The sabotage itself goes just fine. Liberty water walks her way over invisibly, brings the whole thing crashing down with just a couple of well placed spells, and even manages to avoid drowning in the suddenly turbulent waters. The bit that goes less well is the getting away part - it turned out there are a lot more scary people in the immediate vicinity than they were counting on, and pretty much none of them missed the extremely loud sabotage they just got through with. They had to take off in a hurry, and ditching the falcon familiar one of the wizards sent to tail them required a lot of circuitous riding. Seriously, how can one bird be so hard to hit?

As a result, instead of spending the night halfway back towards the coast, they have to put up their rope trick in some out of the way demesne only a few dozen miles from the river. But hey, it's not like they can get much more heat on their trail, so as long as they're in the area...

If you're a bunch of skilled adventurers, it's not actually very hard to topple a minor noble and his pet Asmodean cleric. Just slip in a bit before dawn, get the drop on a middle aged man while he's without armor or weapons, and then work your way through his guards with superior skill and a few strategic sleeps. They don't get the priest before he wakes up, but that's okay; he doesn't any spells prepped this early in the day and they can drop him in six seconds flat. And then Joy, Treason, and Eric can set about letting the slaves and indentures know they're free while Liberty asks Milani to refresh her spells. All in a good day's work!

For whatever reason, the slaves seem even more terrified than Chelish slaves normally are! 

Asmodia wakes up exactly at dawn, just like she has every day for the past few weeks, not that she lets herself show it.

Most days, she takes her best guess at when her mother's spell preparation would have made enough noise to wake her. Today, there's a lot more noise than that. She can hear voices, unfamiliar ones, too muffled for her to make out what they're saying. She hadn't known her lord was expecting visitors. Most of the explanations she can think of are really bad signs for her — she hadn't thought her lord suspected anything, Tea confessed, but maybe he'd realized some reason why it couldn't possibly have killed Guifré — and she's pretty sure it wouldn't be hard to catch her, they wouldn't even need a truth spell—

There's not actually a way to sneak outside from this room without going through the rest of the manor. If they've got magic that'll catch her out it'll catch her either way.

She pretends to wake up and slips out of the tiny room, technically separate from the servant's quarters, that she shares with her mother.

It's not actually surprising that all of the slaves are scared of them. They know a bunch of the bellflower signs, of course, but Cheliax does its best to make sure most slaves don't, and it's not like nobody else can say the words as a trick. If they'd been planning this they would have brought a freed halfling with them, they usually respond better that way and there are plenty chomping at the bit for the chance, but this was more of a target of opportunity than anything. Instead they've got Eric, who's plenty scary with his rapier but a lot less viscerally terrifying than Joy's wizardry or Treason's everything, calmly talking with them about what's going to happen and what their options are. The fear on their face hurts, but it's the Asmodeans who are at fault, not their victims.

Treason absolutely is going to keep an eye on the servant girl, though! They haven't heard anything particularly bad about her, but the slaves haven't exactly been opening up all their deepest fears and there's a lot of ways a free person can try to make their lives miserable. She's not going to be hostile unless it gets violent or Asmodia tries to make a run for the horses, but a woman with enough muscles to use a longbow and the concentration to hit a moving target at a thousand feet keeping an eye on you can be pretty intimidating.

He can certainly talk to them about their options! If he wants to talk with them about their options that's going to be trickier. They seem to be doing their very best to avoid talking unless they think they're being ordered to.

She can stay still and quiet, if that's what the strangers seem to want. She's trying to come across as obedient, rather than as terrified of being caught, but it's fine if they think she's the normal kind of terrified.

