Yeah, that should wait on learning whether she's going to surrender to the Empire or not. 

(She wants to serve the Empire. As long as it's safe. Altarrin knows what the Empire is about. Altarrin told her to flee it, temporarily, so they could save it. It's for the Empire.)

Time to sit down and go through that conversation – mentally, because he does not want any notes on it floating around, though he'll write down Caris' suggestion for conditions – and question everything he was thinking! 

At the start, Caris offers him the opportunity to speak through an intermediary. He declines. He - doesn't think declining was the wrong decision, and in particular he got some key information out of it. 

(- if it's true - he meant to ask for a way to verify it that doesn't run through 'sending someone to question Altarrin, who might instead get mind-controlled into saying whatever Caris wants them to', though...he's honestly not putting very much weight on the strong version of the contagious mind control theory, and if it is true then he's not sure that even failing to prevent the Office of Inquiry from staging a coup is enough to save them -) 

Fine, so he doesn't regret it, but did he make the decision for sensible reasons? What did he say...that it seemed worth considering for future conversations, if this was going to take a while to arrange, but it wasn't his top priority. Because - well, his main argument here is that ten marginal minutes of conversation with Caris, while he's maximally on guard, seems like it should be a small effect next to, well, all the sex.

(Not thinking about the sex. Feelings, box, go. He mentally replays Caris' girl voice, to try to prod his hindbrain into either treating "Carissa" like a different person who isn't his lover, or at least tuning down any feeling of attraction.)

This argument is, of course, assuming that any of his priors about how magic normally works apply here. Kastil made that point and it's...not a terrible one. Implies that interrogating Altarrin is a priority, they can't be entirely sure of anything he tells them but it's got to be evidence. 

Gratitudes are exchanged, he doesn't think you need mind control to explain that, saying "thank you" is free and he did owe Caris at least that, he had already decided on it before the conversation, that much should be in his preparatory notes, it could of course be due to earlier mind-control but it's not (much) evidence on whether the additional ten minutes of speaking was dangerous. 

He explains where they're at with Altarrin's interrogation. He - was pretty open with it - but he definitely had planned on that in advance, because it's their half of the trade, Caris was going to save Altarrin and give him back rather than stealing him away to hide, and in exchange the Empire wasn't going to make him regret it. He thinks they need that, to go any further, and - 

- and he still thinks that's the right choice, because he would give it - hmm - three in four odds, maybe, that this is still salvageable and that trying to salvage it won't destroy the Empire. And he's certain Kastil had contingencies, so - if it goes badly, maybe they just lose but some of that is in worlds where they've as good as lost already, and in some edge-case scenarios, it means, maybe, that the Office of Inquiry has more to work with... 

Caris tells him the secret. He prods a bit - he doesn't think any of his questions were stupid - Caris was very cagey but that's understandable, he wasn't expecting to even get this much. He'd hoped the 'how long' question - which Caris claimed not to know but he's very sure that was a misleading not-technically-like and Caris does at least have some bounds on it - might get at ways to check this against the historical record rather than with Altarrin himself. ...Can he just do that, it was implied that Altarrin has 'come back' to the Empire at least once, which begs the question of who he was last time and that...seems like something that someone who knows him well ought to be able to guess at... 

Advice on what angles are safer to poke: gods in general, framing the question as 'what convinced you to trust Caris' rather than 'what did you talk about on that first night', it sounds like it should be safe to ask what he knows about Golarion, and magic - in general they would want to give him leeway to answer a question with what he thinks is most relevant and not hazardous to spread. 

Or he could ask the lead Mage-Inquisitor to find an interrogator willing to make a redacted report and be executed afterward. He doesn't like it - and it sort of requires not having a Thoughtsenser on hand, they don't have enough Thoughtsensers to start executing them for convenience - but it seems like it might help give a better sense of the constraints, to give alternatives. 

(Assuming the Velgarth gods can't get information from dead souls, if they know to look? Caris didn't seem worried about that, though, and honestly reasoning about gods makes his head hurt.) 

Caris gave some basically reasonable conditions. They're approximately the same as the proposal the Emperor had already written down – location known only to him, guards loyal only to him, contingencies for if he is himself incapacitated (though he'll need to figure out how to differentiate the case of "assassination by gods" and "assassination by the Office of Inquiry after confirming mind control.") If anything, he was inclined to be more generous and allow Caris some purely defensive magic – not the ability to cast spells, but maybe a Velgarth shield-talisman, which a mage can disable on Altarrin's orders but would offer some protection against a random god-driven earthquake. 

