(Altarrin is much, much worse than he was when they captured him! The infection is raging in his blood and various organs are trying to shut down in protest, which is making it very hard to coax his body to clear the supposedly-nonlethal poisons and they're sitting around causing various new and exciting kinds of damage. Also his blood isn't clotting right and various spots of internal bleeding they had previously had under control are not super under control any more. His heart is valiantly trying to keep some blood moving, and they can help that out with constant application of kind of a lot of Healing-energy - even with two of them they probably cannot keep this up for more than another candlemark - but he's stopped breathing on his own a couple of times. They can poke his body into remembering to do that. It'll probably keep working for a while longer.) 

He's terrified. 

He waits for Caris to contact him, and desperately hopes that Caris hasn't done what would honestly be the reasonable thing, the thing Altarrin would want in the scenario where he's telling the truth, and fled rather than try to salvage this. 

Carissa has certainly contemplated it. But -

- maybe ten, fifteen percent chance she miscalculated and they'll be able and willing to kill her while she attempts this - the obvious way would be forcing Altarrin to Final Strike right when she heals him. And if that doesn't happen, and he's alive, then she thinks her best-guess forty percent chance of dying from trying to do this on her own with the gods conspiring to make sure the Empire's assassins learn her location until Altarrin's next life finds her is at least halved.

She spends the time preparing spells. Like a lot of people she leaves many of her slots open in the morning; you never know what you'll need. Though the spells she's actually using here are very standard, simple ones. The point isn't to throw around a lot of power; it's to do things that as far as she can tell the local magic systems can't do. 

When it's been most of a candlemark, she's ready.  She dismisses the Rope Trick she's been sitting in. Goes down to the other Rope Trick that has the Thoughtsensing talisman in it. She ties it and glues it to the base of the Rope Trick's rope. Very firmly. It falling would be a very stupid way for this to fail and so the kind of thing the gods would try.

Prepares a Sending. "Thirty seconds. I want a horizontal gate under Altarrin, also horizontal on Gate target: Altarrin’s Thoughtsensing talisman he gave me. Gate to the talisman. Now."

Fly, as she jumps out of the Rope Trick. She needs to get clear of the Gate location in case they Final Strike it.

Invisibility, while already flying, so for a second people on the ground below might see a flash of something in the air. They're going to see more in a bit. Unless the Emperor changed his mind. 

She's going for five hundred feet above the ground. That's a forty story building; the Empire doesn't (as far as she's seen) have those. It's also seven hundred feet below the talisman and she has Resist Fire up so she thinks - if they betray her in any way other than sending Altarrin forced to kill himself -

(Kastil would probably have pushed for that. Bastran...did, actually, consider it briefly, but it would be a tiny window, and he doesn't know how quickly Altarrin will be conscious enough for even a a forced Final Strike - it doesn't require complex thought but there's an act of will. And it would be absurdly stupid to end up making just-Healed Altarrin kill himself when Caris was already out of range.

Besides, he's chosen his gamble and he's making it.) 

Communication-spell. Direct, because it may be a tiny additional risk but he doesn't have time for delays. Relay instructions, starting with <countdown started> to let them know to get the mage into the room now. 

Someone else drops the mage in by Gate. 

The mage is, fortunately, well prepared for this, having seen the full schematics for it and had a Thoughtsenser pull him into mind-rapport with several other mages who had incidentally interacted with Carissa but not substantively. If the plan had been a different one they might have had more trouble. 

Tiny threshold just to anchor and then search first, that's the hard part here - most mages can't resize the threshold after but he can and it'll make it slightly faster.

...They obviously have someone else scrying the talisman. Not from Altarrin's prison cell now hastily set up as an infirmary, from a different secure location, and he probably won't get it before the Gate and almost certainly not fast enough to Gate someone else in, which Bastran has ordered them not to attempt anyway. But it would be interesting to see Caris' plan in action.

The Healer is still holding Altarrin's hand, up until the last second. They've been pushing really hard and his vital signs are slightly stabilized, though his extremities are mottled and cold.) 

- twelve seconds. He would be faster if he had seen the talisman himself but it's within the time limit. The search lands. 

