In his surroundings, in a high spot with a view of the cave entrance: mages, camping out, well-shielded.

Telumë allows himself thirty seconds of internal frustrated groans, while he holds perfectly still in the cover of trees and also an illusion. (The kind that doesn't leak any external signature visible to mage-sight, it took a week of practicing to get the technique down again but at least it doesn't rely on raw power which he doesn't have yet.)

He thinks. 

This is very suspicious. He has to assume that those mages belong to Vkandis, even if he has no idea how they found his cache - the fact that they found it indicates that there's something he didn't know about their resources, but for right now he can't fill in enough of the context to guess at what sort of puzzle-piece he's missing. 

If he had Thoughtsensing he would sneak close enough to try to read them. He doesn't have Thoughtsensing. Even if he could take them in a fight, which is dubious in this body and with his limited mage-artifacts, that would give away to Vkandis' forces that he's onto them.

...For the moment, the most important question is whether they saw him before he saw them. Telumë continues holding still, and watches with his Othersenses. 

They shift position a little, but not much. None of them leave the camp. The shields on their camp do not change.

All right. What are his goals, here? 

He wants to know what they know. How they found his cache, and whether this means that they know the location of all the others. He wants to accomplish this in a way that doesn't make it obvious to Vkandis Sunlord what just happened. 

What are his resources? 

A relatively paltry mage-gift, he's the equivalent of middling Master-level right now, and what amounts to very patchy and random training. Not all of his reflexes and transferred procedural memory have been properly tested, yet, which makes him reluctant to put weight there. He can do excellent illusions and shields, pretty good compulsions, and a very limited array of low-power offensive magic; it just wasn't worth focusing there when the current strength of his Gift is the main limiting factor. The notes he carried with him, to study when he's resting at night, are mostly on wards and trap-spells, which are fiddly and complicated and didn't come across perfectly from his last body - while he can expect to have more skill there next week, he doesn't have it now. 

What he does have, though, is a decently strong Healing-Gift. Hmm. 

Eventually, Telumë circles back, quite a long way, and creeps around to higher ground, keeping a very close eye out for any wards or traps that the camp may have laid themselves. 

Their camp is warded. Two perimeters, it looks like. The outer protections will just alert them if anyone gets that close; the inner protections will bite. 

Reasonably competent, but probably not their most elite. Which - probably means this isn't the only location they're staking out, if they did only know about this one then they'd have the best on the job, but there aren't enough of the best to cover several dozen posts...

If he were an Adept he could get a compulsion on one of them past all those wards, without being detected. Right now, he can't. Instead, he climbs a tree, checks his shields and illusion-invisibility, and then very carefully uses his magic to whack a small sapling twenty yards downhill and ten yards east of his position into the bigger tree next to it, making a loud rustling sound.

He prepares to cast another illusion. 

Two of them head down to get a clear view of where the noise came from.

Illusion - flicker of something rushing through the trees, too quick and behind too much undergrowth to see exactly what it is, he accompanies it with more nudges to make the bushes rustle, all of it very careful not to leak excess magic. 

They hurl some levinbolts at the mysterious thing rushing through the trees. 

The levinbolts 'miss', Telumë arranges for the mysterious something to dodge and weave sideways–

–and as soon as they're within five yards of his current position, he can very quickly use his Sight to check their shields, most combat mages won't be able to block compulsions but it's theoretically possible they could be wearing talismans that could both block it and set of an alarm at the attempt. 

They are not wearing talismans that do that. 

Then they're going to get minor compulsions, the subtlest he can manage. The rustling has stopped and it's not clear which way the thing making the noise went, or whether maybe they hit it - they should split up to search, he should go left and the other guy should go right. 

They've been warned that Leareth is good at compulsions but that's not actually enough to notice this or be suspicious of it. They split up.

He slips down from the tree, silencing his fall with a brief sound-barrier around the spot where he's landing, and adds another whisper of a compulsion - stop, look that way - and once he reaches the man, who is now looking not in his direction, he touches him and reaches out with his Healing-Gift instead. Sleep. 

The mage goes down. 

