- you know she would probably have predicted this if she had been. Thinking. 

(She tries to tell herself it's fine - it's good that they're being thorough and careful and paranoid, Altarrin would approve, Altarrin did approve - honestly he should have done some things differently, only she gets why he was scared and - 

- and what if it gets worse now, that the secret isn't small, what if the Foresight footprint is bigger, what if it sends more of the gods after Carissa, who Altarrin had wanted so badly to keep alive - but it's all right it has to be all right at least they'll have more help in dealing with that - 

- she's so incredibly angry with the gods -) 

Ellitrea's story doesn't especially change in its highlights. She can recall more conversations, more events, more observations she made. With coffee, and the right prompting, they can get more of the subtext that made her say that Carissa is not an especially safe person, though Ellitrea maintains firmly even in her thoughts that neither is Altarrin and in fact you can't be and also get anything done. 

They'll also get a whole bunch of emotions about how Carissa and Altarrin were almost but not quite communicating, almost but not quite close or able to trust each other in the friend way not the ally way, and like, Altarrin is himself, Altarrin mostly doesn't have...friends...and maybe couldn't have gotten where he was if he did. But. He was lonely, and he was sad, and Carissa - seemed to just find that kind of tedious, sometimes, but if they could have just really talked then maybe Carissa would have understood and been there for him in the way that Ellitrea never really could be... 

She is trying so hard to believe that she isn't betraying Altarrin, because if she were then she doesn't think she could keep going at all 

They will reassure her that she is serving Altarrin and the Empire, that she is, genuinely, doing the right thing for her teacher and her country, as they guide her to one of the Very Polite Prison Cells For People We Don't Want To Die Of Cold And Damp. 

- And the investigation at court, along parallel tracks: What does the situation there look like?

They're having a stressful evening, too, as it happens.

Carissa went into her shielded Work Room and didn't come out all day or well into the night. They pieced together why when they arrested Ketar and Merda in their sleep; both knew, apparently, that Carissa was currently Caris, and currently on a date.

With the Emperor.

Ketar additionally knows some specific detail about their sex life. The Emperor has evinced an interest in being given orders and treated as powerless, and Caris has been providing. 

Ketar likes Carissa, feels badly for her. He seems to have switched mentally to trusting and wanting to protect Carissa based on the first day of mindreading her, which (it strikes the inquisitor writing this report) might suggest that her manipulative powers extend to Thoughtsensers reading her at a distance; he hadn't met her face to face at that point. Ketar's own account, of course, is just that she was inventive and curious and fascinating, and then terrified to be called to Altarrin's quarters, where she expected the violent rape that would be...traditional in her culture, or something, and this made Ketar feel badly for her and protective of her, to the point where it ran up against his loyalties. 

Merda says that she doesn't know if she likes Carissa or not and it depends entirely on whether Carissa sticks around to clear up the mess she made or runs (Merda's betting on runs) and of course whether Carissa killed Altarrin but she claims to be quite sure she didn't. Her Thoughtsensing artifact, a bribe for putting Caris in front of the Emperor, has been confiscated. They haven't tested it. Merda says it works great, though only on people in the same room. 

They ...await guidance on what to do about the fact that the investigation target is spending the night in the Emperor's private suite. 

Kastil will be over immediately. The plan is to arrest her with minimum casualties as soon as she leaves - the Emperor is not acceptable collateral damage. The plan for this - 

Caris wakes earlier than the Emperor, of course. He has decided to endeavor to still be in bed and snuggly when the Emperor wakes up; there's lots of romantic possibility he is otherwise foreclosing. So he quietly prepares spells, and then quietly does some crafting, ready to put it away when the Emperor starts to stir, which shouldn't be for several more hours.

The plan is this. They move in tonight, to surround the imperial bedroom. They check the commander of the imperial guard for compulsions as best they can, then inform him the emperor's current lover is wanted for questioning in a serious crime, and that he should not inform the emperor until the suspect can be apprehended. They watch him, of course, with Thoughtsensing, so he can't send a message.

