Altarrin's been taken by the ...Inquisitors, okay. She sort of imagined that if you didn't have a church you wouldn't have those. 

She can scry him and teleport to him, but she's never prepared two fifth-circle spells in a day and flatly can't pull it off today. So she could get to him but he'd have to get them out, and Infernal Healing might not be sufficient for that. She'd much rather follow someone to headquarters but it looks like they're being too cautious for that. 

They....probably won't let Altarrin die, if they haven't already killed him? That requires that they prefer him alive but will fail. Local healing isn't very good, but - Altarrin's pretty tough. 

The Healer assigned to this is well trained, but junior - he was selected both for not knowing anything important and for being nearby, and while there exist more experienced Healers who meet the first criterion, they're in other provinces, not in the capital. (He was also, on some level, selected for being easily replaceable, a criterion which is harder to square with 'experienced.') He has not been informed who the patient is, but he can make some inferences. 

The patient: is in terrible shape! No one problem would be fatal by itself, but there are a lot of them. Severe backlash, bad enough by itself that he would likely be unconscious for another day and bedridden for a week. Various other damage that match with "nonlethal" measures used to incapacitate powerful mages.

The bigger problem is that - it looks like he was in bad shape before this, probably already deteriorating. He's bleeding internally, not fast but it's gradually weakening him. He has severe burns on his arms which look days old and like they haven't gotten any Healing attention in the meantime; they're dubiously bandaged in a way that did not especially keep them clean, and currently sloughing off large quantities of dead tissue. He's only ever seen this in textbooks before but it most closely matches the effect of accidental close-up exposure to one of the water-sterilization mage-artifacts. (This is an accident that occasionally happens to sewer workers, he's trained to recognize it but is not really sure what to do.) It's very precise so it...might have been deliberate, an attempt to stave off infection for a little while. It might even have worked, because the patient really should be dying of blood-poisoning at this point, but actually he's only in the early stages of it. Though the severe backlash won't help; he has no physical reserves right now. 

ALSO there are multiple poisons in his body! The junior Healer doesn't even recognize this one. Again, it...looks like none of them would be fatal in isolation, but it's a very bad combination with backlash and completely drained reserves, plus broken bones and internal injuries that need attention, plus an infection that is going to start getting out of control unless he focuses all of his efforts on it (neglecting the other problems) and maybe even then. 

Report: he...can buy time for them to get some other Healers here? He's not sure how much. Candlemarks, maybe, not days. Honestly he's not sure this patient is going to survive even with unlimited access to the best Healers in the Empire. 

He's not sure if they wanted to question him but it seems like this prisoner is unlikely to regain consciousness before he dies. 

--- 

If Carissa hovers for a few minutes longer, she can get lucky and slip into a few more minds. This mage is one of the Inquisitors! He's unfortunately not thinking at all about the location of the secret prison where Altarrin or the imposter-Altarrin is being kept.

He is, however, triaging messages for Mage-Inquisitor Kastil! One of the other mages just got a communication spell about the Healer dispatched to look at the imposter. The Healer seems to think he's probably dying, though it's entirely possible this is also some kind of trick. He's thinking that the Mage-Inquisitor probably won't want to have someone mindread him, because of the mind-control powers, but if he does want answers he needs to decide in the next couple of candlemarks. ...Maybe won't get them anyway, it takes a very good Thoughtsenser to get anything off an unconscious casualty and even then you can't get a lot. 

Oh.

Well, that's that, then. She can't exactly - Altarrin wouldn't want her to -

- breaking into the inquisition secret headquarters alone at fifth circle low on spell slots is just objectively stupid -

- sure, she can think of a plan but it is a stupid plan, and when the gods will tilt the table against you you can't risk that kind of thing -

When the gods tilt the table against you you need to be not just hard to maneuver into mistakes, but reliable to never ever make certain kinds of mistakes. It's what Altarrin saw in dath ilan, isn't it, the logic that lets you chart a path in a world that knows how to warp you. 

- the Emperor, if he wasn't bluffing the whole time, just might be competent to -



She takes off flying.

The Thoughtsensing amulet goes in a different Rope Trick at a lower altitude than the one Carissa is in, but she can see it from hers. She bets they can't use their search-spells across planes, but if they can, and they go after it, she can Teleport out in an instant.

Scrying takes an hour. Sometimes the scry isn't even high-quality enough to have a conversation through. Altarrin may well be dead by then. She starts the spell anyway.

