"It's slightly interesting and might buy me the benefit of the doubt from the law later. At least long enough to explain myself if a problem occurs."

"-Yes, I would've been mad to rush to a snap just to hear news. Maybe I should make another badgeset and keep one end. Oh- I figured out how to make them permanent, but it costs diamond dust and you need to leave them to soak in moonlight sometimes. Maybe teeeen? GP worth per badge set?"

Sinnah is now poking Weiss's shoulder, annoyed. "Hey. Hey. You did something that interesting and only tell me now?? Show me!"

"In a bit! You provide the dust."

Sinnah nods rapidly.

"Good idea to try landing a Scry from the spellbook, I'll write a note to the evidence room for you. And yes, we'll gladly pay that much for permanent badges and can handle purchasing the dust for you. Anything else?"

Cressida is unfortunately not in the mood for this kind of upbeat conversation.

"-Oh, it's not a scry, it's a detection and ranging spell. Gives me a fairly precise direction and distance. Maybe Weiss could use that to pick this guy out of a crowd."

Sinnah is oblivious to most other peoples' moods.

(This is a very Good face, one troubled over the idea of going straight to lethal on another person, evil or not.)

"-Oh I had something else. Doesn't need to happen now, you seem tired. I talked to a ghost and wanted to enter her testimony, however much it's worth, under a Truthtelling. Also entering that I have this ability, that I understand it to work reliably, did not coerce the ghost, et cetera."

"A ghost... Was it a Varisian woman, with long dark hair?"

"-Yes, Zellara Esmeranda. Claimed among other things that the necromancer we arrested and his father are responsible for killing her."

She nods, remarkably unsurprised.

"The team of guards who searched the place after you found her head in a hatbox, some kind of grisly trophy. If you'll swear to her testimony I'll amend the writ for the evidence room so that you can take her head for burial and anything else of significance to help lay her to rest. The last thing we need is another violent haunting."

"I wrote some of it down..." She pulls out some notes and separates them from other notes. "Uh, she wanted a Harrow deck to go to me, because I - helped get him, and promised to investigate someone else." She looks a tiny bit embarrassed, or at least aware this looks kind of sketchy. "I'll swear to it all. Under Abadar's if necessary."

"Given she has formed a ghost, contesting her intended inheritance would be rather unwise. There's a clerk in the next room who can record the details and has a wand of Truthtelling; I have manhunts to organize."

There is one spell that will almost always be found in the collections of any fifth-circle sentient undead reliant on an external object for their survival, such as a vampire wizard's coffin or a lich's phylactery. That spell is Mage's Private Sanctum. 

Ramoska had already prepared one such Sanctum on arrival to Varisia to store his coffin inside, making it permanent with a scroll. Without a second such scroll, he has been forced to devote one of his daily highest-circle slots to covering the hidden lair of the Urgathoan contingent. It is in that latter Sanctum that Rolth has been stashed away following his rescue. 

The first nine attempts at a search spell get nothing as she tries ever more esoteric angles on ~signatures-like-that-of-this-spellbook. What finally gets some kind of return is an entirely different spell, a scent detecting spell. Even excluding paper and spell-inks, the book has been handled by several other people already, which gives a cloud of weak returns, and also returns from the places Rolth Lamm used to hang out, and his jail cell, and all the places that other people who touched the book tend to hang out...

...It's not nothing. But even after generously cutting away obvious wrong things, there are dozens of buildings it could indicate. And she thinks that's about all she's going to get if he, as would be sensible, is under a privacy-type permanent spell. (Smells like some sort of undead came and took him out of that window, by the way, if they were wondering about the breakout method. Exact spells in use unknown.)

The good news is, Rolth didn't let many people touch his spellbook, which narrows down the locations, and one of them is the Dead Warrens which confirms that he was the necromancer collaborating with the derro. 

The bad news is that there are none of the strong returns that would indicate his present location, implying he's either far away or under wards.

As for the ugly? One afternoon when Sinnah is searching the north side of the city, she'll encounter a commotion at the Avenue of Arms:

A crowd of pedestrians will be hurrying away in every direction, except for a few who are staying behind to watch as a spellcaster with skin transmuted to flexible stone moves her staff in circles as she finishes up a large-scale ritual!

Ooh, a large scale ritual.

Sinnah immediately drops her focus on the latest variation of the scent-scry spell and flies over to observe and take notes.

She is noticed, and the spellcaster adds a flourish to the next motion of her staff. 

"At last, someone other than the rabble to witness me. Are you a fellow wielder of the arcane?"

"Yeah, I am."

She's still casually floating just above head height. Outside any visible-to-her building magic. 

"What are you doing with all that energy? I don't recognize the shape of it from my reading. Though I haven't really delved into local ritual style casting."

"If you're not from around here, you won't be familiar with the initiation rites of the Hellknights. To prove oneself worthy of a Hellknight order is a simple matter: Face a devil from Hell in single combat and triumph. Most are not capable of calling their challenger personally, but I have devised a way to harness the latent planar potential here for my purposes. Behold!"

Her casting concludes, and a twenty-foot portal is torn open across the street, parallel to the line of strange stone arms. Out from it billows gouts of hellfire, scorching the paving-stones and emanating a sulphurous stench. Through the flames strides a hamantula, a barbed devil, fiery-eyed and bristling all over with sharp spines. It surveys the material plane that it finds itself on with disdain.

The magic at work here really is fascinating. There's definitely a catalyst or ambient draw effect in play... She'd previously determined that it's not great expected utility to learn Calling, compared to more general wizardry. But it's so neat! Then again, most wizardry is neat! She likes conjurations...

...Hmm, pay attention to the now.

"You won't get to beat it solo if there starts to be collateral damage, fair warning."

And trigger the little communication to Weiss that she gave, earlier, and wait for Weiss to respond.

Her warning goes unacknowledged. "Those fools of the Nail rejected me, when none of their paravicars could equal me. Now they shall see, I'll show them all! Black Tentacles!"

The street erupts in a forest of writhing and grasping black rubbery tentacles twenty feet across, each of them ten feet or more in length. The barbed devil is engulfed and restrained, limbs wrenched by the grasping mass. One of the pedestrians who lingered to watch is also caught up in it and shrieks in pain as he is pulled between two tentacles, but the sorceress is indifferent to that. 

"Disintegrate."

A thin green ray projects from her staff and strikes the devil in the chest, but it fails to show any effect. She frowns in annoyance.