They don't look like they're with the army, at least, but she's never met adventurers out of stories before, for all she knows they're as bad as soldiers. Her eyes are still moving, trying to make sense of the situation, trying to — is that a holy symbol of Cayden— 

No matter what this is, whether it's a trap or — something else, she doesn't dare hope — it would be safer if she hadn't noticed. But she doesn't think she can pretend she didn't see it, if they were watching they must have seen the way her eyes caught on it, she needs to figure out what to say only the right thing to say if it's a trap and the right thing to say if it isn't are pretty much exact opposites. What does she even know about Cayden — he likes alcohol, even the kinds that aren't legal, he thinks people should sleep around like they do in the cities and not get all fussed about getting married, he wants people to bravely fight the demons at the Worldwound, she's not sure what else—

Subtle, thy name is not Asmodia Ferrer. You don't exactly need eagle eyes to spot where her vision is going, but they're useful enough to tolerate the pun so Treason has a pair anyway.

"Never seen a Caydenite before? You've been missing out, let me tell you."

(Eric can work with that. He thinks the ones he's talking to will probably want to do a runner without them, so he's going to spend a bit more time on the logistics of that one even though he really doesn't recommend it, but he'll make sure to go over the pros and cons of all their different options and avoid anything that even sounds like an order.)

Apple thinks this would be easier if they still had Tea, but he's not about to say that 

"No, ma'am, I haven't." She doesn't actually have any idea what you're supposed to call Caydenites if you don't want them to torture you for not respecting them enough. ...Probably it doesn't matter, they're Chaotic Good, they're probably a lot more likely to torture her because she used to worship Asmodeus than because she messed up a title.

Titles are for losers who can't let their actions speak for themselves. Besides, she wouldn't have picked her name if she didn't want people using it.

"Don't get all stuffy on me. There's gonna be a lot of changes around here, at least until they find some inbred cousin of his to stick with the position, but I don't plan to stick around for long and we're probably not going to kill you unless you're really awful."

Oh. 

Her lord is — dead, then?

There's some incredibly pathetic part of her twisting up with disappointment, hearing that. She had wanted to kill him, she'd thought that was what she'd been chosen to achieve, she'd stuck around even knowing it was only a matter of time before Chosen Dalmau asked for the right spell because she wanted to make him pay, him and his family and Chosen Dalmau, and if she ran and might never get the chance.

But the important thing is that he's dead.

She hopes it hurt.

Unless it's a trick. But probably if it were a trick they'd've bothered to look her over with magic, and they'd be cutting into her right about now. 

She's never met anyone else who was trying to actually listen to the little voice inside them telling them to make people like that suffer the way they deserved. And she looks a lot better at fighting than Asmodia, Asmodia still hasn't figured out how to get close enough to Chosen Dalmau to kill him without him just using his magic to kill her first. It'd be upsetting not to get to do it herself, but as long as he's burning in Hell with his god she thinks she can manage.

"Did you — Chosen Dalmau, he sleeps by the chapel — did you get him—"

"Of course, we're not amateurs. Him, the wife, most of the guards... the kids are still around, but honestly I don't fancy all their chances of lasting the year."

The same goes for the surviving guards, honestly. Cheliax is a shit work environment even if you didn't just surrender to their enemies.

She's not really sure what the point of leaving the kids alive is, they're still nobleborn Asmodeans, she's technically a child and she doesn't worship Asmodeus. Maybe the littlest ones, maybe, but it's not like any of them are decent people. But that's not really the point, the point is that her lord is dead, and Chosen Dalmau is dead. And she wishes it had been her hand on the knife, but even so, with any luck they're trapped in the fires of Avernus, desperately begging for it to stop, knowing that it never will.

...And if this is some kind of trick, she's already asked them to kill the priest, there's not much that's more obviously disloyal than that, there's really no reason to pretend.

"Good," she says fiercely.

Now, see, that's an appropriate reaction to Asmodean clerics being dead. She's pretty sure it's genuine, too - some people like to talk about how good Chelish people are at lying, but in her experience it's mostly that they don't know what telling the truth looks like for comparison. 

Of course, having that reaction also puts her in even more danger than just being a witness to them pulling this off does.