And an hour later, in the Emperor's definitely-secret refuge, a voice will speak in his ear.

"- it's Caris. I'm going to use a girl voice for professional communications, if that's all right with you, I think it'll make things a little less weird. If Altarrin isn't dead already, I can save him."

That hour that was spent scrying was not, down in Jacona, wasted. Mage-Inquisitor Kastil spent most of it briefing the Emperor, going over the chain of events - newcomer appears, immediately (possibly) rushes up north near Vkandis's center of power and (definitely) has the Empire start new projects near the Empire's center of power, newcomer claims to be from a country ruled by a spectacularly powerful evil god who gives alien magical powers and maintains his own pocket dimension where the souls of all his followers are trapped, as well as to have magical powers that have nothing to do with Gifts but are totally unrelated to the ones the god gives we swear. Newcomer seduces Altarrin, talks him into devoting lots and lots of resources to increasing her magical power, then builds lots of powerful magical items that influence the minds of extremely powerful people in court, all the while winning control over many of Altarrin's top agents, who now feel loyal to her, as well as to end up with very loose Compulsions and give her a Thoughtsensing talisman. 

It is a known fact, he explains, that there exist Gifts that can bypass Compulsions while leaving them in place, altering the mind such that Compulsions cannot detect them. They are spectacularly rare and usually enter history when a god really, really wants to screw over the Empire. 

At that point, she then devised a previously unknown ability to change shape to seduce you, Your Majesty. This unknown method was invisible to all Gift senses and allowed her to do that completely successfully. You then became unusually attached, gave her absolute power over you (in bed), and at that point Altarrin no longer served her purposes and was disposed of by Vkandis and a minor conspiracy while investigating the mine.

(It is, Kastil grants, theoretically possible that Altarrin is now in his dungeons; that Vkandis and her demon-god are only loosely aligned, and Vkandis was willing to knock off one of the demon-god's pawns. This is why he was grudgingly willing on the healer's judgement to find a more experienced healer from the provinces to be brought in; that won't take long because of the Imperial Gate system, but it will still take time. But if Altarrin is in his dungeons, it is a subverted Altarrin willing to take spectacularly uncharacteristic risks for the sake of preventing the Office of Inquiry from catching up to Caris/sa, which he should not particularly be afraid of if Caris/sa is in fact innocent and he is in fact still loyal to the Empire.)

He is happy to go over all the evidence, and point out just how thoroughly it suggests that everyone is acting bizarrely out-of-character. This is not the sort of thing that happens when there's a new player on the board, this is the sort of thing that happens when someone who can mind control Altarrin has just done so, and is now trying to do this to the Emperor, and has probably succeeded. Kastil thinks that murdering Caris/sa will probably succeed (absent extreme interventions from the gods, like someone who looked exactly like Altarrin showing up just then), and that if they fail to do this, they are probably handing absolute power over the Empire to a demon-god, possibly handing absolute power over the Empire to Vkandis, and maybe just handing absolute power over the empire to a foreign adventurer. If Caris/sa escapes, then she/he can probably get life-extension magic (if Caris/sa got Altarrin, Caris/sa can get anyone) and take over some other empire and maybe even get more minions with his/her abilities and then they will be screwed. Maybe if Caris/sa hadn't tried to flee finding him/her innocent could have been a reasonable cost/benefit decision, but at this point with all the god-coincidences to preserve his/her life, the only actual chance the Empire has is if Caris/sa is just dead.

Meanwhile, the investigation has been continuing, albeit fruitlessly; anyone Carissa knows has been interrogated for potential hiding places, Kastil's agents have scried for the thoughtsensing talisman and failed to find it; this is Very Bad, since they were rather expecting to find it thrown in a ditch somewhere and this means that Caris/sa can still read thoughts, and a mundane search has taken place that has completely forgotten to check 'in a pocket dimension in midair', for some very odd reason. A mage has gotten close enough to Altarrin to try to tell what his compulsions looked like, and gotten about the correct response, and and immediately withdrawn to 24-hour quarantine while they figure out just how paranoid to be (beyond 'very').

Well! That is in fact really convincing and terrifying and probably the Emperor should put significant weight on the hypothesis that his mind is untrustworthy and he should let Kastil, who hasn't interacted with and plausibly been compromised by Caris, make the necessary decisions. But Altarrin (and this was pre-mind-controlled Altarrin, who Bastran still thinks he can trust as much as he could trust anyone) used to advise him that his thinking on any given issue would often be less than entirely trustworthy – and that this wasn't a reason not to think.

