They have time for almost an entire chess game before Seldan interrupts again with more news. 

Vanyel, it sounds like, is now arguing for heading north as well, having pointed out that his trip here has already served its purpose of proving he isn't dead. 

(Reading between the lines, asking Leareth's people to Gate Blai - known to be a priest of a god - and his Companion to one of Leareth's secure northern facilities and give its location to the Heralds is - a much bigger ask - than just letting them go with a message to bring back to Leareth. Vanyel, at least, is someone they know Leareth approved of and hoped to be able to work with, and it seems like that was enough that they were willing to hear him out.) 

They're also not going to do a Gate from the main Gate-staging area, because Vanyel pointed out that there are still a lot of people in Haven who don't report to the Heralds' chain of command and could potentially be in on whatever is going on. So they're going back to the House of Healing to Gate from the shielded room there, and hopefully the kidnapper-mages will actually agree to take Blai as well once they read his mind. 

(Leareth's mages tried a comms spell as well and apparently couldn't get through either, including to a somewhat less secure contact-point. It could just be out of range - it's apparently over eight hundred miles - but they didn't think it was that. Which makes it seem more likely that something or someone - or Someone - is blocking all communications out of Valdemar.) 

It's so weird that being an Iomedaean makes him untrustworthy. A former Asmodean, sure, but they don't know that. Blai has not met anyone from Rahadoum and certainly has never been there, but he's pretty sure even they know that you can just ask for a promise, from an Iomedaean, and get it kept. But sure he can go get mindread. What are they going to want him to be thinking about? If "out of Valdemar" is likely to be the actual operative constraint is there another country they could stage things from, maybe Rethwellan, that's come up before as a friendly country?

It sounds like the part that was most relevant to Leareth deciding to un-kidnap Blai was the being from another world, which shouldn't take long to be sure of from reading his mind but maybe he can focus on thinking about all the things that are extremely different in Golarion? And the fact that gods in his world have known alignments and Iomedae is Lawful Good, though Leareth's people won't have prior familiarity with those concepts; the fact that Iomedae used to be mortal is probably more convincing on the matter of Her being a goddess Leareth could conceivably work with rather than having to work around.

Oh, and he should probably think through what happened with k'Treva just so it's really obvious he wasn't in any way involved. 

They'll be back at the House of Healing within five minutes. Seldan is mulling on whether it's feasible even in principle to relocate the Senior Circle decisionmakers to Rethwellan tonight or on whether it would have to be more of a long-term plan once the immediate emergency is solved, but he does have attention for at least a few more chess moves (in case he notices that Blai is worrying unproductively.) 

Okay. He can direct... some of... his thoughts toward those things. Unfortunately for the people who are going to be reading his mind he will also be thinking about how he is aware of memory modification magic so it's not LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE that he blew up k'Treva himself even though he certainly can't think how he'd have gone about it if he'd wanted to or what might have possessed him to be so inclined. And how Iomedae is Lawful Good but he's probably not Good because of how he was an Asmodean cleric for twenty years. And how on Golarion he's going to have to attend a constitutional convention as a religious delegate and he is not even totally clear on what that is or how to accurately represent Iomedae's interests in any remotely unusual case. And how Norgorber lives in Axis for some reason. Knight takes pawn.

Once they get back to the room again: 

These mages are SO TENSE in Blai's presence (and not, like, showing it much at all by Valdemaran standards, but they aren't Chelish.) He'll get a stiff :It seems we probably owe you an apology: in Mindspeech, though, and then the mage-Thoughtsenser glances at Vanyel and actually asks for permission before mindreading him. 

...His thoughts do seem to line up with the story Vanyel has been determinedly trying to convince them of, though. (If anything Blai thinking about the existence of memory modification is reassuring, reminiscent of Leareth's style of carefully hedging how sure he is of something.) 