"On a related note, though, you're probably going to need to get out of here yourself. If there's anything the Asmodeans hate more than feeling disrespected, it's people knowing you can just kill them like anyone else - doesn't matter that you didn't do anything, you still know too much. Maybe if you were good enough at grovelling, but, well, I imagine you hate that as much as everyone else. We're advising the same thing for all the other servants and guards who are still alive."

(She totally thinks Asmodia is lying. The little bitch goes to services every night, and now that someone stronger shows up all of the sudden she's pretending like she never cared about any of that? But it'd be pathetic to start whining just because Asmodia is better at pretending to be a traitor than she is.)

She's spent the past few weeks pretending like she's shocked and horrified about Guifré, she's pretty sure she can manage to grovel convincingly. It's just that that won't be enough to help, even if the Crown doesn't just decide to torture everyone here to death, not if they start asking questions under truthspell and definitely not if they bother to check for secret priests.

"Do you, uh, know how to get to the border from here?"

Asmodia has never seen a map. She thinks probably Andoran is to the east but she's not even sure of that, and she could steal one of the lord's travel passes if no one else gets to them first but that won't get her all the way to Andoran province.

—Actually, now that she thinks about it, she's not sure she even wants to go to Andoran? If there's people going around making people like Chosen Dalmau or her lord or Guifré pay for what they did — they might be dead, but it's not hard to remember the smoldering feeling that used to burn inside her, or the sheer rightness of killing Guifré, and it's not hard to imagine pointing them at someone else. Is there a way to say she wants to do that instead that doesn't make her sound like a pathetic child with no idea what she's doing — probably, but she hasn't thought of it yet.

"Andoran's about 400 miles east, Molthune a little over 300 northeast from here. Gotta be careful with Molthune though, if you don't go east enough you'll end up in Nidal and that's not any better. Plus Molthune can eat a bag of dicks. Once we're done here we're gonna-"

"Treason." There's a sharp reproach in Joy's voice.

"What, I'm not gonna give her any details."

"Don't tell people things that you don't want the Asmodeans to torture out of them."

They're going to commit treason next? Aren't they already — wait, is he calling the woman "Treason," is that her name — that's not the most important thing. Maybe she's worried her name will get stolen by faeries or something.

"All I really know about other provinces is what they told us, and sometimes it, uh, changed."

She's mostly guessing Andoran is a good place to go because Chosen Dalmau used to say it was full of anarchists. Also, wow, that really isn't helping with the thing where she probably sounds like a pathetic child. (She totally thinks she could just not give in under torture if it were really important, the problem is that they can just solve that with magic.)

"Oh, yeah. Asmodeans hate accurate maps because then they'd have to admit we've already taken half the country from them, and then people might get ideas about the other half."

That didn't really answer her question. ...Probably this is her fault for not actually saying the question part. Only now she has other questions — how do you ask about that without sounding like a stupid child—

"I think it's harder than they thought to stop people from, uh, 'getting ideas.'" 

That... was also not a question.

Right, sure, Asmodia, we totally buy that you've secretly wanted to rebel against Asmodeus the whole time. It'd be less pathetic if she was just groveling at their feet.

"Nobody ever said Asmodean clerics were smart."

"Nah, I'm sure Cheliax lies about that one."

"Nobody ever said it with a straight face."

"Usually they said Asmodean priests were wise, if you were smart you were supposed to go be a wizard. ...Was that not actually true, that you've got to be wise to be a priest?"

...That was also probably a stupid question. She should really figure out how to say her questions in a way that sounds less pathetic.

"Eh. More than most people, sure, but that's a wide range and Asmodeus' are less wise than you'd think. I always figure anyone actually wise would be able to realize getting paid in eternal torture is kind of a shit wage. I think he has fewer of the total washes, though - I know a Caydenite who isn't even wise enough to conjure beer, but he gets 7 channels a day to make up for it and evil channels aren't very useful."