So the Emperor spends most of that hour thinking.

The findings of the investigation do, in fact, sound pretty damning! Laid out in a neat timeline like that, Caris' actions and the various reactions to him are incredibly suspicious! In hindsight, he was putting kind of a lot of weight on Altarrin trusting him. And that in itself is at least a little suspect, though Bastran doesn't actually think it's uncharacteristic of him - the main thing is that he didn't take into account that Altarrin was dead – and under suspicious circumstances that arguably were Caris' fault. Whether or not he was involved in the human side of the plot that took place in the palace, which he could definitely have been if he really has arbitrary mind-editing powers, and plausibly even if he doesn't and just learned enough at court to steer the corrupt clerk in the right direction.

Even if not, though, Altarrin arranged the spellsilver mine for him. Caris would have easily had an opportunity to steer for it being in Vkandis' territory; the theory doesn't even require that he was actively working with Vkandis, or that his evil torture god was in communication with Vkandis and he had contact via that route; he could have gotten there just by accurately modeling Vkandis. Altarrin likely wouldn't have visited the mine in person at all, if it were a normal project, and he almost certainly wouldn't have gone underground, it's obviously risky and Altarrin isn't stupid. He would have done it because he was unusually invested, both in Caris' project and also in demonstrating his commitment – he seems to have badly wanted to earn Caris' trust, which in hindsight is itself not really in character for Altarrin, he's generally quite skilled at working with people who don't trust him, it generally works fine and is much simpler to use compulsions. It's not clear why Altarrin didn't use much tighter compulsions on Caris, and in hindsight (hindsight is so much clearer!) it's very suspicious that he didn't. That he gave Caris a Thoughtsensing talisman, and that he did it unilaterally, after a "heart-to-heart" with Caris that he never revealed the contents of. Ellitrea did arrange for Ketar to mindread Caris, but - with permission, so Caris was warned, and Ketar is...not hard to manipulate.

Looking at this from the Mage-Inquisitor's perspective, looking at the cold hard facts laid out for him, it - makes a lot of sense that Kastil sees a terrifying threat, and no reasonable option except to take the threat down.

(Honestly Bastran could kind of do without the part of the investigation that involved digging into his sex life. He's is really quite sure that, while it's entirely possible he was mind-controlled into...going faster than otherwise...it's not actually obvious to him that any of his choices were all that uncharacteristic. Caris didn't really need to mind-control him, just - be himself at him. It's definitely not the case that wanting to, uh, play games where he's powerless and given orders - can he emphasize to the Mage-Inquisitor that this was a game, he could have stopped it at any moment, he kept all his talismans on - is...new. Caris is just the first person to, well, get the hint and then be brave enough to do it, which presumably does have something to do with his otherworldly powers giving him a sense of security, but doesn't actually require them to claim that Caris is mind-controlling him. This is an intensely awkward conversation to be having with the very serious top investigator of his Office of Inquiry and Bastran is not sure he's ever felt this self-conscious and uncomfortable in his life.)

His gut...isn't convinced. This is nowhere near the impression he had yesterday, and sure, there's a perfectly reasonable mind-control explanation for that, but he's still going to consider it from his own perspective, and then decide whether to throw those answers out. 

After the most recent round of events, at least, Kastil thinks the most likely explanation is that Caris is from another world. Bastran agrees with that. It's just - why would it make sense for Caris to devise an entire complicated false backstory, and then carefully stick to it? If Caris is trying to cover up miraculous Velgarth-godpowers, he could just as easily have claimed to have invented an entirely new way of manipulating magic, or to have learned it at a secret school that had been passing down the tradition; his magic works here in Velgarth just fine and should even be teachable to others, and that would have been no less plausible, and simpler. And he was mindread about it, and sure, you could posit that he can spoof Thoughtsensing or alter memories just as easily as he can change bodies - Kastil is positing that - but even so, surely that costs something, so why bother when it doesn't even decrease the suspicion? 

(Also, if the Velgarth gods could do this, why not centuries ago? It doesn't at all fit with their known capabilities.)

No. Caris is from another world, however bizarre a premise that is.

It's a good point, that Caris admitted himself to hail from a country under the rule of a torture god, and to have only recently renounced that god. It's also a good point that neither Altarrin nor the Emperor...reacted to that with nearly as much concern as, in hindsight, seems clearly warranted. And Caris admitted that the gods of his world could grant powers, ones that they think weren't even that dissimilar from wizardry.

