"Yes. I know." 

Mahdi flops tiredly on the sand. "Should've asked Clepati for an extradimensional mansion while she was here."

"You'd think, all those fancy things to say, she could've mentioned Yfandes -"

"I am very sure she could have done that."

"All right, what have we got. Leareth thinks 'young men who think they're immortal, because they are' is about him. 'turned his back on all of the servants of all the gods', is that also you? It's the phrasing Rahadoum uses, but she was talking about you..."

"Can you do a Fox's Cunning for everyone -"

"Tomorrow I can do that but not right now."

"That is not false of me, in any case. What exactly is an extradimensional mansion? Or a Fox's Cunning?" 

"Extradimensional mansion is a seventh-circle -" Sigh. "Backing up. The kind of magic that you don't need any innate aptitude for involves using a magical spellbook in which you can stabilize spells in advance, and then cast them on the fly as situationally appropriate. People who do this are called wizards; I am one. Spells developed this way are very discrete, compared to the magic of your world, because only certain configurations are stable." He flings up an illustrative illusion. "First circle spellform looks like this, second like this, third like this, fourth like this, fifth like this." They get nonlinearly more complicated. "I can't concentrate on seeing them at the same time as I cast them but Vanyel can and so we've been playing around with them a bunch.

If you're a seventh-circle wizard you can create an extradimensional space luxuriously appointed as a mansion complete with servants. Clepati is and I bet she wouldn't have minded and then we wouldn't be camping out here in the sand like a bunch of commoners. 

Fox's Cunning is a spell that enhances intelligence. I feel like we could use it, right now. I have a headband for it but I'm going to forget some of my spells if I take it off."

"I am honestly not sure which is more surprising, magic that can create an entire extradimensional house or that can increase intelligence." Leareth gives Mahdi a slightly awed look. "Anyway. Do you have any pressing objectives other than the problem with Vanyel's Companion?" 

"No. Though if we can't solve that one it seems like we should maybe try to rush the resurrection? In case having the one magic soul bond back makes the other one less of a problem - I am unfamiliar with magic soul bond injuries, I don't know if this would actually work -"

Vanyel covers his face with both hands. "Maybe. If you're going to talk about that can you please go somewhere else." 

"Sure, sorry. Other than that I don't think we have objectives at this time. Our plan was for Fazil to ask Abadar whether he'll be able to get his spells in Velgarth and then Plane Shift over and do arbitrage on gemstones."

"Is it a good idea to also ask Abadar why Nefreti says he loves Leareth."

"...probably. I assume she would not have told a cleric of Abadar that if it were disastrous for it to come to His attention -"

"Given what's happened so far we don't have a lot of reason to think she was steering at 'nondisastrous'. And in fact I bet she wasn't steering - that's why we chose her, right, instead of someone else capable of casting Gate who was going to have an agenda about it -"

"Curious as I am, I have a preference that you not raise my existence to the attention of any gods." 

Sigh. "The petition can just ask about Velgarth, but you should know that Abadar can pay attention to me if He wants though He never has. It would be unprecedented for him to do anything about you."

"Maybe do the petition in Sothis. So it goes through a part of Abadar that can't, straightforwardly, pay you any attention."

" - I'm slightly uncomfortable with actively trying to avoid Abadar's notice here. I respect that Leareth has had bad experiences with gods, that's good enough reason to not ask gods about him in particular without a compelling reason. But -" 

Sigh. 

"Let's keep talking about this and maybe when we all have more shared information it'll be clearer what we actually disagree on, if anything."

"You are a cleric to Abadar and receive divine magic from him?" Leareth turns to Fazil, (mostly) hiding his discomfort. He should assume that he's still at these people's mercy, even if they're not literally trapping him in the horrible magic-blocking room which is probably going to give him literal nightmares. It probably makes sense to assume that Abadar knows about him already, though that doesn't necessarily make it wise to draw any more attention to himself. 

"Abadar does sound - less dubious - than the gods I know, if not exactly aligned on what I would consider human flourishing. Can you tell me more about him?" 

"Abadar is a god of commerce and trade. I agree that this is not the same thing as human flourishing; it's - a step upwards of that, a tool that allows whoever uses it to have more of whatever they value. But when in human hands it promotes human flourishing - and Elf flourishing in Elf hands, and Dwarf flourishing in Dwarf hands, and so on - and Abadar wishes for it to be in as many hands as possible."

Leareth decides against complaining any more about the slaves. "Yes. I quite agree. It is a tool that pushes things in a direction, and generally that direction is one I would call improvement. It is also far too - legible - to be something one of our gods could be the god of. Which is interesting in its own right, I think." 

"Yes, all your gods sound like the more confusing half of our gods. And they don't directly grant their followers miracles, Vanyel said, which is most of how we learn of our gods' priorities. Abadar has been known to grant cleric abilities to people who write good treatises about economics, people pick up a miracle from Iomedae while defending the innocent - my best guess is that it's cheap somehow for our gods to identify people devoted to them and grant them miracles through the standard system for that, and your gods don't have whatever shortcuts make that within the attentional capacity of ours."

"Interesting. I hope the fact that I wrote treatises on economics in my own world does not draw Abadar's attention, though I suppose I make no claim about whether they are good. Your country must be very advanced, then - do you have a banking system..."