He can tweak those compulsions to see if letting it work is better? 

Then he goes back to what he was doing before, spinning an elaborate lie about being a double agent.

Arbas is not quite at the point of frustration, but he's definitely starting to feel some impatience. 

:I think we'd better move on to less friendly methods: he sends to Altarrin. :I'll - come in and take over, for now: because Altarrin is squeamish.

They in fact seem not to be succeeding at making much further progress. Altarrin sighs and sits back. 

Arbas strides into the room, glowering, and then re-adds the compulsion-blocks around spinning elaborate lies and apparently believing them.

...Also he's pretty sure they said the prisoner has some kind of unrecognized and hard-to-diagnose Mind-Gift, not Mindspeech and probably not Empathy either but closer to Empathy. He'll slam down a very thorough compulsion-block on that, broad enough that it's likely to cut off a lot of other random mental affordances but he doesn't need the man that functional right now. 

He sits down. :You will tell us the truth sooner or later: he sends, his mindvoice silky. :Might as well not make it harder on yourself than it has to be: 

GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH GAH

He is very short of mental affordances of any stripe!

Describing actions involves trying to take a mask! Saying things involves taking a mask! His thoughts are a pretty confused jumble right now, with the only action-focused ones at the preverbal level and getting thoroughly messed up by Arbas's compulsions.

:You're lucky that I'm more patient than the Archmage-General: Arbas sends dryly, and then gets to work on a new layer of compulsions.

With full access to Samien's (admittedly very jumbled and hard to follow) thoughts, can he walk the man, one patient step at a time, through setting up a new mask which is exactly the one he would find conveniently? Namely, that of a prisoner being interrogated, utterly under the power of the Empire, and understandably scared but aware that things aren't going to go better for him if he makes this excessively difficult? 

That is not a mask he wants to form! If you start with 'prisoner' the obvious thing for the 'prisoner' to do is to build another mask with which he can talk his way out! Imposing 'utterly under the power of the Empire' in a way that does not automatically go to 'use social skills to exploit the difference between "empire" and "people in empire" is really spectacularly hard!

...Mmmmaybe Arbas will try giving him just a little bit of wiggle room in that direction, but corralling his thoughts very hard towards 'the way to use social skills to exploit the fact that Altarrin is not personally the same as the Empire' is to tell Altarrin true things. Altarrin is tired and jaded and dislikes wars that kill people, and is probably way too sympathetic to critiques of the Empire. (This is, as far as Arbas knows, actually just true.) Altarrin always takes information seriously, especially shocking new information - Altarrin will listen, and take it seriously, if they have compelling evidence that Aroden isn't like other gods - but if someone isn't even capable of tracking what's actually true then the conversation is useless to him.

... No, if you are as good as Arbas you can in fact get him to think that is the best plan!

"The key thing about Iomedae to understand is that she is immensely powerful, and the main thing she's trying to achieve is peace. She's dead, who knows when she'll come back, being dead is not very expensive for her! But, equally, the main people hurt by your campaign to retake Oris are the empire. Yes, you might retake Oris, but at the price of a bitter house-by-house, street-by-street, village-by-village resistance, in which imperial soldiers will die, and then there will just be another revolt. Or Iomedae could come back and beat your armies by herself again! And yet, in fact, all she wants is to negotiate. At every step, you can just stop, and step back, and say, 'I'd like to negotiate with Iomedae,' and do that instead of fighting a war. Because she is coming back; as she told us, mundane death won't stop her."

See, Arbas figured it out because Arbas is brilliant and the best in the world at what he does! Altarrin can have at it, now! 

(Arbas is having a delightful time.) 

Altarrin slides his chair closer again. "Why does she want to negotiate so badly? It is not what I expected of someone with her powers. Consider me open to being convinced but, for now, still very suspicious." 

(The trick to interrogating people under Arbas' mind control is rather different from other ways, but in many senses easier. He can be a lot more straightforward.) 

"If you're powerful enough, I think, you stop seeing enemies and just start seeing people who aren't dead yet, are probably going to die, and might be possible to make not die."

That - almost couldn't be more exactly targeted to be convincing to Altarrin. Except that the grounds on which it's convincing are facts about him that no one else knows - Arbas did prompt him, sure, but he wouldn't have thought that narrowed it down enough. He has no idea how Samien is doing it, based apparently in gut intuition, while under incredibly heavy compulsions that would on most people be quite impairing to their persuasiveness. 

"Is this a teaching of Aroden's church?" 

"I don't think, quite? I think she'd phrase it in a more - prioritization, way? With emphasis on all these people spending all this energy and ingenuity on killing each other instead of building civilization and doing something about all the problems that are just - fundamental to the world - like people starving? There's a better world where nobody fights and everyone works together on their nonviolent goals, and though I personally want to make sure that every imperial soldier who sets foot in my homeland dies a painful death, I recognize that they want to kill every rebel against the majesty of the empire, and I'll obviously fight them tooth and nail until they leave, there's a better world where they just go away with no fighting and we go back to trading."