...The thing is, though, he - didn't need to say that? If he can control minds on the level of controlling someone's direct sensory impressions or changing their memories, neither of which compulsions can do, then - why leave so many grounds for suspicion just lying around? Why arrange Altarrin's death without first making sure that everyone who might suspect him was taken care of? It feels like Kastil is positing both that Caris has, honestly, an absurd level of power - including the power to mind-control people Thoughtsensing him from a distance - and also made an incredibly obvious, blatant mistake. Altarrin has access to the Mage-Inquisitor. Kastil is now taking precautions to have his subordinates take over if he changes his mind in a way suspicious for mind-control, but if he hadn't been expecting that in particular... (Today's whole scenario could have been deliberately orchestrated. But, again, why? What goal would it achieve?)

- whatever Caris is working toward and whoever he's working for, it really looks like Caris made a mistake. It's a much more plausible mistake if Caris can't arbitrarily mind-control people, and was exactly as disoriented and lacking context as he appeared to the Thoughtsensers who read him.

Kastil, faced with the evidence he has in the order he receives it, thinks Caris is probably an enemy to the Empire, and that the most likely version of that is that he serves Asmodeus.

Altarrin didn't think so. And the thing is, if Caris made a mistake on this level, that implies that his mind-control abilities, if they exist at all and were successfully being concealed - which the Emperor cannot in fact rule out, on further introspection it is suspicious just how quickly he fell for Caris - are probably limited. 

(Bastran is not, currently, thinking of Caris as a lover. This is absolutely not a situation where he should or can afford to be thinking with his dick – and he suspects Caris would judge him for it. Those feelings are boxed away; right now, he's reasoning about Caris as an otherwordly stranger with unknown capabilities, who convinced Altarrin to take his side.)

Maybe Caris was able to nudge Altarrin's impression of him, come across as more harmless and more - aligned with the Archmage-General's goals - then he really was, but Altarrin is very paranoid. If it were just that, would he really have committed so deeply just on the basis of a vague positive impression? It feels off. It feels very off that, on that basis, he would have flung himself through a Gate into a room where he would almost certainly die, just to buy Caris a few seconds of warning.

Kastil, of course, thinks this is further evidence for the mind-control hypothesis, and on the face of it, it does seem very very out of character. But is it? Or is there an explanation, a possible set of circumstances, for why the Altarrin he knew would sacrifice himself to get Caris out. 

Bastran has always known that Altarrin would give his life for the Empire, if that was the trade he was offered. Not everyone would, but Altarrin is someone who would do it of his own will, even if his compulsions weren't forcing the matter. 

Would he give his life, not just to protect the Empire from an existential threat, but to hold onto a valuable resource? ...Actually, yes, if it were valuable enough. If they're really in the world where Caris is mostly aligned with Altarrin's goals, and is their only hope for truly making headway against the gods.

But really the thing I'd do is a life after death, Caris had said to him. I hate it, that there isn't one. It feels like it's lurking over my shoulder, every day, every waking hour, that this is it, and it's so fragile... I'd figure it out.

It's not an incredibly convincing argument, certainly not one that will convince Kastil, to claim that Caris saying that is particularly strong evidence of Caris meaning it, even if Bastran is setting aside the strong mind-control theory and assuming weak mind control at best. Altarrin's people, when questioned, admitted that Caris was a very good actor, and skilled at controlling his thoughts while being read, and of course Kastil believes that Caris could have just made people see what he wanted them to see.

But to the Emperor's gut, it feels like it means something.

Kastil is the most skilled investigator in the Empire, and has clearly put in his full effort, and this is the conclusion he came to. It's - evidence. The Emperor is not ignoring that. But he's still going to weigh it against his own impressions and alternate theories. 

Kastil is one of the best in the Empire at, well, being unshakably and relentlessly paranoid in the way you need to catch and block plots by the gods. Altarrin respected him for it. And Bastran leans on it, because he's always known that the paranoia required to rule here doesn't come as natively to him; Altarrin counseled him on that repeatedly.

