He doesn't get it in two days.

He has the basic technique down. He could probably even reach another planet, one corresponding to a star he can see in the sky, if he had a specific-enough search-target to aim at. 

Iomedae's world is apparently much, much further than that, though; he tries it, with Aritha's current search-spell as of the end of her next day of work, and he doesn't think it fails, exactly, but it can't find anything within the distance he can reach. He's pretty sure even a thousand lives worth of blood-magic wouldn't be enough unless he can somehow cut down on that impossible distance. 

Figuring that out is the part that takes him most of a week. 

He's not really leaving himself time to think about anything other than research, except for the occasional quiet pointless five-minute panic attack in his Work Room. He's...pretty sure this is a mistake...but it's not a mistake he sees a way out of, he's under too many constraints and juggling too many threats and hurting in too many ways, and the time pressure is real and at least something he can focus on and turn into forward motion.

(To the research leads supervising him, who only interact with him during scheduled checkins and when he updates them at the end of a work session, he continues to seem preoccupied, and very stressed, but otherwise stable.) 

After a week of working twelve candlemarks a day - well, mostly at night, so Aritha can use the headband while he's asleep - he thinks he has it figured out. The generic search-spell is picking up on something, at least, juuuuuust at the limit of his reach. He's pretty sure he could Gate, and end up - somewhere - that is magical in the way Aritha's search-spell is trying to find. 

(He could get the routing more efficient with another month, he thinks, by going back to fundamentals and figuring out an actually-elegant model of how the planes fit together. He's not going to do that right now.) 

He...also doesn't want to Gate somewhere blindly, especially since he's not sure it is Iomedae's world. What if there's more than one. 

Another half-day of work gets him to the point of being able to adapt the search-spell and planar routing to work with scrying. The power requirement is very high, compared to scrying anything in Velgarth, even on the other side of the continent or through shields, but he thinks he can manage a few seconds. 

...He would try to use Iomedae as a target, but he's never actually scried for her as a target as opposed to her artifacts, and he doesn't know that she's alive.

He asks the research team to assemble the artifacts, and sorts them by approximate complexity. Which ones are around the middle of that spread? The dagger is too simple, Aritha thinks she could learn to replicate it without needing many theoretical breakthroughs, and he wouldn't be surprised if there are hundreds or thousands like it. The headband, on the other hand, is absurdly complex and - if Iomedae was a legendary hero in her own world - might be unique, something that took the best mage in the world thousands of candlemarks of work, and that only a living legend could afford to own.

He wants something vaguely in the middle, such that there might be others of its type belonging to other less legendary warriors, but not hundreds of copies. 

Aritha decided somewhere along the way that it's probably better for Archmage-General Altarrin to be the one shaping your mind for his purposes than Mage-General Kottras and since then she's been fantastically useful. She nominates the shield-amulet the priestess was wearing; it's expensive if she's right about what makes things like this expensive, but it's not priceless. Dozens not hundreds sounds about right.

(Altarrin likes working with Aritha. He would like it even more if he wasn't miserable and if his mind didn't keep quietly reminding him of what she could be in Urtho's Tower and why he can't have that here.) 

He takes her advice. He doesn't think this part is especially dangerous to bystanders, and he does want someone on hand to pull him out of it if he's about to drain himself unconscious trying to get a better look, so Aritha is welcome to come sit with him in the Work Room while he targets an initial search on 'this shield amulet, but not the one here, the one(s) over there.' 

And...? 

Many of the wearers of powerful Amulets of Natural Armor are important nobles; those also tend to possess good antiscrying shields. 

Some of them are heroic adventurers, but powerful adventurers do tend to make enemies, and those too often try not to be scried.

That leaves crusaders, who tend to rely in the field on their very good Will saves, which is not the thing Velgarth scrying interacts with. And so Altarrin's spell finds Marit, fifth-circle sword-wizard and paladin-in-the-honorary-nonmagical-sense of the Knights of Ozem, occupied as he usually is these days in holding the undead off the back of the army as it prepares to take Urgir. 

