The King doesn't think this would really add anything, not over and above questioning Starwind and Moondance under coercive Truth Spell about every single interaction in the Tower, and maybe having Melody deep-scan them.

Though he's not sure they'll cooperate for that, in which case he might have to order her to do it to them against their will, the Mindhealer claims she can take down a Thoughtsenser's shields by force but it'll cause 'damage.' She's apparently willing to consider doing it anyway, for this, but wants Randi to run it past all of the senior Healers in Haven and get their consensus that it's worth it.

In general it sounds like the Tayledras Adepts aren't not cooperating - for example, they haven't Gated out, even though the Senior Circle decided against using compulsions to prevent that. They're not volunteering any information or making it easier for the Heralds to investigate, though. 

Savil suggests they bring Melody in, so they can rehash the argument around how much the culpability is on them versus on their Goddess. 

Melody claims they weren't under standard magical compulsions or Mindhealing set-commands. She thinks Starwind did it of his own choice, or - well, as much as something can ever be a person's own choice, when they've spent their entire life subject to Powers beyond their reckoning. (She looks so, so displeased about this.) 

Both of them, though, have the same sort of odd mental patterns she's observed in other patients (read: Vanyel) who've interacted with gods. She's still unsure what exactly the Goddess told them or maybe did to them; as with some previous patients (Vanyel) they have a gap in their memory about it, and this time she doubts the Goddess will agree to unblock it if they ask nicely. She'll keep trying to get through it herself. 

What does this mean for Valdemar, in practice? 

Savil isn't sure. That they shouldn't count on the Tayledras for any strategic needs, especially not ones that involve interacting with Golarion and Leareth. It's - debatable whether the Adepts are even subject to Valdemar's legal system, but either way, the punishment for murder is exile and that'll just mean sending them back to the Vale, this time with orders from both their Goddess and Valdemar's King not to leave the Pelagirs and set foot in the kingdom again. 

He tinkers with his demiplane. He'd like to figure out whether he can block all magic except Truth Spells, or except the functioning of certain artifacts. He works on his national life insurance scheme. He figures out how to say to Abadar the thing he'd been wanting to say. 

I think, he says in prayer one night, the costs of this were almost all costs of the kind gods barely know how to track. And so I feel - suspicious of something, here, I feel like we're being underweighted. If She hadn't taken the souls, would You even be angry?

Abadar's answer is complicated but He ends up proposing after some hesitation that perhaps they're a heuristic that defending humans against god-meddling is higher priority than defending them against various purely human ways of harming each other, because humans can rebuild trust that was broken in human ways but can't so much rebuild trust that was broken by gods using them as instruments.

Leareth works on various Cheliax projects, and advises Aroden on the Pelagirs project, and goes around existing in public around the citizens of Cheliax even though they're reliably scared of him.

- One of the retrained mercenary combat mages imported from his organization in Velgarth and now doing infrastructure work in Cheliax is caught using his magic to steal and extort money from the locals. This is really obnoxious, especially since Leareth does a lot of filtering when recruiting even the mages in less sensitive positions. Leareth is comfortable claiming the man as under the jurisdiction of his organization and imposing the usual punishments according to his written legal code for his forces in peacetime, and the punishment for repeated offences using Gifts is having said Gifts burned out.

The entire plan here is for mages to settle here permanently, though, and have children with mage-potential, so Cheliax is going to need a legal system with appropriate clauses. He realizes he's not actually sure what the customs are for arcane wizards (for divine casters, presumably the appropriate consequences can be imposed by their god.) 

On his next visit to Osirion to see the pharaoh, he asks about it. 

"You can do that? That's not - possible, with our kind of magic. You can throw a geas at it, but that's a substantial enough expenditure of resources that it's not the default. In general if it's a weak wizard you can just confiscate their spellbook and send them to a monastery, they're not going to acquire the resources to do magic again, and if it's a strong wizard and you don't have anyone who can do a geas on hand you need to kill them."

...he scowls, suddenly. "I wish someone would've mentioned there's a way to make Velgarth mages safe to hold at less than extraordinary expense when I had a couple of them."

