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Surface pastwatching! He's not going to be able to go far back enough to catch sabotage or suspected forgery of documentation - the spell has a hard time covering as long as a day and a night even when there wasn't a lot of magical and just generally violent interference - but he can go back far enough to see Altarrin rising for the morning. 

...maybe? 

.......okay he's been awake since only two and a half candlemarks after midnight, he really isn't getting much sleep. He is instead writing in cipher, and pacing, and mending one of his artifacts, and going outside in the below-freezing air to cast detection spells, and sitting down apparently deep in thought. 

 

Other than that, the mine is quiet. Altarrin arrived late last night. (Actually, he has the Gate-records to cross-compare, Altarrin got in at half a candlemark to midnight and must have spent a while giving orders to empty the mine and arrest the Isk suspects. He can only have slept, like, two candlemarks.) But the mine was fully evacuated of the night shift workers. Altarrin also ordered the entrance to the mine-shaft guarded. As of a candlemark after midnight, almost twelve candlemarks before the incident, they have written documentation that everyone on site was accounted for, and no one entered unauthorized. 

The three Iskan natives were under guard. The other mine personnel weren't; they were off work, and asked politely to stay in their barracks, but they weren't  individually being watched, and it's dark - you can't project mage-lights into pastwatching - and his "visibility" on the relatively dim life-force auras of un-Gifted or very very weakly mage-gifted men is not great. It would take him twelve candlemarks to individually track every person. 

 

If he focuses on the workers under arrest, though, things get interesting....

 

---

 

Ten minutes before noon.

 

The mage-guard has been on duty for eleven candlemarks, and may not have slept before that either since they apparently came straight here from Stormhaven. He's yawning, glancing around, clearly eager for his replacement. The clerk is intently reviewing mine-records and making notes. The workers under guard are bound, but not very tightly, the compulsions and eyes on them are doing most of the work. Having skimmed the past while, the guard-rotation for patrolling past this area is every half-hour; clearly Altarrin's other people basically trust their colleague. 

His face lights up, and then the pastwatching spell informs Kastil that the Healer - the same Healer he saw approach Altarrin - is walking up to him. She sidles up to him. He makes an embarrassed hand gesture. Norma, I'm on duty. She shakes her head, apologetic but not very. When are you off? S'posed to be noon but I bet you anything the bugger will be late, he says back. 

Norma leans in to peck him on the cheek, which he seems to accept. 

 

- he sags to the ground. The pastwatching can't get any more detail on whether Norma used Healing on him (and he wasn't shielded, but most people aren't as paranoid as Kastil or Altarrin, and don't) or if she stabbed him with a poisoned pin, or had a kerchief soaked in one of those drug-mixes that works when inhaled (they're rare and expensive and come from the far south but it's not the first assassination he's seen with one.) 

Though she doesn't proceed to kill the man. She looks apologetic, and eases him to the ground, not too uncomfortably. 

The clerk, watching, does nothing. 

The Healer gives him a brief glance. Money's where I promised. Take him. And she unties one of the men. He outranks you, Aster, he's your guard, you listen to him. 

(Even in the haziness of pastwatching, it is at this point noticeable that they share a certain family resemblance.) 

Come with me, the clerk says, and it seems like even the prisoner-compulsions allow this. 

You're not coming? Aster mouths at her. No. I'm covering your tracks. 

Aster and Altarrin's clerk, who is apparently not loyal to Altarrin, hurry away and vanish behind a building. The Healer stays with the remaining two men, bound and compulsioned. She looks - thoughtful, and determined. 

It is about three minutes before noon. 

One of the prisoners looks baffled and terrified; one of them is meeting her eyes with a level albeit half-glazed expression. 

Well, she says to that one. Are you with me? - We'll have to take care of him, somehow. 

The tied prisoner jerks his chin in - a direction. Maybe the direction of the mine-shaft. But he looks anguished. 

It does serve the Empire, the Healer says. I promise. I outrank you, and I'm telling you this is your duty. You trust me, right? ...I'll knock him out, it's - a little kinder. 

Apparently the prisoner does trust her. She unbinds him, and he picks up the remaining unconscious man, and - heads for the mineshaft. 

(The look in his eyes is a familiar one.) 

 

Apparently dropping someone five hundred feet down a mine-shaft will a) go pretty much unnoticed, and b) allow the dropper, if he's already below the lip and blocked by a lot of stone, to collect at least some of the blood-power. He does not appear to be very efficient at it. He's clearly done it before. 

 

The Healer hurries off. She's nowhere nearby when the unconscious mage-guard and missing prisoners are discovered. 