When Caris, Carissa, or anyone other than the Emperor leaves the room (without the emperor), the first group of mages hits that person with everything they've got - compulsions, cuts to any spells on them they can see, force-blasts (and a Fetcher, brought in at great expense) to remove talismans, attack-spells to bludgeon the mind or stun the nervous system into unconsciousness, low-powered levinbolts that cause a great deal of pain but don't stop the heart, and all the other nonlethal weapons that the Empire has developed for subduing mages, to which they're adding darts tipped with a variety of nonlethal poisons (normally useless against shielded mages unless you get the shields down). The Empire has developed quite a lot of tools, for the purpose. Simultaneously, Kastil and two of his deputies will open horizontal unthresholded Gates beneath their target; the deputies are much slower, so they shouldn't interfere with the first Gate, and they have a proscribed order for stacking. All these go to a windowless cell full of a soporific gas buried in a specific extremely warded location beneath Inquisition headquarters which is warded against all magic aimed outwards, including Gates.

The third group of mages is supposed to kill Carissa with every attack-spell they have if she shrugs off the nonlethal weapons and the Gate and is still moving at the end of it.

(Kastil needs to be there, in person, to apologize to the Emperor - passing that off would be simple cowardice; If the Emperor wants him to make the full apology, his deputy is fully briefed. Further copies will be released to most of the other top Inquisition officers if he does not return.)

If anyone else enters, the Imperial Guard go through exactly the normal procedure and they arrest Caris as described above the moment he's alone. While the operation is underway, any orders to cancel it should be assumed a product of Carissa's mind control abilities. If he countermands the order to take Caris prisoner for any reason, he is to be assumed compromised and his offsite deputy will take over and call an emergency alert, a process that will involve informing the entire Inquisition and probably some Archmage-Generals.

Almost two days earlier. It's a few minutes past noon.

Everything is still and quiet and dark in a deep underground in an incredibly well-shielded room -

(in fact, the same shielded room where Altarrin once panic-Gated with Carissa, six weeks ago)

- and then, unobserved by anyone, the glow of a Gate-threshold appears. It's anchored on something that isn’t actually a permanent Gate, it has no power source, but it does have some of the targeting-related set-spells, and some structure laid in the stone to guide the magic now shaping the destination threshold.

The threshold is nearly in place when the magic - jumps, twitches, flaring as the source on the other side is disrupted - and then it snaps into place and a man is tumbling through, with the characteristic rolling momentum that an experienced mage might recognize as what it looks like when a mage drops themselves through a horizontal Gate-threshold onto a vertical destination one. He’s already curling into fetal position, protecting his head - on the other side is clearly a blaze of fire, briefly lighting the stone walls and neatly stacked crates, but he's shielded -

And then, with no warning at all and when the man is about halfway through his sideways fall, the Gate-threshold explodes. The force of it flings the man through the rest of the way, even as the Gate-threshold comes apart, and smashes him into the opposite wall near the ceiling. He falls, ragdoll limp, and lands, two meters down, in a heap on the unforgiving stone floor. His clothes are slightly on fire.

His heat-shield talisman absorbed most of the force from the fiery explosion that took down his Gate, before shattering and backlashing onto him; he’s badly burned, especially his hands and forearms, and the small narrow stone room already reeks of scorched meat.

His several overlapping shields against mage-energies are actually designed with Gate-strikes in mind, and even operating on pure reflex, he was running the energy-link to the threshold through a high capacity focus-stone. They get most of the backlash – and then they shatter, the focus-stone rather violently, and his mage-channels take the rest. His physical shields were still just barely intact when he hit the wall, at which point they too bite the dust, and he picks up some broken bones and internal injuries on both impacts.

Once the light of the disintegrating Gate-threshold fades, the room is once again still and quiet and pitch-black. But if an observer were there (none is), they might hear the man’s ragged, unsteady breathing.

Five hours pass. It's early evening, now. 

The man stirs.

He's only very debatably conscious, and certainly not lucid, but some things are trained to the level of reflex. Mage-sight (it hurts a lot). Check for shields and wards.

...Familiar. And he's alone. Safe, for now. He drops mage-sight before the effort and pain of it drives him back into unconsciousness. 

- he's cold. (In fact, the man's body temperature has been dropping for candlemarks while he lay unconscious on the bare stone in an unheated underground base, and he's now well into the realm of hypothermia.) 

It takes him a long time to do anything about this, because it involves making a decision and a plan, however basic. 

...Heat-spell? - Yeah no absolutely not, and the effort sends him spiraling back into unconsciousness. 

- wards? Familiar. Safe, for now. - cold. So cold. Can't feel his fingers or toes.

