"Do I have, if I accept this invitation, a guarantee of safe and unobstructed conduct home?"

"Yes, absolutely."

They saw how it went for the other guy.

Arguably it went fine for the other guy. He woke up and the kidnapper is alive and well. But if Blai has cultivated a usefully unkidnappable reputation so much the better. "On what time scale do you need my answer?"

"Not longer than one month."

"Do you plan to be in Liscor for that long if it takes that long?"

"Most likely, unless I am called away on urgent business."

"What's the turnaround on messages to Manus about the Voyager's preferences?"

"I'll be corresponding by [Message] spell, so nearly nothing on the actual messages, but accounting for explaining the situation and however much time the Voyager will take to make up her mind, a few hours to a few days may be expected."

"And you're prepared to verify what you say and your vouch for the honesty of whoever you correspond with by truth magic? Further, do you have an outline of a deal that would hold even if my information is unsatisfactory and my contacts don't want to talk to you?"

"Of course. What is likely to happen is the Wall Lady's staff will attempt to ascertain the value of your information without you actually disclosing it, with your cooperation—there are Skills for it, and truth magic for you to make claims to the substantiveness and scope—and either there will be no deal and you keep your information, or there is a deal and you get your end even if we're unhappy with what you say. If you want to ensure you're not wasting your time, monetary compensation in the former case could be discussed, rated against your ordinary earnings in a similar period."

"Interesting, I didn't realize there were Skills for that. May I use this information to ask about those Skills from other parties?"

"There's a Skill for anything under the sun. Could you give an example of who and what you might ask? You'd be looking for [Information Broker] Skills, [Appraise Secret], as a basic example, but you really only have our word that we're not doing anything more underhanded. It is certainly possible to cheat a person out of their secrets, for someone unscrupulous with a Wall Lord's resources."

"Well, where I'm from the bank might be a good place to learn about things like that but I don't know if it is here, so I might wind up asking several people."

He thinks about it.

"Can you do so anonymously?"

"...I am not immediately thinking of a good way to do that."

"If you identify an expert or the author of a book on a relevant topic you could send an anonymous letter or a letter under a pseudonym. You could... I suppose you can't easily disguise yourself, unless you have illusions good enough to change your species. You could if you headed up north. I'm not sure who you'd be trying to ask."

"I don't have illusions for that and I don't think I ought to use a pseudonym."

"My priority for secrecy is to not make it known that you're trading information to the city of Manus, as opposed to, for example, having your healing services solicited. Inquiries into information brokerage or high-level divination Skills is suggestive of one thing and not others. If you can find sufficiently generically knowledgeable consultants and bind them to the same confidentiality terms such that it's not possible to infer the nature of your business in Manus, that's fine. A reasonable number of persons—not more than two, is that sufficient?"

"Well, I don't know if it will be or not and if it is not and I have lingering doubts about allowing the Skills' use then we will not have a functioning deal. Do you think it will be sufficient?"

"I don't have a good idea of your threat model and what answers about Skills you would find satisfying or unsatisfying."

"I would be concerned that they'd be - damaging or that they would reveal any other confidences I might or might not be carrying or that they'd have some completely unfamiliar to me form of effect that I can't possibly predict at my present level of ignorance."

"Suppose," continues Blai, "this all being contingent on my Law anyway, that you release Voyager Silverfang in advance, and then I will consult her about whether I can safely travel to Manus and have this interview and provide the information you want, and if I can determine, with her as a buffer between me and any research I need to do, that I can safely do this, then I will go, on my Law; and if I cannot, then I won't, such that you should certainly only go with this strategy if you are firmly convinced that it's not likely to be harmful to me or my interests to go. And that she isn't dreadfully angry with you."

"So you think there might be negative side-effects that we won't correctly identify as damaging to you or your confidences? There's a wide range of methods available; would it suffice if we agreed not to use any Skill on you which you don't agree to in advance having been appraised of all their effects? The most basic measure, for example, would be just for us to describe what pieces of information would be worth how much, then for you to swear on truth magic that you think it's worth our time. If you're afraid that we would deceive or force you, knowing more about the effects of the conventional Skills for this purpose won't help; we would just use unconventional and more violating methods, which there is also a wide variety of.

"Your other suggestion is... interesting. The enforcement being that, I guess, you you may lose your Class if you break your oath? I have to think about it. 'Not harmful to your interests' is very broad."

"We can narrow it down some from there - if nothing else it's going to be inconvenient to travel for weeks and I wouldn't count that kind of thing. You can think of the enforcement being that I'd expect to lose my magic but I don't really think of it that way myself, I think of it as - being able to organize the pieces of a trade in whatever order in time makes the most sense while still definitely having all of it and not only one side. Being the kind of person who can do that is important to me."

Having principles is not a very surprising thing to be, but they don't have a foolproof way to confirm his character! Having verifiable penalty clause is much more load-bearing for negotiations.

"Right. If the condition for you to come after we release her is just that you verify it's safe and we haven't materially deceived you about the circumstances, things we can objectively control from our end, and not that—on reconsideration you think it's a bad deal—I can talk to my boss, see what she thinks."

"When should I expect to hear back about that?"