"Trade and peace being good is a teaching of Aroden's church."

Mmmhmm. Altarrin - while trying to reveal nothing at all of his reactions in expression or body language - would like to know absolutely everything that Iomedae ever mentioned about the activities and work done by Aroden's church and the 'Knights of Ozem' in her own world. 

- oh, also the part about her coming back from the dead, what's the deal with that? 

Apparently gods like Aroden just grant their clerics extremely powerful miracles regularly? Like, daily? Some of her abilities came back with Aroden gone but others she needed to use artifacts to recharge and more she just couldn't do at all, and apparently that includes resurrection.

She said they did education, healing, architecture, truth-magic... the Knights were an associated entity rather than part of the church proper, he thinks? Mostly she said the knights were fighting a war with an army of corpses reanimated through blood magic by a lunatic archmage who couldn't be killed and was trying to take over the world. She preferred that to fighting people.

Altarrin forces aside the escalation confusion, his mind repeating 'what? how?' over and over. Focus on the matter at hand.

He'd like to know more about the...corpses reanimated with blood magic??? but unfortunately it seems like Samien doesn't know that much more. So. Moving on. 

...afterlives. He's aware of this from other reports but suspects they were rather incomplete and misleading; he'd like the full, non-misleading version from Samien, please. 

Sure.

Iomedae said that there were multiple afterlives; he didn't understand just how many there were, but probably more than two she mostly talked about. She said she'd personally toured them, and had verified their existence, using planar-travel spells, and that she still talked to people in them sometimes.

She thought that, if you did evil things - rape, murder, theft, executing captives for blood magic, torturing people, that sort of thing - a lot, you would end up in an Evil afterlife, where Evil gods tortured and enslaved you for their own purposes; he's not sure just how many of those there were, but pretty clearly there were different ones depending on different flavors of evil. If you peacefully obeyed the law and didn't do evil things, you'd make it to Axis, which was Aroden's afterlife, and an endless world of civilization with no evil people in it where you can build a new life under benevolent laws and in an exalted civilization. If you are extremely good, you go to Heaven, which is also a benevolent utopia, but is less normal and less devoted to - enjoyment? - than Axis and is completely devoted to defeating Evil in all its forms to make the world better for everyone. There were various other good and neutral afterlives, but she didn't talk about them much. She thought she'd end up going to Heaven, but not that Heaven was better than Axis, just that Axis was much easier for normal people to achieve, and that the actual priority was not ending up in an Evil afterlife.

She thought wars were very bad for the state of your soul, which was one reason she wanted to push for peace, and she thought that one of the main reasons she was opposed to the Empire right at the start was that a lot of Imperial officers are Evil. She was surprised that Samien wasn't, because she assumed that anyone leading a rebellion would be just because of all the hard decisions involved.

...Did she claim that the people of Velgarth would also go to these afterlives. 

(Because that would be a lie. He's checked. He doesn't let this slip in his expression, but - he would make updates based on it, if it turns out that Iomedae did confidently claim this.) 

She said she didn't know but suspected they would, because everyone did in her world. She thought Anathei and Atet might be gods she recognized, but she wasn't sure because of presentation differences.

But she didn't use the planar travel spells to demonstrate this, just spread that teaching? 

She only had the miracles her god gave her to use the day she left, and had to use mage-artifacts to get them back if she cast them. And he didn't give her that one that day.

Which is awfully convenient. 

...or inconvenient, maybe. If his own magic depended on the will of a god, offering him new miracles every day, and he found himself accidentally on another planet, and he had no way to check some of his usual assumptions because he hadn't asked for the right miracles and couldn't get any more now, he - might in fact have failed to notice differences that he wasn't expecting. Especially if all of this were happening in the middle of a highly destructive war, and - she encountered Atet early on, another religious order that claims the existence of an afterlife, it's known to him but it's not actually common knowledge in Velgarth. 

(If he had wandered onto a rebellion in a recently-conquered province being brutally crushed by an Empire run on mind control, without knowing any of the context behind why, he - would also, probably, have supported the rebels.) 

So - maybe not lies. Maybe just a deeply tragic misunderstanding, one among dozens. Hard to know, now. 

(Iomedae might come back, not just to life, but to Velgarth. That is incredibly relevant and Altarrin is notthinkingaboutit right now.)  

...Moving on. He would like to know everything Samien does about the activities and teachings of Aroden's temple order in Oris, the one that Iomedae founded. Do they have priests? Was the hope that their priests would also be granted reliable daily miracles? Has there been any sign of this happening? If not, what else is the temple order doing?