Focus, focus, and - 

- snap up the small horizontal threshold and then embiggen it to cover the surface of Altarrin's bed and wait a beat - he's through - and down– 

(Long enough to get a glimpse of open and and the ground a very, very long way down. Which is - what - uh, wow. There is presumably some kind of plan for how this doesn't kill Altarrin but the Healer is having some slight regrets.) 

That's a falling body! Carissa is kind of far away but it's probably Altarrin. He's completely limp, not struggling at all as he falls. 

Several excruciating seconds pass while hopefully-Altarrin falls out of the sky. 

Then - 

Feather Fall, which is nearly instantaneous. Infernal Healing and then away from him as fast as possible as it starts to kick in, also away from the Gate location, up up up to within range to dismiss her Rope Trick (she does not want them getting a look at it) and Teleport to safety. Well. To the place where Altarrin left her a large supply of spellsilver. She's not counting on it being safety. 

Altarrin will settle more or less gently on the ground, healed, forty seconds after she's gone, unless the Emperor intervenes on that. The falling Thoughtsensing medallion will beat him to it. 

They get scrying up, anchored on the talisman, twenty-five seconds in, which is not enough to see very much. Altarrin is in midair but appears to not be falling very fast? They can't see any sign of Caris, but probably he can be invisible. 

They do not try to Gate anyone in for a Final Strike. It's really unclear where they could aim and not risk hitting Altarrin. They do not have a reliable way to nab him out of the air on this little notice and planning. 

Altarrin blearily wakes up ten seconds into the Feather Fall. 

...He has no idea where he is or what's happening, but his entire body aches and he kind of feels like he's dying. 

orient -

Mage-sight does not work. 

- he can't move - he can't actually confirm that he's under an enormous stack of compulsions, because he can't use magic and because he has never, actually, been subject to nearly this level of them, this is much stronger than what they use even on most prisoners, but it's got to be that - 

Also he feels like he's - floating? 

It takes him another ten seconds - after which, to his vague surprise, he feels somewhat less like he's dying - before he thinks to try opening his eyes, which whoever laid the compulsions has apparently deigned to allow him. 

- he's totally floating! In midair, not falling so much as sinking slowly. The ground is all the way down there! 

Altarrin is unable to do anything whatsoever about this and is still not incredibly with it. He spends the remainder of the Feather Fall in a state of complete panic. 

They do get people on the ground within thirty seconds of the Gate, plenty of time for them to run to where it looks like Altarrin is going to land - coordinating quickly, ready to fling up force-nets at various heights if whatever spell that is fails - and they're trying to examine it with mage-sight as quickly as possible, what is that - 

The spell doesn't fail. Altarrin falls gently into several sets of arms and a cushioning force-net. They're not exactly interested in sticking around when Caris might be floating around invisibly. The Gate will go right back up and Altarrin will go right back to his cell and his bed. 

How is he? 

For one: he's passive and unresisting. Which must be the compulsions, because he's pretty clearly awake and terrified. He doesn't seem very oriented to his surroundings. 

In terms of physical condition: anything that could reasonably have been called an injury seems to be gone, or just about gone, like he's done weeks of healing over the course of seconds. There's no remaining sign of internal bleeding, and the various broken bones are healed to the extent that they probably don't need to be immobilized at this point, though it's possible to tell by looking closely that they were broken. He has some interesting scars on his arms but the sloughing, oozing dead tissue is completely healed. He's no longer suffering from blood loss. The backlash is gone. 

He's still pretty dehydrated - he was losing bodily fluids fast from the burns - and he's still poisoned several different ways at once, and he still has a pretty extensive infection in his blood, the healing doesn't seem to have touched that. But it's done pretty well on the various accumulated organ damage, and it looks like his native immune system should be functioning normally now... 

In short, he's going to be fine. Not immediately, he's going to have a miserable night, but he would likely make a full recovery with rest and fluids even without the Healing attention. 

...also he's still clearly panicking, his heart racing, and he's trying to vomit now and the compulsions are not letting him even try to roll over. 

