"Would your brother -"

"I mean it's the same diamond we're sourcing anyway, we'd really just be asking him to front it for a couple of days."

"I imagine it would require explaining more to him, unless 25,000 gold is cheap enough for him that he can front it for us on a whim. I think - hmm. I am not actually sure how Companions work, but I think Yfandes is not being directly controlled by a god at this time, and simply has - some sort of built-in structure, related to the purpose Companions serve in Valdemar. I am not sure we would want to remove all of that structure, since I assume part of it is what supports the bond with Vanyel, but - did it look to you like she was in conflict with herself? If the structure has multiple parts, and one part is loyal to Vanyel but another is against fighting gods..." 

" - kind of. Maybe."

"It might be safe - or at least worth risking - to go back and ask her. We ought to check that she is all right in any case, at some point. Though I think a first priority is helping Vanyel get some sleep. And possibly some healing spells would help cancel out the sleep deprivation he has been accumulating." 

He rings the bell to summon one of the servants. 

Servant appears promptly. 

"We would like to have one of your clerics see if they can help Vanyel. He is not physically hurt, but he is in serious emotional distress due to - it is hard to explain." He glances at Fazil and Hagan to see if they have any quick cultural translation of it. 

"Uh, he had a magical soul bond with his boyfriend who is dead, and he had another magical soul bond with his - paladin mount? And she's - blocking him out of the magical soul bond."

"I assume someone has already suggested raising the boyfriend?"

"There's a different afterlife situation involved complicating matters but the pharaoh said there's an eighth-circle spell to directly track a soul which he will try tomorrow and if the results are promising then we will raise him."

"Are we figuring that even if magic soul bonds are vulnerable to a sufficiently heightened Break Enchantment getting rid of them is not desirable -"

"If we can't raise the dead boyfriend maybe he will want to not be soulbonded to him? But I don't think he or Yfandes want to not be bonded at all. He just needs to be able to sleep and rest and recover. And we think he's too powerful for sleep spells."

"I don't know a spell, then. We do have some drugs he can try if he'd like. Most of them will make it hard to do much of anything and the ones that do let you act normally you pay for afterwards."

"We're not counting on it for a long-term solution."

"I can have someone bring things up and explain dosing."

"Thank you." Leareth does not say out loud that Vanyel already isn't doing much of anything so it can hardly make things worse on that front. He does slip in and update Vanyel on the plan. 

Meh. Sleep sounds good. He doesn't really care about the other side effects, right now. 

Then someone can come up and explain dosing for various powerful painkillers that will cause him to be asleep. He can try a couple and see which has the least annoying side effects. 

Side effects such as being totally unable to think seem fine, maybe then he'll stop getting stuck in the constant stupid loop of how it would be a great idea to kill himself, except for the part where nobody is going to let him, which seems horribly unfair right now. 

(Leareth discreetly tells Mahdi that they should probably not leave the drugs anywhere where Vanyel could get to them if someone stops watching him for thirty seconds, he probably isn't going to impulsively try to kill himself by taking five times too much or something, but he's evidently not thinking that clearly and being drugged half out of his mind is probably not going to help on that front.)

And then he finds a moment to ask Fazil. "What exactly did you talk about with the pharaoh? He is casting a spell to search for his lifebonded's soul?" 

" - well mostly he just wanted to answer the questions prompted by the revelation that apparently he's not Abadar. And then about the fact that he imagined I might have been put in the difficult position of being asked to keep things from him and from Abadar and not being clear on whether that's allowed or not. - it is. Apparently. He said you can decide what to explain on your own time, because - part of what the essence of Law is is being the kind of person other people can successfully cooperate with, not just when it's momentarily advantageous but all the time, and he's glad we came to him and prefers to predictably be someone we're glad we came to. 

And then he said that the afterlife question seemed more immediately important to us than the question of what would happen if hypothetically we got ourselves killed usually is, to adventurers, and I said we were going to try to get someone back, and he said that. I think he  - probably got more out of the conversation than this summary implies, but - it is not actually my job to keep things from the pharaoh in extended personal conversation."

"Sorry. I wasn't thinking about how I was putting you in a difficult position."

"I wonder if it's because you have been making a habit of not thinking about how you're putting me in a difficult position for as long as we have known each other."

"The pharaoh had a bunch of nice simple clear-cut instructions on when he'd consider me obligated to obey you and when he wouldn't and how to adjudicate edge cases and I'm just going to listen to him about that until I encounter any evidence you are trying to offer me that."