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.