"Nah, for the day. Give it like twelve hours off and it'll be good as new."

:That seems fine, then, unless we expect to need it urgently for a non-Leareth-related purpose. I'll try for maybe-Leareth's-spymaster, then: 

She does so. 

Nope.

Horse-sigh. :Maybe he's shielded too. Van, want to give it a go? You were watching through my eyes for part of it, you saw what he looked like, no?: 

"I did get a look at him, probably not as well as you did." Vanyel can take a turn. 

There he is!

He's on the move! This is helpful, since the scrying spell follows him. Not that it's obvious where exactly he is relative to Leareth, but he's indoors, in a hallway, and probably not more than eight hundred feet away, it hasn't been long. 

He stops at a door and goes in and talks to a dark-skinned woman about magic research, asks her to check in with Leareth after. (It doesn't sound like they've made much advancement.)

Vanyel provides the best running commentary he can, but it's not very interesting so far. 

Then the man reaches a meeting-room with a much larger number of people in it! He seems to be briefing them on something, though the details are cryptic; he hands out envelopes to them, presumably the more detailed orders are in writing.

One of them, a youngish red-haired man, reads his orders and then heads off immediately at a brisk pace. 

"At a guess, he's briefing more spies? Maybe sending them into Valdemar. I'm going to try to follow this one again." He releases the spell and tries switching to the redhead. 

This works fine. 

Excellent! Then Vanyel will follow the presumed spy. 

The man stops at a room with some bunk beds in it, and packs quickly, and grabs what look like Bardic Scarlets. (It's a horrible look with his hair.) Then he heads off with his travel-bag. 

Down some stairs. 

...Unfortunately it doesn't look like he's going to go outside, because he stops at what's very clearly a dedicated Gate threshold. (Of course; it wouldn't make sense to send your spies off on foot, all the way across the mountains to Valdemar.)

There's a window he passed, though, and Vanyel glimpsed a uniformed sentry who did seem to be outside. And there's another guard by the Gate.

Perfect. Vanyel gets as good a look as he can at the bored-looking indoor guard; they'll presumably rotate positions, and he can try to scry for the man again later.

He also checks to see if his mage-sight works through the crystal ball, so he can note how many wards and alarms there are here. 

It does.

There's quite an intense level of shielding, but notably, there aren't any alarms or traps set to go off if someone suddenly Gates in. (Presumably because this location is only known to people who have reason to frequent it on official Leareth business.) 

Hmm. Could be worse. It doesn't seem wise to teleport into a facility run by Leareth, but it might not kill them, if they're fast. 

He tries to scry for the sentry who he glimpsed outside. Short, brown hair, uniform like so...

Nope.

Yfandes can try? She was watching secondhand, but actually has a better visual memory than Vanyel does. 

No.

Vanyel turns away. "I don't know if it's that I didn't get a close enough look or the ball was out of power. I'm going to try again later, there are a couple of guards I saw - actually I passed more of them in the hall, too, Yfandes should remember their faces better than me. I'm hoping they rotate and the ones I got better looks at inside will be outside later on. Also there's a hallway we could conceivably use although it wouldn't be ideal, I think it's kind of a stupid idea to teleport into a building Leareth is in charge of." 

"It seems super risky. Given what all is at stake it might just make sense to pay someone for a Gate. I'd be pretty sure it was except that doing that involves telling whoever it is about Velgarth and I don't know any ninth-circle wizards I'd be delighted to give that information."

"Do you know any ninth circle wizards period -"

"There's one in Andoran. Morgethai. If we were going that route I'd probably go to the cleric of Nethys in Sothis, on the grounds that at least Nethys already knows about Velgarth. And I've never heard anything terrible about her."

"Mmm. Er, how does Nethys know about Velgarth? I can't remember if you already told me that."