She will try the various languages she knows, not with any expectation of success but to show willingness. Can she indicate with gestures that she would like to communicate mind-to-mind? ...head-to-head?

That gets an irritated head shake and — when they do, indeed, prove to have no languages in common — a series of exaggerated gestures instructing her to go away and come back with a "quendi".

Probably.

Cross-language charades is remarkably difficult through a low-to-the-ground slot in a heavily armored door.

This is a very reasonable yet also frustrating situation! This guard-tower has no telepath ('quendi'?) posted; visitors need to be one or to bring their own. This has always worked before, because people who didn't unexpectedly appear in a random location either know a local language or sensibly travel with a means of communication. (It's a good thing she doesn't have to present a passport or other proof of identity! ...Tanya very much hopes that won't be the next hurdle; border control isn't usually empowered to decide to admit a completely undocumented person on their own recognizance. Appearing inside a state's territory is much easier in this respect.)

If she draws a map of the local area, could he please tell her where she can find a 'quendi'?

(Tanya is by now very good at drawing accurate to-scale maps based on aerial observation.)

That is a weird thing to have to ask, but it's not like he particularly has anything else to do on guard duty. He uses a long poking stick to indicate a fairly general area back to the southwest, on the coast. And then he briefly pokes at the big forest to the southeast, for completeness, even though she'll probably have trouble even finding Doriath.

He repeats gesturing at the coastal area, because that's probably her best bet.

That's on the other side of the Free Peoples' (Glorious Liberation) Army territory, and in the approximate directions of the polities Dorvulk said they were at war with. (Also, how does he expect a lone human - a young woman at that - to cross several hundred miles and back? Is there faster transportation here than she's seen so far?)

This is puzzling because (quite apart from international relations) she knows there are telepaths much closer by. But maybe the ork telepaths are all engaged in the war effort, just as all A-rank mages were conscripted by her army, while their enemies have... telepaths for hire who are willing to travel across enemy territory just to be paid to translate something? No, she is clearly missing something here.

She tries to remember what Dorvulk called the enemy states. "Doriath?" she asks. "Finrod?" She doesn't know if she can correctly pronounce names that she only heard telepathically, or for that matter if those are names in a language spoken where she is now.

The guard nods agreeably. The forest to the southeast is Doriath, and the coastal area isn't "Finrod", but it's close enough that he's not particularly tempted to quibble across the language barrier.

"Angband? 'quendi'?" she tries next.

The guard freezes for a moment with a complex look on his face.

Eventually he settles on a kind of conflicted shrug, and then points her at the coast again. She's not wrong that there are Elves in Angband, in the same sense that there are prisoners in a dungeon, so he doesn't want to lie. But she should really not go dragging Orcs to the trade post.

Ugh. Fine. She can in fact fly to the coast and back again in a reasonable amount of time, and she can even carry a translator on her way back if she has to. Inconvenience and annoyance are no reason to make suboptimal choices.

She will try to thank the guard (bow?) and leave and spend over an hour quick-walking out of his probable eyesight before she repeats the illusion decoy trick and flies away.

She'll go for the coast next. Doriath was said to fire on messengers, which is completely at odds with rational self-interested behavior. Even her world's nations normally accepted a parley under flag of truce, and they had radio!

...she can't make it that far before dark, though, and she shouldn't push herself to exhaustion. She'll look for a place to spend the night, far away from people and roads and local magic, with clean water. Hunting game can wait until tomorrow; if she can find a quendi translator she should be able to trade for rations.

How is she going to pay the translator? Or convince them to trust her, a stranger proposing to take them to a distant country using a secret means of transportation? She will need to spend time with the Finrodians and find useful knowledge or skills to trade, even if she has no intention of settling down in another nation at war. And she'll have to tell them about her origins, she cannot come up with a plausible cover story, which means she will have to trust them. The trade will reveal at least some of her abilities, which will make it easier for them to betray and overpower her...