But Altarrin also warned him of a different possible failure. When someone pushes paranoia as hard as possible, focuses entirely on preventing threats, then sometimes they look at true random events and see plots. Sometimes the gods might use that. It's a useful tool, if they can nudge the protectors of the Empire's gameboard into destroying some of its most valuable pieces themselves. Altarrin told him never to forget what he's protecting: the people of his Empire. His role isn't just to flout the gods, though often he'll need to, and often the measures required will be ruthless and costly and he has to be willing to bear that cost. But - the Emperor's true responsibility is holding together, day after day and year after year, the one place in the world where people can work together, invent and trade and build and study, feed their children and teach them to read.

Altarrin said it would be doing the gods' work for them, to compromise too much of that for the sake of being more definitely certain of averting threats. It's...like burning farms to deny an enemy army food, sometimes justified but something is lost.

The Emperor is not entirely sure he understands all of the...philosophy, that's really what it is...that Altarrin taught him. Certainly it's a nearly impossible balancing act, and– well, they do make compromises. The Healer in Isk who blew up a mine to save her brother from his sentence (Bastran looked up his crime; it was drunkenly participating in a brawl that accidentally killed two people; his sentence was five years) certainly didn't feel that the Imperial mandate was doing her local community any good.

Caris may not be what he seems to be. The Emperor is genuinely deeply unsure. The story where Caris serves Asmodeus and got Altarrin killed and was in the process of suborning the Emperor in order to carry out some horrible plan unopposed, holds together almost as well as the story he believed yesterday. Kastil isn't wrong that it would be the biggest threat the Empire has ever faced, worth burning a vast quantity of metaphorical crops to avert.

Of course, in this case it's not crops, or any tangible or intangible resource the Empire already possessed. The resource they would be giving up, by going with Kastil's suggestion and throwing everything at murdering Caris, is - their only chance at the better, wealthier, safer future that might be in reach if Altarrin was right. 

Caris said he had decided to overthrow Asmodeus before he unexpectedly landed in another world, and seems to have made a convincing case to Altarrin. Which is a convenient change of heart for him to be claiming, of course, but - not implausible? Worshipping a god who will torture you after you die just sounds incredibly unappealing, if you think you have other options - it seems like a pattern that could only hold in Cheliax because Asmodeus was very powerful and very much in control of their lives and their information sources, and had ensured they didn't have other options. If anything, it feels more implausible that Caris would continue to serve Asmodeus, and presumably expect to be tortured after his death, once he had escaped his god's yoke. 

Kastil's argument, of course, was that Caris had actually received his magic from Asmodeus, which would definitely imply some loyalty even in another world, but - well, for one, that relies on assuming that Asmodeus can reach them here, which seems not at all obvious, and - honestly, like something someone should have noticed before now. And Altarrin didn't seem to think so - that in itself could be mind-control - but Altarrin also didn't prioritize a way to reach Caris' world. He wouldn't even have needed much convincing, and surely the Caris who works for Asmodeus would have wanted access to more of Asmodeus' worshippers and their impossible powers.

Again, if Caris was hiding this, why tell them the gods could grant reliable magical abilities like that at all? It's just...leaving around suspicious clues, in a way that seems like an obvious mistake. Two, why say it could be taught??? Caris could have just...not given them that easily testable claim. It would have made him appear more indispensable, even.

Anyway. If Caris meant what he said, both about Asmodeus and about his desire to help them fight their world's gods and fix the world and give dead souls a place to go (what an ambition!), then– then Kastil is doing the gods' work for them, right now. And...that's a story that also holds together kind of upsettingly well?

One could argue that, even leaving aside mind control, Altarrin and Bastran learned things about Carissa is a suspiciously convenient order. But Kastil encountered information in almost the worst possible order.

- and was in Isk, in a region they had already just observed was within Vkandis' reach. And Kastil wouldn't even need very much nudging; he has firm expectations that anything weird is a dangerous god-plot against the Empire. He might be right, he's been right a lot of times before...

But - (and it's so hard to think about, Altarrin would tell him to put numbers on it but how do you put numbers on something so out of context) - but there's a tradeoff there, and the tradeoff is that they can avert a threat that may or may not exist, potentially at the cost of burning down their first and probably only change to really actually fix things. It's not enough, to only avoid ever losing a battle. It's important, no doubt of that, and it's why they have an Office of Inquisition - they're much more aimed at not losing in games against the gods than at decisively winning them.

The Emperor's mandate is broader than that, and - sometimes you have to gamble to win. Usually you don't have to gamble your entire Empire, but.

