Leareth nods. "How much information on a person do you need in order to contact them with the earcuff - is what is here enough?" It has full names, occupation or specialization, and locations which she can compare against the map.

(Leareth is giving her rather a lot of information on his deployments, actually.) 

"It should be, maybe unless a lot of people have the same names. Why?"

"I could give you more by matching against more detailed records, but it would be much more time-consuming and irritating, especially as most of them only have copies kept up to date onsite and not here. If this is enough, I will not bother. There are likely to be name repeats, but I doubt that name, occupation, and location are going to be duplicated more than a few times by coincidence. What happens with the earcuff if it cannot disambiguate?" 

"It fails gracefully. The spell's not really designed for finding strangers, I didn't slow down enough to rework it like that, I wanted to tell my friends I was safe sooner than later."

"Reasonable." Leareth waits to see if she has any further questions for him. 

She flips through the papers again, then puts them all back in their proper stacks, takes her last bite of dinner. "Thank you. Is there anything else I should, let's say, avoid being surprised by?"

"About my current and past activities, I am guessing?" 

"Current's more important, obviously, but if you have anything real startling - more than 'occasionally kill people for strategic geopolitical reasons' - in the history books, I'd rather not be blindsided. Especially if it's going to run into Elf cultural sensibilities should I ever introduce you. They're touchy about children and childhood, most notably, much stronger reaction than mine to kidnapping kids from their families."

"Of course. I am two thousand years old, which is a great deal of history books material, and it is late. Is it all right if I organize it sensibly and give it to you in the morning?" 

"Yes, that's fine, I appreciate it."

"Anything else for right now?" 

"Don't think so. I apologize for threatening to put your soul in a jar, that was mean."

"Apology accepted." He's smiling about it. 

"Thanks."

"Would you like me to send over some of the mages, or Nayoki, so that you can coordinate on not doing all of it yourself? There are also mages at nearly all of the sites who you could contact; they could remove compulsions and you could presumably check their work afterward if you wished." 

"That sounds like a good idea. Are mages and Mindhealers equally tidy and noninvasive at compulsion removal?"

"The tidiest and least invasive way would be for the mage who cast it to reverse it. However, that would require digging up the records of who did what, when, and moving a lot of people around. Without that option, mages can do it less invasively, but with a somewhat higher chance of missing something." 

"What differential are we looking at there?"

"It would mostly apply for very long-term compulsions or ones that had been changed a number of times – if there are enough layers to it, a Mindhealer might be fifty percent more likely to catch everything and be able to restore the person's mind to an unaffected state. I think cases like that ought to be rare, and people will be able to tell you if it applies to them–"

He stops. "Actually, an exception to that would be a few spies in various distant places, with voluntary compulsions that include self-deceiving ones that minimize the risk they will be noticed or captured. They are not on these lists, and undoing the compulsions before recalling them could place them in danger. If you wish, I can recall them as promptly as possible, but I am not going to give you their names before that point." 

"That makes sense. I'm not actually trying to set your whole organization on fire, here, it seems like it might be a useful organization, just, it doesn't need to be maximally ruthlessly efficient given that in a few months multiverse willing it should have the ability to station key features in another plane. Is there something in particular the spies are for?"

"Nothing very immediate. Mainly keeping an eye on whether the gods are up to anything odd in the kingdoms bordering on Valdemar. Though it would have been very helpful if I could ever have gotten an agent into Iftel and back out successfully..." 

"Why can't you, what's the deal with Iftel?"

"Intelligent magic shield-barrier around the entire country, as far as I can tell personally administrated by Vkandis, that vets everybody before letting them through. It has been that way for the last seventeen hundred years. Also, everybody outside of Iftel mysteriously fails to be at all curious about this odd state of affairs." 

"Wow, I hate it. How does the mysterious curiosity failure work -"

Leareth's lips twitch. "More people ought notice enough to hate it. I am not sure of the underlying mechanism, but the observed effect is mostly that - Iftel fails to ever be salient in people's minds? Consider that it borders on Valdemar, and Queen Elspeth brokered an alliance there with a state marriage, early in her reign; have you heard the place mentioned nearly as often as you would expect given these facts?"