That looks incredibly worrying and also Altarrin can probably only get fifteen or twenty seconds before he's risking giving himself backlash and being unable to do anything else for the rest of today. (Also, he can't overpower it any harder to get clearer mage-sight, because he's already overpowering the spell about as hard as it can take in order to reach the world at all.) 

That...doesn't not look like Iomedae's world. The person wearing the artifact doesn't not look like someone who could have been Iomedae's ally. (Or maybe Iomedae's enemy? He has so little context to work with...) 

With fifteen seconds of scrying time, what else can he pick up? He's mostly looking for nearby very powerful and distinctive artifacts to use as future scrying targets. (He'll also try to gauge what time of day it is, because if he can scry them at camp, rather than in the middle of a battle, maybe he can learn more off actual conversation.) 

The most distinctive magic item around is probably the crusader's banner fluttering very very wearily nearby; it provides a continual hallow effect in a forty-foot radius, with death ward as the added spell hallow offers. It has Aroden's holy symbol on it, and it's glowing VERY VERY MAGICALLY.

Ustalav tends to be overcast, and this isn't an exception, but it doesn't seem to be night. (Not that there isn't fighting at night. One of the big advantages of undead armies is that they can attack at any hour without much difficulty.)

He doesn't recognize the magic but it's certainly distinctive, enough that he thinks he could target it directly on a scry. 

He does recognize the symbol. It was on every temple to Aroden that he scried in Oris. 

So. He appears to have found Iomedae's allies. 

...and then he has to drop the spell before it drains him too far, but he's seen enough. 

He turns to Aritha, blinking away the black spots in his vision. "I think we found Iomedae's world. ...I need to rest. You can have the headband - if you can squeeze out slightly more efficiency for the scry, I can hold it longer when I try next." 

And he'll stagger out of the work room and confirm his success to the research lead. He's grey-faced with exhaustion and not entirely steady on his feet, but in the way you would expect from a mage who's pushed themselves moderately past their limits. 

Aritha's pretty sure that anything that tires Altarrin that much she can't do at all, but she's not going to turn down the headband or the chance to think about magical theory more.

Altarrin collapses into bed and sleeps like a rock for three candlemarks, and eventually drags himself awake and sits down to write an actual coherent report to the Emperor on what he found. The gist is that Iomedae's allies seem to be in a rather complicated situation right now, and while he thinks this could overall play in the Empire's favor - it has to reduce the risk that Iomedae's Knights of Ozem will pick a fight, and increase the odds that they will instead be willing to make a deal with the Empire in exchange for help (if it turns out the Empire can offer that cheaply, which seems entirely possible given their very different magic.) 

And then he heads back to join up with Aritha again, take back the headband, and try her very slightly tweaked and very slightly more efficient search-spell to find the incredibly magical banner again on a scry. 

Urgir is originally a Dwarven fortress, which means it's going to be very very difficult to breach the walls, entirely separate from the general horrors of sacking a city once you get that far. They've had it invested for nearly a year, with no externally visible indications this has made their lives any easier at all; it seems plausible enough Tar-Baphon is supplying the city by Teleport, with enough food for those of his soldiers that eat if not for anyone else. There are other explanations. Maybe there are underground tunnels. Maybe there's a demiplane where food grows in abundance, laid in place by ancient Dwarven architects. (Underground agricultural caverns don't explain it. Those are delicate; they wouldn't be successfully manned by Tar Baphon's orc servants.) Maybe the orcs are eating each other.

It doesn't matter. This fight won't get notably easier if they besiege the place five years; they will have to do it now. They've been picking off the defenders on the walls with flying raids, but there's more where those came from, and no obvious shortcuts. 

(They would like to capture the place intact, so it can serve as a base of operations for next campaign season. But they'd like a lot of things they are not obviously going to get.)

"I don't suppose you've thought of anything brilliant."

