Savil can get an alarmed sitrep.

Aaaaaaaaaah!!!???

:I'm trying to get to you–: There she can use that stable door for a Gate, a few more seconds and she can be there -

:Savil there are over a dozen mages in there - if you Gate in they'll just blast your Gate -: 

There, carefully aiming a levinbolt that shouldn't come near Blai...

Leareth's mages are very well trained and holding a concert shield. They are nonetheless not prepared for Vanyel throwing a strike at close to his maximum power. 

(Neither was the room. The floor is going to be left scorched and smoking.) 

A couple of people get unlucky, are slightly too slow in their attempts to redirect the energy-bleed overwhelming the shield, and go down. 

Nayoki Mindspeaks the Gate-specialist mage, who was behind the concert shield rather than helping hold it and is fine. :Gate him out now.: She's counting on the fact that a horizontal unscaffolded Gate directly under the priest will be hard to blast without getting him too. 

...Yeah. Vanyel is considering whether to do it anyway - Blai is tough has magical Healing, he'll be fine as long as it doesn't kill him outright - but he's slightly too slow. 

Blai falls into an underground room – though he lands on a soft surface, and there's a mage-light so it's not totally dark – and the Gate slams shut over his head. 

Oh no. 

...It's too late to stop them from getting Blai, but no one else got out through that Gate, and at least now Vanyel can throw everything he has at the strike team without having to worry about hitting Blai. 

Blai continues not doing anything. Though occasionally he tries to marshal his mental resources to retry his save in case the spell works that way.

It's a pretty scary fight, and various moments in it go somewhat worse than Nayoki would have expected. They don't manage to get everyone out; a couple of the mages are still down and unable to run for the Gate, and someone tries to go back for them once Nayoki and the more irreplaceable specialist mages are through, but it takes too long and there's no longer shielding on the other end, and someone - presumably Vanyel casting at a distance, going off the power in the spell - manages to blast the Gate, and that's that.

(The two mages who were already through and concert-holding the Gate both go down, but the backlash is divided between them, and probably they're both going to survive.) 

Nayoki is not actually injured but she still needs a few minutes before she can get herself to stop shaking. How about she doesn't get herself into any more fights with Vanyel. 

They left behind an envelope with a letter addressed to Vanyel, in the hallway where it probably didn't get set on fire in the fight, but Nayoki has no idea when the Heralds will get around to opening it. 

...Nayoki can have a few minutes. Leareth also kind of needs a few minutes to rest before he feels capable of making decisions; he pushed himself very hard with the scrying earlier. Though he does think it paid off; they didn't kill any Valdemarans or set any buildings on fire, and the original plan probably would have. 

He mostly expects they'll need Nayoki to revise the set-command before they can learn very much, but while she's taking a few minutes to recover from the fight, he can send a different Thoughtsenser - also a mage and keyed to the shields on the secure room - to see if he can get anything useful by passively reading the priest's mind. 

Will save. Nope. Guidance? Also nope dumbass. Liberating Command doesn't work on enchantments. Even if it did he'd have to be able to talk. Can he squeeze the sword-and-sun a little harder in case it's a kind that breaks when you're harmed... nope. What if they were wrong about this evil archmage not being undead themed and he is going to be turned into an undead, that would be awful and Iomedae is not here to fix him with a drop of blood. He should have cast Guidance during breakfast. He already does it an objectively ridiculous amount and doing it twice as much would make him twice as likely to have one active when randomly attacked without being anywhere near twice as embarrassing. He has probably broken Savil's dishes and maybe also her table and now he can't even offer to fix them for her tomorrow morning. Maybe the evil archmage doesn't have an embassy because his diplomats would just be expelled whenever he wanted to do a kidnapping. He's forgotten the archmage's name, how awkward. There isn't even a standard title to fall back on for archmages. Not that he's going to talk. Evil archmages love torture, but Blai's been tortured before... albeit not in an information seeking context... maybe he'd crack. Nothing for it but to make that as expensive and time consuming as possible first though. You can't go around making life easier for people because they've kidnapped you. You should make that a very bad way to accomplish anything. There are people who'd say that you mustn't follow that reasoning off a cliff, but Blai thinks you should, if the cliff is artificial, or you're just incentivizing Evil archmages to construct more cliffs. So no talking. Unless the evil archmage just lands a Dominate. He really REALLY wants a Guidance but on the other hand Iomedae should pull his spells if he's Dominated. Iomedae, I have been kidnapped. It will suck a lot for me if you have to pull my spells but like obviously do it anyway if it comes up, you can't let evil archmages use Your magic, I get that. Should Blai be looking for openings to kill himself, even though he is not, specifically, the Black Prince? What exactly about that situation made it okay - why couldn't he have had a catechism course BEFORE getting eaten by a Menadorian Plane Shift Snake Thing -

