Ostensibly this is a reconnaissance mission, but it's the sort of reconnaissance mission that might easily turn into more than that if the opportunity arises; they made sure to pack the supplies they'll need if it does. The shop will almost certainly be guarded, of course, as much to make absolutely sure its workers won't try to steal the ink as to actually prevent sabotage, but the gates of the town were also guarded and here he is. (Admittedly, it's a lot easier to prevent someone from flying invisibly into a shop than to prevent them from flying invisibly over the town walls.)

Either way, though, they'll need to be careful. The work is always dangerous, but this town is going to have much less of the forest-beast sorts of dangers and much more of the Asmodean sort.

And so it happens that a perfectly ordinary flock of perfectly ordinary birds is sitting on the roof of a bakery, just across the street from a somewhat-less-ordinary piecemeal scroll shop, watching as its workers enter for the day.

The shop seems to have only one employee at the moment, although there's desk space for three or four as far as the thrush can see through the decoratively but sturdily grilled window.  Aside from the owner and his wife, who'll turn up later in the morning, and a halfling sweeping the tiny customer-facing front room but more than likely not involved in the scriptorium, the only person it sees enter is a yawning youngish woman, average height with a slight unevenness to her gait, moving like she's sensibly cautious of predators but knows she could spot them and take off before they spotted her.

One of the birds flicks his wings.

His friend asked him to count the people here unless something interrupts him, and to wait for a couple hours to make sure he gets all of them, and he intends to Do A Good Job.

The small person comes out the front and dumps a little sparkly stuff out of a dustpan into the gutter, then goes back inside.

A young man who smells of currants ducks out from the building the thrush is sitting on and hangs around the side door of the Important Building for a little while, until an old man sticks his head out the bakery door and yells something, and he hurries back. (Neither of them drop any crumbs.)

And finally, just as it's almost been a couple hours, there's two more people at once:  a short man in between the two bakery men in age and rounder than either, wearing a very sparkly hat, and a tall thin woman also of middling age, wearing long clothes that make a swooshing sound as she walks.  

Assuming the thrush can count to five, he's done such a good job!

Eventually the perfectly ordinary flock of perfectly ordinary birds takes off.

One of them flies by a couple other locations of potential interest—

—and eventually lands on the windowsill of a private room at an inn.

When the day's work concludes, there's a man who almost looks human leaning against one of the side walls of the bakery, eating a meat pastry and watching the street traffic with the vague disinterest of someone who's mostly trying to make sure he isn't pickpocketed before he finishes his dinner.

The younger woman is the first to leave; she looks maybe in her mid-twenties, hair swept carelessly into a knot at the back of her head, wearing old uniform trousers and a made-over red jacket.  She glances directly at the bakery as she lets herself out, but the guy with the meat pastry evidently isn't who she was looking for; her gaze skips over him as she heads briskly down the street and disappears into the greengrocer's three doors down. 

The proprietor and his wife leave by the front door maybe half an hour later, him looking smug and self-important, her pinched and annoyed.  The halfling evidently sleeps somewhere in the shop, and is joined by a burly and bored-looking night watchman, maybe quarter-orc, just before full dark sets in.

(A perfectly ordinary thrush takes off from the roof of a nearby building a few moments later and wings its way across the sky, in the same general direction as the proprietor and his wife. Presumably it's returning to its nest to roost.)

He is much better than his avian friend at concealing how he feels about the presumable-slave; to external appearances, he cares no more about this than about any other feature of the situation beyond his pastry.

The plan for tomorrow is to allocate his spell slots to divinations targeted at the shop's worker; tonight he finds an abandoned alleyway, turns invisible, and looks over the inside of the shop with a Clairvoyance for mundanely obvious features, before returning to his inn. He'll be back tomorrow under a different face.

The front room is as elegantly appointed as any modiste's or watchmaker's shop, with comfortable furniture where clients can have the merchandise brought out for their approval rather than piles of dry goods on shelves behind the counter.  The night watchman is reading on a tall stool where he'd have a good angle on anyone coming in the side door or breaking the window before they saw him, and if an observer happens to be watching at the right moment, rolls dice on the hour bells.

The side door opens onto a little hall that appears to double as a pantry and eating nook (no fireplaces at all in this building, it must have been built for purpose), with a staircase up to the scriptorium at the other end.  The halfling is curled up sound asleep under the stairs, but seems to at least have slightly more in the way of blankets and personal possessions than average?

The back room has no windows at all, glazed and barred or no, and contains rows of locking cabinets; magical signatures aren't visible over Clairvoyance but presumably they have whatever protections a fourth-circle conjurer who's almost but not quite the biggest fish in the pond would think necessary. 