"Brilliant? No. I've got half a dozen ways to take a gate, but everything I've thought of to get us past both the walls is risky. Or a brute-force approach that gets a lot of our men killed. It might be feasible to come up from below the city like the orcs did thousands of years ago, that has a number of problems but maybe tractable ones - we could take an inner gate with a small strike team and assault the outer walls with ladders, that probably only kills a quarter as many of our men as storming both - we could sneak a strike team into the city and kidnap one of the enemy wizards, learn from him how to bypass the teleportation wards, then teleport teams in - I assume it is still the case that Heaven is unwilling to send us a corps of angels if I open a gate for them - I could open a gate to the abyss from a thousand feet up and pour demons down into the city but that creates additional problems - "

Most of the Knights get annoyed with Alfirin when she proposes unleashing a horde of demons on a populated city. Iomedae - doesn't. She'll be furious if Alfirin actually does it, but no one dies of the words, and - you'd want to have enough mental scouts posted that you'd notice if it actually were the best available tradeoff, right, you don't want half your mental scouts asleep at their post as they're never called for.

Heaven is not going to send a host of angels to take the city for them. She suspects this is more about god-agreements than scruples; individual summoned angels and archons are willing to fight for them, even in this, once they've talked to Iomedae. 

"I think I want to take a team in to take the inner gate while the main force under Marit storms the outer one," she says, after not actually all that long. At some point you can tell that your thought processes are treading no new ground, and at that point you have to force yourself to call them to a halt and pick something. "I'd be more sure if I had my sword and my armor and my ioun stones but I still expect we can hold the inner gate indefinitely, if we call in a lot of favors in advance preparing. The big risk is that Tar-Baphon decides to show and we have to abandon the inner gate to go meet him, but - honestly, if he's going to show, I don't much prefer to have us out front. And I'd expect he's likelier to try something before the attack than the day of the attack when we've bought a bunch of spell immunities we don't ordinarily have."

"That's what I thought you'd say - the risk is that if things go badly that team might have a hard time getting out whether that's to escape or to confront Tar-Baphon elsewhere - No teleportation or planar travel, the gate mechanisms are indoors so flying out isn't an option if they're caught there - relatedly I'm not sure if we should both be on that team."

"...I think if it's workable there are some other reasons to prefer going through the darklands - On balance I think it's worth delaying the decision another day to see if I can solve the practical difficulties, unless there's been unexpectedly bad news from Marit's rearguard today - no? - Once we're in the city some of the orcs will run. Not just the civilians, some of the soldiers too. If they run into the caves we'll be dealing with nighttime raids from inside the walls for the next six months. If we're attacking from below - we can open the siege lines, leave them a line of retreat to the west, and block the main darklands entrances. I am probably overestimating the chance that this will work out of - sentimentality - I've tried to correct for that in my assessment that it's worth the delay, but you should check me on that."

She removes her headband and hands it over wordlessly.

It's the most powerful kind of intelligence headband mortal hands can make, and without it Alfirin is smarter than Iomedae is when she's wearing it. 

Though Detect Thoughts does not in fact capture everything that matters. 

Gods are fragmented, paying attention to millions of things across an unknowable number of worlds; much of the art of being a god is figuring out how best to use the fragments of your own attention to notice things worth promoting to more of it, how to do as much of the work of making sense of the world as possible with as little intelligence as possible, how to build complex pieces out of simple ones. It is the rare fragment of a god's intelligence that is more intelligent than Iomedae. It's enough, if you have the right habits for using it, for building something greater than it out of its pieces. 

She breaks the plans down in her head into their natural fragments - what happens if they go as expected, what happens if they go badly, or really badly - well, or really well - matches them up against each other and tugs at the places where her thinking feels shakiest, where there are steps that she hasn't envisioned concretely enough - what happens next, what happens immediately after that - what does that specific kind of nagging confusion usually cash out to on the battlefield -

"One more day," she says. "I expect you still won't have a good angle, but it'd be worth it, if you did."

If she were speaking to anyone else she'd give advice, about what checks to run inside yourself when you suspect that the impulse to Good inside you isn't pointed in the same direction as achieving your objectives at acceptable cost. She wouldn't call it sentimentality; it's too close to framing it as a weakness. She has said all those things to Alfirin, and Alfirin found some of them convincing and some of them not, and those gulfs that remain between them aren't the kinds words can cross.