Caris wants to run some things by Altarrin. He agreed to allow that. Loosening Altarrin's compulsions to let him speak freely shouldn't be a stretch, you want that for a useful non-Thoughtsensing interrogation anyway, it's way too easy for someone like Altarrin to play the compulsion limiting speech off against the one that's supposed to compel him to answer to his full knowledge. That's probably at least some of why he was so intensely frustrating yesterday. (His confusion probably wasn't directly mind-control, given that he's better today, and confusion due to a high fever and being poisoned predicts recovery overnight more than confusion due to Caris having done something persistent to him when he healed him.)  

They agreed to speak in six candlemarks. The Emperor really would rather handle this himself, if nothing else it goes faster when they know their shared context, but he'll run that past the Mage-Inquisitor as well. 

All right. Summary: he is still agnostic on whether he's been under mind-control since the first night with Caris but he's more confident than that in not being additionally mind-controlled by a ten-minute remote conversation. He would like the Office of Inquiry to question Altarrin, subject to certain conditions but they can negotiate on how to set those conditions up. He has a proposed list of topics to cover – honestly, learning about Caris' magic is the top priority, they know so little right now and he's pretty sure that, if they were plotting together on how to fight gods, Altarrin must know more. 

He will request a meeting with the (current) lead Mage-Inquisitor. 

The Office of Inquiry did not, in fact, seriously consider attempting a coup against Emperor Bastran.

Part of that, of course, was that Mage-Inquisitor Kastil didn't want them to. He feared a civil war, and so his instructions were largely to stand down, rather than to start fighting. But he does not run the Office of Inquiry, and was not, actually, the prime mover in that.

Most of it is that the Department of State Security did not, in fact, come out of the most recent crisis all that well; the Office of Inquiry was only recently reconstructed, and it was reconstructed in part by Altarrin, who did not want it to start a civil war that might destabilize the Empire. It has had very little time to rebuild, as these things are counted; very little time, as the mages of the Eastern Empire count it, to sink its tendrils into every aspect of the state, rebuild its handful of 'security forces' into an army to challenge the legionary commanders and spread a shadow of fear across the Empire that does more for its power than anything else in the realm. It therefore could not win unless it got spectacularly lucky, and is not, by and large, insane enough to try when it would lose.

Therefore the Office's reaction to Mage-Inquisitor Kastil's arrest was, by and large, to take cover. A few people vanished with contingency orders, a few people vanished with a fear of knives, and most of the senior agents of political skill and political ambitions found somewhere the Empire vitally needed them to be outside the capital. (People who, like Kastil, will so wholly adapt the goals of the organization of their own as to subordinate their personal interests to the State are not so common that the Office of Inquiry largely consists of them; far more common are those who take their pay in hard power and soft influence and the fear in the eyes of those who see them, and there is no power to be gained in suffering an Emperor's wrath.)

This left Mage-Inquisitor Beatta, whose great-grandfather was shaman of a minor northern tribe that happened to adapt to the Empire astonishingly well and who is not particularly ambitious. Oh, she had to work hard to rise her present position, and she does enjoy power and respect, but she also means to be alive to enjoy them. She has therefore made sure that she was competent, not especially replaceable, and so boringly reliable that nobody was interested enough to want to purge her, engaging in an approximately average amount of graft and building up favors in a reasonably standard manner without making any particular enemies. It is her considered opinion that running and hiding in a corner somewhere will draw much more negative imperial attention than quietly accepting the designation of new head of this extremely cursed operation, where (given that Kastil burst into the Emperor's chamber to arrest the Emperor's lover and was merely imprisoned) she will probably just get fired if worst comes to worst, in which case she has more than enough favors owed and wealth accumulated to retire peacefully to the life of a minor untitled gentlewoman in a petty provincial city.

She is therefore available to meet the Emperor, at his pleasure.

It's not an appointment that the Emperor is entirely happy about. He wanted someone clever, with a modicum of autonomy - they won't be Kastil, but he's not sure there is another Kastil, and besides, Kastil is still alive and cooperated with his arrest and will, very likely, also cooperate with being released and handed limited duties. Maybe. 

