helped a little to know that he hadn’t used the knowledge to follow her to the Challenge. Instead, he’d gone somewhere he didn’t expect to see her, probably because he knew she wasn’t around. She might not like him scheduling his day based on whether or not she was around, but being followed to Challenges would definitely be worse.

  Her feelings weren’t the important thing here. She needed to delay Aric. If she could keep him from noticing the rest of her team, that would be for the best. Or maybe she should just explain it?

  “Yeah,” Sophia admitted. “The Reflection Challenge. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting.”

  “I haven’t looked into that one,” Aric said with an easy grin. “What’s it like?”

  A fist softly kissed Aric’s shoulder, making him turn slightly. “Hey, we’re heading on in. Don’t spend too much time out here, the line to get to the altar’s only going to get longer. Everyone wants to touch the Sword today.”

  Sophia glanced at the speaker. It was the blond guy she only remembered as “the archer” from Aric’s team. She was a little embarrassed she didn’t remember his name, but she really hadn’t paid much attention to him. He just hadn’t stood out much. He wasn’t as good with a bow as Amy was, at least not when the goal was shooting monkeys that were throwing apples at you.

  He tended to hit the apple instead of the monkey for some reason.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Aric waved a hand dismissively at the archer. “Go on ahead, we’ll be along afterwards.”

  Sophia waited a moment for the archer to turn away. She couldn’t look and see where Amy was without drawing attention to her, but she was sure they weren’t far enough away yet. “It’s a mirror maze, each person on their own, unless you run into each other in the maze. The maze itself moves around and doesn’t make sense; sometimes, the way forward for one person is the way back for another.”

  “Some kind of distance magic, or odd angles?” Aric asked. “I’ve looked into getting something that would let me strike with my spear at a distance, but that Challenge didn’t come up as an option.”

  Sophia shook her head. “Illusion, mostly. When you run into someone, you have to say if they’re real or not. If you’re wrong, there’s a fight. It’s supposed to get worse as you go farther in or if you both guess wrong, but the fights start out really easy.”

  Aric frowned and nodded. “Not that useful for a spearman, then.”

  He glanced over at the line that was now visibly extending from the entrance to the Temple. The archer was already inside, but there were at least a dozen people that weren’t, and it really hadn’t been long at all. “Come on; Willum’s right, it’s only getting longer.”

  The messenger birds have a number of security features built in. I wonder if there’s a reason behind that … it’s probably historical.