But it does not seem better to look for some other country. She doesn't even know where any other countries are! The only other option she can see is to find, kidnap and coerce a telepath into working with her, and she doesn't have a better angle on that than walking up to people and asking 'quendi?', which she might as well do in Finrod. Besides, she doesn't want to kidnap strangers instead of engaging in trade, she is not a bandit.

"Away from the local magic" is a hard criterion ... but it is thinner, at least, up in the mountains, away from the symphony of the trees. And the mountains do also offer a number of clean, crystal pools and springs, sending clear sprays of water tumbling over the rocks and joining together into streams, rills, and rivers.

A bit of searching from the air turns up a cave with shelter from the wind, easy access to a stream, and nothing in the way of people or magic.

She can sterilize water with magic and has a sieve that works on actual mud, but clean water is appreciated. (She sterilizes it anyway, of course, you can never tell what nasty parasites live in an innocent-looking mountain spring.)

The cave is useful; most people looking for her would try there first. She'll put a campfire in it (burned down to embers) and leave a conveniently misleading trail to the pool.

(Wind? What wind? She is an aerial mage and she is dressed for the Eastern front. 'Wind' happens when you're eight thousand feet up in a snowstorm, not snug on decidedly un-frozen ground.)

Mages can't use magic while they're sleeping; there are no magical tripwires or traps to alert her. (Military mages are not supposed to travel alone.) But she can find a perch that would be hard to reach without flying and tuck herself out of sight, and sleep lightly.

They say it's not paranoia if they're really trying to kill you. Most armies on the continent have been trying to kill Tanya for quite a few years, now.

The ones on this continent haven't picked up the habit yet.

Oh, the Orcs are trying to find her, but she successfully gave them the slip and they don't have a dense presence in the mountains anyway, because of the impassable terrain. So as the trackers who lost her righteously torture themselves (in a pro-social, rational, forward-thinking way: brains learn best from pain, so it's only logical to torture yourself when you fail, so that you do better next time), nothing comes to interrupt her sleep.

The morning dawns chill and foggy, the wisps of cloud clinging to the rock of the mountain like particularly stubborn soap suds to the pan.

Tanya can afford to dry and warm her clothes in a potentially magically-detectable fashion once she's awake. And well above the clouds. And ten miles away on a random bearing.

She should reach Finrod today. Is there anything of interest along the way?

A nearly overwhelming amount of beautiful, unspoiled wilderness, if that interests her. There are fewer Orc operations in this direction, and less settlement in general. The highlands below the mountains are green and endless, marching in rippling waves beneath her path.

... although from her extremely high vantage point, she can actually also spot a hidden city in the mountains to her North. Surrounded by towering peaks, the city is a fractal latticework of delicate stone arches, high-density suspended gardens, and artfully arranged waterfalls sending rainbows cantering across the white marble buildings. It's positioned in such a way that it is probably impossible to see from the ground, and no roads lead to it.

Tanya has never considered the possibility of a city being secret before. The world just doesn't work that way, not in any history she ever read. Nobody knew about the tribes in New Guinea until they overflew them, but those tribes didn't and couldn't build cities, their isolation made them far too small individually. A city requires a civilization to build and to maintain, and a civilization without modern construction machinery requires a large population which requires food and trade, and... 

Unless this is Genghis Khan's tomb on a truly colossal scale, with all the architects and builders killed to preserve its secret? And all the waterfalls and plants are automated - pah, that's ridiculous. Useless speculation.

It's a city and it doesn't look ruined. She will fly close enough to at least check if it's in fact inhabited and by which species.

It is inhabited, by tall stunningly pretty people with gently pointed ears who are probably Elves.

It's... a... city of... models, architects and the best urban planners since Vitruvius?

...

No. Stop. This world isn't like hers and it might have been specifically chosen to mislead her into wrong conclusions. These are people living in a city and that is all she knows. A city which has no obvious roads leading to it, but there are presumably mountain passes or tunnels or something, these people got here somehow and unless they collapsed the only way in behind them they are presumably at least aware of the world outside.