- of course, even if he does decide to trust his own gut feeling and theories over Kastil's, maybe it's moot. It doesn't sound like they've made progress on tracking Caris. He might be a thousand miles away, by now; it would be the smart thing to do, and probably what Altarrin would want him to do. He might just...not have another chance to seize the opportunity for working together, regardless of whether that would in theory be the right gamble to make. He's upset about that. It feels like such a waste. It feels like Altarrin could have done better...

(He is genuinely not having any feelings about the fact that he may have lost his lover, who was really hot and who he was, indeed, already attached to. It's not relevant to this decision. ...He is at least not having any feelings about it where he's consciously aware of them.) 

He doesn't actually have an answer, yet, but - it's got to be evidence of some kind, right, what move Caris decides to make next.

- what? That is - not supposed to be possible - though he's oddly not surprised, that Caris is pulling out another impossible ability, and then a second new impossible ability implied by the fact that he thinks he can save Altarrin.

(Altarrin is alive. Barely. The Healers are trying very hard but he's deteriorated significantly. He's not imminently dying unless they get very unlucky, but only because a very stubborn Healer can keep a patient's heart beating for a pretty long time even at the point when they are definitely doomed. It's just not normally something you would waste effort on. ...And Bastran is very aware that, when one is considering the hypothesis that there is a god-plot at work here and it's working via Kastil with the goal of taking Caris and Altarrin down, it would be much less surprising than usual if they run into the worst luck.)

Using a girl does NOT REALLY MAKE IT LESS WEIRD It - does help with the compartmentalization. Box, feelings, stay over there.

Also, urgent communication-spell to his lead guard! <Some kind of spell-contact from Caris. See if you can track it. ...Do not disrupt it, don't let Kastil disrupt it, that is an Imperial order. ...You can Thoughtsense me if you want to watch for mind control but do not intervene>

And he clears his throat. "...Uh, can you hear me? He's alive. He's - not going to make it - but I think he can hang on for a little longer. What are you intending to do."

"I'm hoping we can negotiate an arrangement that lets me save him without the gods using your empire to kill me. - I can explain the evidence-from-your-perspective that they're trying to do that, but if you won't trust it coming from me then I'll save my breath."

(It's pretty easy once they're looking to find the unfamiliar scrying-sensor floating above the Emperor's head.)

Great! Where does it...go. Do any of the techniques for tracking communication-spells work. 

"I already had that as a theory, actually, the thing I could use is your arguments for why it's more likely, given the evidence we have, than the theory that you work for Asmodeus and are mind-controlling Altarrin and myself. - Though if you're willing to surrender somewhere neutral and accept some compulsions, we can bring you to Altarrin first and I give you my word that you won't be harmed and will hear you out once he's stable. I just, I don't really want to wait..." 

"Whether you can make promises is one of the things in question, on two levels: firstly whether your word actually binds you, even if a sudden flurry of subsequent events causes you to be convinced I betrayed mine and that the whole Empire is at stake or whatever, and secondly whether you have enough control over the actions of factions in your empire that your word would be sufficient if you kept it.

But regardless, no. Something would go tragically unluckily wrong and I would die in your custody. Altarrin thought it was worth dying to prevent that, and I'm not going to go reverse his judgment; I think he was right. I'm willing to at some point in the future negotiate my surrender; it's not what I'm negotiating right now. 

If I worked for Asmodeus -" something changes in her tone, though only slightly. "If I worked for Asmodeus and had managed to subvert Altarrin I'd have fled the Empire with him the first night, to conquer some smaller countries that are much easier to work in than the Empire if you don't have to worry about the opposition of the gods. I'd come back to maybe seduce you and seize the Empire only once Asmodeus had a solid foothold and an established Church elsewhere; He wouldn't have me bet His access to this planet on my ability to play court politics in a foreign country, and I wouldn't need to. The reason I need to work in the Empire is because the gods are trying to kill me. The reason I haven't fled to the other continent already is that - 

- I'm hard to kill. I'm very hard to kill. By all rights, I would be able to do my work there uninterrupted. But I've read the Empire's histories. A lot of people who should have been very hard to kill die when the gods decide they're too dangerous. If the gods were on my side I would not still be hanging around trying to salvage things here. If the gods were merely indifferent to me I would not still be hanging around trying to salvage things here. But they're trying to kill me, and I give them about a forty percent chance of succeeding if I don't have Altarrin and they do have the Empire trying to help them do it."

