“No need to wonder. I’m a simple man. I love you and I will protect you. And the inn. Even if I have to murder Caldenia and everyone else to do it.”

I stood on my toes and kissed him. “What if we don’t murder anybody?”

The corners of his mouth curved. “No promises.”

“Are we ready?”

“As ready as we’re going to be.”

I touched the wall in front of us with my broom. Glowing dots of light pulsed from the broom, drawing an outline of a huge double door in the wall. The once-solid surface split down the middle, and the two halves of the door swung open, letting a flood of sunshine bathe us.

A large empty arena spread before us, bordered by a raised amphitheater divided into fourteen sections, one for each delegation, one for Kosandion and his retinue, and the last for the observers. Each section was freestanding, raised thirty feet above the arena’s floor, and separated from the adjoining sections by a thirty-foot gap. A short safety wall secured the sections. We had shamelessly stolen the idea from the Old Arena at Baha-char.

Ideally, I would have encircled each section by an impenetrable barrier, the same way I had secured Kosandion’s balcony. Unfortunately, maintaining that many barriers simultaneously was beyond Gertrude Hunt’s capacity. They also caused a distortion in Orata’s cameras, and since the whole thing had to be recorded, I settled for the wide gaps and bringing Gertrude Hunt to high alert. If the delegates as much as twitched toward each other, the inn would pluck them right out of their seats and toss them back into their respective quarters.

In the center of the arena, I had raised a stage. Perfectly round and exactly 25 yards across, it sat about ten feet above the arena floor. When the candidates would need to enter it, I would make a ramp from their section directly to the stage.

“What about the moderator platform?” I asked.

We needed a moderator for the debate, and Sean had volunteered to make a special platform for him.

“I’m working on it,” Sean said.

He raised his head to the brilliant blue sky and squinted at the sunshine. In reality, the arena was deep inside the inn. I had done some serious damage to dimensional physics. The sky above us was real, but if someone flew a drone over the inn, they would find only the worn roof of an ordinary ornate Victorian.