"I can give you some amount of context."

Malduoni intends to give them exactly the level of context he feels comfortable with Abadar knowing. He will probably give Leareth more, because - well, he's at this point placing a lot of trust in Leareth's judgement. Not with the most rock-solid justification he can imagine having, but...for this, he thinks it's enough.

They have invasion plans to discuss (he doesn't know exactly where he would put Mahdi and Hagan, yet, but can at least describe the general shape of what he'd want them to do), and magic theory to discuss, and this will easily eat the rest of the day. After lunch, which is a not-very-fancy meal brought in for them, Malduoni very politely shoos Mahdi and Hagan elsewhere so he can talk to Leareth privately. 

They will head back out into Azir. It feels a little surreal, to be back in a normal city where people are going about normal lives. They don't talk to each other. There's not much that wouldn't be dumb to say, out loud, out here.  

"I miss Fazil," he says eventually.

"Yeah. Maybe soon."

Leareth extricates himself around sundown. He's equipped with half of a set of paired magic mirrors, a communication method that's apparently very secure - this is obnoxious to pull off with Velgarth magic - though of course only insofar as the two ends are. Given who's in possession of the two ends, though, he is kind of less worried about that. 

(Well, Nefreti Clepati demonstrably can rob him of all his possessions, but he doesn't actually think she has a motive to do it again, and also it wouldn't help her or Nethys that much, neither of them are going to be able to impersonate him even as far as the proving-his-identity questions.) 

After a really extensive amount of back and forth, he has Malduoni's tentative agreement to trust his judgement on Abadar. Which is, currently, that Abadar is probably worth allying with, if allying is what Abadar wants to do here. There are quite a lot of pieces there, and caveats, but - ultimately it's not favourable to Abadar's goals to have Cheliax in the hands of Asmodeus, and that seems like the strongest driver here. 

He goes to find Mahdi and Hagan. 

They haven't wandered too far. "Back to where we left from?"

"I think so." 

So he takes their hands and then they're back in the winter palace. Not literally right where they left; the palace has an effect that redirects teleportation to a specific spot. 

Interesting. Leareth would really like to know how that magic works; he can't tell just by attempting to watch their landing. 

They should let the pharaoh know that they're back. Not only is Leareth disinclined to trust anyone else in the Palace with their news, he's literally geased against doing so.

(Malduoni did not explicitly whitelist Vanyel or Fazil. If they decide to trust Khemet fully then this isn't going to be more than inconvenient, but Leareth still wonders if it's intended as an incentive for Vanyel and Fazil to themselves accept the geas, or just as an additional preventative against more information spreading to Velgarth. Whatever it is, he's sure it's not by accident.) 

The pharaoh comes over about twenty minutes later. "Sit comfortably," he says. "How was it?"

"Educational." Leareth isn't sure of the most graceful way to ask 'well, did you guess it while we were gone'.

"If I am right, you have already made some inferences about what we found there." His intonation is almost but not quite a question. 

"The history of Velgarth is suggestive. As are the gods' complaints about you these days. They resent what a mess you make of their Foresight.

Here, of course, it was worse than that."

The pharaoh's face is unreadable and his mind is a blind spot to Leareth's senses, and Leareth is seized by a brief, absurd temptation to attempt to remove the top of his head or something - he desperately, screamingly wants to know what he's thinking. 

"Yes, some events went very badly here." He sighs. Leans forward a little. "I was right in all of my guesses. I offered my help and it was accepted. - I am not sure if that is information Abadar has already, but for better or worse, at this point He is welcome to it. We plan to move a week from now." 

" - a week. All right. There will be no more Plane Shifts to Velgarth; I can hold a Gate for two minutes a day and would not be astonished if your acquaintance can do even better. I don't know how many people you would want to bring over."

"If I do not crack inter-world Gates - of my variety - inside the next week, I wish to bring about three hundred mages, and ideally their support personnel, but if three hundred is pushing it that would suffice. If Valdemar agrees to help with the Worldwound, I am estimating they could spare about fifty Gifted Heralds." Pause. "If I do, which I think I can, then I am bringing twenty thousand troops across. Whatever the Velgarth deities have to say about it, they will not be able to interfere." 

He looks down. "Did the Velgarth gods simply change their mind about Plane Shifts, or did something - go wrong?" 

"Vanyel and Fazil landed in Iftel, and after a brief and unproductive interaction with the locals, Vykandaes set them on fire. They are fine."

"They are in Haven now, where everything is thankfully going much more smoothly. We would predict that Vanyel will be in a position to return, if you have an account of what you want them to do that's sufficiently in line with their sacred national mission."

"I should have warned them– sorry." Leareth lifts a hand. "About Iftel. And the fact that Vkandis likes to set people on fire. He has tried to kill me that way twice. I - Iftel, as well as its impassible shield-barrier, has a magical effect that causes people to find it very boring and forget its existence. It is less effective on me but - still effective." 

"Huh. - one second." He goes to the door, says something to someone, comes back. "Until we know that's not in effect here I want to be told it every hour," he says in explanation. "It would have been useful for them to have been warned in the sense that Fazil could have made them immune to fire, but it's not obvious to me that Vkandis wouldn't have escalated. I guess ideally they would've Plane Shifted back out immediately."

"I am not sure even I would have predicted that Vkandis would escalate so quickly with a Herald present. I suppose He must have been very alarmed by the otherworld magic." Leareth frowns. "We would appreciate their help by the Worldwound. A plan exists already that should make it somewhat less risky for them to engage. Though - it is relevant whether your Raise Dead and Resurrection will work on Velgarth natives if they die here."

(He is not even going to suggest the idea he had unless the answer is yes.) 

"It will work fine if your people die here. Though you will have to supply the diamonds; I have very few of them and would not want to have none left over in the event that this fight has as much collateral damage as the last one."

"I will check back with my organization about diamond procurement, but we should be able to do so. Raise Dead takes a smaller diamond, no? So if some Heralds are killed in action they would be cheaper to raise immediately." His eyes narrow. "Does the diamond need to be mined? It is not a standard use of Velgarth magic to artificially make diamonds but I would not be surprised if Vanyel in particular could do it." 

"Making them with our conjuration doesn't work but our conjuration is temporary. If you are proposing, uh, putting the right kinds of rock under the right kind of pressure... we should try that right away."

"That was my idea. I know our magic can be used to smelt metals and such - it is not very scalable except in places such as the Eastern Empire with a high rate of mages. For this - there is an adapted force-net spell for crushing things; I am not sure that I could overpower it hard enough, though I do not mind trying, but this is exactly the area where the strength of Vanyel's Gift would be key. He can channel...five times, maybe ten times as much power as I can."

(Well, this, and the size of fireball left by his suicide.)