He's not incredibly worried about a coup - though he could badly use Altarrin to advise him here - but he's quite worried about, well, god-plots and unlucky miscommunications and implausibly unfortunate judgement calls. He needs someone who will, if handed a formal Imperial order to run the investigation in particular way, do that - or argue back, but do it anyway if he doesn't relent - rather than quietly finding ways to wriggle around it. And he needs someone who is doing the job at least mostly willingly; they don't have to like it, but he doesn't want to assign someone who will spend the entire time terrified, their compulsions fighting with their actual personal motivations. Beatta will do. 

They meet behind scrying shields, and he sets down his notes on the desk. 

"Caris contacted me, via the same spell as before, about negotiations for surrender. We spoke for about ten minutes. ...I have some summarized notes that I'm willing to share, mostly on my assessment of whether any of my in-the-moment judgement calls seem directly influenced by mind-control happening during the conversation. I think I wasn't, but - I won't ignore your impression, either, and it may go into my considerations of whether to continue future negotiations directly or assign an intermediary." 

He slides over a single page of notes. They're very summarized. Major decisions he made were:

- To decline ending the conversation and having Caris contact an intermediary. He had already decided beforehand to respond to any communications, but wasn't expecting Caris to offer. Bastran thinks it's reasonable that minimizing his own points of contact here is, while maybe a reasonable precaution longer term, lower priority than resolving things quickly. 

- He was fairly open about their status on questioning Altarrin, which is that they mostly haven't. Bastran's impression is that he made this decision beforehand, and stands by it, because Caris kept to his side of their initial bargain, in exchange he committed to - sticking to certain conditions when questioning Altarrin, which he'll explain in a minute - and he doesn't want to sabotage their talks unprovoked. Caris can demonstrably check what they're doing with Altarrin; they think they can disrupt the spell-focus without lethal backlash on everyone nearby, probably, but not instantly, and fully shielding out the otherworldly scrying-slash-communication spell is going to take longer than getting detection wards for it. 

- Caris unpacked some of his conditions for questioning Altarrin. Bastran did change his strategy here in response, but he thinks it was for actual reasons; namely, Caris proposed an alternative to his main strategy, which seems at least useful to convey as a baseline on what's acceptable. 

- Caris brought up conditions that he would require in order to surrender. They basically match Bastran's draft. He doesn't think he's especially changed his mind on what he thinks is reasonable to offer. 

What does Beatta think? She's welcome to take her time. 

Beatta is clever! But she is not Kastil, no. Kastil was the person you picked for the Most Important Mission; he is in prison. The person you pick for The Second Most Important Mission had the advantage of also being very busy investigating possible treason in the provinces, and took advantage of this legitimate concern to be out of touch. At some point, you get Mage-Inquisitor Beatta.

"Understood, Your Majesty." She is not seriously considering the possibility that he made a severely terrible decision that she will have to call him on; these possibilities are not worth considering because they lead nowhere good. She will review the Very Summarized Notes (she had her own intra-Office summaries of the earlier events). "Your judgement does not appear to be compromised, Your Majesty, though in the event that Caris is hostile, giving him the power to suggest terms is dangerous, because they will cover weaknesses." Just, in general, they want to be the ones coming up with requirements.

"The chief risks to continued contact are less that Your judgement may be compromised, and more that having You be on-call for a foreign mage may interfere with Your other duties." (He is Emperor.) "The swifter this matter is settled, the better; alternatively, if there are any specialist-negotiators that Caris could trust, they could, perhaps, speak for you?"

"Altarrin, if Altarrin he is, may be under unknown mental effects. If any specialists in the 'mind-gifts' of foreign peoples can be find, they may have valuable insight into the nature of any effects he is under that mages specializing in the Imperial tradition may lack." Why does NOBODY get this at all. "If he is not under these compulsion-likes, specialists in them may be able to verify this more quickly than Imperial mages."

"I understand that there is information that I am not classified to know and will obey your commands." And will then just not try to know it. Seriously. (If there's anyone working on murdering Caris, that's in a different department. Beatta is in the Not Plotting Against Caris department.)

...He has no idea how to track down a specialist in foreign 'mind-gifts.' The terribly ironic thing is that Altarrin would know, almost certainly, and also, pending ruling out mind control, they can't actually trust his recommendations. 