 

She does look very surprised, and confused and kind of worried, when - seventeen minutes past the hour - someone runs up to her with what's presumably an urgent request to attend the Archmage-General down in the mine. 

But she goes. 

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Ah, the old 'healer is actually an assassin' dodge.

... No, she's - not. She's... rescuing one of her friends... with the help of the clerk, who she bribed or wants them to believe she bribed...

(Or the conversations were all deliberately faked because they know about past-watching. There are so many possibilities.)

And the prisoner who dropped him is a fourth-rate mage who made a dying blow against Altarrin, after getting around his compulsions somehow. (Everyone overrelies on the standard compulsions, but them being standard means there's standard ways around them. Kastil's are tighter.) That explains one but not both of the fireballs; the other - could have been a gas pocket, could have been a separate assassination attempt by the cult of Vkandis or an unrelated entity, on the god's coordination.

All this follows very neatly and clearly. There is, quite clearly, a conspiracy; the Office of Inquiry will root it out, with the help of the Ministry of Cults (who he wishes to send a more insistent message than the one he earlier sent), and this will take care of it. He'll cancel the WANTED bulletin for the dead prisoner (after sending two of his other mages, randomly selected, to make sure he's dead while watching each other's compulsions), and put up one for the clerk; probably the one who had the blood-magic died in a final strike but possibly that was a mundane gate-strike and the blood magic was unrelated... there will be a lot of work, unraveling this, and he can put in the hours.

Mage-Inquisitor Kastil hates his job. But it's not like anyone else would be better at it.

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That's when the report from the capital arrives. 

Altarrin was managing the pacification in the south, with frequent trips down there, but he was in the capital six weeks ago when some kind of alarm triggered in his quarters. His personally loyal mages responded, and found an attractive young woman wearing several unique magic artifacts. Altarrin, several of those mages corroborate, had her arrested, placed under political-prisoner compulsions, and questioned. Some people recall he had a specialist brought in to speak with her about metallurgy; the specialist is being tracked down.

The following night, he had her cleaned up and brought to him. She spent the night in his chambers. In the early hours of the morning he communicated to his staff that he had Gated out with her to address some emergency up north.

He returned with her a few hours later. She'd been given a Thoughtsensing talisman.

The rumor that she has a Wild Gift useful for magic artifact making is widely-repeated, and traceable back to a mage-guard who says he provided security for some testing of her abilities. Altarrin hasn't said anything about it, but shortly after her arrival he pressed the Emperor to open the 'spellsilver' mine. She's rumored to be from some southern city-state, or maybe the regions Altarrin has been visiting for pacification. She is credited for the making of some magical headbands which lots of people around court are wearing; they enhance the mind of the wearer.

Altarrin has lately been spending more and more of his time in the south, as more complications cropped up. His girl made a bit of a stir at court, of first, but not a long-lasting one; she rarely leaves Altarrin's chambers (guarded when she does) except to go to her shielded workroom, and mostly associates with Altarrin's loyal people and especially his past girls.

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He would not, in fact, have thought Altarrin would fall for that.

Given a Thoughtsensing talisman.

Gods damn it.

'Enhance the mind'. Again: 

Godsdamnit!

Please tell him the Emperor is not wearing one of these magical headbands?

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The Emperor has one and has been seen wearing it on some occasions!

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Right.

Right then.

He's going to appoint one of his less distrusted lower-ranking colleagues to finish up the investigation into the Cult of Vkandis and the assassination attempt. Here's all the this-related notes, here's my full report from the pastwatchings... 

And now Mage-Inquisitor Kastil would like to know everything that there is to be known about Altarrin's new young woman, without it leaking to her that he's investigating. He would like this very, very much.

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A healer who treated the girl - Carissa, her name is apparently Carissa - when she first arrived said that she had a strange, extraordinarily bright life-force, and was unusually difficult to put to sleep when Altarrin ordered that done so he could do some more compulsions.

A servant says that her dinnertime conversations with Altarrin were reliably kind of dull - yes, it occurred to her that that was probably deliberate by both of them - she did seem perfectly cheerful and fond of him -

Another former girl of Altarrin's talked to her at a party. She was worried Altarrin would get bored, thinking about what she wanted next. Joked about asking Altarrin to set her up with the Emperor. She could tell it was a joke because Carissa didn't seem disappointed to learn the Emperor was gay and also because, come on, that's obviously a joke. 

She's from Aksell.

She claimed to be from Aksell but a couple people who knew things about Aksell weren't totally convinced. 