In fact, this mountain valley would make an excellent defensive position against a besieging army. Tunnels can be blocked and it's very hard to dislodge dug-in defenders from a mountain pass without artillery or fliers. Given time to dig in they could trigger avalanches, collapse any bridges, divert rivers... 'Having the upper hand' and 'the high ground' are so effective in warfare that they became general expressions.

Lookouts on all the surrounding mountains would make it impossible for an army to approach undetected, and they could contact the city by semaphore. An army could march from the city to the passes before the main enemy force could climb all the way up, and they would have short and secure supply lines...

(Why is she contemplating how to defend this city? Well, it's either that or planning to take it, and she really wouldn't want to play the invaders in these war games without artillery or fliers! Not that field artillery would win against stationary batteries dug in few thousand feet higher and sighted on the only approaches. No, the only way to deal with this place would be to starve it out, and if they're self-sufficient for food then... maybe try to poison them? Or bottle them up forever and wait for your technology to inevitably outpace theirs, a city cannot compete with a country plugged into the world trade, but maintaining that siege would be very expensive and hard to sell politically --)

...to enact an inner-lines defense strategy, the city would need good, military-grade roads to the passes. Can she find those?

Yes, actually. They might not be up to the standards of modern Earth, but there are wide roads leading from the city to three different potential passes. The roads are not paved, but they are crowned to deal with runoff, cobbled in places to deal with cross-streams, and trimmed with decorative stones in places where erosion might otherwise threaten a washout. They're better than the roads between villages that she has seen, but perhaps a little worse than the road that ran up to the Dwarfish tower, for military purposes. The grade is also a little steep — although considering the terrain, there might not have been much of an alternative, there.

Good, they are rational people. Who happen to also be very pretty and build very pretty cities, but still: reasoning, civilized beings.

Does she want to contact them? They don't seem to match any of the places she heard about. They are certainly not orks; they could be very pretty humans, but the humans she saw before (with the orcs) were quite plain.

That leaves elves. She was expecting elves to be smaller and more, well, gracile than the human baseline, which these people are decidedly not, and they barely qualify on the pointed ears front... But she is really no judge of elfiness. 

These people might have quendi among them. But if they really are trying to stay secret they won't agree to come with her to translate. And she wasn't referred to them, and Finrod is only half a day's flight away. And to approach them she'd need to fly back out and then walk up to one of the mountain passes, which is a spectacularly bad idea if there's any chance they're willing to kill to protect their secret. 

Tanya resumes her flight path west.

(The fountains really were very pretty.)

No other mysterious hidden cities present themselves, but as she approaches the coast she does spot a normal, non-hidden city in about the right place to be Finrod. This city is an interesting study in contrasts: on the one hand, it clearly shares a similar architectural style as the city in the mountains. On the other hand, it's much more open, spilling out into the surrounding farmland. Some parts of the city seem to have recently been on fire, and are currently being cleared away.

There are a set of camps and guard towers ringing the inner core of farms, and a set of thick walls that appear to still be under construction around the city itself. Anywhere with in-progress construction is surrounded by delicately painted thin wooden screens, so the city still looks quite striking, even with the construction.

Tanya knows fire was a common hazard in premodern cities; she counts herself lucky to live in an age when rational urban planning and the fire engine made large-scale fires a thing of the past, absent fleets of bombers aerial mages.

They're building walls, with no old and destroyed walls in sight? That doesn't match the story of a three-hundred-year war. Perhaps they were raided recently and now they fear a reprisal. But the walls don't enclose the farmland; if the city is besieged it will starve.

So either they fear more raids, or - their main army must be deployed away from here. That makes sense, she doesn't know how important this city is or how far away it is from the frontlines. 