"I'm not sure any of my duties are more urgent than resolving this matter." He's put the (hopefully now temporary??) replacement Archmage-General on making sure they're tracking potential threats outside the capital; the investigation's final events were not exactly conducted quietly, and it's plausible that, unless immediately and firmly discouraged when they attempt it, someone might spot an opportunity for a local revolt. "And the plan is for Caris to contact me again in six candlemarks; I can spend some of that interval on routine matters. I - don't think there's anyone else Caris would trust enough, right now. Maybe we can work on that." 

He slides forward another page of notes. 

"Altarrin. I want to go ahead with a full interrogation; the Healers think he's recovered enough for it, though perhaps not enough to handle all day. There are two options, here, that will meet Caris' conditions. There...is information Altarrin knows that, if spread any more widely, would attract the attention of the gods and be very dangerous - it's already a risk that I know. Caris was willing to heal him and return him to our custody only once I committed to making sure no one except myself would learn this secret. It - is relevant, but I don't think it's immediately or the most relevant to our main goals here, which are to learn more about Caris' magic and to determine whether Altarrin's judgement is sound.

"My original plan was to ask you nominate an investigator, and send them in under Imperial orders and compulsions not to get into certain topics. The main area to avoid is asking Altarrin to relate specific conversations in detail, and in particular, the content of what he and Caris discussed during the interlude when he was out of contact and had claimed to be in Iftel. Starting from the angle of what convinced him to put his trust in Caris, or to take certain moves like giving him a Thoughtsensing talisman or loosening his compulsions, is allowed. Asking about our gods in general is allowed. Asking about the other world and its magic ought to be fine, and I think that's what we need most urgently anyway." 

He lets out his breath. Ugh. This is terrible and– no feelings not the time. 

"The second option, which Caris proposed and which I don't approve of but seems useful as a comparison, is - we send in an interrogator with free reign, but they need to be executed afterward, to make very sure the secret doesn't fall into the hands of anyone aligned with any god. ...Personally I think that's overkill, compulsions and imprisonment ought to suffice, but Caris is understandably paranoid about godplots against himself and Altarrin, and unwilling to accept anything less. The interrogator could brief me fully, and separately make a complete report to you except with any mention of the secret redacted. It - gets us a much more thorough character assessment of Altarrin, probably. The interrogator will be better placed to judge whether Altarrin's decisions after Caris arrived were uncharacteristic of him at all, or just - reacting to new context. ...It has obvious downsides.

"Finally, I propose we place a compulsion on him against active attempts to deceive us, and calibrate it with a Thoughtsenser first and do a quick check afterward, but not have a Thoughtsenser reading him during. I know that's not standard protocol, but in terms of both Caris' conditions and the worry about contagious mind control, my impression is that it makes sense. We'll also want to slightly weaken the compulsions, at least to let him talk freely, he'll be able to play the 'only answer direct questions' requirement against the truthfulness compulsion. The number of volition-affecting ones we have on him are going to make him need a lot of prompting, but - less able to steer - we could see how that goes." 

He sits back. "What do you think?" 

"Your Majesty, I do not have any competent, loyal, expendable interrogators," she says. Best to get that line of questioning closed off right there. "I do not think we would get good information, out of an interrogator serving under compulsion," nor would she surrender a subordinate to the axe, here. "Every sacrifice you make of information we can gather is a sacrifice to our odds of discerning whether or not he is compelled to be a traitor, but it is Your right to make these sacrifices for the good of the Empire." The Emperor already knows this and she should prooooobably not say it but she does have some professional pride. "I understand the conditions and have agents qualified to interrogate him without looking into the Iftel episode." And to get as much as possible about Caris's world's magic as possible. "I would recommend Junior Inquisitor Restra, if this pleases you." She's not a mage, and she's young, but she's not going to refrain from asking questions because of the fear that Altarrin will take vengeance afterwards, and she's careful. "Here are my suggestions for appropriate interrogation-compulsions -" she has a list, which was written beforehand and approximately corresponds with the Emperor's, albeit from a position of more experience with precise compulsion-wording.

"Understood. I wasn't expecting it of your people - I wonder if Caris finds it more reasonable, since his world supposedly has planes where dead people go." 

And he'll sign off on the suggested Inquisitor and the suggested compulsions. They're not going to have a very functional Altarrin with that many restrictions still on his thinking, but that's a good thing, probably, in the world where Altarrin is on their side is that a mind-controlled thought, he has no idea, and of course if they're in one of the bad scenarios then fewer compulsions is dangerous... 

