One by one, the others shook their heads. Overhead, vultures circled on the thermals their dragons would be using, if only they could, dared, fly by day. At least darkness would hide them in part. Until they came in to pick up the first escapees. Until they came into the light.

“So tonight we run the risk of being seen.” He chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t think there’s anything we can really do about that—not being overlooked by magic, anyway.”

“Uh—” Aket-ten flushed, and held up a fistful of leather thongs. “I think these might help.”

He peered at them, frowning. There were little faience medallions hanging from them. They looked familiar.

“Pashet’s teeth!” exclaimed Oset-re with delight. “Heklatis’ amulets!” He jumped to his feet, pulled Aket-ten up, whirled her around like a child, and kissed her on the top of the head before letting her drop back down again, flushed and laughing.

“Here,” she said, passing them out. “I collected them after we came to Sanctuary; you lot kept losing them or leaving them lying around, and there’s no point in discarding something magic, even if you don’t need it at the time. I thought they might be useful again. Heklatis knows I have them and I told him I was taking them along. He said it was a good thing, otherwise he’d have had to make a new batch and send them along, and I saved him the work.”

Kiron accepted the amulet with a rueful shrug; once in the safety of Sanctuary, he’d been one of the worst at forgetting to keep track of his amulet. Heklatis had made them to interfere with the Magi’s scrying, or seeing-at-a-distance, back when they were all in the Jousters’ Compound together. But although the protection had been priceless while they were scheming to destroy the tala and escape right under the Magi’s noses, they had seemed of little utility out in the middle of the trackless desert, where the distance and Kaleth’s god-assisted protections kept them from being overlooked by means of magic.

But Aket-ten never forgot anything, it seemed.

“All right, then,” he said, pulling the thong over his head. “We can keep them from seeing us with magic, but we can’t stop someone from spotting us just by looking up. So we have to assume they will have eyes in the city, especially eyes keeping watch on the temple, and those eyes will report whatever they see. Even if it’s dragons where no dragons should be.”

Oset-re snorted, and behind him, her neck arched so that her head was right above his, coppery Apetma snorted so exactly like him that, serious as the situation was, it startled a laugh out of all of them.