"Do tell. —That's a request, not an order."

"There was an erstwhile party member who I first met underground while she was standing over a fresh corpse and acting incredibly suspicious about it. Her subsequent behavior was mostly cooperative but I meant to turn her in as soon as I had a quiet moment on the surface; this was slowed down by her claim to be a noble, so the Count's permission was necessary. We received that permission when another party member sharing this room with her and with the Count found a severed head among his belongings. She attacked when offered a truthspell under which she'd have had to assert - I do not remember for certain who proposed the wording, but it might have been him, and at any rate it did not limit itself solely to the specific beheaded victim, and she died in the fight."

He nods. "From that description, there isn't an obvious way that, with the information you had, you could have conducted yourself differently so as to achieve a better outcome, even before accounting for the possibility that arriving at the truth might have gotten you killed. —In general it's rarely beneficial to truthfully provide the exact wording that someone will be required to testify to while attempting to arrest them."

"I do know that, but did not have an opportunity to brief everyone in the tavern. Anevia recognized the head but I have forgotten the name..."

"On that topic — the reason I had travelled to Nerosyan to begin with was to research pastwatching divinations. Many of them ceased to function when Prophecy did, but there has been work in recent years to reconstruct them. The Church of Pharasma has recently redeveloped a ritual that could theoretically shed light on the disaster at Heaven's Edge, but it would  have to be performed on-site, and the site has been sealed since shortly after the disaster. Unfortunately, the only person with the authority and ability to unseal it is Count Arendae himself, and approaching him about it poses... obvious concerns, presuming one prefers one's head to be attached to one's body."

"...is there a public reason for its being sealed? Is for example there any live concern that the disease could linger?"

He shakes his head. "The initial investigation, disorganized as it was, entered the premises and retrieved the bodies with no apparent ill effects. Officially, it was sealed by the Count in commemoration of the tragedy that claimed his parents, and as a means of ensuring that any further demons that breached the Wardstone line could not despoil it, but he was eleven years old at the time, and it's unclear to me whether it was his idea or whether he was acting on advice."

"Who would have been advising him at the time?"

"His regent at the time was one of the daughters of the count of Tala, Lady Ariane Kitt — not a near relative, as his near relatives had died in the disaster at Heaven's Edge. I suspect that when the queen appointed her it was partially with an eye to ensuring that she wasn't taking anyone from the war against the Abyss. Apart from that, I believe him to have been close to..." He lists several names. "Lady Kitt is no longer on close terms with him."

"I have no plausible pretext in mind that might lead him to open the estate."

"Understandable. In that case my main advice is to avoid arousing suspicions. And — to be clear, this runs contrary to all remotely standard procedure in Lastwall, but I struggle to think of a better alternative under the circumstances — I would advise against investigating mysterious beheadings matching the modus operandi in this case, unless you have strong reason to believe them to be unrelated."

"...I struggle to think of another reaction I might unsuspiciously have to a severed head appearing in any context where it becomes obvious to anyone that I've noticed it."

He contemplates this for a few moments. "From your description of the situation with your other party member, it sounds like the investigation in itself would not necessarily provoke further murders, as long as suspicion does not fall on the Count. Do you expect it to be possible to conduct an investigation and simply close it without identifying the culprit, or to delegate such investigations to a trustworthy person on your staff who is read in on the situation and can similarly avoid confronting the Count?"

"It... might be possible to do that without technically lying... easier to delegate to someone more specialized. Once I have enough of a staff. - is this your primary project right now or do you have too many other duties to be that person, so as to limit the spread of the information -"

"It was my primary project prior to Deskari's attack, though not my only one, and with the benefit of hindsight it is possible I should have deprioritized it in favor of identifying cultists and cultist plots."

"Those were numerous and the Prelate seemed... distractible."

"—In what sense?" He's never heard anyone accuse the Prelate of being insufficiently concerned about demonic plots.

"He spent quite a lot of time guarding a particular hole in the ground - I don't, mind, know that nothing came of that, but it was not obviously fomenting cultists most of the time - and was also absorbed in arresting Desnans for their admittedly ill-executed attempt to repair the Wardstone in response to a divine vision later corroborated by butterflies, before my team went in with more authorization."

"Ah." 

Apparently his visit to Nerosyan was even more ill-timed than he had thought. 

"May I have your permission to discuss your account of those events with the Prelate? Among my duties is to serve as an advisor of sorts to him."

"Yes, that's fine. - he did back me in the belaying of an illegal order another Inquisitor, I don't know the name, attempted to give to a Luminary who was counseling the prisoners, but, he did not appear to notice independently that that was a problem..."

Liotr grimaces. "Mendev, ah, does not exactly have a robust set of procedures surrounding the idea of illegal orders. Insofar as they have the concept at all it's largely seen as a way to protect against an enchanted commander directing his people in service to the demons."

"...do you have any suggestions for organizing classes about that and other key features of the Lastwall handbook, which I'm planning to use because it's orthodox and I'm acquainted with it, short of just teaching them all myself?"

"I expect teaching them all personally to be an inefficient use of your time. If you can manage it, I would recommend finding a smaller number of trustworthy Mendevians, teaching them your curriculum, and dispatching them to teach classes to the rest of the army. —Specifically Mendevians, I don't expect it to work with foreigners teaching the main classes even if you trust them."

"But you don't have any specific names to recommend me?"

"Ser Tirabade would likely be competent at it given the training, but relatedly I expect her to be otherwise occupied. In terms of other options, I'm afraid I haven't seen anything resembling a complete list of the casualties in Kenabres; do you know if anyone has created anything of the sort?"