Then she will spend the evening drilling her spells until they go faster.  She was slow this time, but she will not be slow again.

Beating Fifth Eye, or Nerat if that's different, will take some doing. Fifth Eye used to be a trained expert of the Wild Wrath, a school whose shortcomings did not include speed, and then Nerat made, or at least attempted, improvements - and Nerat himself has been practicing for centuries. But, hey, good to have a goal!

Verse spends most of the afternoon outside the camp walls - they don't really trust her and she doesn't much like them.

"Heard you found some of Nerat's hollow birds," she says when she gets back to the tent, "And didn't just kill them? I guess I can see keeping one."

"Mhm.  If they're connected to him, he's connected to them - and maybe we can use that."

"Maybe. They never seemed all that smart, I don't think he paid much attention to them."

"Still...I wonder if we could, actually, make him pay attention.  Perhaps even to the exclusion of keeping a lid on himself - it took only a little light infuriation to get him to lose enough focus that someone seized a mask of his, though he clearly has some contingencies - that staff of his was able to turn the mask back to Nerat.  ...Should probably sit down with Lantry, see what we think we know about - any of that whatsoever, really, especially in light of all this.  ...Might want to have you around to consult any intelligence you have on Nerat, especially with your situation being as it is.  Or on ways to make him want to pay attention to the birds."

"I could send a message with one, using the Voices's spy code? Who knows whether he'd believe it, I'd say 'no' but he clearly thought he'd get something from sticking me with you and saying I should stay there even if he publicly renounced you."

"Oh, I didn't mean like that, I meant - illusions, I suppose, that would draw attention he can't spare to their eyes."

"Maybe. I wouldn't be surprised if he could just - cut their strings. I mean, if you're a spymaster, what's the worst thing that could happen, right? Have your spies caught and interrogated. So he'd want to make Eyes he could cut off whenever."

"True; that's why we want to grasp his end of them before he gets the chance to think twice.  Ideally while he's too desperate to turn down even what's probably an obvious trap, I suppose, but I don't think we're that lucky; the Chorus is too good at reaving."

"No need to go anywhere blind when you can send a dozen conscripts in first and listen to the screams to see what was there. I guess if this lasts a few span he might start to run out, but I think the Disfavored would run low first."

Verse is treated to a searchingly bemused stare, for a few moments.

"...I feel like we're talking past eachother, somehow.  Where'd scouting opportunities even come into befuddling Nerat via his Eye bullshit?"

"What did you mean by 'reaving', then?"

"Oh, I just meant that - I didn't expect Nerat's position to get strategically desperate anytime soon, especially with the low uptake everyone's predicting on the terms of surrender, such that he'd stick his leg in a snare of his own free will."

She scribbles an unrelated note: 'Stasis through Eye link?  Lantry.'

"Anyway - I just had a thought about how to incapacitate Nerat that we might need your and Barik's help testing."

"Oh, yeah, I was just thinking that's what he'd do if you presented him with a trap. If he was desperate enough to try it himself - well, he'd have to have lost a lot of people, and also if he looked that weak he'd probably lose a lot of people. What did you want to try?"

"You might remember that trick I set the few illusionists we had available that could do it, to pulling off as a protective effect?  When Cairn was rampaging?  I'm wondering if we could use his Eyes to freeze Nerat, when he's in a vulnerable position - possibly indefinitely if we have enough birds and casters, I'd have to do the math - but that's not something you want to just hope works.  So, I want to test making it - pause - you and Barik."

"Huh, if you think it could work, sure."

"Well that's what I want to find out!  But I think it ought to be feasible enough to - invest effort into, at least to properly check it."

"It's not likely to do things you weren't aiming for, right? So yeah, that's okay. Rather it not be Lantry doing the casting, though. I don't know how a geezer like him has stayed alive through the wars, so I figure he must still be up to something."

Huh.  "I'm really not sure he has room for more secrets; we already know the big thing, and if he's so good of an actor to fool the both of us - remember the time I went 'fuck Nerat' and you were there and he got all spooked of you being about to stab everybody because he thought you might've liked the fucker, having not known you for more than five seconds?  That's pretty hard to do on the fly - even prepared, really, with no time to refresh your cues because you were strapped to a post and probably on some very real drugs - and if he's that good he may as well be Bleden Mark taking a span off.  ...Which he can't be, by the way, Bleden Mark's outside the zone of death, unless he's really having me on about what he can do with Court mail.  Regardless, I'll do the casting.  It's my project, anyway."