Shouldn't - magic - but - supplies -? 

All of the records caches have the exact same layout, for exactly this reason. Altarrin can, without ever carrying out more than one step of planning, find a wall, follow it until he finds the nearest stack of crates - 

(this takes him almost a candlemark, because he's still very much sliding between brief periods of semi-consciousness and deeper unconsciousness - but he repeats the same loop, over and over, orient, figure out the priority, take the next step toward it -) 

His hands really aren't working, by the time he reaches the crates, but the fact that he can't feel his extremities at all is almost useful, it means he's not in agonizing pain as he flails with his burned useless hands for the bedroll that should be there...

- collapses back to the stone. 

...check wards? (ow) 

Familiar. Safe for now. Alone? ...cold. Also, he seems to be half lying on a rolled-up bedroll and set of blankets. Good...work...past him? (He has absolutely no memory of getting here.) 

The bedroll is supposed to be very easy to unroll but he still ends up needing to use his teeth, and passing out again a couple of times. But, eventually, he gets himself into the wool-lined sleeping sack, mostly, though he's lost track of the mat for cushioning the floor.

It's been seven candlemarks since his Gate.  

It's a well-insulated sleeping bag, with a heating set-spell designed to trigger when it's disturbed. The man still shivers for a while - half-wakes a few more times, reflexively orients, notices warmth, slides back into darkness - 

Once he's mostly warm enough, he subsides into an exhausted half-sleep, half-stupor. 

Another nine candlemarks pass. It's been sixteen candlemarks, now, since the explosion and the Gate. 

(It's the early hours of the morning, almost exactly a day before Carissa will wake up in the Emperor's suite and prepare her spells.) 

(Sixteen candlemarks with severe burns and, not just without Healing attention but without food or water, would normally not be very survivable. However, Altarrin has a Ring of Sustenance.) 

He claws his way to awareness. 

He's in agonizing pain, is the first thing he notices. He can feel his body again, now that he's not freezing, and he does not appreciate it at all. His arms and hands are in agony, an agony he recognizes - burns, not good when he's alone without Healing care, just being mage-gifted doesn't give him any special immunity to infection and the spells he knows for it are...blunt instruments. 

His right arm is almost certainly badly broken. He's done something nasty to his neck though given the normal sensation in his body he probably hasn't damaged his spine. He doesn't think he has a concussion, and the backlash is starting to recede, but his head still hurts very badly. There's a stabbing pain in his ribs whenever he breathes. 

That being said: he's alive, and he's clearly been in and out of consciousness for a while even if he has no memory of it - no one else put him into this bedroll, and he's rather experienced at evaluating the stages of recovery-from-backlash, if it was bad enough to knock him out and he feels like this now it's been at least ten, twelve candlemarks... His injuries themselves aren't going to kill him, though infection might. 

- time to orient more fully. How did he get here....? 

....Carissa. 

She wasn't there in the exact leadup, of course. He's bleary enough that it takes a while to retrieve, but - north. Mine explosion. Betrayal. He remembers looking into the Healers' eyes, recognizing the magical signature of a blood-magic-boosted Final Strike about to smash into him, and knowing that she had known - 

(at least Carissa wasn't there, she wouldn't have been hurt)

- remembering noticing that he hadn't been careful enough, not paranoid enough, obviously he shouldn't have gone north at all and obviously he should have told Carissa about the notes he had left for her - and all the other supplies, he's taken a few opportunities to Gate around and drop more crates of his own records and boxes of Velgarth mage-artifacts in her cave, because in the scenario where she had to flee there, she would need months of runway before he could find her again... 

But he didn't have that conversation, because -? 

Because it hurt, and he was so tired, and it never felt like he could quite manage to navigate it so that Carissa heard the thing he meant. Because it - because why?

Because it kept feeling like there would be a better time later, when she felt more secure, more established, less like he was the one who held all the cards. He doesn't think he was wrong, that Carissa needed that, but - she needed other things, too, and he's pretty sure there's some way he could have threaded that needle, if he had tried harder - if he'd tried at all - 

It's stupid how everything having fallen apart makes him realize, too late, what he should have done, when even the occasional Owl's Wisdom that he requested didn't - he understands better why Carissa was so frustrated with human weakness, he's not sure he agrees but he understands 

Hindsight bias. It's easy to say now what he should have done. It's worth doing a post-mortem on whether he had enough information to know that before, but - not right now, not as the top priority, it's not over.

