Her Mind-voice is slightly more formal, in response to this, but not angry, and not dangerous. :I so swear. I will depart this building doing violence to no one who hasn't tried to do violence to me, whatever you tell me. I have no intent to oblige you to answer any questions, save insofar as I might refuse to work for you if too much is unanswered.:

"No side effects. You can always decline to answer a question, and I won't ask what I evidently shouldn't know."

"Understood. Boys, out. She won't stab me, I can tell."

And Iomedae puts her hand to her chest (the gesture isn't necessary, but if no one's seen her cast spells paralyzed they might assume she can't, which would be convenient for her), and casts Zone of Truth. And while she can easily throw off her own spells - she can usually throw off Tar-Baphon's - she does not do so. She smiles evenly at him.

And once the guards have left: "Have you lied to me, in our conversation so far?"

"I am not Marshal Orestan, I'm his body double who he's feeding lines with Mindspeech. So. Define 'you.'"

- she laughs. " - all right. I would appreciate it if he'd come here and be subject to the spell, but I understand if that's out of the question at the moment. Do you, the person I am speaking with and the only one subject to this spell, know anything he asked you to say to be a lie?"

"Well, we're revealing a military secret right now. Other than that, no; he didn't ask me to say much. He copied me everything he was saying directly to you, and the only possibly false statements I noticed were that it's possible there have been times the gods weren't on his side and I don't know if 'a dozen' is an exact number of the times they saved his life."

"Do you yourself work for, or do you know anyone in the revolution to work for, any gods of torment, slavery or tyranny?"

"No."

:In the interests of complete accuracy we are supported by Holy Ithik, whose god is the one I assume you heard rumors of, but he doesn't seem to have any interest in torture, just propagating the status quo.:

:I am not going to begrudge you an alliance with everyone it's useful to ally with, you'd be stupid to do anything else, but I will want to check with someone other than you that it isn't an aspect of my own world's god of tyranny who is also concerned with those other things, and who likes lying to mortals. I'll let you know if I learn anything.:

"Do you think Marshal Orestan deals with people honestly? Lawfully, if that has a different meaning to you?"

He pauses to consider. "We're all breaking the laws here. I think that he's trying to balance that and a lot of other considerations, and sometimes - like, say, me - the balance comes down on the other side."

"Would he give his word falsely?"

"I doubt it."

"Arrange and then betray a ceasefire for peace negotiations, if it was a really good opportunity to kill the Emperor or something?"

"I don't know. I expect it would depend on whether he thought the other side was going to live up to it."

"Kill an innocent person?" Because if he insists that his commander would never do that then he's just found a way around her truth spell, and if he says something diplomatic and meaningless then that's probably also how to interpret the last several answers.

"You kill a lot of innocent people in war. I expect he already has."

:I have. For the freedom of Oris and before, for worse reasons. If that's where you draw the line, it's drawn.:

:I'm not drawing lines, right now, just trying to understand them.:

"Do you have questions for me? I know you're taking my word for it about the spell working at all."

"Quite a lot, actually." Also, he has a sense for people, and it's not picking up much from Iomedae but that might not mean much. "Have you lied to us in this conversation?"

Turnabout's fair play.

"No. To my recollection, which is generally very good, I have not lied to anyone since I arrived in this world, though I've elided my capabilities in various ways, sometimes intending specifically that people assume something wrong about them."

"Are you currently intending to take action against us?"

"No. I intend to make the Empire cut it out in Oris and possibly elsewhere, pending further research, and you're clearly doing a notably good job here, and I intend and want to help. If I changed my mind about that I would tell you, unless I'd changed my mind because I'd learned you were lying about a lot of really important stuff, in which case I wouldn't feel any urge to be more honest than you'd been."

"Seems fair. Do you know of very important resources we could use to help win that you aren't telling us about?"