"I don't think he's a plant or really have anything specific I suspect him of, I just... Ehh, never mind. You're the boss anyway."

"No, no, your concerns are important, and your feelings do matter.  I'm kind of gathering that it's mostly along the lines of - him just being too good to be true?  Honestly, I see where you're coming from.  I have to admit I'm still surprised Nerat didn't eat him, myself.  Though given what we know about how the Voices work, maybe that was a non-starter, giving a bunch of people with not just a grudge, but the skills and motivation to exploit it, internal access...  Anyway, if you want me to test the spell, I'll test the spell; I can, I would want to anyway, and you'd prefer it.  Might need to make sure I'm not - cheating in my own way - the once, but it's really not some undue burden.

"...I wonder if there's enough - people - still functioning within that gyre, that they could - all lift together, and properly unseat Nerat.  Aside from what Brennix did, which - it's really frustrating that I could not ask him how, before Nerat just -- ugh.  I hate him.  And I hate that at every step he took, I was just never quite quick enough to stop it.  Whether it was banishing Brennix or teleporting out via Fifth Eye or...

"I'll be quick enough, next time we meet.  No more escaping judgement for him.

"I can at least say that he stood no chance at beating me with words.  He thought he could win an argument about the law with me.  Which is - inordinately stupid.  I mean, no less than Tunon the Adjudicator has said they trust my reasoning to produce appropriate judgements, and he challenges me upon the law, the thing I have specialized in knowing every nuance of?  I don't know who supplied Nerat with Lantry's special stash, but he should have heeded the warnings.  And then he thought that juvenile insults were going to make me lose my composure the way bringing up the Edict of Stone hadn't.  I'll admit, it's a niggling little thought he thunk - but even if every word he said was true - which actually implies I should write to Calio about this; if he really does have some," she intentionally inserts a space as they wend their way through the camp to Ophelia's tent, "body busy watching all the Fatebinders gossip, she ought to be alerted - even if every word he said about the other Fatebinders is true, and they're all 'laughing behind my back' at my penchant for written declarations and, I'll admit, hyper-formal language - whyever should I care, if they're professional to my face and to every standard I can measure my work has never suffered for it?  It's obvious bullshit, regardless - but still.  That was how far he had to dig to find any words worth trying to weaponize - and he still had to lie about it.  Absolute dumbass.  I don't know why he thinks he's clever; if I put some of my people up against some of his people in some sort of information-gathering contest I bet Welby would whip his ass while he was still trying to figure out who to blackmail to let him cheat, that woman's not just keen and attentive to detail, but thorough, and then Calio's been thwarting him for decades - she's not even an Archon, you know?  Just an ordinary person.

"Nerat's just...So painfully bad at his posture of - intellectual superiority, even his cunning, just coasting along by having enough knives to make people grimace - excuse me, I mean smile, and nod, when he says something absurd and asks if it's profound.  And he tried to come at me - when I put the unstolen work in to make myself who I am today, with every dusty tome I studied, with every decision I weighed the costs of - he tried to raise a strike against my solid bastion of law, by sneaking through my home fields of understanding people.

"Needless to say, but I'll say it again - that was an absolutely idiotic move.

"Almost makes me want to pity him, but then I'd be pitying Nerat.

"Oh, hey, here we are.  Goodness.  Time flies when you're having fun."

(And also accomplishing some other things, like spreading some useful rumors and perhaps, even, rehabilitating Verse in the Disfavored's eyes to some extent, by showing their common enemy!  She hopes, at least!)

"I think even when the Voices aren't letting someone else use the face they're still - well, 'they'. Nerat's probably the original, and probably he has much more control than anyone else, but they're insane. For all I know they're working at cross purposes with themselves all the time and they're just good enough at it that it's still useful. That is kind of how they taught the Chorus to work."

"Ah, trying to understand the Archon of Secrets, one of the most ill-advised of intellectual challenges," Lantry says as they walk in, glancing over briefly, "I suspect this is one subject where 'Kyros only knows' is more than just a figure of speech. And he's welcome to it, I like my relative sanity intact."

"Well.  Kyros's name is hardly supposed to be a figure of speech, so I'm glad you're not using it that way.  But in this case...we do know a few things, and I'm hoping to use some of that knowledge, and some of our knowledge, to put a proper stop to Nerat.  So what do you say to seeing if there's a way to enstasis something that's magically entangled with something else?"