"I've actually always wanted to check whether you could kill a horse, Teleport with it, and then do a Breath of Life on the other side but you'd need setup work in advance. Surely in an provincial capital you can get the fair price."

"The fair price for a good horse is twenty six solidi but if I demand that of some man here it'll practically be robbery, it's worth less than that to him."

"He should be happy to help the Crusade, then, sir."

"I don't think the Abadarans would say that but I'm not entirely sure what I'd say instead...I'd just sell at whatever they quoted me except that's not fair to the prisoners."

"- I think the Abadarans would say, if you told them you'd sell the horse for a fair price, then you already promised them twenty six solidi, and what you then do with the horse is entirely your own business, you can eat it if you want."

"Or sell it for whatever I can get without drawing a sword and informing someone the fair price is twenty six. Thank you, you're right, that's the answer."

He turns to the prisoners and instructs them to hold hands for the Teleport.

Iomedae will translate, since she still has the Tongues up.

They'll cooperate with the teleport.

Ivet can't understand the discussion well enough to know what's happening to the horses. She supposes it does not, in the grand scheme of things, especially matter.

Then Iomedae will sell the horses in town at a price that does not make the buyer stammer that he has a family who'll go hungry, and join the last group for the last Teleport out. 

And then she will march into the part of the keep that has a permanent portal to a dead magic demiplane that has a permanent portal to another -

"Am I allowed to consult you on this matter at all or should we proceed as we would have a couple of years ago?"

"How would you have proceeded a couple of years ago?"

"Probably not had the resources to follow up at all...the question was ill-posed, I think. Should we proceed as if we have spare resources to look into this, but not your assistance, because I did infer already that you could have prevented the Asmodean cleric from wandering off, and didn't, and I certainly don't have enough information to second-guess you on that but it leaves me at a bit of a loss because ordinarily the thing I would do about this is ask you what to make of it. If it's real, if there's another world with Asmodeus ruling Menador, I want to go conquer it immediately, of course."

"No one will transit back and forth between worlds. You should talk to them. You can try to hunt down the Asmodean, but I predict it won't work. - you should have contacted me faster."

- well that's all of the questions answered. Iomedae has enough of an understanding of the larger picture to understand that Arazni is curt when explaining herself is expensive, and that it isn't annoyance, but this does not always wholly dispense of the visceral sense of being a misbehaving child.

"Oh, and you should go back and deal with that King of the Barrowood, at some point."

"Thank you."

They bring the prisoners bread and soup after a few hours, after some hurried cultural consulting on whether orcs eat the same things as humans.

If they'd asked him he would have just told them to pretend all of them are humans, but they haven't, so he's not giving any advice here.

It's pretty good for prisoner food.

Iomedae comes in a few hours after that.

She spent the interim reflecting. Her goal is to learn what is going on. The simplest thing to do here is to have one of the wizards Dominate them and then ask all of her questions. Then she'll know what's going on. She thinks this is Evil, done to innocents. They aren't innocents, they're Asmodeans serving Asmodean house Narikopolus, but - at least half of the reasons it would be evil to do to innocents still seem to be in play. 

The alternative is to talk to them like people, and the argument against that is that it's been going terribly so far. But it doesn't exactly get in the way of giving up and doing the other approach. And it has been going terribly so far for reasons, so if one wants it to stop going terribly those reasons need to change.

She looks for Carles, when she comes back. 

He's sitting with his arms crossed and his back to the wall of his cell, mostly looking bored and staring at the opposite wall. He's in fact observing his surroundings pretty closely, but there's no call to look like it. He doesn't immediately look up at her.

"The next step, I think, towards my goals, is to have the wizards Dominate you and give me a complete account of your world and what you know about its history and how Asmodeus ended up ruling it and what His servant who fled might be planning here against us.

 I don't want to, though, because there is a sense in which you are my neighbors, but for a thousand years, and that's not at all how I'd approach it if my neighbors were without any apparent intent on their part involved in some plot of Asmodeus against Menador - I wouldn't have to approach it like that, because they'd want it straightened out too. I don't know if you want it straightened out too. I don't really have any idea what you want, except if it were me I'd want to get back to my duties. I don't know if we are in the convenient situation where we want enough of the same things that we can settle matters just off that. But I would like to try to figure it out before I ask people to treat you like a traitor for crimes that you did not actually know were crimes when you did them. And instead of that, hopefully. Will you come talk? You may refuse, and might as well if you're going to refuse to talk to me about anything important anyway. Refusing won't make things worse, except by making it less likely we can think of anything that's actually better."

He regards her levelly. He doesn't have to think for long; the alternative is not better.

"I'll go in for questioning."

"Thank you." The guards will let him out, then, and lead him to another room, at which point Iomedae will wave them off because she's not particularly afraid the man will try to stab her. 

"RIght," she says. "The thing I most want to know is what your priest is up to, and whether I need to fear Menador being infiltrated and conquered by the Church of Asmodeus - so when that happened, and how it happened, and why people let it happen. The thing that I want to know that is probably most relevant to your own interests is whether you and your people are working with him, or with the Church of Asmodeus, and whether I'll regret it if we let you go with your possessions and your money and a tolerable understanding of local law in some place where our enemies won't find you. 

I am happy to answer your questions, too, but I don't have much idea what they are."

Carles does, very momentarily, consider how much he wants to help this woman.

The thing is, Carles doesn't actually give a shit about Asmodeus.

"I don't know what the priest is doing, besides presumably working for Asmodeus. I am working with him in the sense that we generally need healing to venture into the forest and kill things before they eat the peasants, and not particularly in other senses. We use the church in general for military signaling purposes, and - well, I've been told that discussing myself as a member of my family is illegal, I don't know if you want me to work around that."