He nods. "I can have a small force ready shortly. The best."

"Thank you."

"If they do seem to have a language and you don't know how it works it might be worth sending a drone - that's a little flying non-person device that can sort-of-kind-of-think - to listen in on them and see where I can get with that. I mean, they might just blow it up but a drone will be less inconvenienced than a person by extra weight from shields."

"Reasonable," says the king. "Then if we're decided on sending you to the edge now, the last question before you leave is: how will we dismiss and resummon you if you appear to have been captured irretrievably by the Enemy?"

"Summoner concentrates on wanting rid of me for about a minute. Here is a circle that will get me, personally, unbound, if drawn on the floor with room for me in the middle of it. Don't fuck with the design." He produces a paper. "You may want to give me a few minutes before panicking in case you happen to finish the circle while I'm in the shower or something."

Ashras takes the paper.

"Thank you," says the king. "I leave you in Azair's hands. Faidre, take charge of your grandchildren; none of them may go along."

"I should warn you all before anybody draws that. And because one of you has already performed a summoning. Under the system I am familiar with - which does not include strange physics or evil aliens or anything like that - people who summon daeva become, on their deaths, daeva themselves. The alternative - again under the system I'm familiar with - is worse, but I don't know how any of this interacts with whatever you've got going on."

"Normally what people become on their deaths is dead," says Dalvor. "Indestructibility and world-shaking powers seem preferable."

"Dead people look pretty dead to outside observation where I'm from too. They just also, simultaneously, appear in one of the daeva realms or Limbo. Limboites get to be indestructible but have no powers and the world is really boring, and I'm absolutely certain that if my Limboite pen pals had ever met anyone with a tail I would have heard of it, so I don't know that you'll land in daeva realms any more than you do in Limbo."

"Thank you for the warning, in any case. Is there anything else before you leave?"

"I don't think so."

"Go, then, and good luck."

"This way," says Azair, motioning to Cam.

Cam follows him.

Out they go. Azair collects a few other winged Aluvai with nods and gestures, then leads them all out of the building and takes to the air.

Flying! Flying is nice. Cam can do flying.

Along the way he tells the collected winged ones, "This is Cam. He proposes to spy on the Enemy. We're here to make sure he isn't captured in the attempt."

"Please nobody attempt to take a lethal hit or even seriously injurious hit for me, I'm indestructible, the main issue is that I could be stunned and carried off," Cam clarifies.

"Faidre tried to blast one of his wings off and the result was as you see," Azair confirms, to mildly impressed looks from the team.

"About how far from where we're going do the Enemy hang out?"

"They keep most of their forces beyond the celestial circles," says Azair. "As far from the edge of the planet as the edge is from the center."

"...And how far is that."

"Fifteen hundred miles."

"Wow, that's really close, I was imagining astronomical distances. Okay. ... Are the celestial circles the same distance from the planet? Do the sun and moon just happen to be in a pattern where they don't hit each other?"