"Why don't I get you a room and then, uh, there'll be a lot of meetings, and we'll ...need to pray about some things, I think, and in the morning we can have someone scry your ship for you."

"Thank you."

She bundles him off to a room that is a significant step up from the barracks, furnished with a bed and dresser and table and altar and fireplace, and thanks him, and tells him to just stick his head outside and ask if he needs anything, and then hurries off after flagging someone down to stand guard at his door.

He doesn't really know what the altar is for but he can sit on the bed and... stare at the wall, he supposes.

The altar has candleholders and fresh candles and a stone figurine of a woman in armor, raising her sword to the sky, and a short handwritten text the translation spell lets him read, that begins 'I am my weapon.'

Bells ring, outside, and someone brings him dinner.

At least so far they're feeding him, but, well, so was Carissa. He thanks the someone and eats.

There are more bells. It gets dark. The person standing outside his door gets replaced with three different people.

He sits there, becoming a connoisseur of slight variations in boredom, until the sun is down and it seems reasonable to go to sleep, which he then does.

In the morning a whole group of people come to get him. The wizard from before is with them, but in the back.

"Good morning, Kyeo," says a unfamiliar person, earnestly. "I'm Isavel. We're going to start on the scry for you, and we have a couple of other questions in the meantime, if that's all right."

"Good morning," says Kyeo.

One of the people fills a basin with water and then starts moving her hands over it.

"That's the scry," says Isavel. "Should I take that as 'no more questions, please'."

"I'm... not clear on what my obligations to my command are under the circumstances. If I'm taken as a prisoner of war it's name, rank, serial number, but this is a much stranger situation. It will depend on what you ask."

"You're not a prisoner of war," she says very earnestly. "We're trying to keep you from Cheliax because they are Evil and if Asmodeus knows about your world he might attempt to conquer and damn it, too. But we're going to try to get you back to your people as soon as possible, and it's entirely all right if there are things you can't answer for us. 

Can you explain - how Ibyabek became the kind of place it is today? It sounds like it's unusual among the worlds you know of?"

"It is, yes. The Ibyatok system was originally colonized under the name Sohaibek and three planets in the system were settled. Pheon Naar Am, the original Glorious Leader, was a philosopher and he saw that the way the people of Sohaibek lived and were governed was bad for them, and he convinced the people of what was then Inner Sohaibek to join together and resist the unjust government, and succeeded, but on Outer Sohaibek right philosophy didn't make it to enough people and they started a war, and Old Sohaibek, in between the two, was melted in their crazed attempt to prevent the Glorious Leader's ideas from taking hold there, but we were able to fight them off in the end and keep Ibyabek as it is now." It is almost exactly what he told Carissa; he has it memorized.

" - the world was melted? How?"

"There is an advanced weapon that can do it."

"Does Ibyabek possess such a weapon. Is it - simple to describe, such that once people know of it they too can build it."

"Yes, and - not if you're starting with swords and magic."

They glance at each other. "That might -"

"Asmodeus wasn't with Rovagug."

"I said it might, let me finish, warrant revisiting -"

"I don't think so, the justification there was that this way's less suspicious."

"I just want to pass it along."

"Fine, go do that."

"Sorry," says Isavel after a minute. "It's a lot to take in. The gods aren't ...limited to swords, in the things they can build, necessarily, so it's scary to imagine they might get their hands on such things."

"The weapon also does not involve... prayer? in its manufacture. It's a piece of very high technology."

"...I should hope no god would grant it to us," she says, looking absolutely astounded. "I mean that They could probably build it Themselves. With technology."

"I apologize, I don't know how magic and gods work."

"Not your fault, we should have explained. Gods are ...people. They are very powerful people. They can do much much more than us. Some of them have goals that are very hard for us to understand, because we are so small compared to Them, or because They were never human to begin with. But while we do pray to them, answering prayers is only a tiny fraction of what They do, and if these weapons were dangerous it wouldn't be because of anything to do with us. Does that make sense?"

"Not especially. Uh, Ibyabekan has a word for 'god' but it refers to - ancient superstitions -"

"...and now I am the one who doesn't really know what you mean. You have the word but not any gods? You...used to think you had gods, but you didn't? Did they leave?"