He would like them to scout the Chelish cities that they think might have wizarding schools, then, from the shuttle to start with and then he'll fly over in morph, one of the faster flying morphs he's acquired just in case flying wizards show up. Hopefully people won't often be directing their mindreading upward at the sky. If those both go all right, and they can get a sense of which neighbourhoods are the wizard ones likely to have mindreading in order to avoid them, he'll consider sending some of the Yeerked humans in at that point. 

They get started on this. 

Ostenso is the home port of the Chelish navy, with grand spacious docks that must have been extraordinarily costly and that stretch on for nearly a mile. The Chelish navy is doing fleet exercises. There's an army base there too, guarding against nearby Andoran. The rest of the city is mostly two-story wood buildings. 

Corentyn looks as busy, but much less orderly; it started as a fortress city and has since sprawled outwards in three directions. The seawall is tall and grey and covers the whole coastline; the city itself has narrow streets and stone buildings.  It's on the northern end of a massive bridge, what should have been an impossible public works project at their tech level, that spans the fifteen-mile gap between this continent and the southern continent at their narrowest point. 

Corentyn is about twice as large, with a population of perhaps a hundred thousand. 

Mhalir is inclined to go with Corentyn, which doesn't have as obvious a military presence. 

He morphs one of the local birds with very good eyesight, and flies over the streets, scanning the various neighbourhoods, looking for signs of wizardry being done in public, or buildings that match the Yeerked humans' sense of what temples ought to look like. 

There are big public centrally-located temples to Asmodeus! One of them is currently hosting a public execution in which someone is skewered on a pike for treason. There are no visible temples to other gods. 

In the upscale part of the city, there are magic streetlights and the roads are neatly paved with flat, wide paving-stones. There are magic shops. People don't tend to do magic casually as they walk but they often have a magic-bonded creature on their shoulder or at their side, a raven or a raptor or a cat or a small dragon.

There is a school of wizardry, labelled as such (the sailor couldn't read but Alloran's translation software is starting to get the swing of things).

Mhalir flies back to the shuttle to mark the relevant places on a map. Learning the address of a recently graduated wizard is going to take a lot more surveillance than this, but for a start he's tried to mark out less fancy-looking bookshops, in the less upscale parts of town, where there will hopefully be less in the way of magic defences.

He thinks about what approach makes the most sense here. <I can try to get in in morph, but I cannot bring books with me that way, if I use a small morph. ...I suppose we could just send one of the human hosts with local currency, if any of our prisoners had some with them or if we can get a good enough sense of it to imitate it, that might be simpler. We can drop them off nearby so they do not need to travel through too much of the city and potentially encounter mindreading wizards.> 

None of them had Chelish currency, but probably Cheliax takes gold and silver same as everywhere else, and it won't be that remarkable to have Taldane money in a port city. 

Mhalir plans to be nearby in bird morph again, so he can watch the surroundings, and warn them if trouble seems imminent, although if the shop does have a wizard who happens to be mindreading all their customers at that particular moment, they're going to have a serious problem. 

If the human hosts speak the same language as the locals here, then this should be quite straightforward; they can ask for books on history and on the gods. Mhalir has a sense that books to learn magic aren't going to be sold at a ordinary bookshop, but there might be books more generally about magic. 

It's the same language; their accents will identify them as from Taldor but it should be possible for them to make themselves understood.

The bookstore turns out to have books on history and on the gods and on the grand Chelish revolution in the teaching of magic.

Excellent! Hopefully they have enough Taldane money to buy a book on each topic, and once the book-purchasing scouts have been retrieved, Mhalir directs them to upload pictures of all the book pages to the shuttle computers, while he makes a start of reading them directly using Alloran's translation software. He starts with the Chelish revolution in teaching magic, since this seems very relevant to how magic schools work. 

Historically, claims this book, magic has been taught by wizards to apprentices, often people they encounted through their travels or who impressed them with their cleverness. But it serves Asmodeus for many of his people to be wizards, and in His service House Thrune has funded great academies of magic, which train all of the most promising students in all of Cheliax in magic. Students are evaluated at the age of 12, and again at 16, with a spell that can sense the potential of their minds, and those suited to wizardry will get six years of training in it. It is the duty of every loyal parent to ensure their child is tested, so that no potential is missed and every worthy wizard gets a suitable education.  

Other schools of wizardry only teach students basic magic, but students who graduate from the top Chelish schools of magic can often, by the end of their tour of mandatory national service, cast third-circle spells; this means that Cheliax has more wizards than any other country for national defense and for inventing new heights of magic. Cheliax has also contributed to the standardization of measures of the skill of a wizard; while some parts of the world spoke of 'circles' and some of 'levels' and some of 'masters' and some simply sorted wizards by the most powerful spell they could cast, Cheliax has studied the true underlying nature of magical progression and sorts its students accordingly, so as to ensure they progress as quickly as possible.

(The true underlying nature of magic is not included in this book.)

Various loyal impressive wizard prodigies are profiled; they now serve the crown directly in Egorian, the book informs him, or are in the army.

He's unsure if they want to aim for someone from a better school, who's likely to know more about magic, or a less talented wizard who will still know something but will be easier to abduct and less likely to be missed.

In any case they need to do a lot more scouting. It would be very useful if they had the mindreading themselves, for this; it sounds like it's significantly longer range than what his Leeran morph can do. 

