Élie had heard that there used to be witches here. Well, in the place that used to be here, before the Worldwound happened to it. A whole order of them, with their own strange rules and rites and rituals of initiations – it's that last one that got his attention. If they had a way to induct new witches – if they could do it on command – well, if they did, it's almost certainly all gone now. 

Still, he's curious. It can't possibly hurt to take a look. 

The Worldwound is....kind of dismal. There are the fortresses built on the wardstones that maintain a shimmery pulsing force-field around the whole thing; there are the smaller garrisons stationed to address the occasional demon with enough good luck or spell resistance to force its way through the force-field. There are barracks, and temples. All of them were built when the crusades began, a century ago; none of them have been repaired very recently, except for those minor injuries Mending from bored wizards can fix. The dome of the temple of Iomedae once gleamed with gold, which someone has scraped off; of course, that might be a deliberate statement. The church of Iomedae is a more sober institution than it was a hundred years ago, when it was taking up Aroden's banner, when Cheliax was free. 

Cheliax has the bulk of the forces stationed here. They have their barracks, and their temple. There's a girl on the roof, looking at him.

Ugh. Just a few months ago, that would have frightened him. Now, he's merely annoyed. It's rather difficult to keep a sixth-circle wizard anywhere he doesn't want to be. 

He needs to get his bearings. Probably he should go talk to the Iomedans. If he's going to do research at the Worldwound, it's only polite to volunteer, and they probably have the most organized operation. He might even be able to get news of the paladin de Luna, Naima would probably appreciate that. So, to the temple of Iomedae. 

...Just as soon as he figures out where it is. 

She hops down - well, takes a running jump and Feather Falls. He has some decent gear. Fifth, sixth, circle, she'd guess, judging just off how nice the gear is. Avistani. Galtan, maybe, by the dress. It takes extra effort to win those over but not that much extra effort, really. Adventurers of all stripes are vulnerable to naive pretty girls who want to coo over their magic items and can hold their end of a conversation about how they made them.

"Are you looking for someone in particular?"

Well isn't this an interaction he would prefer not to be having. 

"Oh, no, just here to enjoy the scenery." 

He gestures at a particularly drab-looking little hill. Go away. 

"It's the uniform, isn't it. Unfortunately if I take it off everyone gets too distracted to hold their end of a conversation about magic. You were looking around. For the Calistrians? They're thereabouts." She points. "And if you're looking for countrymen Sarenrae's people keep an eye on them, patch them up, write letters home about their glorious achievements so whoever's in charge might keep paying for their upkeep. She's that one, on the left."

Interesting to note that Cyprian is, apparently, paying for a Galtan force here, one would think he has enough else on his plate, but – oh. Gods. This is flirting. He's being flirted with. How perfectly awful. Time to put an unambiguous end to it. 

"Do you want to go to Absalom?" 

"What, has a portal to the Abyss opened there?"

"I mean, do you have any interest in foreswearing devil worship and starting a new life in Absalom? Because if you do, I have the resources to arrange it, and if you don't, I feel no further obligation to continue this conversation. Good day, miss." 

"See, we have got this portal to the Abyss, here, and I was planning on doing something about it." That usually works on Good people.

It's probably smarter to just not engage, but if Élie was any good at that he'd have led a very different life. 

"If you find it fulfilling to toss fireballs at demons and report your subordinates for forbidden thoughts then by all means be my guest. You know just as well as I do that your odds of doing anything of any real significance are vanishingly small. After all, your masters wouldn't like it." 

"Wouldn't like the Worldwound closed? ...even purely from the most cynical possible geopolitical perspective we have far, far more force committed here than Galt does, and would gain a lot more if we could bring them home. 

And I don't toss fireballs. I do magic arms and armor research. If anyone's come to the Worldwound bearing it in the last three years, I can make it. We need better wardstones, that's how we end this thing." 

"Oh! Please forgive me, I had no idea I was in the presence of the distinguished abjuration specialist who's going to make the first major breakthrough in wardstone efficiency anyone's had in 80 years. Tell me, truthfully – you're trying to make fourth circle, right?" 

"Oh, were you better than that, at twenty-two?" She's actually twenty-five but she was third-circle at twenty-two and anyway she hardly owes him honesty. 

"Oh, no, much worse. But then –  I stopped being Chelish, which made a great deal of difference. ...I'm not trying to insult you – I mean, of course I think you're fundamentally incorrect about every question in the world which really matters, but I'm sure you're exceptionally good at what you do. Which is why I am sure you will make fourth circle. And I can tell you exactly what will happen when you do. You'll be strongly encouraged to take a nice, well-paid research job somewhere far away from the front. They'll be on you to sell your soul to a devil – more than they already are now, I mean. And if you don't, I am equally certain that however talented you are, you will never make fifth." 

There are quite a number of Chelish exiles, floating among the wizards' colleges in Absalom and Quantium and Katheer. Some of them are his friends. None of them like to talk about their previous lives, and honestly Élie doesn't like to listen, but it's like an itch, he just can't leave it alone.  

"I really don't think any of this is going to matter to you right now. I don't even know if you sincerely care about the Worldwound, but I'd like to believe that you do. So, in a few years, I hope it occurs to you to wonder why your king and your god would rather you be too weak to really do anything about it, as long as it means you're not strong enough to leave." 

"I guess when the time comes I'll look up what the people who figured out how to safely rise in the ranks did, and do that. I think I would've thought to do that anyway, but - thank you, for suggesting it, in case I was one of those people who can only keep track of how magic works and not how the world does. Who are you here to see, I want to learn about all your magic items but I can catch you at dinner, for that, there's nowhere here to take notes."

"...that might be difficult. I'm looking for the Paladin Alexandre Riguez de Luna. Of the temple of Iomedae." 

"Don't know the name but the temple's that one, over there. They'll let me in for dinner, on principle, but they'll be on edge all evening so perhaps it'd be a rude thing to do to them. We can meet in the dead of night, if that's easier."

"I hope you don't take it personally if I'm not inclined to go out of my way, here." 

"I'm taking it as proof that you lack imagination. What do you think is the cleverest magic item someone brought through here in the last year? Did you know there's a way to stably lay spells on a sword that we can't cast at all, because they won't prepare stably? That's not the cleverest magic item someone brought through here in the last year, but it was clever, and I have notes on it. Did you know that you can use siccatite in place of spellsilver and stabilize djezet in a solid form under enough pressure, at which point it intensifies all your spells? I'm not asking for charity. I want to hear what you're working on, and I'll trade you. And you could circle the world twice and learn half as much."

"Have you considered I might not have anything very interesting to trade you? I'm afraid all the projects I wouldn't mind your government knowing about are all terribly boring." 

"That's not a boring ring. Or boring glasses."

"Oh, the glasses are nothing, just some lenses of Detect Magic I threw together because I was tired of preparing my spells blind, I'm sure you could do the same if you wanted to. The ring I can't take credit for." 

"Present from an admirer?"

"Payment for services rendered. As it happens, I'm a married man." 

"Awwwww. What's she do?"

Look, Élie's never been accused of being a sensible person, but there are some conversations he knows damn well not to have. 

"She's a healer. A – a cleric of Pharasma, who also compounds mundane medicines. She specializes in healing children. That's why she couldn't come, she can't leave her patients just now." 

His voice gets just a little warmer. 

"Are children different to heal than adults? I guess they probably die of different things."

"Yes, they're much more likely to die of diseases – of course, so are most people who aren't adventurers, but children are more vulnerable because they're weaker in the first place. If you're interested in doing anything scalable about disease you end up seeing a lot of kids. It's not really what divine healing is good for, that's what a great deal of our research – " 

Aaaaaand that's enough about that subject. He trails off. 

"Is she planning to leave Chelish children out of the eventual medical revolution? I guess they don't go to Hell, if they die as babies."

"I have nothing against Chelish children – why, I used to be a Chelish child myself – but seeing as we're both forbidden from entering the country I don't think there's a great deal she could do to help them." 

"Well, we could send some people to learn from her."

"You could, but you haven't. What's she supposed to do, go begging for acolytes from a government that wants us both dead?" 

"I think if the Chelish government wanted you dead you probably would be, with all due respect. Possibly they do not think about you nearly as much as you think about them. I can see about the acolytes, if they won't get told they had better renounce their faith and change their names and move to Absalom."

Oh, he wishes he could tell her about their honeymoon in Isarn. Fortunately, his sense of self-preservation is greater than his ego. Just a little. He's got a family now. 

"Oh, I just meant opportunistically, last time I checked I was still technically a wanted rebel against the crown, and one does assume they like to keep up with these things if it's at all convenient. I you could rustle up some students – well, I wouldn't say they'd be required to do anything, but we live in Absalom and given a choice of students I can't see a good reason to choose Asmodeans. In my experience, it's not a faith that lends itself to intellectual inquiry." 

"I'm a big fan of the 'only country in the world to educate girls' thing. But I've long since learned not to expect Good people to care about that as a part of what intellectual inquiry looks like, next to important things like whether you can build temples to the god of drunkenness."

"Cheliax is the only nation in Avistan that educates anyone at public expense, and that's because they need a way to squash their children into numb groveling compliance. Honestly, I don't know or care what opinions Good people have on the subject. All I've ever wanted out of an education is the right to believe things that are true." 

"Like that Chelish children are better off dead, is that true?"

Élie doesn't expect to make a convert here. The woman is a true believer. Ah, as long as he's not going to accomplish anything, he might as well be honest.  

"If my wife and I succeed at inventing some novel cure for disease that scales without her personal involvement, she'd share it with Cheliax, I'm almost certain. I'd – at that point I'd like to think we'd be powerful enough to have more options, but that's cheating. So – I don't know. I've thought about it a lot. Ever since I was a child myself. When I was eight and my youngest sister was a baby, just before I went away to school, I used to spend hours and hours sitting by the cradle and wondering if I should – I mean, in expectation, because she'd be tortured for eternity, nothing she could do in the seventy or eighty years she'd be alive could matter nearly as much. Or if I should drown myself in the mill-pond behind our house, or if it was already too late for me and it wouldn't make a difference. Even then, I believed there wasn't enough in me for the Lord of Hell to shape into the kind of tool that he could use. I used to think about this a all the time, actually, it's like a disease with me, if I'm not supposed to think about something I just can't stop. I'm not any closer to having an answer I'm happy with than I was then. Chelish children deserve better." 

What an utterly bizarre problem to have. She expected dissident Galtans to be weird but this is not, actually, the way in which she expected them to be weird. "Is your baby sister all right?" she says, because what do you even say to the rest of it.

"Oh, yes, she's fine, I couldn't make myself do it, the last time I scried her she was happy and healthy and working as a modiste in a town north of Isarn." 

"I'm glad. I don't know who scared you so badly about Hell but - I talk to devils. It's all right. A journey to get there, but would you want to be the same thing your whole life?"

Okay, that's it for vulnerability hour. 

"Oh, you know, they tell you it's where you become the version of yourself Asmodeus can best use, so I always assumed it'd be like school only moreso and that just about did it." 

"I've never met a fifth-circle wizard who hated school before." If he's sixth he'll correct her; it's the safer direction to err. "I shouldn't keep you standing here, but do think what I can trade you for a look at the ring, even if everything you're working on is terribly secret."

"Sixth," he correct automatically. "Ah – as of a few weeks ago." 

Of course, he's not going to meet with her again. He's not particularly interested in the latest techniques for self-sharpening swords or demon repellant or whatever else it is the kinds of people who go the Worldwound come up with. There's no way she has anything he'd really be interested in. 

"I don't suppose you know anything about ancient Azlanti technology for artificially simplifying and distributing spellwork?" 

"Huh. I mean, in a sense all magic items do that, right, make a spell into something anyone can cast with a single gesture instead of needing to be a wizard. But I think specifically you'd want to look at the itemwork for stabilizing spells that wizards can't cast into magic items wizards can make. Like Glibness, it's a bard spell, but it doesn't have a stable spellform so no one's ever figured out a wizard version. But wizards can make magic items that hold it stably. The most obviously useful extension of that is casting self-only spells into objects that let you cast them on other people, there are so many useful self-only spells, and I'm working on that, but I think it'd have some implications for simplifying and distributing spellwork, too. If you could stabilize half a spell, and have the rest completable at a lower circle - the other thing you should look at is the notes I have on metamagic rods, and whether they could be done in some other format -"

Damn it. 

"The obvious question for off-list spell stabilization is 'well can you do it with divine spells too' and I think it probably depends why they're divine spells, right - if they can't be stabilized, then, sure, this approach should solve that. If they're funneling complexity directly through your god, then that'd require a different technique -

- but really, this is quite enough when I've been promised nothing in return. Should we get lunch tomorrow?"

Well, he got the ring from the King of Korvosa, which is basically a Chelish protectorate anyway, so she'd hardly be the first Chelish wizard to get her hands on it, and it's not like it's anything game-changing, really, just a better pearl of power – 

"Noon. Not at your camp." 

"The Calistrians have the best food and don't look at me with either pity or terror. Noon."

And she heads delightedly back to her barracks.

That was not how he'd expected his morning to go. It's obviously been too many years since he's had a real conversation with a devil-worshipper; he used to be so much better at getting under their skin.The Chelish officer seems bright, and genuinely curious, which is always upsetting. He's never understood how people like that can be so loyal to a system  that's basically antithetical to rational thought. He's always privately suspected he was too stupid to ever be a good Asmodean, it requires a certain gift for holding two contradictory thoughts in your head at the same time that he's never been able to master. Maybe, if you could focus the critical part of your mind down to a point, use it to make enchanted swords and wardstones and nothing else, it wouldn't be such a bad way to live. He'll have to ask her tomorrow. He's never liked things he can't understand. 

It's easy to find the Temple of Iomedae once he knows where to look. They're a little skeptical of his intentions, but it helps when de Luna greets him as a friend. He arranges to spend a few hours, well, lobbing fireballs at demons, which leaves the rest of the afternoon free to get on with his research. 

Carissa goes back in and retrieves her books and puts them away. She's happy. Magic is interesting and you can get through to any wizard, really, once you convince them that you see it too. He's a heretic, but he's a heretic because he's a crazy person who considered murdering his own baby sister, that's not a really threatening kind to engage with. And it's a neat ring. You could do the same with an expensive pearl of power, sure, but she hasn't seen the spell effect added to a ring before and she didn't have quite enough time looking at it to see how it was done. As always the decision of whether to try to learn rods or rings or garments is agonizing...

Someone in a command uniform finds her after that. Not any of the unit commanders, but she's seen him before - it takes her a second to recall - when she's been reporting mindreading, right. 

"Sir?"

          "Elie Cotonnet."

"The Galtan, sir. We spoke ten minutes ago." They must know that but it's best not to seem like you think you have anything to hide.

         "He's of interest to us."

Darn, she thinks. And after she had that great line about how he thinks about Chelish intelligence much more than they think about him. They won't have him assassinated, not here; there's a treaty. But espionage is allowed. "We're meeting for lunch tomorrow."

"It'd be advantageous to sustain a relationship."

         "...he offered to help me defect to Absalom."

He studies her carefully. "Step into this room here, Sevar."

          She's not afraid. She does that. He casts Detect Thoughts and she lets it hit her. She was not tempted to defect to Absalom. She thinks Cheliax is better than Absalom. She doesn't think she can run from Asmodeus and she thinks it's pathetic to try. She wants to be useful, not far enough away she's not worth retrieving. They did talk about why he wasn't an Asmodean, and it seemed ridiculous to her.

"Do you think," he says after a moment, "you could convincingly imitate a defector."

          "...I don't know. Not - not if they're all like him."

"They aren't. Some of them are normal people, who spend too much time worrying about the next life. Some of them did a small crime and then it snowballed because they feared punishment for that, and committed greater crimes covering it up. Some of them have friends who left, who say reassuring things about how they're neutral now, and Axis is lovely. It is lovely. So is Dis, and Axis won't be independent for long, but you shouldn't be shocked, if it's lovely."

            She takes a deep breath. "I don't - see why women would leave. Even if men would."

The slightest bit of a smile. "They are less likely to."

           Carissa feels a flush of pride. "Maybe you should aim to have more women be wizards, then. - sorry. Sir."

"Cotonnet is of significant importance to us."

            "I'll figure it out, sir."

"Yes."

He leaves. Carissa stares contemplatively at her fingers for longer than anything about her fingers warrants. 

She's going to be so good at this.

The food at the Calistrian camp is actually pretty good. He's showed up early and told Felix to bite him if he starts talking about anything he shouldn't. 

Carissa deeply appreciates both the food and the fact that, the one time it came up that she wanted to go to Hell, the person she was talking with said 'huh, I don't think it'd suit me' and left it at that. She gets some chili. 

"What services were rendered for the ring? Not that I want to run off and render them but I'm at least considering it."

Okay, that's an obvious one. Well, it's not like he's trying to keep his identity a secret – there aren't a lot of sixth-circle Galtan wizards based in Absalom to begin with. 

"Did you hear about the time the Queen of Korvosa murdered the King of Korvosa?" 

"I did! Some of the Hellknight order involved in the whole mess got assigned up here afterwards, I think because they were in some trouble with their superiors, and they were very grouchy about the whole thing."

"Well, we got him resurrected. And then killed her. ...Not all on our own, we had help. Credit where credit is due, your Hellknights were really remarkably unobstructive about the whole thing." 

"The King can't have given presents this expensive to everyone who helped reinstate him, he'd go broke. I guess that's a better problem to have than being dead."

"He must have been feeling generous." 

Personally Élie thinks she could stand to be a little more impressed, but if all the details aren't widely known inside Cheliax that's probably for the best. 

"Why'd you do it?"

"Well, we arrived in Korvosa just at the wrong time. The Queen had been poisoning her husband for months, nothing helped, and then my wife showed up and actually managed to heal him, so of course Iliosa had to finish the job and pin the blame on her. She – the Queen – was claiming that resurrection attempts had failed, but we managed to secure some of the body and get a higher-circle cleric in from Lastwall, since we'd figured she'd used  Hasten Judgement, which she had, and that did work but at that point we were in the middle of an all-out civil war. My companions and I – ah – didn't like the idea of Korvosa becoming even more of a Chelish protectorate than it already is, so we went in for the King. Turned out for the best, since the late Queen was planning a blood ritual to sacrifice the whole city in exchange for immortality." 

"No way. I didn't even know you could do that with a blood ritual! But then she must've been a very powerful wizard..."

"Actually, I think she was some kind of spontaneous caster – maybe a sorcerer, but if so, an awfully strange one. Of course, I doubt the ritual itself was entirely enabled by her intrinsic ability – " 

"Oh, were there other players? I suppose usually one does not murder a king without allies."

"Oh, no – sorry, I've been reading too much theory lately – Azlanti magic users didn't distinguish between spontaneous and prepared casters like we do. Rather, they saw a fundamental difference between intrinsic and patroned casters. In this schema, wizards and sorcerers are both intrinsic, clerics are patroned – I meant that I think Ileosa was an intrinsic caster, but the ritual might have been drawing on extraplanar aid. It's unfortunate, most of her notes were lost with her – " 

He catches himself. 

" – I mean, of course nobody should have the tools to recreate it, just – " 

"- well, you'd want it personally, even if you didn't want anyone else using it. Maybe you could use old people or something, anyway."

Well that sure is an awkward silence. 

"...she was certainly the equivalent of a 9th circle caster, in whatever it is that she was. If I get that far, I think 9th circle wizards have better options." 

"Do they? Obviously some wizards are immortal but some are ninth circle and aren't immortal. If I found a method of pursuing immortality I wouldn't pass it up - and not because I think it's all right to murder a whole city of people, I don't," it'd depend obviously but probably prospective defectors have Good-friendly opinions like that, "but - maybe there's a more efficient way, maybe there's - I take it from a Good perspective there's something wrong with the old people idea but there's got to be some variant that's allowed, maybe with animals..."

"I do wish you'd stop talking about the Good perspective on things. It's not a framing I've ever found particularly useful." 

"Huh, how do you think of it?"

"Interesting as this conversation is, we're not very likely to reach 9th circle or discover a new method of immortality, so of course it's important to think about where one might spend one's afterlife, but I don't like to confuse that with moral reasoning. I am generally speaking in favor of freedom and self-determination of sapient beings. That's why I'm against murdering the elderly, among other things, and if Pharasma changed her mind about it tomorrow I'd hope I'd still have the courage of my convictions." 

"...I do wonder why you think it isn't alright to murder a whole city of people. I mean, I know why I don't, but surely the orthodox Asmodean response is that eventually everyone goes to Hell, which is anyway more efficiently designed for the forming of souls than the material plane. So unless I've misjudged you, you can't have a fully general principled objection." 

She knows her actual answer, it's something about how Cheliax is richer than other places, a better place to live, and that's part of how a human can know that Hell is a place where they will be formed well. It doesn't seem like what a defector would say. What would a defector say to that. 

"...well, eventually everyone goes to Hell, but it's not really clear what happens if some of them get there via other afterlives, I think probably a lot is lost - in getting compressed first into whatever Heaven wants of you and then secondly whatever Hell does, right -"

"Maybe? I suppose it depends on how much value you place on the raw material. And there, I know, there are different schools of thought – personally, I worry that all the afterlives lose something important, just by virtue of squeezing mortal souls into accordance with their fundamental nature. But it's not like I'm in a position to do anything about it." 

"That seems right to me. That all the afterlives lose something. And I think I can make myself a shape where Hell doesn't lose the important stuff, but if I went to Heaven first and then to Hell - well, I worry that a lot of important stuff would be lost. So even if everyone goes to Hell eventually that doesn't make killing them wantonly a good idea. I notice Asmodeus doesn't do it."

"Reasonable enough. Personally I tend to think that whatever my condition when I arrive in hell – hypothetically, of course – the thing left after they were through with me wouldn't be worth keeping. But we're getting away from the subject." 

"Right. Anyway, she wanted to murder a whole city of people for immortality, and one of the reasons that's a bad idea is that it's a lot of people who have now gotten turned into your enemies, and some of them were you lot."

"Well, yes. Quite. Of course, we didn't know about the blood magic ritual until it was all almost over, but she did try to frame my wife for regicide and one tends to take that personally. ....Not that I'm not a regicide myself. Technically speaking. It's the principle of the thing." 

"You only want to be wanted for regicides you really committed? Or is it about whether the King had it coming. Are there any Kings who don't have it coming."

"Mostly the former. There are some kings – well, there are some kings it's more trouble than it's worth to do anything about. We did put the old one back in charge." 

"I've never heard anything bad about him. ...never heard anything bad about our Queen either, of course, and somehow I doubt she's on your list of rulers not to bother with."

 "I mean, I think we disagree on the valence of serving Asmodeus – " 

"I suppose. What would your ideal country do with people who serve Asmodeus, it seems like if you try to stamp us all out you stop being Chaotic and Good pretty fast."

"Ban the organized faith, of course, but if individuals want to worship in private and on their own recognizance...try and talk them out of it? Build a culture of respect for liberty and the mortal spirit? I don't think it would be a serious problem. It's not a popular faith in parts of the world where you're given a choice. And in the end if someone really wants to consign themselves to hell, it's an unspeakable tragedy, but there's not a whole lot the state can do about it." 

"In parts of the world where you're given a choice, by which you mean the organized faith is banned?"

"Plenty of places have freedom of religion. I live in Absalom, it's legal there, and the church barely has a presence. Almost nothing if you don't count Chelish expatriates. As religions go, it's really not very appealing! But we were talking about my ideal country – and even given all that, I just don't think it's worth it." 

"And here we are talking religion again, instead of how you stopped the mad queen. I assume she did not just go fight a bunch of mid-level adventurers. When trying to conquer countries one should really be prepared for intervention by mid-level adventurers."

"Well, no. After we resurrected the king, we smuggled him into the Acadamae, and he got them to agree to back him in re-taking the palace. So we snuck in first and rescued his cousin, the heir apparent, who was being held hostage, and while that was happening we got the chance to explain to the leader of the local Hellknight order that the rightful monarch had been resurrected, which made things much easier when everyone was storming the place – and at that point, I suppose we just got lucky. Our party went to investigate the castle vaults and managed to find her inner sanctum, the place she teleported herself to when she was injured. As indeed she did. If she hadn't been severely weakened we'd never have managed it." 

"Huh! Congratulations. Did she try to bribe you. That is what I would do if I teleported to my sanctuary and it had a bunch of adventurers in it."

"Oh, it was all over much too quickly for that. At least I think so." 

"...you think so?"

"...traded those exact memories to a Caulborn. Long story. My party had to fill me in later." 

"- really? What was that like?"

"Weird. They're fascinating creatures, you know, their whole species is a telepathic hive-mind and collectively they know almost everything. I think they – eat? – memories. Draw sustenance from them in some way, certainly. Naturally I don't have the clearest memory of the precise moment it happened, but I do know that it felt like being very slightly hollowed out. And that there were more slurping noises than I really felt comfortable with." 

" - wow. I think it'd drive me mad, not knowing things I ought to know, but I guess we forget lots of things anyway... do they pay well. Caulborns."

 "They pay in arcane knowledge. Depends on how badly you need to know."

"Oh no, now I'm tempted."

"I could – I couldn't let you copy the spell, really. It'd probably be better for me if I didn't have it – my friends definitely think so – but I can't say I regret it." 

"What, are you protecting me from myself? I'm going to Hell! If that has any advantages it ought to mean people stop protecting you from yourself."

"Oh, if it was just for your own sake I'd do it gladly. But you seem like the practical type, and you have goals I wouldn't like to make it easier for you to achieve." 

Gesture at the Worldwound. "I want to stop it from eating the planet. I guess that serves Asmodeus but it serves a lot of other people too."

"I would sincerely like to be able to trust you." 

"What, do you think I'm a spy sent to ensnare you? You can ask everyone around, I've been here for years. Also I think ensnaring people is prohibited by treaty. Depending what it entails."

"It's really not personal. I just don't go around sharing information with agents of the Chelish state." 

"I could quit." Too forward? Probably. She's said it now, though.

".....really." 

Godsdammit. 

She's a Chelish wizard. She could have her mind read at any time. Which means her superior officer will know she's made the offer, which means, if she's sincere, she doesn't ever plan to go back – or she's not, and it's a trap. 

Of course, the latter is much more likely. True believers don't convert over lunch. He should leave. He should get away and never speak to her again. He should take care of his business and teleport back to Absalom this afternoon. 

....but if she meant it, could he ever forgive himself?

Does that. Work. "I think I could play it off," she says calmly. "I've let worse slide. If you didn't mean it."

"Oh,  I meant it. But I very much doubt that you do." 

She can't, right? There's no possible way. If he brings home a Chelish officer Catherine would kill him, and rightly so – not to mention Naima.  Gods. 

"Well, in the future, I think you shouldn't say that to girls if you're going to go practically incorporeal with shock if they say they'll take you up on it. And if you've got some test in mind for them first you ought to say that up front too."

"Oh, I say it to everyone and nobody ever takes me up on it. So forgive me if I'm a little off-balance. In my experience very few Chelish officers get to the point you're at without very successfully excising their capacity for doubt." Which is why he hadn't actually thought about what to do it he got to this point. "If you are serious, I'd want to take you to the Abadarans for a few rounds of Abadar's Truth. And bring my companions here, just in case it doesn't occur to me to ask all the right questions." 

"Sorry, you want to conduct an interrogation in order to drop me off in Absalom? In that case I think I'll pass. I bet I can get a Calistrian to do it for a blowjob."

"That's what I thought." 

"Got any restaurants you recommend?"