Apparently he's supposed to be able to follow instructions but it's not clear he's tracking his surroundings at all. They'll deal with it, and try to slow his heart rate because that cannot really be good for him, and repeatedly tell him to calm down. They would say that he's safe but he's a still a prisoner and honestly they have no idea what the plan is supposed to be from here. 

They'll pass on a report to Bastran. 

...It worked. He was really mostly not expecting it to work! He's almost dizzy with sheer relief, and - what next, where do they go from here - no he can't think about that yet. 

He wants the Gate site scried from a distance for any magical traces and if there's nothing in the next thirty minutes he wants pastwatchers sent out. These are the precautions for supervising Altarrin. They need someone to re-check his compulsions, properly, and - honestly maybe they should just redo them, they can do one at a time to avoid him ever being able to do very much.

He wants a Thoughtsenser to read him. He wants to check just in case Caris somehow had the ability to swap Altarrin with an imposter at this late point, and also it's really hard to gauge Altarrin's information state right now and that might be important. The Thoughtsenser will work from another room, with a lot of compulsions in place and under guard, and they'll need to quarantine afterward too. (Until and unless he actually hears from Caris again and they negotiate a surrender and the surrender happens, he is going to continue with as many of Kastil's precautions as he can manage.) 

If Altarrin is lucid enough for it - the Thoughtsenser can confirm that - he wants someone to explain to him the basics of what just happened. He'll - write up a letter to be relayed. It's - not the same as going himself, and really that's the least he owes Altarrin, but...he can't. 

They should read him during it to get his reactions.

Altarrin's incredibly thorough and incapacitating compulsions are exactly as they were left. (They snipped his compulsions for loyalty to Empire and Emperor after checking that they were in place - it's standard protocol, people can get a lot of motivational weight wrapped around their loyalty compulsions and if they're very good at this, they can sometimes pit that against their imprisonment compulsions and get them to bend a little.) They'll redo them all anyway. 

Altarrin can tell this is happening. He can't do anything about it, and probably wouldn't try anyway, he's still not entirely sure how he got here but it doesn't seem like resisting will either work or be likely to go well. 

Once he is as securely compulsioned as they can be sure of given the involvement of mysterious magic of unknown scope, they'll send in a Thoughtsenser. Not Ketar or Ellitrea who might be mind-controlled. Someone unimportant, yoinked from a minor border placement, who can be imprisoned afterward. He's not incredibly enthused about this but he's not fighting his compulsions about it. 

Altarrin is incredibly disoriented and has not gotten as far as forming a specific hypothesis of where he is, though he's under the general impression that he's probably in the Eastern Empire as opposed to some other country somehow. He did consider if he was in Iftel but he's pretty sure they're speaking the Imperial tongue and they don't look Ifteli and also why would Vkandis keep him alive. 

He's having a very hard time stringing together thoughts, between the number of compulsions that affect planning and volition directly and the fact that he's running a high fever and his head aches and he's intensely nauseated. 

He's really, really scared. He's - somewhat more in control of it, now. The Healers are interrupting the physical correlates of panic and that helps break the loop somewhat, and he's managed to drag together enough of a thread of thought to remember that being terrified is not actually going to do him any good here. 

He's so confused. It's taking him a while to reason through the pieces, but - his last clear memory is of being in a records-cache, alone and badly injured, after an obvious godassassination attempt. An inside plot, at least partially - he remembers not being sure the Empire was safe for him - 

Carissa. 

He's mostly trying not to think about her because presumably his mind is being read (this thought is not even explicit, it's on the level of habit) and also thinking is really hard. But - she didn't flee, at least not like they'd discussed. 

- and then the most recent thing he remembers is waking up abruptly, and feeling awful and then slightly better, and also while in midair. That's absolutely Carissa. ...He has no idea why or how Carissa would have collected him from the cave and healed him and dumped him in midair but that's his top theory right now. 

There's nothing he can do about it now. He'll...try to rest. 

This is summarized through two stages of clerks and reported to the Emperor. 

The Emperor hates everything. 

He wants to order them to release a couple of the volition-affecting compulsions, he still won't be able to escape but he might be less miserable and terrified about it. ...He might only care about that because of mind-control. At the very least, people are going to wonder, and if he's going to juggle this nightmare and de-escalate then he needs his people not to be doubting his judgement. 

