The rest of the night is uneventful. 

Leareth gets a gloriously solid night's sleep, wakes up not too long after dawn, and slips by to let Fazil know he can take over if he wants to get some more sleep. 

He has to do his spells at this hour but it's probably good to have someone who is not busy praying on hand, Fazil could stop but it might mess with getting all his spells for the day.

Leareth can definitely take over watching asleep-Vanyel. 

Asleep Vanyel's status shows no sign of changing. 

Well, he probably needs the rest. Leareth spends the time silently reviewing his notes. 

And eventually he has his spells and Mahdi has his spells and they can go back to the library after asking Leareth to fetch them once everyone's up.

(Leareth is so, so fond of his headband, it's noticeable how it makes just reviewing his notes more productive.) 

When Vanyel is finally awake, he calls for a servant to request breakfast, and then alerts the others with a quick burst of Mindspeech. 

They trickle back in. 

"He bribed you," says Hagan, looking at the headband.

Leareth raises an eyebrow. "He told me to consider it an investment, in the success of all my endeavours. Which was some rather skillful flattery in itself." It's the most delightful and useful bribe he's ever received. 

"What did he want?"

Leareth glances around, and then raises a privacy-barrier around them. Not that he especially thinks the pharaoh is going to spy on them here, but he might as well. 

"All he asked for this time was our information on Rahadoum, since he had observed that we were drawing inferences from information his spies do not have. I do actually want to be cooperative with him, so I said as much as I could without giving any hint toward the Aroden connection." 

"Huh. The Aroden connection is - a pretty important piece of the picture though, I think."

"I know. He must still be very confused - I told him about Nethys, and the 'story told again and again across worlds', and that I recognized the person we guessed is in Rahadoum. He may have inferred that 'someone I know' refers to myself." Leareth shakes his head. "I do think that it does not really hold together without the context on Aroden, however, I do not know if Aroden is remaining concealed from Abadar on purpose, and that is something I would really prefer to check before revealing him." 

"That makes sense."

"This is all rather stressful."

"Next step is going into Rahadoum sort of undercover to determine whether Aroden's running the show?"

"That would be my next step, yes, but." Leareth looks over at Vanyel. "It is really not the ideal timing for an undercover journey." 

"Sorry." 

"I can't go anyway and would rather not be the only one staying behind. And, uh, it might make sense to try to keep a lower profile than Vanyel by default has - I guess I haven't seen you in a fight, Leareth, maybe it's going to be the exact same problem -"

"Ideally we are a not especially remarkable fifth circle adventuring party, yeah, or maybe-Aroden is going to be paying a lot of attention to us and it'll probably be harder to pay attention to him."

"I think I will be less conspicuous than Vanyel in a fight. He is much more powerful." And also Leareth will probably default to using mind control a lot if the alternatives would draw too much attention. "If we plan to do that, we ought discuss exactly what kinds of combat magic will stand out here versus seem commonplace, although ideally we will avoid getting into too many fights." 

"I mean, easiest way into Rahadoum is go back to my contact who was recruiting and tell him we're in for a couple of months. - we don't have to stay the full contract but I do value my reputation there moderately highly - it wouldn't be illegal to go visit with no excuse, do tourism or whatever, but it'd be highly conspicuous. And they'll let a lot more slip about what they're planning with the people they're trying to train to do it."

"That makes sense but it is also very costly. I suppose just finding him directly and asking him is unlikely to work, he would be very suspicious and - hmm, I am not sure how I would go about convincing another me to trust me. I am not very trusting."