Mage-Inquisitor Kastil is not going to interrupt this conversation. He is absolutely going to have his mages try to track Caris/sa so they can murder him/her if they get the chance. (He is not looped in on the details of this conversation, and indeed thinks that he should not be looped in on the details of this conversation; if someone who unfortunately has to be wants to summarize it to him, that is acceptable.)

They're trying to trace the scry!! It, uh, does have another end, though it looks like it might be on....another plane?

Sigh. 

"In...that scenario...I understand your concerns. And I - appreciate it, that you're willing to consider a future surrender; I think that's a step that we need, to navigate out of this. And you're right that I don't trust you, right now. I am putting more than fifty-fifty odds that you're telling the truth, but you want to be a lot more sure of that when the downside risk is letting Asmodeus puppet your Empire, right? There's evidence that would make me lean more in that direction, probably even if it's not true but our gods are trying to get you killed. - I would under ordinary circumstances be pretty sure I can keep you safe. At the very least, I can arrange it so anyone you could plausibly come into contact with is under a top-ranked compulsion to obey my direct orders. You've got a point that if the gods are trying hard enough, they could arrange for the building to accidentally catch fire while you're under compulsions not to leave.

"I need a plan that - doesn't make our situation drastically worse if we're in the bad scenario. Do you have a better idea." 

....Wow. 

Altarrin could figure that out, probably? In, uh, a few days, and also there is sort of a problem with that plan. 

(Bastran has already discreetly passed an order that the Healers should try even more heroically to keep their patient alive as long as possible, however futile it seems. There...might be a plan.) 

" - okay, if I worked for actual Asmodeus then no, there's no plan that doesn't make your situation worse, you already lost, but Asmodeus isn't pinned down for you the way He's pinned down for me, anything I say about what Asmodeus is capable of and why it means you lose is new and therefore useless.

If I worked for - a hostile entity in the range of capabilities consistent with what you know about Asmodeus, discarding all the worlds where you already lost, then - you need to start training your own wizards, so you can start developing wards against my magic, etcetera. I can trade you introductory wizardry for Altarrin but one, that looks extremely messy to the gods and they're going to be steering hard against a deal like that going through, and two I'm not sure you can verify it in time. I was actually thinking about leveraging how messy introducing wizardry looks to the gods in the opposite direction, have it as a plan if they let Altarrin die so it looks less messy to them to let us work this out. 

There may be ways to let me heal Altarrin that don't meaningfully improve my position at all - that is, they don't let me keep him - and make me expend some resources and show off some capabilities, and I'm open to doing one of those. For example, if you can verify that my compulsion set won't let me remove his, you can give him to me compulsioned and I can't make him useful. Or if you want to give him some kind of fast-acting poison I don't have the antidote for, then I'll have to heal him and give him back if I want him to live. Or if you have a way to block his Gifts.

The problem is that I think Altarrin probably prefers being dead to being picked apart sufficiently meticulously by your inquisition, because he has some plans to fight the gods which are and should remain tightly held state secrets and the more people who learn them, the worse. I'll agree to give him back on your word that either no one interrogates him beyond confirming his identity or that everyone who learns the contents of his mind gives you an answer about his loyalty from a pre-selected set and is then put to death on the spot."

The Emperor is following along - right, that matches what he was thinking, that in the worst-case worlds that Kastil is most afraid of, it doesn't actually matter what they do from here, they've lost. 

- Kastil is going to hate those plans, he won't trust that Caris can't spoof anyone reading his compulsions, or mind-control them into thinking they saw what they were supposed to. Kastil is going to hate any plan that saves Altarrin, and - it's not just Altarrin, really, it's the possibility of cooperation (and learning wizardry), not to mention retaining some degree of control. There are plenty of not-worst-case-but-still-bad scenarios – Caris is a Velgarth native with a Wild Gift, Caris is loyal to Asmodeus but he can't reach her here and her magic is her own, Caris is from another world and loyal to no one and will totally take over the Empire if given an opening – where having Caris working within the Empire seems...better than not. 

- and then he freezes. 

"...I'm sure you realize that you're giving me some serious doubts about Altarrin's loyalty to the Empire." Words he absolutely never thought he would say, but, well, a lot of unexpected unprecedented things are happening right now. "I'm not comfortable negotiating an agreement where he tells no one, since it might be relevant to what the gods are going to try to do to my Empire. ...I am willing to negotiate an agreement where he tells me, and I'm under a compulsion not to tell anyone else. He can place the compulsion himself. I think he trusts me that far - I guess you have less information on that, I'm not sure what he told you..."