When they return triumphant from Kantaria there is a summons waiting for Alfirin; Lord Entat wants to conduct an interview about the alleged spy in the camp.
Lord Entat is a squat, grouchy old man who says “ah, you’re a girl,” with apparent dissatisfaction when Alfirin enters. He shows her Iomedae’s sketch of the man. “Does this look right to you?”
“The lady knight said he just walked away while you were talking and was nowhere to be seen when you looked around for him?”
“Enough time that he could’ve just wandered away in a totally nonmagical fashion, or do you think he disappeared?”
His reaction to that is expressive, but what exactly the expression is is hard to read. “Yeah, all right. You see him again, you stop him disappearing.”
The first thing she tries is scrying, though she's not optimistic about it going through; if he's a spy, and not just an unusual crusader, then he's probably practiced throwing off spells, and she's only met him once in passing, maybe not even in his real face. Or her real face. It fails the first time, and the second time, but she keeps trying every evening she has the spell free, alternating between the supposed spy and Iomedae's dead siblings.
Iomedae’s dead siblings are much less difficult about being scried, probably because they are children and not trying to hide things from the Shining Crusade. They are in Axis or in Heaven; it appears that the guardian angels were not in fact negligent, or that Iomedae’s family members have a strong innate inclination towards Lawful Goodness, or both.
The spy resists the first nine scries. The tenth reveals a very young man, probably still a teenager, with the thin wispy beard of someone who can't grow a full one. He’s in a barracks that looks like most of the other barracks the Crusade has put up in Vellumis, lying on a narrow cot and practicing casting a cantrip one-handed; after a few minutes one of his bunkmates sleepily asks him to cut that out as he’s trying to sleep.
Alfirin keeps watching for as long as the scry lasts, sketching the man’s face (or at least the one he’s wearing now). When the spell ends, she heads over to the barracks and casts locate creature on the bunkmate.
Down this street and up this narrower one, in one of the row of buildings named after all the Emperors currently in good standing in Imperial histories in order.
Alfirin enters the building with the spell still up, to pinpoint and note down the room.
That’s enough to take to Lord Entat, or whatever secretary gets between her and Lord Entat.
"That depends, sir, on whether he’s a third-circle wizard with nondetection or a seventh-circle lich. Or a shapeshifted dragon. I’ve spent many of my spells for the day but he may have too. If he’s fifth circle or below and I have backup I expect I'll manage, if he’s sixth circle or above it comes down to how well we take him by surprise. And if he's a dragon -" she shrugs.
Lord Entat raps sharply on his desk and a young priest comes in. “Arrest tonight: will I tell you in an hour it went well?”
"I've worked well with Iomedae and her people, but she usually calls me in for wizard backup rather than the other way around. I don't know if she's busy at the moment."
“Does she have a secretary?” Entat asks his own secretary.
“Yes, sir. I can go check if she’s available.”
“Goes well,” the priest reports.
“Love to hear it. - we should still get you good backup,” he tells Alfirin, because sometimes wizards try to be too clever for their own good about prophecy. “If you do stupid things in response to the omens then it’s much less useful checking them.”
Iomedae is available. “I heard we might be arresting a seventh circle lich?”
"We're arresting the maybe-spy from last month, who turns out to be quite scry-resistant and is hopefully not a seventh-circle lich but we should plan for the worst."
A seventh circle lich is not, in fact, the worst possibility that jumps to mind to plan for, though it is very difficult to imagine why anyone more dangerous than that would be here in person a week after inviting their suspicions. She reaches for her unfathomably expensive new sword."Do we know if he's living?"
"I'd prefer to take him alive, if we can - I want to know who he reports to. But if I make the sword merciful then we'll be in a tight spot should it turn out it's centuries too late to take him alive. I suppose I could bring a backup sword." She saw a woodcut once of Cayden Cailean dual-wielding rapiers - one merciful, one vicious. It was probably intended as philosophical commentary of some kind but perhaps it was just good sense if you arrest a lot of people of uncertain deadness.
"Yes, I agree that we want him alive. I have a hold person but it might not stick even if he is one, so I think I should try to counterspell if it comes up and you should focus on the actual arrest."
