Mage-Inquisitor Beatta nods. "Understood, Your Majesty."

(She is already preparing her excuses for the new regime, focusing on "I only had a limited ability to reverse Kastil's previous decisions." She is rapidly regretting the fact that she hit the emergency button when they learned about Modify Memory, and wishing she put someone other than Restra in charge of the interrogation. Maybe she can swap her out without much political difficulty.)

The Emperor is intending - probably - to put in a formal commendation that he's pleased with Junior Inquisitor Restra's work. It's what Altarrin would do, even though this process has been exhausting and frustrating. 

"Thank you. ...The second matter is that, depending on how conversations tomorrow go, I'm planning to take full charge of the operation around Carissa's surrender. If Kastil was nudged into place by Vkandis to take down Carissa after the attempt on Altarrin – which I think is if anything more compelling a theory as the one where Carissa is the threat, we have a long history of godplots including some resembling that – then I think this is the best way to avoid any escalation while Carissa is incapacitated."

Sigh.

"I think I'm right. If Carissa shows up on schedule and meekly submits to the conditions, tomorrow, I'm - willing to bet on that. But I don't want the Empire to go down with me, if it turns out I'm wrong." 

And he slides a magically-sealed letter across the table to her. 

"I want you to assign some people to watching for sabotage or assassinations or any other clear enemy action that would require Golarion magic, or is outside the scope of anything we have on record from god-interventions before Carissa's arrival. I'm not going to tell you more in advance, yet, but - if your team reports that this is happening, open the orders and follow them. That's an Imperial order." 

She nods. "Understood, Your Majesty."

And, "As you command, Your Majesty." Is he going to give her a specific order to not try to learn what's in the order in advance, or just leave that up to the usual "do what the Emperor obviously means you to do" compulsions, which is a lower degree of order than following his explicit words?

Nope! (He's not actually considering this in enormous depth, right now, he's mostly - following existing habit, partly a policy he absorbed from, mostly, Altarrin - better to give people discretion, his subordinates are selected to be smart and education and experienced for a reason...) 

He tells her that she's dismissed. 

And she bows her way out of the room.

(It is, perhaps, worth modeling the events taking place in the Office of Inquiry, over the past few days. Momentum has begun building for a change of thought, among the Office of Inquiry, for a reversal of opinion that might, perhaps, be shocking to those who did not understand it - a complete reversal, on the topic of Altarrin and on the topic of Carissa Sevar. A newcomer to politics might suggest that it is a product of the fact, now becoming reasonably apparent to the Office, that they are almost certainly innocent.

Someone who has more experience with the Empire would, perhaps, understand better.

The Emperor has a new lover, the new lover is accused of treason by the Office of Inquiry, the new lover flees arrest - and the Emperor, desperately loyal, protects her, arresting the accusing officer. This is not, in fact, a new story; those of the Office of Inquiry as old as Altarrin have seen it before, and those who know their history know that it is happened. The new lover will return to power, and the new lover will return bearing a grudge, and merrily she will ply the axe until such time as the Emperor tires of her, and the old lover is accused of treason by the new lover. Oh, there was a brief spasm of patriotic paranoia at the thought of memory-modification, but the Office of Inquiry does not, in the final resort, act to protect the Emperor when he does not want to be protected. Emperors have come and gone, is the quiet wisdom amongst the inquisitors; the Empire is eternal.

Does this then suggest that they mean to serve the Empire? Oh no. Many serve Empire over Emperor, as they are bound to do, but the truth is that the Office of Inquiry, like any good Office, exists to perpetuate itself, for any Office that does not will, in the end, be devoured by those that do; if you trade off self-protection against doing your duty, then - as Kastil has just demonstrated - you will not protect yourself, and the Office of Inquiry has just received another lesson in exactly why this law holds. If Carissa Sevar is a cultist of Asmodeus - well, they will not say 'All hail Asmodeus' - but one could hardly say it, could one? Let her take her vengeance on Kastil and the remnants of his faction, let one director's head fall and other director's head rise - so long as the Office of Inquiry continue. The words remain unspoken, but there they are: The Emperor is dead. Long live the Empire.)

Altarrin is resting in bed, drowsy but not quite asleep, when one of the Emperor's mages comes in. 

He's calmed down, back to a state of - blank resignation, mostly, not making plans, not thinking ahead to tomorrow, just - enduring. It's going to get incredibly boring if they give him actual free time, but right now it seems like he's going to be sleeping fourteen candlemarks a day and being interrogated the rest of the time, so boredom has yet to come up. 

