"I threw a rock at his invisibility curtain. I communicated to him exclusively by projecting audio illusions from that rock while he held it, was invisible the whole time, and used no visual illusions. I gave him nothing written, although I haven't checked for the presence of my physical notebook since then so I suppose it's conceivable he pickpocketed me of it. No osanwë in either direction, no objects other than the rock."

"Is Maitimo safe?"

"He was on his way back to, and within your sight of, the gate to Tumunzahar, the last time I personally confirmed his whereabouts, and I have no reason to expect he didn't continue there. The Enemy knew where he'd been staying and I don't have a confident assessment of the place's defensibility and he has an easy method of suicide if he wants it; other than that I don't think he's in present danger."

"Is there information about Thauron you're withholding from us?"

"What I know is what's there. I could show you what he looked like when we spoke, if you want; that's the only thing that comes to mind that I know which isn't in the transcript."

"Is there information about Maitimo you're withholding from us?"

"I redacted some lines at his own request which in my estimation are genuinely irrelevant to this topic, and have not presented you with the instruction records from our game of Governor or a detailed assessment of his facial expressions and tone, and except for the former I'm willing to provide them if you want them."

"All right," he says, and Macalaurë stops singing. "It sounds like we need to confront Thauron."

"...how did you come to this conclusion?"

"Do you disagree? He seems to regard the Enemy's ability to leverage free will somehow to be important, I'm inclined to believe that it is, and he either works quickly enough we should be alarmed or has been planning it for long enough we should assume it was a major priority."

"It would be perfectly lovely to go slash him to ribbons, but it is reasonably likely that committed resources won't come back."

"We came here to fight this war."

"Fair enough. So - what, spend a few weeks with me intensively training your forces as best I can in between trying to figure out my ice powers and then march over there?"

"Unless you think you and Huan can do it alone, yes."

"He does have werewolves. Huan cannot presume he's prophesied invincible in this context."

"He is definitely going to fight," Tyelcormo says.

"All right, apart from prophesied invincibility since that doesn't factor in, what does Huan bring to the table and what can be guessed about Thauron's tactics and resources by comparison? - I've got ice powers, but not practice with them yet."

"Will silencing the area prevent him from using music, assuming I can keep it up against counterpressure? What is the range on 'magical weapons'? And that sounds like a great idea but I don't know how much to pull my punches if we're going to go fight Thauron afterwards - my healing spell works on humanoids and birds."

"We'll presumably have several days' transit for him to patch himself up as needed."

"And that's enough?"

"Yes."

"And I'm not a werewolf so if I have miscalibrated ice blasts at least he won't die, all right. My other questions?"

"Silencing the area works against music magic," Macalaurë says, "though I expect he'll oppose the silence since it costs a smaller share of his concentration to do so than it does of yours. If the Enemy has magical weapons they'd have no greater range than ordinary ones, or else be something like the Bow of Oromë that literally always hits its target, in which case we'd probably have noticed already. Magical bows less powerful than that would be able to do things like find an invisible target within normal archery range, or kill whatever they hit, or allow the archer to rematerialize at the place where they hit - naming projects we've personally vetted as possible-but-hard."

"How long would these projects take, should I assume he may have something specialized against me in particular like the invisible target one...?"