Report from the Thoughtsenser, ten minutes later: 

Apparently their prisoner is a priest of the goddess 'Iomedae'? Has Leareth heard of that god? No? Weird. 

He's also a bizarre guy, though you would maybe expect that of anyone sent in on a god's orders to muck around in Haven. He's taking having been kidnapped by a powerful mage remarkably in stride - oh, he's definitely scared, but he - seems to have been expecting it? - he's not panicking and he's already planning how to be maximally unhelpful. 

He...has a pretty baffling way of relating to his goddess? In particular, he seems to have - or believe he has - ongoing access to miraculous abilities directed granted by his goddess, that he expects Her to withdraw if he's compromised? Also there was at one point a brief and particularly confusing line of thought about...not actually knowing all of his goddess' teachings? You would really think someone would make sure they knew what they were getting into before cooperating with a mission like this. 

He did not happen to think about what he was up to in Haven. He maybe briefly thought about how he arrived in Haven but thoughts go by fast and the Thoughtsenser did not recognize almost any of the concepts being referenced so he doesn't think he followed. 

There are some other confusing notes that the Thoughtsenser didn't know what to make of – for example, he briefly wondered if Leareth might turn him into an animated dead body? that is not how blood-magic works?! 

He's pretty sure they need an expert for this. 

Leareth feels uneasy about...something, he's not sure what? It feels like the picture he was given doesn't actually hold together. 

Is Nayoki ready for an interrogation? 

She's pulled herself together, yes, and is now a little embarrassed at having needed to do that, it wasn't that bad. 

Set-commands are incredibly annoying to modify and she's under less time pressure now; she's inclined to replace it with compulsions, she can be thorough but still less restrictive. Which does leave open more of a risk of god-possession, if their theory is right, but she'll still be right there and can set-command him again, but it's hard to interrogate someone under a set-command as thorough as the one she has on him right now. 

...Leareth isn't entirely unworried about the risk, but he's also worried about being confused and missing something important. 

(The man didn't think about what he was up to in Haven. He was half-expecting to be kidnapped, which you could take as evidence that he knew he had been operating against Leareth, but could also just be that the Heralds had warned him...) 

Nayoki can go ahead. 

A woman with very dark skin and a woolly fluff of sharply contrasting white hair lets herself into the room where Blai is. 

:I am going to redo the set-command so that you can answer questions: she says. He's not going to be able to do anything to either agree to this or resist it but she's still reading his mind in case his response is at all informative. 

She's probably reading his mind. He's been told it's unpleasant but he doesn't know how to make it more unpleasant on purpose so it will just have to be whatever amount of unpleasant it currently is. If he can speak he can Liberating Command but he's not in fact tied up so that's not going to help at all. Which other spells are verbal only - maybe he should have learned to cast still spells - Protection from Evil has somatics - she's probably reading his mind and he shouldn't be thinking about this at all actually! How many Detect Thoughts might someone have prepared if they woke up this morning expecting to do an interrogation - wait, that's not the right way to think about it, is it, because they don't even have slots, they're some weird slotless sorcerer kind of thing here -

....Nayoki stops what she's doing. (She hasn't done very much, yet, just the initial round of compulsions against escaping or planning to escape or trying to harm anyone, which won't feel like anything to Blai since he doesn't have Detect Magic up.) 