He's staring at a piece of paper with multiple scratched-out lines on it, trying to draft an explanation for Altarrin that might help him feel slightly more oriented and less scared without giving too much away, but - it's really hard to judge that, actually. ...Also what if he's being mind-controlled into caring whether Altarrin is oriented and not scared. 

He doesn't draft an explanation. It sounds like it's unclear whether Altarrin is really lucid enough for it anyway. 

And on the other end of Caris' Teleport - 

It's a cave! It's cold and musty and completely unlit. 

Carissa can't stay in the cave very long - they'll get the location out of Altarrin - but she is taking the risk of coming here first because she's way too easy to kill for this kind of thing and she's hoping Altarrin's supplies can help change that. She's shaking violently, which is embarrassing, sure she's not an adventurer but Cheliax shouldn't produce any wizards who get freaked out just by a trivial scoop-a-person-who-might-explode-out-of-midair-heal-him-and-flee mission.

She's also pretty sure that the compulsions are in fact affecting her thoughts, though in a way that gets worse when she looks directly at it so she's trying not to do too much of it. Because the thing is that the wise thing to do at this point is to leave, to run away, to make it a fact visible in her prophecy-footprint that she's not going to make any trouble for a hundred years (and that if she dies a bunch of deadman's wizardry notes will be unleashed on the world) -

- and she can't, as kind of a bare fact, run away from the Empire like that. She's doing this for the Empire. She's just trying to make sure she doesn't get killed when she turns herself in because the Empire needs her alive. 

She resents that but, again, gets worse the more attention you pay it, better to just not at least not while you're still in the middle of an emergency.

What's in this cave of Altarrin's.

If she provides a light, the cave contains: 

- A pallet laden with ten-pound ingots of spellsilver, packaged for bulk transport in oil in durable sealed oilcloth pouches in straw in little crates. There are actually twelve of them, so 120 pounds. 

- A sturdy, rather ancient-looking unmarked chest with a magical lock on it and a lot of spells woven into the material. It would be very hard to figure out with Velgarth magic but Dispel Magic ought to open it just fine. 

- A crate with a label and complete inventory list of the magical artifacts it contains. It's written in an obscure dead language that hasn't been spoken or written since shortly after the Cataclysm, but Comprehend Languages won't care, which of course Altarrin knew. 

- Resting on the spellsilver in a spot she couldn't possibly miss, a small, very very thoroughly magically reinforced satchel. Unlike the chest, this one looks new. She'll need a Dispel Magic to get into this one too, but it's labeled in the Imperial tongue and, at this point, she might even recognize the letters for 'CARISSA' without a Comprehend Languages up. 

- A very generous stash of non-magical (or slightly magical) emergency supplies. Bedroll, extra blankets. Warm clothing in roughly her size. Nonperishable food. Sealed containers of water, and some wine. Tent with durability shields and a built-in weather-barrier, though without a Velgarth mage to power it it'll only last two days. 

She's such a fucking idiot for not fleeing the instant he died. He didn't quite say to do that. He probably couldn't. Compulsions to the Empire. 

...inconveniently she's running very dearly low on spells today (she would still have some third circle slots except she's been using them for extra Rope Tricks) and can't afford the risk of staying here overnight. They'll have the location out of Altarrin by then, if they're prioritizing it. (They shouldn't have it yet, he hasn't hit the ground yet.) She Alters Self as small as the spell lets her (adolescent halfling) and starts looking for a way out of the cave. 

It's going to take her a while, but eventually she can follow a faint breeze, and wriggle her way down a crevice and then another one, and eventually there's a tiny crescent of blue sky peeking above a large rock in the way that looks much too heavy to shift aside but, when poked, turns out to be - maybe hollow inside, or something? In any case, she can lift it just fine. 

Moving her supplies out through the crevice is going to be really annoying, if she wants to do that.

...how long would it take a moderately competent wondrous-item crafter to make one of those blankets and some of that spellsilver into an emergency Bag of Holding. 

Two and a half days.