He looks at them tiredly, without curiosity. 

"The Emperor wants your compulsions modified. Don't resist." 

What is he supposed to do, exactly, glare at the man. He's also not sure what else they could possibly put on him, at this point. 

Apparently the thing he's actually going to do is remove a lot of the compulsions against higher-level generic planning and strategic reasoning! Not the more specific blocks - he can't plan about escaping, and there are a couple aimed at preventing planning in advance to steer his interrogator down a different topic tree to avoid certain information coming up, though this one is (for Altarrin) rather easy to work around. 

They're not doing anything about the one where he can't voluntarily decide to move. 

That's...

...he's going to figure out how he feels about it later, when he's not having his head poked. But it's - good, probably, it means Carissa must have convinced the Emperor to let them speak. 

He's so tired. Having the ability to think about the future almost feels like a weight on him; they're so constrained, he has so few resources, he's pretty sure there is a path forward from here but it's hard to think about for reasons that have nothing to do with mental modification. He should...try anyway...but he's spent the last two days leaning into helplessness and resignation and that is an incredibly annoying set of grooves to have worn into his mind. 

- he should think about how to undo that but actually right now he's falling asleep. 

(Altarrin is in fact sleeping a lot right now; he half-wakes a few times during the night, tries to bang his head on advice that would help Carissa, runs aground on lack of context of what the surrender plan is, slides back into sleep.

He's going to stay asleep for candlemarks past dawn unless Carissa interrupts sooner.) 

Carissa doesn't need much sleep. She paces, and contemplates contingencies, and considers scrying the lead inquisitor who went after her but that's really mean, he'd probably worry she'd compromised him, and it probably won't tell her the things she wants to know anyway. 

She isn't going to finish the Boots, so she doesn't bother, just bundles them away with everything else.

She's so scared. 

They're not going to torture her, the Emperor said. She suspects the Empire...draws a very sharp distinction, or something, between pain and other kinds of suffering, treats putting a wire in someone's heads for all their thoughts to rip against as an entirely different sort of thing from pressing a hot poker to their skin. And treats it as very different to break a person's will by denying them sleep than by breaking a few bones. She doesn't dread them differently, she suspects.

- she doesn't object to it either, to be clear. Hurting people so as to make them less able to oppose you is a reasonable thing to do for many reasons in many contexts including interrogations.

But whether there's blood has awfully little to do with whether there's suffering, and this is going to be awful. The Emperor mostly can't make it less so; he can't make her not fear for her life, and if she's doing any steering for any goals she has then they're not doing their jobs. There isn't a survivable amount of pain that'd make it much worse, or a strategically reasonable amount of mercy that'd make it much better. 

And suffering is fine if you'll come out of it but -

- she really might die. She really truly might.

- and, this matters a lot less than dying but an entirely reasonable conclusion, were you the Emperor, would be that Carissa is indeed very useful and very dangerous and honestly was flirting with quite a lot of treason and has now caused quite a lot of trouble about it, and will spend the rest of her life neatly compulsioned to make magic items for the Empire and not think thoughts.

And then she'll die, if Altarrin doesn't fix it.

Altarrin would probably fix it. 

It's not her read of the Emperor's personality, at all, but she has no idea who will have his ear with Altarrin gone. Maybe they'll clear him soon once they have her, and he'll be back; most of her hope rests on that, at this point. 

She waits to scry Altarrin until any reasonable person would be awake.

Then he'll be awake! In bed, increasingly frustrated about the inability to move, still experiencing quite a lot of distress, his heart rate keeps spiking for no discernable reason. He's having unreasonably more difficulty than usual keeping his thoughts from spinning off into what-if scenarios based much more on what sounds terrifying than on what sounds the most plausible, and leaping from there to fire, to lying helpless on the floor of a records cache, freezing cold and unable to even move another inch - to hanging and sinking slowly in midair, unable to move, unable to use magic, helpless to do anything if Carissa's spell runs out too soon - 

(This, he's experienced before though not, that he can remember, this intensely, and it's incredibly inconvenient. He could make a lot of progress on it in the next couple of days if he had paper, and ideally privacy, and of course the ability to move his hands voluntarily. He doesn't have that and the current situation is doing the opposite of help and he mostly, at this point, expects to be trying to work around this for the next few months.) 

He still can't see the scrying-focus. 

