It is thinking about evil awful slug things and this place has only the species and roughly the ecology in common with the intelligence report but that doesn't mean it doesn't have them, or won't soon. There is probably not one sitting in this particular man's head or he wouldn't have knocked him unconscious, would've tried to get the body somehow...

Vanyel takes a deep breath. 

:...Look, if my country is in danger of being invaded by - slug things - then I have to know, right, so we can put up some kind of defence. Where do the slug things come from? What do you mean, get the body?: 

<I think that it is very possible that my commander when informed that your leadership is not yet infested will decide to explain everything to you, so that we can aid you in coordinating your defenses. However I do not know what is going on and I am not going to explain.> He is not even clear on why they want an explanation if they can dig things out of your head anyway but all the more reason not to give them one, if he doesn't understand why they need it and it can't help them advance their stated goals.

(Vanyel would prefer an explanation because digging fragmented concepts out of the bizarre, not-quite-physically-here alien mind is exhausting and he already has a headache.) 

:I would like you to take me to your leadership, then: he informs the creature. :I promise to return you safely to them, but only if I accompany you there: 

<No.>

Vanyel is so tired of having to mindrape this poor lost creature for every scrap of information. He knows that what he should do is keep pushing, but... 

:What would you propose instead, then?: 

<You permit me to leave and go inform them of this conversation. I will return if it is deemed appropriate.>

...He is going to get yelled at so much by Randi if he makes a unilateral decision on this. However.

:All right. I'll let you go: 

His magic is all over the creature, and - it doesn't seem to have any way of resisting it? Its body may or may not be 'not its real form', in the way that a summoned Abyssal demon's mage-construct body isn't its true one, but it's not magical. It's a perfectly ordinary bird, just one linked to a mind somewhere else. Is this some sort of alien spirit that can just possess random animals...? No, Vanyel has a feeling he's still trying to fit this into terms he understands, and that it's something different entirely. 

Still holding the bird, he undoes the force-net holding it pinned, but he doesn't dispel the magic entirely. It still clings to the bird, not doing anything in particular anymore, but nonetheless a beacon to his Othersenses.

Something he can anchor his Farsight on. He already knows that the other creatures were fleeing north. 

This one will be faster than them, because it doesn't have to stop to demorph. Well, can't. 

And shortly later: 

"What do you mean you let it go?" 

"They weren't sent by Karse. I'm nearly certain of that. They're - maybe not from this plane, they're possessing birds or something - or, not quite that, but something really weird is happening here and I wasn't going to find out what by interrogating it any more. I left some of my magic on it so I can find it easily. I'm going to follow it north." 

"...You could have considered asking me first. If you've ever heard of that concept." 

"Sorry." Vanyel's voice is absentminded rather than particularly apologetic. "Randi, I have to go, the longer I wait the further of a head start it'll get and my Farsight and Thoughtsensing range are only two hundred miles or so." 

His King glowers at him for nearly a minute. 

"Fine. Go. Do not get yourself killed. If it looks like a situation where you might get yourself killed, back off and wait for someone. Please." 

"I'll be careful." This is not strictly an agreement to any of what his King just said. "Got to go now. I'll relay to Tran." 

And then a white mare gallops out of the city, maintaining the impossible pace with a steady stream of node-energy fed to her by her Chosen, who has his Farsight anchored on a bird now flying north. 

Elsewhere, a Gate-threshold unanchored on any kind of door appears in an unremarkable forest clearing, aimed by dead reckoning and a map, approximately ten miles from where the weird metal-glass-turtle was buried. A dozen mages stream through before Leareth himself crosses.

If these strange newcomers have the ability to detect magic, Leareth thinks, they're going to find themselves very busy quite soon. If not, they'll need the rest of the day to cross the intervening forest unseen. 

They don't have the ability to detect magic. A few of the sensors were repairable but none of the sensors were magic detection because that is not a thing. They do have thermal sensors about half a mile out, though the ship's computers keep tossing up stupid false alarms because they're calibrated for a completely different situation than this one.

Once the ship is covered they retreat inside it to draw a map from returning spy reports, and send people out in rotations to acquire humans and practice moving with the human bodies. A few bird-scouts circle.

Human mouths can supposedly make the sounds of their language out loud but it seems to take a lot of practice.

A bird from the south gets within range to message him and stops heading north, lands on a tree. <They have some capabilities we did not expect. They can read minds. They can dig in minds for information . They can knock us out of the sky with their hands -> And he sends the whole day's events. <I presume the one who captured me is following. Do you have a plan.>

Matirin's tail swishes anxiously. <I will speak to him. I can come to meet him south of here. You can tell him to expect me, if you can see him following.>

<I will look.>

Vanyel is on the North Trade Road; Yfandes is holding an unbelievable pace of forty miles an hour or so, and he's already halfway to the northern border. Though he has a guess that the weird invaders are a lot further north of that. 

The other arriving party is much closer, but they're riding normal horses and also following a narrow, not especially straight game-trail through forest, occasionally cutting their way with magic across areas of dense undergrowth.

Leareth reaches ahead with Thoughtsensing. He should be in range now. 

There are about thirty people in the turtle. Their minds are oddly shaped, and most of them are in horseperson forms. They're thinking about how to fix their alarms which were destroyed in the fight, and how to interpret the alarms they are getting which are unclear because this ship is meant to be suspended in nothingness, not stuck in dirt; they're drawing lines on a spherical projection of a world, and arguing; some of them are on another plane and holding onto human forms, making them walk and talk, doing phonics exercises...

There are some holding onto bird-forms and scouting. 

There is one thinking about what to tell the humans in Haven.

...They're in touch with the humans in Haven? 

None of them seem to have noticed Leareth or the rest of his approaching party, which is good. Five miles out, he stops, hangs back.

Getting out his artifact to make distance-casting easier, he focuses intently on one of the scouting bird-minds, and then snaps two simultaneous compulsions into place on it. Fly this way. Do not communicate with the others. 

- the bird is terrified and confused! They got the update, a little while ago, that the locals had unexpected capabilities which included the ability to detect them in morph and trap them and dig things out of their head, but did not include this, whatever this is.

The bird flies in the direction demanded. It is trying to take in the implications if the Yeerks take this planet - or already have this planet, though that's looking steadily less likely. It's trying not to think about how long until its lack of communication will be suspicious, because the local capabilities are known to include mindreading. It is trying to think how this could possibly be done - maybe something akin to what Andalites do to control a body - would that work if the body already has a mind in it - that'd make you no better than a Yeerk so obviously they wouldn't have developed it but could you...

Leareth has been paying a lot of attention to the thought-communication flying back and forth, which he can half-intercept, and he plays around with modifying some existing shield-techniques while he waits for the creature to reach him. 

When it does, he's waiting, and he weaves the test shield around both of them.

:What is your name?: he asks it. 

Presumably the stranger will now demonstrate the digging-things-out-of-peoples-heads capability but the bird is obviously going to make him do that, rather than answer.

It looks like he's - doing something? Concentrating on something? But nothing visible - is it something in hyperspace, do they have some way of interacting with it so they can notice morph -