Telumë catches him - well, sort of, the man is fully grown and he's a scrawny fifteen-year-old. He flings up a sound-barrier around them, muting his grunt of effort and the resulting rustle as he lays the man down.

Now he has to work fast, but at least he can do it unhindered by needing to make sure the mage won't notice his work as he's doing it. More complex, layered compulsion. The man is going to get up, after this, believing that nothing out of the ordinary just happened. (This will wear off when the compulsion itself does, but hopefully by then he won't remember the specifics of the weirdness and also Telumë will be far away.) After he gets up, at some point tonight, he wants to write down some notes on their current situation; inconveniently, Telumë has no idea if he shares any languages with the mage, with his luck the notes will come out in a language he can't read at all, but he can deal with that later. Then he's going to 'lose' his notes whenever he goes to relieve himself before bed. All of this is very ordinary and not strange at all; he doesn't have to be furtive about whatever he's writing, it's perfectly normal, but also there's no reason to talk to his comrades about it because it's very boring. All the compulsions will wear off tomorrow morning.

He's been preparing and rehearsing this particular set of compulsions, and it takes him about ninety seconds in all, during which hopefully nothing else happens. 

The other mage yells "nothing over here!" and starts stomping back in their direction.

Telumë darts back into a bush and crouches down and hides himself behind the tightest illusion and shields he can manage. The mage should wake up within about five seconds, thinking he tripped and fell and shouldn't mention it because it's embarrassing.

The obvious failure mode of his plan is that the others back at camp are also mages and might be well trained enough to notice compulsions even without specifically looking for it. Most mages aren't that well trained, they'd have to be more elite than these people seem, but it occurs to him that Vkandis and Sauron are being very smart, here, and - he shouldn't underestimate them. 

The mage gets up. They talk, in low voices; both of them head back to camp.

It's extremely frustrating that he doesn't have Thoughtsensing and can't tell if the low-voiced discussion indicates that they're onto him. 

Just in case, he waits until they're back at camp and then creeps further away, a lot further; if he's a mile off and also well-hidden then even if they call in reinforcements he should have time to get away. (Obnoxiously, he isn't really powerful enough to Gate, not usefully; he could maybe blind-Gate himself a few miles and then be utterly exhausted and also make a very loud magical signature on both ends, Gating as an escape strategy isn't that helpful unless you can do more than fifty miles at a go).

He also doesn't have scrying down, yet, but he does have an artifact for it, so once he's settled himself in the hollow where a large dead tree fell over and its roots were wrenched out of the earth, and set up some simple but very invisible passive wards, he unwraps said artifact and tries to scry the camp, hoping they're not warded against it and especially hoping they don't have the kind of ward-stones that would detect an attempt. He doesn't expect it, as far as he knows he's the only person in the world who has that technique, but it's not like he knows anything about Iftel's school of magic. 

He can see the camp!

Four mages, huddled together talking. 

And then a lot more mages than that, Gating in.

Goddamnit. He drops the scrying right away, just in case this new batch of mages does have the skill to detect it and trace it back to him.

The obvious thing that went wrong, here, is that they got special training and instructions to check each other regularly for compulsions. Which...indicates that someone knows more about his operating style than Vkandis really ought to. Does Sauron know him that well? The torture memory is less helpful than he would like for figuring this out.

–Maitimo. Maitimo knows him that well. And is, in general, absurdly good at this kind of outguessing other people, he doesn't need specifics to remember that piece clearly. And - he left Maitimo behind on a battlefield, gambling that he could either get out back to Arda (which they both knew the odds were against) or at least kill himself before he could be captured. Maybe he failed. Maybe Sauron - tricked him? No, that doesn't fit, but - something - niggling at the edge of his half-lost memories... 

Focus. It doesn't matter how, right now, it just matters that they know he's nearby. And he can't Gate out. 

Get to the river. Water, moving water in particular, blocks magic decently well, and if he can get underwater he can transport himself a reasonable distance unseen.

Othersenses spread out to detect anyone approaching, and thoroughly hidden by an illusion, he starts cautiously moving. He doesn't think they've seen him, yet. 

Probably not because they fan out and start looking.

How far is he from the river? 

Maybe a quarter of a mile.