If their enemies can raid deep into their rear and they're unsure enough of stopping them to spend money on building a wall, even though the wall won't protect the surrounding areas, that bodes ill for them. ...no, politics would cause this either way; a civilian population will demand visible protection even if it doesn't make sense in the cold calculus of the greater war.

Is this city also inhabited by the very pretty maybe-elves? How many troops do they seem to have? What kinds of weapons are on display? Are there any war-engines, fortifications more complex than walls, prepared terrain to constrain and funnel the enemy?

Yes, the city is inhabited by pretty maybe-elves. The number of troops is harder to estimate, because approximately everyone appears to be armed, mostly with swords and high-draw-weight longbows. There are no obvious children.

There are no apparent war-engines, but a moments reflection about what the topography of the land would look like from ground level makes it clear that the irrigation channels and field-separating ditches and fences in the farmland have been arranged so as to make a direct charge on foot toward the city as annoying as possible. The road winds in toward the city in a sort of spiral.

That is beginning to make more sense: they evacuated the city of noncombatants following the raid and are now fortifying it into a defensive location. That is the rational response when your cities are attacked and you realize you cannot prevent a reprise, as long as you have enough depth to fall back to, but it requires colossal discipline on the part of the citizenry to carry out. It also requires titanic feats of organization and logistics, which in a premodern context inevitably means repression of your own citizens and a great many incidental deaths along the way when that organization inevitably falls short.

An army will drill for years to follow orders but also show initiative, it will draw up elaborate plans to move hundred of thousands of people around, and it will still be a marvel of modern technology when the trains run on time and they all arrive at the front in perfect synchronization. A civilian population, unused to following orders, unprepared psychologically for the reality of war, with political dissidents protesting against the government's failures (as if they could do better), with no actual trains and all supplies and services moving at horse-speed and no organized supply train, with not enough food or resources of every kind because all the resources are going towards the army desperately fighting to let the civilians escape in time...

The best-case scenario is that you will evacuate highly prioritized people - local politicians, scientists, workers in crucial professions - you will evacuate any crucial industries that may have been located here... All the while the rest of the population flees in panic into the countryside because they are, correctly or incorrectly, unwilling to wait their turn when the enemy might come back before the evacuation wagons do. The roads are blocked with dead horses and broken-down wagons and that impedes both the evacuation and the army so you force them off the main roads, the roads are lined with people wearily trudging on on foot and falling by the wayside with noone to count let alone bury them. Local-born soldiers start deserting to help their families so you rotate in an army raised in a distant region, which treats the locals harshly and makes them think you don't intend to protect them and makes people irrationally avoid the official evacuation process or even sabotage it by stealing or selling crucial resources, and the chaos only grows. But still, there are no dead animals or debris along the roads leading west...

...Tanya shakes her head. She is clearly wrong. The fire was more recent than the beginning of construction on the walls. The city must have been evacuated ahead of time as the war-front drew near, and done so in a calm and organized fashion. 

She commends whoever did it, the people who were willing to admit to their civilians that it was needed when the need was still distant and uncertain and who convinced them to leave their homes and livelihoods and the politicians who built a state where the citizenry trusted the government enough to let them do it. (Unless it was accomplished through brutal repression and they have had long enough to bury the bodies, which she is not ruling out.)

In any case, the city seems to be under military rule and said military appears to be reasonably organized and competent. She would have preferred to make contact with the civilian authorities - if nothing else, she can't very well offer to hire a translator who's enlisted in an army at war - but that was always unlikely, given the givens. She isn't going to bypass a military installation protecting a front at war to illegally reach their rear.

Tanya flies a bit back, finds a place to land and dismiss her illusions out of line of sight of anyone she can see, and repeats her routine of openly walking up the road. Is there someone obvious she should hail?

She is swiftly met outside the city by a swordsman on horseback, while one of his fellows with a bow hangs back. They wear light leather armor, embroidered with fine curling leaf-like designs.

:Hail and well-met, if friend you are,: the swordsman says by way of telepathy. :What business have you at Nargothrond?: