"And maybe talk to the prisoners."

"Sure. Through bars or with a guard there, though. Can't have one clobbering you."

"Oh, sure, I don't need to get very close." She starts circulating through the prison, getting a sense of the layout and amenities.

The whole place is stone. There's a lot more group cells than individual ones, large rooms with little privacy dividers around beds, with metal-barred doors. The place is subdivided into three blocks with the exits to the blocks secured, but prisoners are mostly free to wander during the day. There's a central bathing area with wooden tubs and brushes and stuff, a big central canteen, waste rooms for each block, an exercise area with hanging bags and various other equipment, a big outdoor area with a few game fields marked out (and watchtowers at the corners), and some workshops where volunteers do stuff like weaving and wickerwork for extra stuff and privileges. Their escort mentions that all prisoners are allowed to visit the Well of Souls escorted upon request, at most once a week.

"Is it too difficult to grow one on the premises?"

The guard snorts. "We have six for the entire city. They take super careful work and rare fertilizer. So, yeah."

She wanders around checking that everything looks clean and well maintained and seeing if any prisoners want to talk (complain) to her.

They don't clean up to Amentan standards, but things are mostly clean-ish.

Some prisoners want to complain! That they are not a bunch of damn pirates, that's a lie!

She would love to hear their side of the story.

Maybe not with the guard there, he'll just interrupt.

Guard snorts and walks down the hall.

"So, I don't know what's up with aliens-"

"We heard a lot about you but never saw one until now."

"-But you seem to be like, working with the Bell Heads, so we obviously can't give you anything they don't already know, but. My grandparents were pirates. They'd been abused so badly by Captain Kittiso that they, yes, they mutinied and murdered him and stole some boats. With good reason! I can tell you lots of horrible stories, but first- I'm not a pirate. They did the pirate thing for a while, and then they settled down and built a village, that's where I was born. What we're doing now is collecting a small toll for passage through a narrow sound. Taxes, not piracy."

"Hmm, and Three Bells doesn't think you have the claim to the sound?"

"Yeah, they want all the trade waterways so they'll get even more stinking rich."

"Will this come up in your trial?"

"I'm gonna say it, so people know. Maybe they won't even deny it."

"How long have you claimed the sound?"

"Longer than I've been alive. It was their haunt even before they stopped hunting ships."

"Hm. Well, I'm just here to observe, but I can tell my superiors anything you'd like them to know, if you think that might help."

"I mean, that's politics. They have the big stick. I just don't want it forgotten that they're hitting people with it. I want my town left alone. I want a kid, but 'prisoner' is kind of a crushing blow to your pride so that's not happening when they let us out. I'm rambling. Just, if you don't approve of annexation, let em know?"

She nods solemnly and writes this down. The ambassador later finds an excuse to inquire after the history of the area in which piracy occurred.

What sort of history? On what timescale- Decade, century, millenium?

Century-ish?

Well, Pune Burr Strait is a few hundred miles away. Three Bells has been around for centuries but wasn't a big naval power then. The area was claimed by a polity known as Oak Spears, but then Oak Spears kind of semi-collapsed into a federation, leaving the area unpatrolled. It was a high-traffic area under Oak Spears, saving about 1200 miles of travel along the route to the southeastern inner sea, but with their collapse the area's small towns started practicing piracy when they could get away with it, like always happens. Traffic declined a lot, with only well-armed or daring captains taking the route. Then the Three Kills set up shop there about fifty years ago and occasionally raids further afield ever since then. About thirty-five years ago a massive band of raiders under the Duelist Sea King Ullumar marauded across the region- Three Bells gathered an alliance fleet to oppose this planning a decisive battle at the strait, but Three Kills leaked intelligence to Ullumar and it was a horrible defeat. A bit after that, a series of polities in the area started trying to seize the strait but nobody could decisively win and by then the pirate clique was pretty established. About ten years ago Three Bells attempted to organize a local alliance to dislodge them but the alliance fell apart to infighting, and of course just now they found out that most of the Three Kills' navy was elsewhere and launched a decisive raid while they were distracted, hopefully opening the way to restoring peaceful trade through the region.

Great, it's nice to have a perspective on how history unfolds here.

History beyond a century or two is mostly told in stories and legends, of course. If they wanted the millennia-long version they would have gotten the Epic of Yusuf, about a possibly fictional hero, among other things.

Maybe another time. Who were Three Bells's allies in these actions?