 

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In terms of discreet investigations, you can get a pretty long way via having the rights of a Mage-Inquisitor to enter locked records rooms alone and look at whatever you want. A lot of things get written down, in the Empire - scrying reports, Thoughtsensing checks, meeting-schedules, copies of all non-top-secret mail sent via the court messengers, bonus time for wage adjustments when some staff - say, the court Healers - are called to an emergency.

Most of this is never reviewed by a skeptical eye, because where would you even start - and much of this situation has been higher secrecy, skipping the normal record-keeping channels - but sometimes you can read between the lines. 

The day that the girl arrived - Carissa, she's called - Altarrin urgently summoned some Healers. The report on what they did is redacted - all they have is rumors - but it is documented that a shielded infimary room was requisitioned and apparently one of the Healers remained on duty for - quite a long stretch, maybe overnight. During this period, Altarrin cancelled all of his meetings and - on several routine checks by his own guards, they do them not out of suspicion about Altarrin but to maintain his security - wasn't scryable. Which could mean he was in his Work Room or his bedroom, they thought nothing of it at the time, but. 

Altarrin requested some history books and a different secure meeting-room, presumably for his girl though she didn't happen to be scried during that time. He arranged for a metallurgy-expert mage-engineer to meet with her; the minutes for the meeting are redacted, but said mage immediately had all of his other work reassigned. A note with the officer he was reporting to said that he 'wished Altarrin would be less high-handed' but that his employee seemed 'happy'. 

Then Altarrin summoned her to his rooms with a stop via the bathhouse, and - according to several scrying points, he had at this point attracted attention - had a rather innocuous and inane conversation with her and gave her a lot of wine before hauling her to his unscryable shielded room - at which point aforementioned events happened, and the girl came back from the "trip to the north" with a Thoughtsensing talisman. The breakfast conversation was so boring that none of the servants or scrying mages really reacted to this, at the time. 

Altarrin inexplicably assigned Ketar, a junior Thoughtsenser, to come - not even read the girl's mind - to come talk about Gift stuff with her? Which is bizarre because Ellitrea, a much more experienced court Thoughtsenser, reports to him directly and would surely have been more qualified. Merda, a clerk with a reputation for working for anyone she can wrangle and a long-ago history as one of Altarrin's women herself, was a notetaker.

(Other gossip, says that at some point she had an altercation with Carissa, at which point Carissa stormed out of the room in tears, and then Ketar (and Merda) followed her. Ketar was only in there and unscryable briefly; Merda, for like an hour; that part is in the standard security-report, in Altarrin's private records that no one else has the right to access. This might normally be harder to do discreetly, but Altarrin is dead and his staff are upset and distracted.) 

 

Altarrin kept his new woman close to his chest, especially in the first couple of weeks. It's like he was trying to minimize the attention and gossip. At some point, he did start inviting people over, or bringing her to small events, and eventually loosened his hold and sent her off to attend court parties, which is the source of some more of the gossip, including a joking conversation about seducing the Emperor. 

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Mage-Inquisitor Kastil is so, so tired.

It is, in fact, possible that Carissa was a key resource of Altarrin's for a plot genuinely intended to serve the Empire. This is a possibility. It is a reasonable possibility. It is not out of the question.

But it's really much more likely that she and her conspiracy (masterminded by - Who Else? The Gods -) are trying to take over the Eastern Empire, and that Altarrin was suborned the first night. There are ways of affecting the mind that are invisible to compulsions, routing around them completely; this the Office of Inquiry knows, from long experience and careful records.

He'll monitor Merda, where he knows that Carissa is elsewhere, safely, and from a distance. And he'll send a message inviting Ellitrea to come north, officially still about Altarrin's supposed death in the mines, to be interviewed for - 'context'.

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She goes. Her ordinary schedule is thrown into disarray anyway. She asks Ketar to let Merda and Caris/Carissa know, when it's convenient, but mostly as a courtesy notice. She doesn't know how long it's been but she's confident the site is secured, they wouldn't summon her there earlier. 

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....Ketar will do that. 

 

Honestly, he's kind of miserable right now! He realizes that not everything important is destroyed, but it's - the first time a really, actually bad thing has happened to someone he knew. Someone he was kind of terrified of, in this case, but - someone decent, even Merda of all people was willing to admit to that. He feels like he's wandering through a haze. 

It's evening. How has it possibly been less than two days. 

...He'll let Caris know right away, via Mindspeech, since he's pretty sure Caris has another date with the Emperor tonight and might soon end up in a bedroom shielded against Thoughtsensing. He'll alert Merda when they have their scheduled Mindspeech check-in tomorrow morning. 