"Burning out Gifts - without risk of much greater harm, you can do it by blasting someone with enough magic but it will often kill or brain-damage them - is still very inconvenient. It requires a Mindhealer, which I have two of, though Nayoki is one of them. Also the standard method of doing it is is irreversible, so I avoid using it for holding people before an investigation is conducted. We do also have compulsions, which any skilled mage can do and which are thus a much lesser expenditure than Geas, but - I think your problem when it happened was that you had them and no other Velgarth mages? Perhaps you should have some mages permanently on your staff; that would also have allowed them to contact Nayoki with our communication spell and she could have Gated over very rapidly if needed. Though Nayoki's availability is not something I would wish your procedures to rely on, since she sometimes goes back to Velgarth." 

"Well, soon I'll have my demiplane for holding people pending investigation. I do want Velgarth mages, but I figured it'd be rude to poach yours when I can just resurrect some who died untimely deaths doing interesting things. Maybe I can get Mindhealers that way, too. Valdemar has some, right?"

"Valdemar has five, which is actually quite a remarkable number. Also Vanyel tells me that his honorary niece - the King's daughter, actually, but they are very close friends - is manifesting a Mindhealing Gift and also is begging her mother every single day to move to Golarion and learn to be a wizard too. She is seven, though, so it will be some time before you can recruit her." He considers it. "Valdemar's House of Healing does likely have records of past Mindhealers who worked with them in the last few centuries, who you could try to resurrect." 

"Maybe I'll ask them once things have died down a little. I do feel better about the whole situation knowing the murderers needn't just be on the loose with the ability to get back into Urtho's Tower any time they'd like."

"- I am not actually sure that Valdemar has imposed this punishment. You may know more about the state of the investigation than I do; Vanyel just mentioned to me that they were basically holding the two of them voluntarily, they had not imposed any compulsions even to prevent their Gating out if they decide to. He was displeased about this." 

"It's not even fair to them, right, I don't think they want to go kill more people for their goddess but they will if she orders it and we're about to give her reason to do that - I guess Valdemar doesn't know that last part -"

"They do not, and probably should not. I - wonder if we should push harder on that. Or send Vanyel to find out more of what they are thinking. Though there–"

He stops. 

"There is a Heartstone in Haven. It provides the power source for their kingdom's magical defences, Vanyel built it. Heartstones are Tayledras magic and have some basic intelligence and will. Because they contain a fragment of the Star-Eyed Goddess. I - am not sure if this is impacting anything but now that it has occurred to me I feel very concerned that it is."

" - huh.

I will talk to Abadar about that."

Leareth frowns. "If you have other matters to address at the same time, that makes sense, but - if not, I really do not like causing you horrible headaches, and there is a separate matter I have been vaguely planning to ask Him about, so I would not mind asking about the Heartstone as well." 

"If you are going to be doing it anyway by all means ask him about the Heartstones while you're at it. And if he thinks it's safe maybe I can send a diplomatic team to open a wizard school and heal the King regularly and be politely insistent that it'd be unacceptable to us for the Tayledras to be sent home with no consequences."

"Of course." Leareth writes this down. 

"On a happier note, I finished my demiplane, and wonder if you'd like one of your own as payment for my interworld Gate."

"That is very, very tempting. On the other hand, I - am not sure I can justify asking for something I do not actually need, rather than money to pay our teachers and childcare workers. I will have to think about it." 

"I'm very curious how the childcare workers thing works out, and whether it's sustainable without Hell paying for it."

"There are certainly various schemes we could set up to to pay for it with tax revenue or tariffs, but that would have other economic ramifications that we are not sure are worth it. We are considering, for example, imposing a low fee for use of the Gate network. Placing a higher fee for foreign trade through it would increase revenues but also discourage said trade, which is not actually what we want." 

"The recurring problem with trying to offer services for people - you have to make them pay for it, somehow, unless you're Hell."

"Aroden says that what we are aiming for here is to have the citizens of Cheliax pay for these services, but in a way that - makes the overall shape of society more equal-opportunity, since the people who benefit most from the childcare and school are those who could not otherwise afford them, and thus will also not be the people paying much in tax revenue. And so we need to have the wealthier citizens content with subsidizing those with worse circumstances. And of course having our country be wealthy in general, for example once we can produce enough of a diamond surplus to sell them to other countries, will help it not to feel like a burden. I do think we are going to keep the diamond-production spell to ourselves for now, so we have that income stream."