What an Iomedaen evil archmage. Probably she wouldn't appreciate being told that.

Well, at least it's better than Razmir.

"To get a better sense of your request," Cansellarion asks, "Are you intending to operate against us during the course of this war? I think it might be difficult for us to pretend we didn't notice, if during the course of this war we find you - abducting Lastwall's citizens and torturing them, or something -"

She doesn't roll her eyes because that would be rude, and she's trying to be diplomatic. It's not that ridiculous a question to ask if they don't know very much about her, except insofar as someone in her position less inclined toward sincere cooperation against their common enemies could just lie.

"While we are openly allied I will not start new operations or plots aimed at harming Lastwall's direct interests. To the extent feasible I will abort or pause any ongoing operations and plots aimed at harming Lastwall's direct interests. I will not use resources you have provided me with in order to do things I believe that you would disapprove of unrelated to this war. If I am engaged in activities unrelated to this war which I believe you would disapprove of, or if I start any such activities, I will attempt to deprioritize them to the same extent that I would if I were not allied with you. I am not as good at that as Iomedae was. I will not start any new espionage targeted at Lastwall or at the Glorious Reclamation. If I have any existing information-gathering operations targeted at Lastwall or the Glorious Reclamation I will not actively advance them, though I also will not order them stopped; if I have any such operations which report back to me regularly I will keep taking reports. Is that satisfactory?"

What an Iomedaen evil archmage.

"It sounds," Cansellarion says carefully, "like you intend not to start new operations targeting Lastwall's people and institutions, and like you don't intend to wind down ones that are ongoing without requiring maintenance. What about ongoing ones that require some maintenance - re-casting spells..." like dominate person, perhaps?

Probing, Alex?

"If I have spells ongoing which need to be recast regularly, I will do that. If they need maintenance because you dispelled them I won't."

Which means there will probably still be dominated people in Lastwall reporting to her against their will, though Cansellarion having license to try to find them all is not in fact worth one fewer allied archmage, so he won't push.

Marit's current read which he's not going to helpfully volunteer is that Alfirin is not in fact abducting and torturing anybody but absolutely refuses to admit this as relevant, or seek any kind of agreement of the sort that only exists between people who are mutually not doing any abducting and torturing. 

…that's not a surprising way for Alfirin to turn out, really.

"So I'm just an old cavalry general and I'm not always sure I'm following conversations like this, can you just confirm that I've got this right - you're offering to help us out in the war against Hell, and to stop any hypothetical abduction of our citizens that you're doing for the duration of the war, and in exchange you want us to not take the help you're offering and use it to stab you in the back."

"Approximately!"

"And that's it? You don't want to be the new Queen of Cheliax, you don't want an archduchy or a sack full of diamonds or anything? Amnesty for your past misdeeds? A free pass for future ones?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"...Pardon, do you mean to say it's ridiculous to imagine you might want any of those things or ridiculous to imagine you're not asking for them?"

"It's not ridiculous to imagine I might want some of those things, but I would not demand them as the price for working together against our common enemy. And though I'm sure you'd try to pay me in diamonds, if we came to terms on that, I can't imagine you'd agree to an amnesty for past evils when you don't even know what those past evils are."

"I think we want some lawyers," says Heliu, "To write this all up, in language we all agree on, and make sure there aren't any loopholes or tricks before we commit."

"Go ahead, having it all spelled out formally should help avoid misunderstandings. But I'm not trying to trick you here and I'll swear to it."

"You could lie."

Someone noticed. Besides Alex, that is.

"If I'm willing to break my oath, how will a contract save you?"

"We'd at least have something to point to, to outside observers -"

She gives up and rolls her eyes. "If it pleases you."

"I think the most important element is actually - if it looks to us like you are abusing this agreement to abuse our people while we are committed to not using our knowledge of you to respond, then is the agreement void? What clarification should we seek before we consider the agreement void? The lawyers cannot prevent you from breaking your word, but they can make it clear under what circumstances we'd be breaking ours, and lay out some degree of breaking-your-word where we're allowed to respond. While ensuring that this conclusion won't be arrived at accidentally if you are mostly keeping to what you've outlined here."

"Sure, get the lawyers. I assume Lastwall has some and you're not contracting out to the Abadarans, but if you are and for any required arbitration I prefer the church of Abadar outside of Osirion."

"We can do that for arbitration, yes, and have our own lawyers to draft it."

"Are we in this room the only parties to this agreement, or is there anyone else?" Cansellarion asks. "Clepati, who already knows who you are, for example, or Morgethai since a lot of the ways we'd most benefit from open cooperation involve multi-archmage operations… or anyone else who we should avoid investigating?"