“I carry a second circle pearl of power,” says Iomedae, and hands it over to him. “Do you know how to use it? It’s hard to get wrong.”
“I’m going to save the holy avenger for the worst-case scenario here and go in with a borrowed merciful sword,” Iomedae decides. “I know someone who has one I can borrow.”
The barracks are quiet; their inhabitants are mostly sleeping. Their target doesn’t seem (to an arcane eye) to be asleep, but he’s stopped playing with cantrips. He doesn’t visibly have any magic items, or any spells up.
"I'll cast a haste and then we’ll go through the door, I don't have a dimension door to drop us on top of him. Everyone ready?"
They’re ready. Iomedae, with a haste up, is terrifyingly fast; in the time it takes anyone else to blink she can knock a door down, cross a room, and hit a moving target with a sword several times, though this target is not moving and, in fact, is bleeding out on the mattress once she's hit him once. She pulls back suspiciously. There are alarmed and bemused cries from the other beds. “Security operation, this is Knight-Commander Iomedae, stay in your bunks.” Her expression for Alfirin is very legibly - you’re sure it’s this one?
"That's the person I saw when I scried him and the bed he was in. If he was only temporarily impersonating this soldier and - swapped them back at some point in the last half hour - that seems implausible, though. I assume Lord Entat will learn which."
So Iomedae will carry her captive out of the barracks, not-apologize at the front about the door which will need repairing, and accompany Alfirin back. “I suppose a third circle wizard might easily just not be very durable, compared to the things we’re accustomed to fighting.”
"You’ve seen me sparring with your junior knights, and I’m tougher than a third-circle wizard."
“I fret over you dreadfully. - when you’re actually fighting, not when you’re sparring with the junior knights.” The Crusade would raise Alfirin if she died but it's still disturbing that a single blow can do it.
She sets the prisoner down gently on the floor of Lord Entat’s office.
“If it’s all the same for you you could keep carrying him,” Entat says. “We have antimagic cells, and it's a great deal easier to interrogate wizards if one can let them speak.”
“In truth, sir, I’m terribly curious about the whole business now and will stay as long as you allow us,” Iomedae says, picking him up again.
“Well, I normally find it doesn’t help, having paladins around for interrogations - see,” he says, because Iomedae glares quite sharply at him, at that, “that’s precisely what I mean.”
“I am familiar with, and countenance, the Crusade’s procedures for interrogations.”
"Oh, you countenance them, do you." He leads on towards the dungeons. "All the same, you'll have to leave. Can't scare a man if he knows you'll follow the rules."
Being known to obey the rules is part of what the rules are for, that’s how Law works, if you’re deriving advantage from uncertainty about whether you’re going to be Lawful you aren’t -
What does she want and how will her actions move her closer to achieving it. “...I take your point, sir….Alfirin’s not a paladin, and has a knack for enchantments.”
They chain their prisoner up just outside the antimagic cell so they can heal him before tugging him into it. He pretends he’s still unconscious, until the guard kicks him in the ribs. Lord Entat’s mannerisms change impressively; he is friendly, sympathetic, concerned. What is the soldier’s name.
"Well, son, I don't know, but this is a terribly serious situation and if I were you I would be worrying more about that. We know you've been spying. We don't need to know your name to hang you for it. But if we know who you're working for, there's a chance we'll decide we'd rather have you keep writing to 'em. So if I were you, I'd be forthcoming."
“ - not just for fun. But not illegally, sir. I asked Ketheri, to whom I am apprenticed, and he said there was no rule against it, so long as I didn’t impersonate anybody, or use it to go anywhere I didn’t have leave to be in my own person, and I’ve never done that.... there should be a rule against it, sir, and I'd follow it if there was one.”
"Don't know, sir. When I signed up they said to give a guess and I guessed eighteen."
"...well, sir, if I were Tar-Baphon I'd have the Crusade working for me by now, and I wanted to check if it was."
“Well, mostly I just got permission to be various places, and then I listened to the people there, how they explained themselves, what they cared about, whether there were matters where they were obviously lying. I figured if Tar-Baphon had compromised the Crusade all the best people would end up dead, and all the worst in power, and if it's run by angels like they say, then the opposite, maybe."