She gives the headband back. 

The hard part, of course, is navigation. The darklands are notoriously convoluted; The crusade has dwarves with it, but none who are thousands of years old and might remember the particular network of caves below Koldukar. Ghosts sometimes persist for thousands of years - are there any rumors of hauntings here? Convenient ways to summon up a ghost?

There might be dark elves but - she would not bet at five to one odds in her favor that dark elves aren't a myth, and presumably even if real they don't exist everywhere in the darklands...

A find the path spell would find a way into the city from the darklands but ideally they want multiple paths, and the shortest path from wherever they cast it isn't likely to be one that can transit a larger body of troops -

Druids have spells for navigating unfamiliar wilderness. Low-circle spells, even. Maybe they work underground? Or have underground variants? She's not going to reengineer them as wizard spells in a day, but she knows druids. (She does not know any cave-dwelling druids who are the most likely to have a useful variation but perhaps she knows druids who know druids who know cave-dwelling druids)

- If there's no convenient entrance nearby but outside the city, maybe she can dig in? Move earth won't do it, but perhaps summoned elementals? Or - there are spells for flight and swimming, there are presumably spells for digging even if she doesn't happen to have any herself - druids might have those too -

...That's enough leads to take up her day if she doesn't think of any better.

"Thank you. I'll probably be leaving to do some research in Absalom and elsewhere - " Telepathic Bond - "so you can call me back if there's an emergency. ah - Transmuter, dwarf, red beard, what was her name - Nonden? Neddam? Whose command was she under, if you remember?"

"Neddam, under Arshas. I'm going to ask Aroden if He's got any opinions on our options, here, and then relieve Marit for the night. May you realize all our hopes."

When Altarrin next gets a scry up, Iomedae is there, in angel-winged flight, fighting some kind of many-limbed batlike demon-creature. 

(And, importantly, the ninth-circle wizard who would've noticed being scried even with an unfamiliar magic doing it is not there.)

He's at-least-somewhat rested going into it this time, and actually remembered to eat, and had a sugary drink half a candlemark ago (for some reason this delays backlash and even the research-Healers aren't sure why), and also he knows where to look, on a scale much more precise than 'which planet' - he's not going to waste a lot of his previous reserves just on spooling out a relatively imprecise search-spell to find the right world. That alone will get him to being able to hold it for a whole minute before he starts to risk backlash. 

Also, while he can't use a standard powered scrying-artifact for the search component, which is decidedly nonstandard and probably still too underspecified and running-on-intuition to teach to anyone else let alone lay down as a set-spell, he's set it up this time so he can at least drain the power reservoir. That can get him to several minutes, if it seems justified. 

He casts the spell. 

Iomedae is alive. 

This has....a lot of strategically relevant consequences. (Many of them are paths he can't follow because there are walls in the way; over a week of working with the headband, Altarrin has gotten very accustomed to navigating those constraints.)

Anyway, while he's in the middle of holding a scry isn't a good time to be thinking through them, though, so he sets it aside, and just - 

(- notices that he's glad and relieved and it feels a little more like maybe something can be salvaged, it feels a little more like there might be a light at the end of all of this -)

....Just focus on observing as much as he can, in the first...call it 45 seconds...he has no way to do anything except "Gate in" (which would exhaust his remaining reserves, so he wouldn't be very able to fight afterward) and he needs to make a call on whether this is even a good time to be collecting intelligence. 

What happens, in those 45 seconds? 

She kills the bat thing, sweeps on down to engage a second bat thing that's ripping its way through her men, kills that one too, heals everyone, and then takes off fast to go help some men farther down the line with the skeleton archers who are firing on them from the nearby hills.

She looks - tired, but tired in the manner of someone in the tenth hour of the tenth day of a march, not tired in the manner of someone handling an unexpected emergency. The bats were expected, the casualties were expected, she has been doing this all night and will do it all morning so Marit has some time to contemplate plans for the primary assault. Her Ring of Sustenance is back to functioning.