This doesn't mean they're delighted about bringing a priest with miracle-magic north, even to a not-particularly-secure facility to start with, solely on Vanyel's report that Leareth would definitely be okay with this. (Vanyel offered to let them mindread him about the interaction Blai had with Leareth, but he's kind of difficult to mindread anything detailed off because of the thing where most of his mind is howling misery.) 

They will politely ask if he minds thinking about the circumstances under which Leareth agreed to meet with him, and also about what he thinks his goddess' intentions would be toward the situation here. 

If it helps he can go over what spells he has prepared for the day. The Planar Inquiry is admittedly potentially dangerous but it takes ten minutes to cast so it would be really easy to interrupt him before he could get it all the way cast, if they want to escort him? - sure, he met Leareth indirectly when kidnapped and then again like so with the Law detection and the prophecy -

- Blai kind of doesn't think Iomedae has any intentions here? She's broke. Prophecy doesn't work on Golarion so he doubts she saw the plane shift snake thing coming, let alone bestirred herself to place it. He's pretty sure his being here is a complete coincidence. Her interests in full generality where She doesn't have any ongoing operations or commitments are just, like, the flourishing of Goodness and of Lawful institutions that will carry on promoting and defending that Goodness going forward, but Blai is one random unprepared priest without marching orders.

Whether Blai was sent here by pure accident wouldn't necessarily imply that She doesn't have aims now that She happens to have someone here anyway, but - being "broke", whatever that even means for a god, plausibly means more? ...What does it mean for a god to be "broke" and how did that happen with Iomedae? 

Oh, gods (normal gods) (sorry, Golarion gods) are not free to just do as much as they want on the Material plane. Some combination of making it so they don't just cancel each other out, and too much direct action being harmful to the world or something, and probably also a bunch of stuff Blai doesn't understand because he's a mortal. But you need this concept to make sense of what things the gods choose to do and Iomedae's church is particularly concerned with it because She's a young goddess and plausibly less powerful than most, and because it's a strength of organized Lawful churches to allocate things efficiently within their scope.

Anyway, a bunch of nice things happened recently like the Worldwound closing and Cheliax getting conquered and Iomedae presumably did some stuff to make that work out and now She's broke. As far as Blai knows he might be the only new empowered Iomedaean selected in the last eighteen months. He is pretty sure he was available at a discount because that's the only way that makes any sense as an expenditure but he's not sure what he's... for... yet, and it probably isn't anything on Velgarth.

Those are a bunch more concepts that definitely seem to fit with Blai being from another world, and with Leareth being motivated to investigate whether his goddess might, in fact, not be terrible! 

The mages briefly confer among themselves and agree that they'll raise a concert-Gate for Blai and his Companion as well as Vanyel. (To a lower-security facility that isn't particularly close to anywhere that important, because they don't trust the Heralds' security that far.) 

Conveniently the shielded room is the only one with a Companion-accessible side door and stall, so Seldan can slip in for the Gate. 

Savil has arranged to troop over to actually peek at the room they're putting the other end of their Gate in, rather than rely on Vanyel pulling her into rapport. And also so that she can hug Vanyel before he goes. 

:You're sure you want Stef to stay behind?: she sends privately. 

No. It's going to be awful. 

:We have no reason to believe Haven isn't safe, now. And - we might be out of communication with you again once we leave, if it's the Web blocking us - the Senior Circle should know if. If anything happens to me.: 

And if Stef is here, among people who can rally to take care of him, then - maybe he has slightly better odds of surviving Vanyel's death. Not that Vanyel is sure he would wish that on Stef, but... 

:...I'm worried about you, ke'chara.: 

Well can she please stop that

:I'm not going to do anything stupid.: He doesn't want to ruin things for Leareth, now that it's finally just starting to look like maybe Leareth was never his real enemy, and if he dies for real - even if he's sure it wouldn't be Leareth's fault - that could still be enough to make everything fall apart. 