“You listened to the lady knight's conversation, on the occasion when she had a letter from her family?”
“I’ve listened to the Knight-Commander Iomedae's conversations dozens of times, sir. I said something that time because I was worried the letter was a security risk.”
“Yes, and through her to the Crusade, sir, if Tar-Baphon could lay an ambush at her home, or get her to do something stupid - and he probably could. I could! And I’m first circle!”
“That would have been less suspicious, sir, and I should’ve done it, but I was in a different face already and not in the habit of telling people I didn’t trust my name. It wasn’t until later that I realized it would have been wiser just to stick around for whatever amount of suspicion occurred to her on the spot, and thereby lay it to rest. …it wasn’t a crime, though.”
“Did you tell anyone else the result of all these conversations you technically secured permission to be in the relevant mess halls and training yards for?”
"No, sir. I'd have reported anything illegal and important but I didn't run into any of that."
"It's not an easy thing for a young man, being so much more clever than everyone else and not respected by them, not paid like he deserves -"
"I don’t want to be respected. I don’t know why Tar-Baphon doesn’t just assassinate everyone who gets well known. The Crusade pays me on time and I wouldn’t desert even if it didn’t, and it doesn’t owe me anything else.”
Entat is smiling. "Well, it seems it's been underusing you, at any rate. When did you sign up?"
Entat’s whole assessment of the situation visibly changes, at that. “Talk to anyone else from there?”
“...I am opposed to Tar-Baphon. Also I heard I could learn to be a swordmage here, if I had the knack, and I wanted to be a swordmage.”
"The last I heard the worms down in the desert love Tar-Baphon. Why wouldn't they, when he besets their greatest enemy?"
“I think that you’re lying to me, because you’re scared, and that is perfectly understandable and also the biggest mistake of your life. And you need to rethink it, before it’s the last mistake of your life. We can work with spies, in my line of business. But we can’t work with spies who lie to us even once they’re offered the chance to tell us the truth.”
“We know you’re very good at defeating spells. Much better than a first circle swordmage should be.”
“Don’t have one, and this doesn’t warrant one. You want me to take expensive steps to help you, I want to hear about who you work for, what the pay is, how you beat our scries -”
“I work for the Crusade, I earn three solidi a week, I’m good at throwing spells off. How does this not warrant a priest of Abadar? I’ve been quoted twenty solidi for a truthtelling and -”
Entat looks at the guard, who kicks the prisoner in the ribs again, harder than he did to get him to admit he was awake. “This isn’t a negotiation. Admit you’ve been lying, and tell me who you work for.”
"I haven't spoken to anyone in Katheer since I joined. I work for the Crusade. I'm not a spy."
“You are by your own admission guilty of spying on dozens of the Knight-Commander’s personal conversations.”
“I have enough of my own money saved up for an Abadar’s Truthtelling, and am requesting one. I’ll pay for it.”
“Whoever put you up to this, in Katheer, they did it knowing you’d get killed for it, eventually. They didn’t care.”
“A lot of men make a foolish decision when they’re eighteen. Some of them are lucky enough to get a second chance.”
“I’m curious what you care about so much that you’d spit that second chance back in my face. You so sure you like where you’re headed?”
That throws Entat for a loop. "Oh? You don't think Sarenrae comes to the rescue of her each and every sandworm? That's what I usually hear."
"Probably not, sir. It seems like a very convenient thing for everyone to believe."
That one takes Entat a while. “Now, that’s not the answer I’d have expected from an innocent man. I’d have expected an innocent man to tell me he fears nothing as he’s broken no laws and will be welcomed into Axis.”
"I could have a dominate person prepared in fifteen minutes, sir. If that's authorized and legal."
“By all means, go right ahead. Did you hear that, son? Fifteen minutes, to say anything you want credit for, because after that I can’t say you were even slightly cooperative.”
“How is it ensured, sir, that she’ll make me tell you the truth and not something else?”
Alfirin steps out to prepare her spell, which will not take nearly that long, and to go find Iomedae outside the building.