"The other question is whether to inform him of recent events. I haven't, yet, and it seemed yesterday that he doesn't actually remember why he decided to Gate into the Emperor's suite, though now that he's clearer-headed he might dig it up with enough prompting. ...I think he'd be willing to cooperate and try to help us, if he knows that Caris is - not here - and negotiations are in progress. But of course there are risks to telling him anything, one of them being that if he is compromised, he'll know which way to steer us. ...I don't know. I lean toward not, but I will let your Inquisitor make the judgement call, if it seems likely that filling him in on some of what he missed will help." 

(He misses Kastil, which is sort of an absurd way to feel when yesterday he was terrified that Kastil would prevent this from working out entirely.) 

She nods. "Understood." That is indeed a reasonable point about how people from a world with an afterlife might feel. (Her judgement was just that Caris was a terrible boss.)

"I will allow my Inquisitor to make that judgement," and she will make it on a basis that has nothing at all to do with the truth. What you tell people usually doesn't, in interrogation sessions.

Does the Emperor have any more directions before she can go do her job she is dismissed?

She is dismissed! 

He will tell the Healers to prepare Altarrin for questioning– er, he doesn't mean warning him, to be clear, just making sure he's awake and cleaned up and anything that would be an interruption is gotten out of the way. He informs them that a mage will be coming by to adjust Altarrin's compulsions. The Thoughtsenser on-site - who does not seem especially mind controlled and certainly isn't sympathetic to either Altarrin or Caris, the cause of his being dragged into an unwanted and inconvenient assignment where he can't even leave his room most of the time - will spend five minutes testing the truthfulness compulsion with trivial questions and making sure the current level of compulsions-that-affect-planning doesn't, like, take out Altarrin's ability to speak in complete sentences. 

...The Healers can do that. They're worried but also faintly relieved. Caring for a patient who approximately can't communicate his needs, and who is stable and improving now but was kind of terrifyingly dying until the alien healing magic and what if the alien magic stops working - and who is also withdrawn and miserable and they're having a time coaxing him to cooperate at all with things like "eating and drinking" - is kind of a terrible assignment, actually. 

The mage alters compulsions. The Thoughtsenser will read Altarrin while running him through test questions like "what color is the sky" and "try to tell me the moon is made of cake." 

Altarrin seems to be mentally capable of speaking in complete sentences, though he often won't bother unless clearly and directly instructed to. The compulsions are not letting him lie. He is still just as withdrawn and miserable and will cooperate with this process exactly to the extent they can force out of him. When asked even slightly difficult arithmetic questions, he defaults to "I don't know" but can be dragged through doing mental math with enough insistence. 

(- he could definitely be coping better than this. He feels vaguely unwell, but at this point he's mostly weak and shaky and lightheaded from 24 candlemarks without really eating anything, the fever is broken and the headache is gone. Being trapped and helpless is awful and he's startling at any unexpected sound - mentally, mostly, though sometimes it makes it past the compulsions not to move if it's sufficiently involuntary - and his mind keeps going into spirals of panic and he is not, really, trying to do anything about this. It does not seem to be in his interests to try to be more functional, right now.) 

He can guess they're about to interrogate him and - maybe without Thoughtsensing, since they're doing the calibration checks, but he's not counting on that. He's not planning to try to steer this because he has no idea what's happening and is bouncing off a dozen different mental walls when he tries to make plans and he's quietly resigned and terrified but basically to the same extent he has been for the last day. 

(He's approximately not a mage, right now, but his Gifts aren't blocked, and he has decades of practice. He can mount some degree of native shield without using mage-gift at all - not that the compulsions are allowing it right now - but he can also usually detect Thoughtsensing. Unless it's done very skillfully, and that Thoughtsenser looked decidedly...chosen to be expendable. He - still isn't going to put very much weight on it. Maybe there's a better Thoughtsenser outside the room. But it's information.) 

It's presumably taking them a bit to get an interrogation room set up, or something. He waits. 

This is the point at which that distinctive scrying signature shows up again.

The Emperor did warn them that this was probably going to happen, and that it's an essential part of the ongoing negotiations and should not be interfered with. They should avoid doing anything that spooks Altarrin into refusing to answer Caris' questions, such as having a mage burst into his cell. They cannot, obviously, promise privacy, and neither party would believe it anyway, but they're not to read Altarrin's mind. He has a reasonable chance of noticing and might refuse to talk to Caris on those grounds alone. 