Savil does manage to realize (with a bit of prompting from Kellan) that continuing to look dubious about this would definitely not help. 

:Good luck.: 

And they can go through a Gate into an underground but spacious room. 

There'll be a bit of a wait while the mages confirm that they can get in touch with the other bases now, and then pass up a high-priority message that Blai and Vanyel are here and need to urgently talk to Leareth or at least get a message to him. 

In the meantime, chess? 

is Seldan sure that this isn't a high priority worrying time such that chess!!!

It's really not a high-priority worrying time! In two to five minutes they'll have way more information to inform worries! 

(Seldan is going to keep abusing the chess=less anxious Blai button as much as he can until the bond is more established and he knows Blai better. And maybe after that, it's not like playing a lot of mental chess is a hardship.) 

Nayoki receives an urgent report that Vanyel and the priest just arrived at an outlying facility with some of the strike team mages previously held captive in Valdemar; they've been out of contact and they have important news. 

...She'll request a Gate over there immediately, and - probably Leareth has noticed that comms to Valdemar are blocked, which is something they had half-expected to happen at some point given how hard the Star-Eyed Goddess seems to have been trying to cut them off before. But she'll reach out anyway. 

<Leareth. Vanyel and the priest of Iomedae came north with word from Haven, were cut off. Gating to them now.> 

<Acknowledged.> 

Not incredibly surprising, no. At least they can down-prioritize scrying Haven, and focus on finding out if anything is happening in Waymeet - or elsewhere along the border, but Waymeet is the single most likely place they would see it if some of the forces Valdemar has accumulated decide not to listen to the Heralds' orders to stand down, and stage some kind of offensive north. 

Elsewhere, just north of the Valdemaran border: 

It's possible for a well-organized team of White Winds Adepts to raise a variety of quite impressive shields. 

Most of them aren't workable if you have twenty-seven people and a circle with a thirty-mile diameter to try to cover, which is as narrowed-down as Brightstar could get the area where he's pretty sure Leareth is hiding. But a highly targeted shield against specific kinds of magic is, while a lot more difficult in a detail sense, much less energy-intensive per mile to cover, not to mention less detectable.

And Brightstar had a chance to look at the artifacts Leareth sent with the priest he had tricked. They should be able to block that as well as all the communication-spell variants that he and the other Adepts could think of. 

The hardest part was raising the structure of a shield - the most stable shape is a sphere - and selectively putting less power into one side of it. Leareth has to be expecting countermeasures on the Valdemaran side, but if they move prematurely to block him from his own people north of the mountains, he's liable to get spooked and run. 

He doesn't know what Leareth is planning next, except that according to their encounter-in-passing with the rumor mill in Waymeet, it involved an imposter playing Vanyel. Convincingly enough that the Heralds sent him south, apparently, which isn't good. 

Doesn't matter. They're almost in position, and this is their last chance to end this now. It might already be too late, with Leareth forewarned, but they can't not try. 

A mindvoice reaches for him, from thirty miles north, the other end of their circle. 

:- We detected a communication-spell.: And a mental sense of the bearing. It's coming from the north, slightly east. 

Even with this many skilled Adepts, they don't have the ability to overhear messages. But the communication-spell has to put a bit of extra energy into punching through the weaker half of their shield, and that part can be detected. 

They've detected messages going the other way already, but this is the first time a communication was initiated by the greater body of Leareth's forces, north of the mountains.

It could be anything. But one of the things it could be is that - presumably Leareth has a number of mages on recon duty. If they've noticed something, then Brightstar has just run out of time. 

:Bring up the other half of the barrier. We have to move now.: 

Jisa is in the privy. (Or, well, the cave-chamber set aside for that use, she's not about to troop outside for it in the middle of the night when they're on high alert.) This isn't the ideal time to have to go, but she's had a lot of chava tonight. 

So of course that's when Leareth Mindtouches her, because that is just the kind of night they're having.