"The sane explanation is that His Imperial Majesty has a secret spell for bypassing compulsions and a dozen other secret spells and a really well-trained child infiltrator -" or just very small person with a magically-aided resemblance to such "- and this is an elaborate loyalty test."

"Sounds plausible."

"I don't know why he's letting us know he has a way to bypass compulsions, but that's a question of psychology, not - possibility." His Imperial Majesty isn't some kind of sadist who likes torturing people before disposing of them, if he wants Janos dead he can just summon him to the palace and have him executed, and Janos doesn't understand why he'd entrust him (him and Seiran) with a secret like this if there was any way they'd live, but, again, psychology.

... The thing is, if this is a loyalty test, the thing that best serves the Emperor is to do the maximally loyal thing, and the thing that serves the Empire is to the thing that won't get him executed.

And if this isn't a loyalty test, and the Emperor will believe that Dalan is real, the correct thing is -

- The correct thing is probably to find out more, and then to tell the Emperor about immortality immediately, but the more they can spend his time instead of the Emperor's time, the better.

Which, of course, might get him killed if it, again, is a loyalty test.

Janos does not like politics, but it's not like there's anything else out there.

Well, you could just be the loyal flunky to someone who has to do politics.

The curse of being the best, yes.

The governor will want to see Dalan again!

Leareth is much more impaired than he would prefer to be for navigating this! He's tired, because apparently pushing a brain that recently belonged to a random thirteen-year-old through "remembering" (and significantly re-deriving) the Imperial notation for ten complex spells is a lot to ask right now. He - should be thinking further ahead - 

- the wait wasn't that long. Long enough for a well-trained Adept already familiar with the standard non-secret repertoire of spells to skim his notes, but probably not long enough to, for example, Gate anyone else in to consult with them. If he judged this right, they're now going to be a lot readier to take this seriously, but - still, probably, considering a lot of hypotheses other than the one where everything he's said so far is true.

From a straightforward perspective, he should - try to focus on giving them information that makes it seem less likely he's lying about some or all of the situation? But he also needs to take into account that an Imperial Adept and important provincial official will be under compulsions of his own, and Leareth doesn't want to accidentally wedge him into...some course of action that wouldn't benefit either of their goals here. Unfortunately, thinking about how to prioritize two different goals like that is already almost more than he can manage right now. 

He will cooperatively follow the guard back for further questioning, trying not to look too visibly exhausted. 

The child-imposter-immortal is tired, or pretending very plausibly to be tired.

"You have convinced me you have access to classified imperial spells the thirteen-year-old son of a minor baron absolutely could not know," says Janos. "Tell me your story, and I'll see if I believe it."

It would be easier to start by saying things he's now pieced together in his head about his past in the Empire, but - the problem is that it's basically not verifiable (and also if he tries to imagine hearing it, it mostly sounds too absurd and, well, something-from-a-tale-or-ballad, to be true, which - probably they aren't still entertaining that he's just insane, given the spells, but it seems better to give more evidence against that before saying things that sound deeply implausible.)  

Which means he should prooobably just take the leap and say the part that feels like an unreasonably terrifying point of no return. But - better to have it like this, probably, while he has some control of the conversation. And, just like with Vanyel, he's certainly not going to be able to get anywhere without revealing his hand a lot more than feels comfortable. (Though in that years-long dance with Vanyel, at least he had time to think between their conversations, and wasn't exhausted and disoriented and nearly helpless in a child's body...)

He takes a deep breath.

"I keep records caches to return to when I incarnate in a new body, so that I can orient and resupply with talismans and such, and there is very likely one within a hundred miles of here. I cannot rely on remembering their exact locations, so I choose places that would be...very characteristic of me...and generally I can find one within a few weeks. Faster if I had access to maps and Gate-capable Adepts. I am not sure it would be enough to fully confirm everything I am claiming, but - I do think I made some sort of plan for how to prove my immortality to a skeptical audience, in case that were ever relevant, and I could look up what it was." 

Leareth pauses for breath, and to try to gauge how the Imperial official is reacting. He deeply hates how unsure he is about whether any of that was an irretrievable miscalculation to say. 

He nods slowly. None of it is implausible; dangerous, of course, but if he was an immortal who came back under dangerous circumstances, he'd want to have secure caches. "You need to have Gate-capable adepts working under you, or you need to provide them with cache locations?" There is an obvious correct answer and an obvious Pushing The People Who Are Asking You Questions answer, but nonetheless...

"...I mean, I assume I usually do not do have Gate-capable Adepts whose help I can count on at all? And need to -" what even would have been his default plan, here, "- run away and sleep rough, and buy or steal maps until I can guess where the closest one is and travel there on foot – and by the point I arrive I would have been pushing my Gift hard enough that I could manage a Gate at all if the distance were literally ten yards so I could get in, I am not sure they are accessible from the outside at all without Gating. I was assuming you would not want to wait for weeks, and I am also in - more of a hurry than usual, for reasons I can get into later - and so if you have maps, and are willing to invest your Adepts' time, I think I could give you a spot on a map and some pointers for what your people should look for." 

Leareth haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaates this, the giving-up-control and how all-or-nothing it is which secrets he's handing over, and he's not entirely managing to conceal it. 

He nods. "We can manage that." Obviously giving him maps is a slight risk, given how ambiguously a prisoner he is, but it's not as though maps of the province are classified. "Is there anything you need now?"