The Healer gets a Mindspeech message and twitches. 

Altarrin cannot sense the scrying signature without mage-sight, and isn't looking in the Healer's direction right now; he doesn't notice. 

(He's clearly awake, though, wearing a clean infirmary shift and propped up to a half-sitting position. He's staring woodenly at the wall.) 

"Altarrin?" She'd prefer he be able to speak, but wasn't counting on it, and doesn't want to wait half the scry hoping for it. A reaction would be enough.

Altarrin's eyes widen and he startles enough that he jerks involuntarily in the bed. And then goes back to limp stillness, it certainly looks like he's compulsioned not to move.

He can speak, but it takes him a few seconds to calm himself enough that his voice is working. "Carissa?" His voice cracks. "Are you -" He's almost crying, which is currently very inconvenient but is predictably what will happen once he's spent an entire day being miserable and not even trying to be less miserable and refusing to eat because not eating will make him worse at things and he's– he was so lonely, hearing Carissa's voice is like coming to the surface to breathe when he's been holding his breath underwater for minutes...

- Focus. He needs to change strategy, he is not going to get to 'okay' in the next thirty seconds but if Carissa is risking a spell that might be traceable then this must be important and she needs - so he desperately needs to be -

...ugh, planning block. Just. Calm. Breathe. He is not at all going to be able to direct a conversation right now so he really hopes Carissa has a plan. And knows that they're obviously being watched, but Carissa isn't stupid.

(From the outside, it's pretty obvious to Carissa that he's initially panicking at the sudden contact, and then upset, and then - re-evaluating, but disoriented or something, struggling against something invisible presumably the compulsions he's under - and now trying to compose himself but with considerably more apparent difficulty than she's ever observed him to have before.) 

"We have some time," she says, dryly. "They'll be trying to trace the spell and they'll have an interesting time of it if they succeed. - I wanted to prove it's me, first off." Because obviously an interrogator would feign this, if they wanted Altarrin paying attention and trying. And it's a nontrivial task because it can't be anything he already knows; it has to be in the character of what he knows, as judged by him, while not being something you could invent having only him and not Carissa.

"Dath ilan doesn't have afterlives. What they do is, they freeze people, every person who dies, just their heads because that's the part where all the information is, at very cold temperatures that suffice for high quality long term preservation, and in the future, when they know how, they're going to bring them all back from the dead. And if you murder someone - unless you're really a monster - you would want them to get found in time for their head to be frozen.

And so they have the Surreptitious Head Removers. They won't do a murder for you. They won't dispose of the rest of the body for you. But they will, to the best of their ability, arrive discreetly and silently to the scene of the crime and remove the head to freeze. And they will never tell anyone that you called them, or act in any way that might let someone learn your identity via that route, and the police, for their part, will conduct an investigation that makes no assumptions from the missing head, not even that it was a murder rather than an accident.

The question we all thought of, when Keltham told us, was why dath ilani were stupid enough to believe that. I haven't - totally ruled out that they were in fact governed by an evil conspiracy, so take this with a grain of salt, but - you could check, right -. You could do an analysis of murder cases and clearance rates, you could notice the ways that headless cases were different, and the information you got would be very muddy but the world's sewn together too tightly to lie without traces, and they have a billion people, and - there are actually just very big important differences, that show up, between being the kind of person who'll break your word if it suits you and being the kind of person who wouldn't in any future any god could see or bring. I would - want to run the statistics myself, probably, if I found myself there, but -"

(The Healer is supposed to be trying to listen in on the conversation and taking notes. It turns out this is kind of hard because the other side of it is pretty tightly targeted on Altarrin and she has to put her head kind of right next to his but she can get most of it.) 

Okay what the actual fuck. 

Uh. 

The Healer is...really not sure if that's a state secret that she isn't allowed to know and now she's going to spend the rest of her life in prison or maybe die. Although. What kind of state secret is that - what could that possibly mean - what is a dath ilan and how does this have anything to do with anything here - 

A mage scrying the room and the Healer's notepad from another facility is now rather urgently relaying a message to the Emperor and Mage-Inquisitor Beatta because what. Just. What. 

Altarrin is not processing very well and still trying to wrestle the pointless panic attack under control and he only realizes that he should be suspicious of this a second before Carissa says the same thing. 

