:Twenty Healers? I'll be fine by tomorrow even if you just leave me in a ditch somewhere! They should heal Ma'ar, if he needs it!:

Technically Need could just tell some of the Healers to do that, but it's been a really boring few candlemarks and it sounds much more entertaining to just yank Ma'ar into a group-link with Iomedae. 

:Hey, idiot, Iomedae says she'll be fine and you should get some Healing for yourself before you pass out. ....Also she had some very sweet things to say. Apparently it's not very many people who've ever rescued her before: 

Why is this the thing that's happening right now. 

...Ma'ar has no idea how to actually respond. 

I went to considerable lengths to cause you to not die and if you die anyway I will be so annoyed. 'm scary when I'm annoyed.

He almost certainly isn't going to die permanently, he'll get better that is not something Ma'ar should let slip even when he's very tired and also very very very relieved that Iomedae is talking to him. 

(It's still kind of implicitly apparent in the overtones of his Mindspeech that he's...less worried about dying...than someone in his position really ought to be.) 

:The Healers were very worried about you!: he sends instead. :I have definitely not at any point been at risk of dying: 

But he'll grudgingly Mindspeak a few of the Predain Healers anyway and admit, reluctantly, that he may have picked up some injuries in the process of collecting Iomedae after Urtho's weapon went off in the north. And maybe it would be good to get some Healing attention about that. 

- they'll have a look at him with Healing-Sight and almost instantly (though very politely) suggest that he should probably be resting in bed while they work on his burns, which are actually quite bad. 

Sure okay but can he do that in this room. They made space for one temporary bed in the administrator's office, surely they can find space for two. 

Need is cackling about this in Iomedae's head. (She doesn't much care whether Iomedae would rather be resting right now.)

Iomedae would like her communications channel to have only important information like what's wrong with Ma'ar and whether someone's in charge right now of preventing further assassination attempts and how many people know she and Ma'ar are in the same place. Also she keeps reflexively healing herself and it keeps not working and it's upsetting every time. 

....All right, fine, that's probably rude. Need will instead (somewhat grumpily) be an official communication channel, to convey that:

- Ma'ar has moderate burns over most of his body, but the main thing wrong with him is exhaustion. Unlike Iomedae, he was conscious and holding his breath the whole time and so his lungs weren't damaged. He is not really in any shape to fight right now, which isn't ideal, but he'll recover in a few days. 

- It seems like Ma'ar did manage to delegate some precautions, and also they got back a report on a (rather incompetent) secondary possible-assassination-attempt on Ma'ar, except it happened after he Gated out to try to grab Iomedae – maybe Vkandis thought he wouldn't risk himself for that – and the mages did not in fact Final Strike and are currently prisoners of war in Predain under a lot of compulsions. Need approves. 

- ....Uh, probably kind of a lot of people know that Ma'ar rescued Iomedae, given that he apparently frantically contacted Urtho directly with the communication-spell to get additional Healers. This doesn't necessarily imply the same number of people knowing that they're in the same place, but it would be an obvious inference. 

- this was not actually a question Iomedae asked, but no, Ma'ar is probably not very on top of strategic thinking, given his condition – so if Iomedae doesn't trust the subordinates who he would have delegated things to, then...possibly she should not be assuming that the situation is under control. This also feels like a rude sort of thing to be telling Iomedae, given her condition, but Need can only do strategic reasoning to the extent her bearer can, and so cannot just solve this on Iomedae's behalf. 

Iomedae takes a mental motion that's like closing her eyes and leaning her head back, though her eyes are kind of sealed shut and her head isn't responding to requests either. :If there's  a hint of trouble here - even just an unexpected Gate - please tell me, there are things I can do.: In particular she can get both herself and Ma'ar back on their feet for a little less than two minutes, which is both not very long and long enough to probably be decisive. 

Someone not swimming in an ocean of pain should think about the incompetent secondary assassination attempt. Captured? Have they been interrogated yet? 

