A tap on the doorway drew Broken Blade Amaryssa Seuvarin's attention away from the match happening below her window. It wasn't a particularly good match, in any case; no one was in any doubt of who the winner would be. That bored Amaryssa, but some matches like that were good for the crowd. They liked to see blood. "Enter."

The Blade's adjunct Jaxucet Willowbloom stepped into the doorway but carefully did not cross the line that designated the inside of the room. He knew better than that. "Blade Seuvarin, the warrior who lost the last match, was sanctioned, yet he did not recover after his injury when he reached the recovery area. I had the healers called as if he were unsanctioned, of course, and he will live, but they were unable to heal his eye."

Amaryssa snorted, unimpressed. This adjunct was proving, once again, that she was an excellent judge of character; he was performing exactly as she'd expected. It was simply too bad that the reason she'd chosen him as her adjunct wasn't for his capability as a possible next Blade; instead, it was for his compatibility with her Sphere. In a few months, he'd be ready to break, but for now she had to continue building up his confidence. He had to be brittle if she wanted him to break easily, and while he was progressing well, he wasn't there yet.

"You did remember to check with a Sanction Stone?" Amaryssa made certain to infuse her voice with doubt, even though she didn't actually doubt that he'd done that much.

The adjunct nodded. "Of course, that was the first thing I did once he recovered enough to know he'd survive. The Stone glowed blue."

Blue was the color for a moderate sanction; it was by far the most common for arena participants, because it was far cheaper than the more comprehensive purple. Recovery was suppressed in the arena to let the crowds have their blood and improve the fights, but it worked almost anywhere else that was close enough to the old ruin.

Amaryssa particularly enjoyed using the sanction in the training hall, but not everyone was willing to pay for a purple sanction. Some people even went only for the very limited green sanction. In her opinion, if you were that poor, you should just expect to pay for the healers. Many people did, and that wasn't limited to the people who didn't know the sanction was an option.

"I even checked one of the healers," Jaxucet added without needing to be questioned. "The Sanction Stone stayed grey. I asked and he's never bought a sanction."

Amaryssa nodded. That was good initiative on his part; maybe he wasn't as stupid as she thought.

"Once I knew it wasn't malfunctioning, I came directly to you," the adjunct continued, proving Amaryssa's reappraisal of his smarts completely wrong. "What do we do next?"

Amaryssa closed her eyes momentarily. She wanted to tear a strip off of him and tell him that there were a dozen different things he could have started and that any of them would be better than coming to his superior with that dumb expression, but she really shouldn't. He wouldn't learn anything and it was still too early.

If he kept failing like this, however, she might have to speed up her timeline. Yes, she needed to advance her Sphere, but maybe she should rethink her plan of using those people as adjuncts. The point of having an adjunct was to have someone who could make things easier on her. Jaxucet was barely adequate at the best of times and this was clearly not going to be the best of times soon.

"First, have the records checked. Find out who's skimming and how much. There will be someone skimming; there always is." It was usually the artifact master, though sometimes some of the item assistants started skimming as well.

They assumed that one minor enchanted item wouldn't be noticed. They were usually right, too; the vast majority of people with sanctions would replace them if they were consumed, and it was very rare to have multiple sanctions consumed quickly enough to make running out a real danger, even if some of the items used as payment were skimmed off and sold on the side.

The same fact was the reason they could sanction someone before the items they gave were rendered; there was enough of a cushion from everyone who wanted safety and wasn't being hurt. Most people didn't think about that at all; they simply accepted that once they handed over the items that paid for their healing, they'd be healed even if they died.

Jaxucet nodded.

Amaryssa quickly ran through the other possibilities in her mind. "Bring whatever you find to me, but if you don't find tremendous levels of skimming, that won't be the reason for a blue sanction to fail. You have a purple sanction, correct?"

The adjunct nodded, but he didn't manage to suppress the way his eyes widened at the question. If he were going to continue as Amaryssa's adjunct, she'd have to train that out of him, but she'd already decided that he wasn't going to stick around. She just had to get him ready, and lessons in self-control were not necessary.

If he'd thought more than the absolute minimum, he'd already know the answer to the test she was going to have him perform. Since he hadn't, well, this would be a good test of just how far along he was in completely submitting. A smart adjunct would realize that even now she was more interested in the knowledge than who got it, while a clever adjunct might well realize that this was a test. Jaxucet was neither.

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She'd get her answer. It wouldn't even be hard. "Injure yourself enough to trigger a sanction. That will determine the rest of what we need to do."

Jaxucet pulled his knife off his belt and slashed his left arm right through his sleeve. Blood splashed onto the wall and rug before Amaryssa could say anything.