:Leareth? I think we are missing some context here.: 

That is indeed the sense Leareth was having already. 

:Can you find out his understanding of what happened in k'Treva? And - look for signs of meddling?: 

That's the most important point, here. The priest could have genuinely had no idea that the Changecreature attack was a godplot, and helped in good faith, but - if his goddess was responsible for what happened in k'Treva, then Leareth is fairly sure that either he would be aware of that on some level even if he hadn't actively cooperated with it, or there would at least be suspicious traces in his mind from a recent godpossession. 

If it seems like the priest wasn't involved, then – well, then Leareth is a lot more confused, but - that's one of the worlds where this in fact wasn't what it looked like. 

:I can do that. Maybe even with the set-command in place.: It'll take her fifteen minutes to dig it out and this seems time-sensitive. 

She's going to focus her Mindhealing Sight on his mind, first. She's seen the aftermath in someone's mind of being the conduit for a large-scale miracle, and also the traces of smaller interventions. Does she see anything like that here? 

This man is a bagel. Orbiting, gently, some central pillar of principle; dense with rapid and irrelevant thought unless actually in a situation where what-ifs and alarm actually compose most of what's useful to think about. A god has touched him, but - so weirdly? What the fuck even is that? It doesn't seem to be making him worse at anything, even a little, the way a lot of godtouched people wind up lowkey psychotic.

She would think this man's mind was really cool if not for the godtouched part! What the fuck!

It may not be obviously messing with him - it's very contained, very - structured - where it sits in relation to the rest of his mind is almost more like Gifts than anything god-related she's seen before? Which...kind of makes sense, what with how the other Thoughtsenser reported he was thinking about the miraculous powers granted by his goddess...but also, what?? She didn't think gods could do that!

She at least feels a lot more confident that he's been - in his right mind, in control of himself and his senses - for the duration of whatever happened yesterday. She would have felt kind of bad about interrogating someone who legitimately had no idea what their god had done. 

...maybe done. She knows that what happened in k'Treva is the shakiest part of the picture they've put together so far, and Leareth wasn't sure. 

:What happened in k'Treva Vale?: she sends. :What did you see and do there? Did your goddess give you orders to act there?: 

He still can't speak; she's nervous about letting him if he can call on specific miracles from his goddess by speaking the right words (what????), and also she doesn't want to waste fifteen minutes digging out the set-command first, but she can read the answer in his thoughts and she thinks that's evident to him already. If he refuses to think about it, then she can stick a compulsion on him to obey instructions including in thoughts, but that an annoying compulsion to cast and maybe just asking will work? 

It looked like a Wish crater but actually fuck you he's being unhelpful you evil archmage's minion who kidnaps people instead of having an embassy like a normal person. How many moves of a chess game can he hold in his head. Let's have white advance this pawn and black that one and then get this bishop out and that knight and - he's mentally misplaced a pawn, starting over -

The thing is, she can't even be mad at him about it, that's such a valid way to react to being kidnapped! It would probably be more likely to get him tortured, if he had gotten kidnapped by someone actually evil instead of Leareth, but if Nayoki imagines herself being kidnapped by someone evil who was working against Leareth accomplishing any of his goals - which is probably how this priest feels about the situation, except substitute "his goddess" for Leareth - she would hope she could pull off being that stubbornly unhelpful. 

...She got a brief flicker before he remembered to be unhelpful, and it's maybe a little informative that the brief flicker was - aftermath of a violent explosion, looked like a kind of disaster he's familiar with - and not anything about orders from his goddess. 

It's absolutely possible that he's good enough at controlling his thoughts to hide anything actually revealing, though. So she's doing this the hard way. She will lay a compulsion on him to follow her instructions and think through her questions in detail – it takes like five minutes, it's a really annoying compulsion to cast if she wants to get it right – and then repeat her questions about what he saw and did, whether he received orders from his goddess at the time, and what he understands his goddess' involvement to be in the k'Treva situation.