Right. Need is on that. Two minutes is a plenty for people with their capabilities to handle something, even ten seconds would be enough for Ma'ar to get them out of here. - actually he could plausibly do that now even without Iomedae's intervention, it wouldn't be good for him but Velgarth mages can dig fairly deep into their life-force to cast while exhausted - it's difficult and unpleasant but Ma'ar seems likely to be exceptionally good at it. 

She'll try to get someone to give them a report on the situation with the assassins. 

- nevermind, actually she'll try to get Ma'ar to get a report on the assassins and relay it to them, she had been inclined to let him rest but it sounds simpler than arguing with his people, who might decide she shouldn't be here at all if they get too stressed about it. In which case Iomedae will recover anyway but won't have a means of communication, which seems rather costly in itself. 

It's bizarrely harder to keep trying to function while lying down with Healers attending him, even though Ma'ar should theoretically be just as capable of Mindspeech and the communication-spell as he was before. 

The mages who were captured were read by a Thoughtsenser while being questioned. (It's possible to use compulsions to force someone to tell the truth, and thus dispense with the mindreading, but it takes a lot of skill and it's not standard practice in Predain.) They are in fact followers of Vkandis and part of the same unit that was on detached duty in Urtho's Tower and thus got pulled into weapons-relocation work. None of them personally received a divine vision. They instead received orders via communication-spell from their division commander - probably the same priest who spoke to Iomedae at General Movat's camp - to track Ma'ar's location. This was in itself an unsuspicious order.

At around the time the weapon was discharged in the north (or at least one can infer this was the timing) they were given orders to Gate into Ma'ar's camp and apprehend or kill him. They weren't under compulsions to Final Strike, and during interrogation didn't claim to have been intending it, but - who knows, Vkandis might have been intending to work through them directly? 

Ma'ar is not sure what other precautions they should be taking about the Vkandis followers. The rest of them are in Tantara and thus under Urtho's remit and he is demonstrably very bad at telling Urtho what he should do. 

(He is both reluctant to bother Iomedae when she's clearly in much worse shape than he is, and also he's overwhelmed and scared and very badly wants advice from someone who has demonstrated that they know what they're doing.) 

Iomedae thinks that the man she spoke to in the war camp yesterday would ideally be arrested, but Tantara can't hold mages prisoner. She does not think it'll go over well if Predain offers to compulsion them for Tantara. Her long term preferred solution here is a sworn religious order whose members swear to only use compulsions to make arrests of mages and maybe a few other specific cases she hasn't thought of yet. But it's a long-term solution, obviously. 

In Urtho's position she'd go to the council of priests of Vkandis currently meeting, tell them the assassination attempt failed and was the cause of the shockwave they all presumably heard, and ask for their advice on apprehending the rogue cultists claiming to act in their god's name, who are very likely to be disavowed now that their plan didn't even work. Once the council of priests is moving in that direction - assuming that's the direction they move in - then she'd nudge Predain to demand a full inquiry into the ceasefire violation if they haven't done so already and authorize Predain to take prisoners in the course of that investigation, accompanied by Tantaran monitors. There should be a trial, under Zone of Truth, the priesthood should strip them of any relevant titles, so should Tantara, that should give her time to figure out something better than 'kill all dangerous mages' as an operating policy here where the correct balance of tradeoffs depends a lot on the afterlife system.

If there isn't time for all that they should be executed, though, Predain's not going to take Tantaran claims to have had nothing to do with this seriously if Tantara's top priority after accidentally giving some Vkandis cultists a terrifying superweapon is getting them off the hook for it. 

(He's so tired, but Iomedae must be feeling vastly worse, and so Ma'ar cannot really complain.) 

All of that sounds like reasonable advice, that Tantara might actually be willing to follow - probably? though it won't help that the suggestions ostensibly come from Predain's leadership - and that Predain, or rather the relevant actors in Predain other than him, will find reassuring. Ma'ar does not especially need further reassurance that Iomedae is committed to helping them but others are understandably more cautious and he hasn't yet had time to convey everything to them. 