(Leareth personally does not feel like it's at all ambiguous that he's a prisoner. And it's not like he could do anything with maps, though he supposes in the hypothetical where he did have a way around compulsions, he might have more options which he's not bothering to try to think of because he does not, in fact, have a way around the compulsions even though he would REALLY LIKE TO.) 

"I could do with water to drink. Otherwise, no." 

Oh no, he's not ambiguously between "a prisoner" and "free," he's ambiguous between "a prisoner" and "a conscript." The Eastern Empire never really bought the idea of individual rights, not when the greater good was so shiny.

"We'll get you water." And once it's been long enough food. And Janos can start putting maps and Adepts together, to have the maps delivered to Dalan once they've got him.

(Which both amount to "prisoner" from Leareth's perspective, because either way he desperately needs to get back to the north before things explode even further in Valdemar, and he can't leave. ...He's not thinking much about whether and how his people are likely to be looking for him, since he would rather that thread not be pulled out of his head if they switch to more coercive questioning later, but he doesn't need to think about it much to know that it's not something he could count on happening soon. He could be anywhere in the world.) 

He drinks his water and waits. 

And then they will bring him maps! He's in Faun Kar province, right at the western end of the Empire next to Hardorn, and while his Compulsions not to leave prevent him from crossing the border, they're pretty close to being the only thing that does.

(He NOTICED. It's FRUSTRATING. ....Being frustrated won't help and he tries to stop that. The stopping-that is not working as an atomic mental motion, which he thinks it normally would, but he can at least mostly set it aside with some effort.) 

The provincial borders have been redrawn since he was last operating here, maybe several times, which makes the maps feel weirdly disorienting. Leareth doesn't remember clearly what he expects to see, just that this is somehow not it.

Are there any old observatories within a hundred-mile radius, that would be the obvious one– correction, within a hundred miles but definitely not in Hardorn, it feels awkward to ask the Imperial official to send his Adepts Gating into another country. He'll also look for old mines (steel mines feel most plausible, gem-mines not so much), or abandoned schools, or even just any feature of the landscape that feels like it would have stood out memorably to his past self. And pays attention to vague feelings of half-familiarity, of course, but he can't reliably count on even having that. 

...No observatories or at least none labeled clearly as such, but there's an old, presumably now abandoned marble quarry at the place where two river tributaries join, maybe six or seven miles upstream of a town informatively called Three Mills with a nearby provincial mage-school. He doesn't think he would have put a site in or near the town itself, too heavily-frequented, but the quarry would have supplied a lot of the town and school's construction, and it - feels right. 

He can point it out to someone rather than drawing directly on the Imperial official's good maps.

Also he knows that he uses a shielding set-spell that he's fairly sure no one else in the world knows, that blocks even the Imperial variants on the communication-spell (though he assumes he knows, or once knew, one that can get through at least in the outward direction). He's not going to write the entire thing down, for one that would take hours and he doesn't think it could be used as a scrying-target anyway, but he'll write down a notation-block. Once they get close, he thinks it should be noticeable from the ground surface to a skilled Adept who knows exactly what to be looking for, since he would have to be able to find it. 

...There are almost certainly wards that bite and he doesn't remember what they are in enough detail to leave any instructions for that, he thinks he must rely on pure procedural memory and instincts to know what to deactivate first. But a trained Adept with Imperial-quality shield-talismans would probably be all right? 

The Imperials are going to take his notes, thank him, their servants are of course going to make sure he's fed and watered, and the Imperial battle-adepts are going to start prepping defenses for an assault into a defended area. They'll see about getting close so they can scry, establish a forward base camp near Three Mills - 

(They will not Farsee into the camp. That's not a card you play if you want it to stay secret.)

- and finish preparations for the strike. The plan is to try to scry for the distinctive signature, then Gate someone expendable in loaded up with wards -

Seiran volunteers!

- expendable in. Then the serious adepts, also heavily warded, can follow and build up a properly combined shield and start disassembling the traps.

How well does this go?

There's in fact an underground, sealed, very thoroughly shielded and warded room, where the very thorough shielding includes the particular weird shield-variant that "Dalan" wrote out them. 

There are absolutely defenses. The expendable mage's talismans are going to take heavy damage and the mage themselves will end up stunned and caught by a paralysis-spell, but nothing that gets through the shields is actually lethal.  

(There are also alarms. If this had been one of Leareth's more often-frequented locations in the north or in Rethwellan and a potential fallback to Gate to if he were injured in a fight, or been at higher risk of being stumbled upon by accident, or even just if it had been a bigger cache with more in the way of irreplaceable artifacts stored there, it might have been included in the network of obfuscated locations that he has people in his organization set up to watch. Leareth has hundreds of caches of this size and approximate importance, though, and setting up wards that will warn him personally is much cheaper than including an additional site in the bonus surveillance system. A week ago, an alarm would have gone to Leareth. The wards aren't keyed to him in his current body, though, and in any case it's not like he would be learning anything new or be able to do anything about it if he did get a warning that his records cache is being invaded by Imperial Adepts.) 

The traps are very well laid and an enormous pain to disassemble, but even Leareth's best work is subject to power-storage limitations, and once the traps have been discharged once on the expendable mage, the rest can get in under a shield without injury and have time to work on the problem. 

The room is quite small and contains a single crate of extremely high-quality shield-talismans. The remaining crates are full of preservation-spelled paper records. 

Do the shield talismans possess insights not known to the Imperial army, or are they just very well-made?

Time to read the papers!