Thank you. She thinks she would normally have some kind of feeling about how - everything is set up for the Yeerks to think of her entirely as an expensive possession of Mhalir's but they really don't, and it feels odd in some way, in the fashion Good often does, and she wants to poke that more, but actually there's no space for the feeling because she is panicking about the war and about Ma'ar and about Mhalir. 

She waits for him to leave so she can go interrogate the mage.

The mage is currently pacing around the main deck, staring in utter awe at all the screens and monitors. 

"Incredible, isn't it? They're so rich - I have a bunch of urgent questions for you, sorry."

He nods, reluctantly peels himself away. "You're the wizard, right, from the other world? You know a completely different kind of magic that doesn't take Gifts to learn."

"Yeah. And I want to figure out if there's any useful overlap we can use to - stop this stupid war, somehow. I want to go down a list of the spells I have and you can tell me if you have anything like that - no flight, right - can you summon animals from other planes?"

"- Uh, I heard some of the mage-shamans in the north can summon elementals and talk to them, even give them construct bodies. And demons, you can summon Abyssal demons if for some reason you want to." Shudder. "As far as I know none of the other planes have normal animals to summon." 

She nods. She goes down her spell list. Shielding, counterspelling, dispelling, antimagic though she can't cast that, infuriatingly, it'd solve several problems here, divinations, illusions, polymorphing - she should check if she gets their Gifts when she polymorphs into them -

They have equivalents for shielding; dispelling and counterspells aren't really separate, you take out another mage's spells by seeing it and using your own to disrupt it. They have illusions. They can scry at a distance - and there's actually a special Gift for that, too, one of their new recruits is a Farseer. They can do Gates. Adepts can tap nodes for extra energy. They absolutely cannot do anything resembling Polymorph and the mage is shocked and awed by the idea. 

How about non-Gate teleportation. 

There's a Gift called Fetching that pops up sometimes? It lets you teleport objects as well as move them telekinetically. He's heard that the strongest Fetchers can teleport themselves a mile, but he's never met anyone who could do that. 

Okay. 

Does he have any ideas about how they'd get to Ma'ar, if they wanted to. Other than turning themselves in in some flashy fashion, which would probably work but which will suck and she wants to think whether there are other options first.

So the tricky part is that Ma'ar sounds smart and paranoid, and so he's probably going to be behind shields most of the time, and protections against local magic. They've got the Farseer, though, and all the amazingwonderful screens of information from the ship's sensors, and enough mages to keep up scrying on a number of places. And if Ma'ar is moving troops for a major battle, he might be more exposed than usual. 

Does Carissa's magic have a way to find Ma'ar, without sending a message to him? That's the main part he's stuck on. If they know where he is and can track him, well, at the very least he could Gate line-of-sight from the shuttle to the ground and - then think of something they could do from there. 

She can scry him. She can only try it once and it sometimes doesn't work but - it's the obvious first thing to attempt.

She pulls out her crystal ball and tries it.

There's a man, with the dark hair and eyes of the Predain locals. He's in an office of some kind, which from the look of it seems to be in an underground bunker; the larger desk is obviously his, and covered in maps. He's on his feet, pacing, occasionally snapping orders to a clerk sitting at a smaller desk writing letters. It's mostly hard to make sense of, this company this location this handful of random nouns which presumably refer to some military contingency-plan. 

He looks very stressed. 

" - got him," she reports. "- damn it, I'm an idiot, sometimes you can talk through a scry, I should've planned in advance - do we want to talk to him."

The mage and several of Mhalir's staff are giving her wide-eyed looks. 

"What would you say to him?" 

"To please not attack Tantara right now!"

Mhalir's second-in-command frowns. "All right, so if I were him and some mental voice from nowhere asked me out of the blue to stand down my army, I would - one, I might be more alarmed, he looks freaked out enough, and I'd...want reasons? Also I'd probably assume it was Urtho trying to trick me." 

"I mean, yes, we'd have to explain that we are from another planet and were flying a shuttle around when Urtho grabbed it and we're trying to talk to him and we'd like to mediate the war after that but if it gets worse in the meantime then it'll be hopeless, and we can prove the being aliens and he has mind control so he can presumably find out if we work for Urtho -"

"Hmm, and what do we think are his plausible responses - if it were Mhalir I imagine he'd be very paranoid about agreeing to meet someone who he thinks might work for his enemy - we could suggest a neutral location outside both countries, and that he send a representative rather than come himself..." 

"Yeah. And he's got all the mind control, he's got to have a way to make people safe for him to meet face to face..."

"All right. Let's think - is there a scenario here when he reacts badly enough that we're significantly worse off than we were before?" 

"If he can do magic through a scry, maybe - do you know of any way that could be done," she snaps at the mage, "quickly, it lasts seven minutes..."

The mage stares at her spell, intently. "I...can't see how you could - there's some sort of link but I can't even follow where it goes..."

     "All right," Mhalir's second-in-command barks, "are we doing this–"

"If he's like Mhalir he'll back off if he's got any reason to at all."