Right. “Altarrin. - I want to confirm you can actually think. Can you explain why I thought of the head removers when you were dying -”

He was expecting this and he still twitches, his pulse racing. 

- it's all right, not a threat, calm down he's being asked a question - 

“You were negotiating with the Emperor about what to do, right? And you - on both sides, each of you had so many reasons to benefit from falsely giving your word. But if both of you believed the other would break the agreement, if the Emperor thought you would kidnap me rather than leaving me for them to retrieve, and you thought the Emperor would compel me to Final Strike and kill you, then neither of you would have agreed to it – even though then I would have died, and both of you preferred I survive." 

He takes a moment to phrase the next bit, not because his thoughts are running into walls but it's probably-unrelatedly kind of hard to concentrate.  

“And - you would expect dath ilan to have the same incentives problem, with the head removers, that the murderers would not call and risk being caught even though they preferred the victim’s head be frozen, but - somehow they do it. Because of…I suppose ‘Law’ in the Golarion sense captures it. And you hoped that the Emperor understood that, and understood why it mattered that his promises meant something, and would keep it. And - were right.”

“Or didn’t give him the chance, I have no way to know. I’m gambling now that I was right, then. Here are the precautions that he proposed.” She wrote them down. She reads them out. “What else would you add?”

Altarrin is more sure that she was right, but of course he’s known the Emperor for really quite a lot longer. Shaped him, in many ways. …Bastran may be questioning some of that advice now, of course, or be pushed to ignore it by the Inquisitors, but Altarrin doesn’t think that he would drop the part about what it takes to negotiate agreements between parties with limited trust. It’s - hard to take that pattern out of your thinking, once it’s there.

“That is better than I expected.” He can think of precautions the Emperor might want to add, to protect against the cases where Carissa is…evil, or something…but since that isn’t the case, he doesn’t particularly feel a need to propose them.

“The plans for the facility seem fine, though you could check how many people he is sending - you want the minimum surface area - he can send them earlier and use the preparation time to lay set-spells, and get the same security with fewer staff. And the other components that could fail are on his end, and - whoever he is putting in charge of setting off the contingencies that I assume he has if you betray him. The main thing I can think of here is that the person running those should be as silo’d as possible - so the Emperor should also be in a secure base in a region we know to have low historical rates of god-interference, and - I lack context to advise him on how to set up contingencies but the same principle applies.”

“But you could still kill me, right, if you decided that I was dangerous? How would you go about it?”

“In the Emperor’s place, at the guarded facility? Communication-spell artifact, magically sealed instructions with his location on a map, and keep the only map of your location with him. Summon a mage to Gate in and Final Strike - less than five seconds of warning - would probably work." 

" - I was thinking in your own place, as a powerful advisor of the Emperor who concludes that he is being mind-controlled and that you’d better handle it yourself for the good of the Empire. That being a position some people hopefully less competent than you probably find themselves in."

“From what starting position - now, or after you surrender?"

He's going to clarify because, apparently, he's too distracted by the fact that his body has decided to throw a panic-reaction at him, presumably at the concept of someone Gating in to Final Strike– oh, Gates feel terrifying right now, that makes a lot of sense and is also intensely frustrating. 

“From the starting position that I have surrendered to the Emperor and you don’t know what he did after that.”

If he could concentrate it would have been obvious from the start what he wanted and he wouldn't have wasted precious scry time clarifying - he doesn’t think he’s being slow because of anti-planning mind control, it's just...everything else...

“...Honestly, I would need at least several candlemarks to think of a strategy there, since I assume anyone doing it will be taking at least that much time. The obvious is to try to locate the Emperor, which I assume people will try, but he is not going to let that work. Leaving that aside, I think there is no - people-routed - way to locate you directly, so it would need to be by other means. ...I might, if I thought I knew the Emperor well, try to predict what his criteria would be for picking a secure facility in a region outside god-influence, where a Final Strike backup plan would not destroy important infrastructure. There would be dozens if not hundreds of options, but someone sufficiently well-informed and motivated might try going down the list and ruling out options one at a time. I think very few people can predict the Emperor that well - I could. Mage-Inquisitor Kastil could but will not if the Empire orders him not to, he is very - Lawful, in the Golarion sense. ...He was running the initial investigation, I saw him in the north on scrying. I am not sure he is still running it now." 

"- I'm mostly counting on you being - competent to, positioned to - figure out what political enemies I've made and what plans they've made - which means also relying on the Emperor to release you soon -"