He needs to find out where Carissa is, whether she's safe - she must have learned of his 'death', and regardless of whether she suspected he was alive, she would have gotten out right away. Unless she thought she had a better option - with the Emperor, presumably, if that was going well. He needs to check which one - 

No, actually, the first priority here is to do something about his injuries. He doesn't have access to Healing, which means it's even more important to clean and bandage the injuries that are at risk of getting infected, if they aren't already. And then he can track down his scrying artifacts, and figure out what's going on. 

(It's been half a day. At this point, Carissa knows what happened in the north. Either she Teleported out at the first opportunity or she didn't, and any near-term consequences that were going to play out already have. If she got out, then she might or might not come looking for him, and if she doesn't, he can still try to find her later, it's not urgent on the level of candlemarks. So it's - only worth worrying, right now, about the scenarios where Carissa is in trouble, of a kind he can still get her out of, maybe. Which requires him to be functional.) 

Sitting up is terrible, and he cannot actually stand, but he can shuffle on the floor, and he knows where everything is, and his hands are not working well but he can feel his fingers (unfortunately) and leave smears of blood and pus on the crate lids, and his mage-gift is working well enough that he can use some clumsy force-nets to help.

He has an artifact for sterilizing unclean water to make it safe to drink; it needs a trickle of mage-energies to activate, but he can manage that, at this point. The particular spell is not a great idea to use on flesh but it'll help shut down an incipient infection and won't immediately hurt, and then he can find arrange salve and clean bandages in reach and the bedroll to fall onto, and a pot of spirits mixed with artifact-sterilized water, and dunk his hands and forearms, for a second pass at all the spots the spell wouldn't necessarily have reached - 

(this part is agonizingly painful and he doesn't quite lose consciousness but he's dizzy and faint and does, in fact, need to flop back and focus on breathing for a while until he can see again) 

- salve. Bandages. He can do this. 

Afterward - it's a slow process, multiple breaks are needed - Altarrin lies down again to try to catch his breath, and wishes he'd also taken out the strong painkillers. (He didn't for a reason; he knew it would be more tempting afterward, and he really shouldn't give in to that temptation and then sleep for the next eight candlemarks, even if that's what his body desperately craves.) 

He's nonetheless exhausted enough to drift, half-dozing, for another couple of candlemarks. 

(Almost twenty candlemarks after the explosion and the Gate. It's morning again, outside, not that Altarrin has any idea.) 

- wake up. ...Wards, familiar, safe for now - orient -? 

Carissa. 

...Scrying-focus, is what he needs. It's in one of the crates but unfortunately it's not one of his emergency survival supplies and so it's not in one of the top crates.

Altarrin - will grit his teeth and make his way to the right pile and miserably find a way to drag the top crate aside without the use of his bandaged hands, and then get the lid off with a mix of using mage-gift and his teeth, and find the scrying-focus among all the other items with mage-sight (ow) and use a force-net (owwwww) to retrieve it.

Carissa's supply-cave, first, the one with all the spellsilver, where he suggested she flee if it came up. If she's there, he can't actually join her yet, a Gate is still well beyond his capabilities, but - it'll make the situation less time-sensitive and he can afford to rest.  

Carissa is not there. 

Also, the effort of casting even that tiny magic exhausts him. Altarrin collapses back onto his bloodstained bedroll, and sleeps. 

(Twenty-three candlemarks after the incident. It's almost noon.) 

Wake up. Orient - check wards - Carissa - focus - 

This time he needs a plan before he uses magic and inevitably passes out. Carissa hasn't fled - probably - and if she has she's fine so it makes sense to focus on the worlds where his actions in the next day might make a difference. 

What would have happened, in the time after he Gated out - he's not sure how long it's been, but (checking his body, the parts that aren't bandaged) judging by the progression of bruises and scabs, somewhere between 18 and 36 candlemarks. Probably. 

Carissa...would have gone to the Emperor, probably, in her guise as a young man. Because she was optimistic enough about her seduction to see him as a potential protector. 

(He can't scry the Emperor's quarters in this condition to check if Carissa is there. He could theoretically get past the wards, maybe, he was heavily involved in designing them, but - not when he's exhausted and feverish and barely lucid.) 