He tries very hard to pay attention. ...No that makes it worse, the compulsions don't especially want him doing that. He...doesn't try to do anything he's just here words are happening - 

- that is absolutely a fact about dath ilan and he can't even think about whether it's a good idea right now that's strategy but definitely there is no one else in the Empire who would ever in a million years successfully invent something a hundredth that convincing even if they thought to try which they wouldn't, they're going to be focused on the magic - 

- oh the statistics thing is clever - Carissa is clever - and Carissa is fine and safe and - no don't cry now - 

"S'you," he manages, and - ugh - the thing where the compulsions don't want him strategizing is going to work in his favor during a hostile interrogation but it's incredibly irritating right now. Relax, let his instincts do it...

"What. Happened. ...M'under compulsions. Cannot. Really think. Sorry." He can manage full sentences when they're demanding that he be coherent but apparently not otherwise, at least not if he's doing anything even vaguely of the direction of 'considering that maybe Carissa can get him out' -  

Carissa isn't speaking very quickly, because he's obviously not in great shape -- he's presumably been tortured all day -- but she's not pausing for long either; their time is limited. 

"Yesterday morning you Gated into the Emperor's suite with a note taped to your chest warning me the Inquisition suspected me of your death. I left, as I should obviously have done days ago, I'm sorry, and then with undisclosed means I determined that you were still alive, but dying, and that your world didn't have any magic that could've saved you. 

And so I spent a while thinking about - Surreptitious Head Removers, and whether, without a devil at their side, humans will ever just - 

I told the Emperor to dump you through a Gate for me to heal. I wasn't all that sure. I gave it a thirty percent chance, maybe, they'd rigged you to kill me, and a ten, fifteen percent chance they'd succeed. I've never - for anyone - I've done it for everyone, but that's different, I'm part of everyone - and I don't even think I was miscalculating out of emotional attachment, I think I was right!

- I asked the Emperor to - not make me worse off than if you'd died. Not ask you questions the gods would benefit from them getting out of you. I am checking in among other things to see if they are abiding by the deal, there. If tomorrow, your assessment is that they're not - well, they'll probably make you try to lie to me. But I don't think you'll be very good at it. Do you understand me?"

He doesn't remember that, but - he wouldn't, he Gated into the Emperor's suite, of course the Imperial guards would have immediately hit him with everything they had and he was already badly injured, he would have known it would kill him - it's if anything surprising he survived long enough for Carissa to negotiate that - 

- he is not going to say he would rather be dead than here. Not when Carissa risked her life, risked dying forever unless somehow someday he succeeds without her and gets her back. He - hadn't imagined she could decide to do that, it's, he can't even think about what it means, with his head like this, except that it's the opposite of loneliness -

And he's not even sure it's true, not if Carissa is fr– ...the compulsions don't like that line of thought. 

He remembers the Gate. 

He understands what Carissa is saying, he thinks, though he's not sure anyone else possibly could, it's– she saw the thing he recognized about dath ilan, the thing he wanted even if he didn't especially want the policy on destroying worlds as ugly as his own. 

"I understand you. I - do not think they questioned me yet. Might not remember. Do not...think Bastran would. Break his word. If...tomorrow...?" That question is not going to make it through the fact that he is absolutely not allowed to think about ways he might get away from here. 

(- his loyalty compulsion to the Emperor is gone, though. And his compulsion to the Empire is gone, it feels weird and empty behind all the gluey walls in his head - there's presumably something there, a different wording that for many people would come out to the same thing, but he's wrapped his mind around the usual compulsion in a very specific way and the replacement doesn't do it, isn't something he can actually lean his intrinsic motivation system on, it's - indistinguishable from the other walls. He would have coped better with the last day, he thinks, if he still had 'serve the Empire' pulling him forward, it's standard policy to snip it and reduce opportunities to play compulsions against each other but he thinks they would have gotten more out of him -) 

"My plan is to surrender, if they can convince me I won't die in custody, if you when you're allowed to think think I won't die in custody, and then the Emperor can - know everything, and make the best call he can.

I know your plan was for you to die and me to run, and maybe it's stupid of me to have done anything else when you're obviously wildly more competent at this, but - the gods would only have had to somehow slip the Inquisition my location once -"

And she thought the Emperor could protect her, presumably, but - he's not going to try to debrief that mistake right now. He's got more than enough of his own mistakes to go over first, once - as Carissa says - he can think. 

"Not sure they will. Let me think."