...They don't actually have Zone of Truth, here, and he isn't sure whether Tantara's courts have an allowance for using Thoughtsensing during trials. 

- on another note, does Iomedae think it would be a good idea for them to arrange for her to be transported to Tantara. Ma'ar isn't actually sure this is a good idea but he trusts her judgement on it further than his own.

(He is separately deeply reluctant to have her out of his field of vision but he can't seem to ground this in strategic reasoning, it's just - a feeling he apparently has, bafflingly strong for its lack of any obvious source.) 

Need figures he's in love and she's probably right, she seems somewhat specialized in - well, not in that, but in something near to it. Iomedae is herself not forming an assessment of Ma'ar in those terms right now as it'd constitute a conflict of interest in negotiating the peace. (When she was much younger Iomedae occasionally regretted the fact that she'd arranged for all of the most impressive and admirable and heroic people in the world to be in her command structure, and therefore unavailable for romantic relationships. Then she met Alfirin who was not in her command structure but who was a bad person to fall in love with for other reasons like that it might someday be necessary to kill her if she turned into the next Tar Baphon. This to say - actually she's not sure why she said any of that.)

She thinks it would not be good for her to be transported to Tantara right now. It seems to have some internal divisions and she doesn't want to bet that they've all unearthed themselves already. She does want Ma'ar to be ready to Gate out instantly if she suddenly casts a spell giving him a bizarre rush of energy.

Of course. Ma'ar has also very firmly indicated to his people that nobody else is authorized to Gate in, they have enough mages guarding them that additional people won't make a huge difference and it means he can assume any Gate is hostile and get them out with or without Iomedae warning him by casting the spell, if he's awake and she isn't. His plan would be to take both Iomedae and Need, plus the Healers currently touching her and close enough to fall through a horizontal unscaffolded Gate along with them, and he's not saying to where and will ideally try to mentally randomize which of a list of places it is before going there, in case that blurs it in Foresight. 

(He's also got a lot of people elsewhere on scrying duty, and the monitors are staying in close contact with Tantara's monitors and should hopefully get word to them very quickly if Urtho flags a problem such as another missing superweapon, but they cannot realistically watch everywhere and the first warning would probably still be an unexpected Gate.) 

...Does the magic sword have Foresight? If so, or if she has a direct link to Bestet, then plausibly she will know further in advance if something is wrong? Does she have a feeling one way or another, right now? 

:Clever boy! ...I'm not to worried, actually. Maybe that was Vkandis' only good card to play, and Urtho really isn't going to make the same mistake a second time with his superweapon guard. Or maybe Bestet's looking out for us in other ways: 

's good. She's going to try to rest, in that case, though it's a bit hard because of the ocean of pain. 

The Healers can't do very much to decrease the pain but they can do a little. (Usually this would be a much more complicated Healing project, fighting not just to keep her alive through the immediate aftermath but to convince her skin to heal in a way that will result in normal range of motion, but Iomedae's body seems to know what it's doing, or something, in ways that are not at all how bodies normally work. Also, most people can only take a certain amount of Healing at all before their internal resources are exhausted, but they've already well exceeded the usual limit and Iomedae shows none of the worrying physiological signs that would mean they should ease off soon. They're just going to pour a very high rate of Healing-energy into her and see if that results in mostly reasonable things?) 

If she wants they can help her sleep with Healing directly, though it's not quite as restful as natural sleep. 

She might take them up on that if it won't interfere with waking instantly if startled?

She should still wake up if her magic sword or someone else Mindspeaks her, but maybe not to unexpected noises outside the building or something? 

- sure, she'll chance it. Need should be VERY ALERT, here.

Need, unlike humans, does not especially need to sleep and can be VERY ALERT for many candlemarks if necessary. She's going to get very bored but she'll even hold off on heckling Ma'ar to entertain herself, he should probably also try to get a bit of rest.