The obvious response is to call for help. He can't manage a Gate of the relevant distance, and he can't summon help to his current location and give it away, but he could probably manage a communication-spell using an artifact, and then a blind Gate to a mile away, and the Empire would send a team to retrieve him, with Healers and guards - 

- Risky.  

The assassination plot against him included elements from within the Empire. He doesn't know how extensive, yet - it might have been a purely local resistance effort, though of course he's well aware of the ultimate source - but he also knows that he already has enemies at court. Who might take advantage of his vulnerability. He can't even reach Carissa to advise her; she's not a mage, can't receive the communication-spell without a very specialized artifact that isn't actually a known Empire technique - can't raise a Gate to the suite bedroom to talk to her, he'll pass out from the effort before he can speak...

So. The one benefit is that if Carissa is a suspect in arranging his death, proving that he isn't dead might - help. But it might not. He has no idea what the conditions are right now - in Jacona, in Isk, anywhere - and it goes against all of his instincts, to head into a situation blind and predictably incapacitated. 

Learn more, then. And do his best to rest, in between, and regain some of his strength - and hopefully he can confirm that it's safe to return to the Empire for Healing.

He can scry the palace (including some parts of it that aren't scryable to anyone else). Find out more precisely how long it's been. What the Emperor is up to - find Ellitrea, Merda, Ketar - find Carissa, if she's not in hiding... 

...The Office of Inquiry would investigate. Altarrin knows rather a lot about the Office (having participated heavily in creating it.) He can - with some thought, and some checking of records, interrupted with breaks to rest - figure out who he needs to search, where he needs to scry, to guess at the current status of the investigation. 

It takes the entire rest of the afternoon to piece together. Once he runs out of pre-powered focuses - he can still use the set-spell but has to provide his own energy - his attempts at scrying are unreliable, failing half the time, and he can hold it for ten minutes at a time before needing a half-candlemark of rest. 

The early information is reassuring. Over at the mine, it looks like Mage-Inquisitor Kastil is in charge. Good. The man is very competent and very very paranoid and unlikely to let this spiral any further out of control. The site appears to have been secured. 

The palace is as peaceful and ordered as anyone could expect the day after one of the most powerful men in the Empire was, supposedly, assassinated. Neither Merda nor Ketar seem worried or alarmed, and they're mostly going about their ordinary duties. He can't actually find Carissa but she tends to work behind shields - shields he laid for her, and could theoretically work around, but he's not confident he could actually manage the detail work for that right now - and he doesn't actually know what her male persona looks like. 

Scrying fragments of notes over the shoulders of clerks, Altarrin pieces together Mage-Inquisitor Kastil's theory about the mechanism of the attack. A clerk suborned (he should have been more careful!), a Healer desperate to rescue her - relative? brother, maybe? from a convict's hard labor sentence in a dangerous far-northern mine. Not even unreasonable of her. It - holds together. It's an angle the gods have used against him many times before. 

(36 candlemarks after the explosion and the Gate.) 

Sometime after midnight – and six candlemarks accidentally spent in an exhausted but actually-restful sleep, after he finally allowed himself a painkiller stronger than willowbark – Altarrin wakes again.

He's feeling...significantly better? Still feverish and in an unreasonable amount of pain, but to his own surprise, his reaction-headache is nearly gone and his mage-reserves are recovering, despite the fact that he hasn't been eating or drinking– oh, right. That's probably the Ring of Sustenance. He feels a pulse of gratitude toward Carissa. 

He'll try some more scrying; it goes faster this time, now that he's closer to fully lucid and has more energy to work with. Merda? Ketar? Ellitrea? A search anchored on Carissa's Thoughtsensing talisman? The Emperor's quarters, not the bedroom itself but the less private areas? 

Merda: asleep in bed. 

Ketar: ....not in his bed? 

Search-spell targeted on Ketar: failed, but it's not that surprising, he doesn't wear any artifacts that Altarrin made personally. 

Ellitrea: not in her bed. 

Search-spell targeted on Ellitrea: ....first try fails, but in the way that indicates bouncing into shields. By adding a few more complicated routing techniques, he gets the second try through. She's...up north? In a meeting-room with a woman wearing the uniform of the Inquisitors, body language not obviously unfriendly. She looks utterly exhausted, though.