He really was an idiot.

"Not on the rug," Amaryssa complained. He really should have known better than that. At least it was obvious that he wasn't being healed; that did answer the question, even if the side effects of the method weren't desirable. "Go get that bandaged, then get back here. You will first need to deal with the rug … or better yet, get someone else to deal with the rug. I'll tell you what else to do once you're back."

Amaryssa waited until Jaxucet was gone to rise from her seat. She needed to go talk to some people; she certainly couldn't trust her adjunct to handle things for her. She needed to find out who knew about this massive failure. Those who did would have to be silenced, one way or another. Finding the skimming might be enough; that would be easy to blame, even if it truly wasn't the cause.

She did not want to cancel all existing sanctions. Doing that would weaken her hold on the Arena.

Even more importantly, however, she needed to send a team down into the ancient artifact that managed the sanctions. It had failed and been repaired in the past, but that was before her time as the Broken Blade. Her adjunct couldn't lead the mission, either. For once, the problem wasn't his incompetence.

He wasn't blessed by the Broken Lord, and the Broken Lord's authority was required to do anything with the ruin and the sanctioning. That was why Amaryssa's plans for him would work but it also meant he wasn't useful for this either. He really was more work than he was worth.

Amaryssa grumbled to herself. She knew that wasn't true; he'd be worth a lot once he was ready to be broken. Until then, however, she had to work around him.

Now, who could she send? Maybe she could pass someone off as an expert when what they were really an expert in was using the Broken Lord's authority?

Yes, that could work. Jaxucet was certainly dumb enough to be easily fooled by something like that.

Jax winced as his bandaged arm hit the door. He really should have been a little less eager to prove his conviction to the Broken Blade. She already didn't seem to doubt him. He could only hope she took it as being overeager and a bit dim instead of being nervous that she suspected him. "It's clear?"

"Yeah," Zarth Cooper answered. He was one of the two people Jax thought he might be able to count on. Zarth Cooper and Tia Yaom were members of the same Maze-delving team. They were also two of the people who weren't healed by their sanctions the previous day. Jax suspected that fact was more important than the fact that they explored the Maze together; the rest of their team wasn't there.

They'd supposedly been invited because "they knew how serious the loss of sanctions was" and because "deep in the ruins, there are more places where a blue sanction will function," but Jax had his doubts. That definitely wasn't the reason; he just wasn't sure what it was. He worried it might be a ploy to dispose of the duo, even though that seemed unlikely. He ought to know if there was a plot like that, unless he was also on the chopping block and he was pretty sure he wasn't.

It could easily be as simple as keeping them from talking to others until the sanctions worked again. He couldn't even blame the Broken Blade for the second reason; she'd quickly moved to fix things and it only made sense to keep things quiet for now.He didn't have to like that logic to admit that it was normal.

"Good, let's keep moving then." Jax hated the fact that he couldn't be in the lead, but his self-inflicted injury was bad enough that he really only had the use of one arm. Like both Zarth and Tia, he was still injured. Unlike them, he would eventually heal enough naturally that he wouldn't be impaired, even without significant magical healing. Even so, Jax somewhat suspected that he was the bait for the pair; after all, if the Broken Blade was sending someone from her organization that was injured, the prospects for recovery had to be pretty good, didn't they?

Zarth only had vision in one eye, so he wasn't the best scout but he could still report what he saw from behind the leader. Qua'helu Mistwalker led the way because he could easily kill any ruins apparitions they found. So far, that was all they'd seen and it was all they expected to see, which was more evidence in favor of Zarth and Tia's presence not being for the reasons Jax was told.

Jax was supposedly in charge of this expedition, but things weren't as simple as that sounded. He'd been allowed to choose exactly one of the other people on the expedition. He'd carefully picked Qua'helu Mistwalker; everyone else was selected by the Broken Blade. Jax understood the inclusion of Sorleh Bhisho and Thera Sandelf. They were supposed to be the experts in the massive artifact that managed the sanctions.

His second in command, Kizru Venan, was also supposed to be an expert on the artifact; in fact, he was specifically in charge of everything to do with the repair, even though Jax was in charge of the expedition. Jax didn't believe it for a minute. He knew who Kizru was and he knew what Kizru did for Broken Blade Seuvarin. He was a problem solver, one who made certain the problems didn't come back at the edge of his blade.

Jax was one of those problems. If everything went well, neither Kizru Venan or Broken Blade Amaryssa Seuvarin would ever know that. All he had to do was disappear into the Maze as so many others had over the years. All he had to do first was find out why fewer people from the Broken Arena disappeared. What did they know that the Registry didn't?

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