(He aaaaawkwardly does nooooot mention that he read Caris' mind while he was having sex. How do you even bring that up.) 

 

It's clear in his mindvoice that he's distracted and - pretty devastated, actually. 

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Caris is busy preparing for his date with the Emperor but he'll try to sound appropriately comforting. :Thanks for letting me know. And I'm so sorry that it happened like this.:

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:I wonder what happened? ...I mean, I think we're all pretty sure it was Vkandis, but I'm curious how, he's - so careful: Mental sigh. :I guess it doesn't really matter: 

He wants to tell him to have a good date but that's probably also super awkward and weird so he doesn't. 

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And the Emperor will be there at the scheduled time! 

He looks like someone who did not sleep amazingly well, but other than that, he's clearly had a less hectic day; he's freshly bathed and well-groomed and wearing a tunic in blues and deep purples with gold embroidery which is very flattering on him. He's tense, but - more in a way that looks like he would be really eager for a way to release that tension, as opposed to just tired and sad. 

- he's going to say yes, to Caris' proposition, and some responsible part of him really wishes he could have run the idea by Altarrin - not whether it was good idea to work with Caris, obviously it is, but whether it's a good idea to also sleep with him. But he's going to do it, and he has butterflies in his stomach which is really utterly ridiculous and undignified of him. 

He lets his - lover? boyfriend? - in. 

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 He's trying to be much more careful with the transitions, now that Caris is presumably being spied on a bunch, so he goes invisible and gaseous to slip out of Carissa's workroom, and sneaks halfway around the palace to find a shielded place to become Caris and go meet the Emperor. He's a minute late. It's only a tiny bit to make a statement. 

 

 

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"Your Majesty."

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Head-duck. Shy smile. "I hope you don't plan to keep calling me that all night. ...Come in. Have you eaten - could I get you anything to drink -?"

(Aaaaugh as usual he has been perfectly in control in all of his actual Emperor-type interactions - though the Splendor headband helps, and no wonder, it's alien magic from another world - but now that he's trying to be flirty it feels like he's not in control of anything anymore.) 

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"I would like a fancy drink, but know nothing of the local ones." He, for his part, looks perfectly at ease. 

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Of course he does. It's so hot.

The Emperor will usher them to his private dining room, the one with a gorgeous mahogany bar and lots of options for fancy drinks. It turns out the Emperor has quite a lot of fancy drink opinions. It also turns out that serving Caris is an enormous turn-on and this is...perhaps slightly noticeable. He's not trying incredibly hard to hide it, although he will probably literally blush if Caris notices or makes a comment. 

(It's very awkward that they can't just - talk openly - about their upcoming plans, but it'll look at least slightly weird and abrupt to his security people if he heads straight to his bedroom, and also he is, in fact, really tense, and hoping he'll become a bit less so.) 

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He's perfectly happy to hang out here where the Emperor's security can witness him giving the Emperor drink orders. That's....a lot of gossip that's going to result, definitely, but gossip is much less dangerous when you have the Emperor and also can discard this identity at any moment. 

He's not going to comment on the Emperor enjoying himself but he's definitely going to visibly notice.

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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah okay maybe a serious downside of this particular fling is that he isn't just aroused he has feelings. Feelings are the worst idea when you're Emperor. 

(Altarrin wouldn't want him to– actually he has no idea what Altarrin would advise, here, he's realizing that his Altarrin-model is seriously incomplete and that's really terrible - he's not letting himself look at the fact that it might be terrible for anything other than instrumental reasons -) 

 

He will be as charming as he can manage - while being sweet and harmless and pretty and caring only about pleasing his Caris - and all the more confusing feelings that aren't just being incredibly aroused can go in a mental box over there and he kind of feels like most of him isn't in his body, but enough of him is to be enjoying it. He can serve Caris a few drinks and try to give hints but not quite bring himself to take the lead on retiring to the bedroom. 

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Oh, he's on that. They've given the staff more than enough to gossip about. He'll carry the Emperor over before he's even finished the fancy drinks. 

 

"I seem to recall I had a proposition for you to consider," he says, once they're in private.

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His breath catches. 

"Yes. I -" why is it so hard to speak, his face is hot, his entire body is hot, "- I accept." A nervous half-laugh. "I don't - know if I'll regret it. But I hope not, and I - you didn't leave me with much incentivize to say no." 

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"Well, I don't think you'll regret it, I don't see how that'd suit my goals at all. Do you want to hear what I plan to do with this partnership of ours, or shall I surprise you along the way?"

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