After a wary long rest, the party chose to enter the city as themselves; Lirielle's augury had promised weal and woe alike. The gate guards greeted them with surprise and word that Sokari was expecting them. Inside the walls hung the dead: Silas Mott among the people Mama had smuggled in, and one rope cut empty. Flyers bearing their faces papered the streets, and the crowd muttered about an army no one could see.
At the Forum they were made to surrender their weapons. Momeline kept Burrowfang, which shows itself only underground, and Dravencoles talked an Elandrian guard into letting him hide his hammer beneath his cloak. Down on the inner ring, Sokari waited alone, and the moment they drew near the doors sealed and the hall went dark. The High Magister and two archers on the ring above tore out of their skins as slaads.
What followed was the hardest fight of their lives. The Death Slaad wearing Sokari's face loosed a cloudkill that swallowed the floor and dropped Lirielle into death saving throws. Landor sprinted for the surrendered weapons; Ferinthria and Lirielle spent their strongest spells; Dravencoles smote the Death Slaad again and again until it fell. The combination of Momeline's sneak attack and Lirielle's lightning bolt took out the red slaad. He poured lay on hands into Lirielle and carried her out of the poison. Only a green slaad remained, and Momeline's slow spell fouled its fireball before it could burn the reeling party, while Lirielle's counterspell and Ferinthria's borrowed luck held the line until it dropped. They stood spent among the dead and could find no way out, until Anvari arrived and opened a hidden passage behind the council chairs.
In the tavern a grieving young woman, Nadira, begged their help and showed them the body of Tomas, hanged and cut down but preserved. The party took another long rest so Dravencoles could ready a revivify. While the others slept, Landor and Momeline went to collect on Landor's thousand-to-one wager, only to find the bookie's office shuttered "off for Fall holidays" and, once Momeline picked the lock, empty. The neighbor recognized Landor, who shoved him into a wall by accident and knocked him cold. Momeline calmed the man's frightened grandchild while Landor woke him and leaned on him, learning only that he knew nothing, but suggested that Tassir in Lowwater might.
Come morning, Dravencoles called Tomas back to life. He woke with a joke about the party seeing him bare again, thankful to be alive but obviously uneasy at how deeply Nadira had come to love him.
Then they turned to the Crown of Judgement. In Shahzir's Library they puzzled out the old Khaladi word "Yazir," and a statue swung to point at a false wall. Beyond it lay a hidden Temple of the Sun, where a series of mirrors had to be arranged precisely to open a deeper chamber. Stone golem sentries weighed Lirielle's worth, judging her finest quality to be neither her power nor her (lack of) patience but her friendship, and let them pass. Deeper into the temple they went, not knowing what waited below.