Possibly the best, or at least the least risky way to learn what they need to know is just to get a lot of shuttle surveillance on the city, from close enough to see individual people, and try to spot people doing magic, and then track them back to where they live and single out a few who live in poorer areas of the city. 

This is going to take a while. 

Alloran yells to Iomedae, and Sarenrae, and all of the other good gods anyone has mentioned. This doesn't do anything.

The host who is a priest of Sarenrae gets a vision. His goddess appears to him with the rising sun and whispers that there is a place in Nirvana for everyone, and that to truly believe this is to already be there. He finds this comforting; it suggests that there is a divine plan, even if its details are unclear as divine plans tend to be. 

Mhalir has so little idea what to make of this. The unspecific nature of it is somewhat reassuring, in that it's not obvious Sarenrae knows exactly what they're doing or can interfere precisely. They'll continue the operation here, after a trip back to orbit so the Yeerks can all visit the pool. 

Since they're going to be spending a while watching video footage of the city looking for wizards, he might as well send some of the Yeerks with local human hosts to carefully selected outskirts of the city, places without much visible magic, to visit markets and listen to conversations. He tells them to give the temples to Asmodeus a wide berth, even though it's not obvious what sort of power the gods have within their temples. 

Mhalir himself flies around as various sorts of bird, sometimes staying high above the crowds, sometimes finding a roof to perch and watch street traffic.

Do they have any idea whether wizards in Cheliax have particular uniforms or styles of dress, that would make them recognizable even if they're not doing magic at the moment? 

They don't seem to, except the ones in the military and on-duty; looking at the people who frequent magic shops and the private libraries near the school is more promising.  The people there are an even mix of men and women, well-dressed but not uniformly so. The more powerful ones all have headbands, and those seem to be understood locally to mean something like that someone is a wizard of note.

In conversation, people complain about the weather and the upkeep on the roads out of town, and worry about delayed ships and talk about their families and share very distant gossip about the King of Cheliax and his plans for the country. (Maybe they'll take back Andoran. Maybe they'll conquer south across the sea. Maybe they'll use magic to have the best harvest in history.)

A group of soldier-wizards returns by ship from some distant war, and these ones are neatly coded by power level; using the book on Chelish instruction of magic, he can parse it. Most of the younger wizards are first-circle or second-circle. The older ones are mostly third-circle or fourth-circle, though there are a few exceptions: some middle-aged men who are still second-circle, one girl who can't possibly be older than 23 or 24 and has the third-circle uniform already.

They make another trip back to the ship in orbit for a Yeerk pool visit before they're ready to move. 

<I would like to get one of the returned soldiers if we can> Mhalir tells his people, <but they are powerful enough that I am very unsure about capturing any of them by force. I would be tempted to approach one of them and ask about an alliance, but - I do not think we can afford any misjudgements here, and so I am reluctant to take the risk at this point. I think perhaps we should try for one of the less powerful local wizards, for their local context, and then use that to judge whether we can take on one of the soldiers.> 

This seems pretty reasonable. They've identified a few of the local wizards-in-training who live alone and could probably be taken at least temporarily without being missed.

<I think we should try this at night, with sedative gas. If it goes smoothly, and if they know more about extrapolating power level and we think we can take on one of the soldiers, I think we should be prepared to do that immediately, before anyone would be missed.> 

"In that case we should pick out some soldier targets at each power level, presumably - so if it still seems wise we know who we have in mind -"

<Yes, we should do that.> They can go down the list of all of them who they saw arrive, figure out where they're staying in the city. <I think it makes sense to go for the younger people at a given level, since they will have less overall experience.>

This is fairly straightforward with the lower level wizards. If they think they can actually take someone at third level, it might make sense to try for the very young woman, although Mhalir is also concerned that if she's unusually prodigious it might actually be harder. 

There are some other third-circle casters who are probably thirty or so, if that seems like a better bet.

Maybe they can compare what sort of accommodations they have, use that as another indicator; they want the highest level wizard they can manage, but ideally one who doesn't have a well-guarded house. 

It seems like most third-circle or higher wizards have nice houses or stay in nice inns, many of them shielded (presumably with some kind of magic) against sensors. The young one doesn't; she seems to be staying in her mother's house down by the docks, along with the mother, a sister, and a cook and housekeeper, who are a different species and probably slaves.

This does not exactly meet the criteria for 'lives alone', but it's definitely an easier target than the magically-shielded dwellings. Really the important thing to find out from their first target is whether wizards at various levels can block the effects of sedative gas even if they're not deliberately casting a spell for it right then. If not, it seems like it should be feasible to snatch the younger wizard quietly, without waking any of the others in the house, and if any of them are woken they can be quickly stunned.

- Unless they have whatever weird property makes it so that humans on this planet are sometimes immune to the stun setting on Dracon beams. Do any of the hosts know what's up with that. 

Well, powerful people are hard to stun because they're powerful. (These sailors don't know much about it but it's generally understood that all powerful magic-users and warriors are at all times much harder to kill than a normal person, from any cause - they can jump off cliffs.)

You still can stun them, it just requires five times as much power or so, and it's a bit harder to take them down in a definitely nonlethal fashion.

Probably the young woman's mother and sister and servants/slaves are not powerful warriors. (Also it's fascinating that it works that way and he very much wants to learn more.) 

Do they have other candidate soldier-wizards at first and second level, in unshielded accommodations?