The scriptorium is upstairs under the wide eaves, with the large glass window that the thrush saw facing the street and another with identical grillwork on the opposite wall, to catch both morning and afternoon light.  There's another cabinet with a multitude of tiny individually locking drawers which must be for the inks, a larger unlocked cupboard, and four writing desks.  Two are just slightly dusty (and one of them has given up its chair to the first floor hall), one is neat but more recently used, and one is a bit untidy- scroll weights left out and just pushed to the side, along with a mirror-glass doodad for focusing a Light on a specific part of the work and a couple of pen ends.

He sketches the layout, and takes stock mentally of which details he wants to add to his written notes later.

(He is, separately, planning for how to counteract their precautions. If the night watchman is really the only guard, it shouldn't be too much of a challenge to silence him before he can raise an alarm. But that still leaves any magical precautions operative, and a scroll shop is hardly going to be short of wizards...)

:...and apparently the owner's been complaining about one of his senior employees using some sort of loophole to leave for the Worldwound.:

:Wow, he sounds like a terrible boss.:

:Thank you, that's good to know. I don't think that changes the plan for tomorrow, does anyone disagree—:

Headshakes all around.

In the morning, there's a completely different woman inspecting a basket full of apples for blemishes and occasionally muttering something under her breath.

And here's the shop's one wizard employee, at around the same time as yesterday but walking a bit faster and finishing up some bread and cheese as she goes.

She sets down an apple, muttering something under her breath in a tone of mild displeasure, and reaches for something in her bag.

The classic divinations are classic for a reason, but it's also helpful to be able to pick up information your target isn't expecting you to be able to gather. Lucio traded this spell from a researcher at Almas University who warned him that for whatever reason most people can't pick it up no matter how good they are at math; he'd been one of the lucky ones. This one lets the caster get a look at what spells the target has prepared — not all of them, not unless they're a fairly low-circle caster, but still enough to have some use.

He pinches a silver disc between his fingers and waits for her to pass by close enough for him to land the spell. Spell Gauge.

She's distracted, and slept poorly, and isn't expecting trouble in a city street on her way to work.  

The spell lands.

Infernal Healing

Mount

Cure Light Wounds

Comprehend Languages 

Floating Disk

Detect Thoughts 

Cure Light Wounds is not a wizard spell.

Lucio has spent years as an adventuring wizard, meeting Eagle Knights with all sorts of strange magical tricks and hearing stories of adventurers in far-off lands with even stranger ones. Arcane Cure spells aren't impossible in principle; he knows a song-sorcerer who can cast them, and he's heard tales of northern witches doing the same. But he's never heard a story he trusts of a wizard being able to prepare it, not without dabbling in something else.

So, how did she do it?

Maybe someone in Cheliax somehow figured out how to do what wizards have been trying unsuccessfully to do for thousands of years and stabilized it as a wizard spell. He doesn't really think so; it's not that Cheliax's wizards have never made novel discoveries, but they really make fewer than you'd expect, and Lucio doesn't actually think the supposed 'discovery' is possible in principle.

Maybe she's dabbled in one of the many obscure magical traditions, arcane or otherwise, that can cast Cure spells. It doesn't seem likely, this isn't the kind of shop you'd expect to find someone like that working at, but it's not impossible.

Maybe she's a cleric. Not an Asmodean cleric — even setting aside the wizard spells she has prepared, it's obvious from her clothes, her bearing, her general demeanor that she's nothing of the sort — but something less licit. In most other countries it would be the obvious guess.

...He casts an Aura Sight. It probably won't tell him anything he doesn't already know, if she's got a really surprising aura it would be dangerous to walk around with it showing, but it seems like it can't hurt.

He's not wrong: she reads faintly Evil, neither Lawful nor Chaotic. 

Well.

She could just be a Neutral Evil dabbler of some variety, in which case the best response depends quite a lot on the details of what kind of dabbler.

She could be an Evil cleric of a Neutral god. Nethys is the obvious choice for a wizard, but it's not impossible in principle for it to be someone else. If that's the case it's probably worth trying, carefully, to make contact with her.

She could be a cleric of a Neutral Evil god. Norgorber, maybe, as Evil gods go it's relatively comprehensible why someone might be a Norgorber cleric. Urgathoa, if she's a very particular flavor of necromancer or alternatively the kind of wizard who likes to invent magical diseases. Maybe one of the obscure ones, there are kind of a lot of obscure ones, for all he knows there's a Neutral Evil god of Evil scrollmakers, this isn't actually his area of expertise.

It might be worth trying to make contact with a Norgorberite, depending on the Norgorberite. It... is probably not worth trying to make contact with an Urgathoan. 

(Does he have a way to tell? He knows Nethys's domains. He... is less sure of Norgorber's or Urgathoa's. Evil, presumably. But if she cast her domain spell it wouldn't show up to a Spell Gauge regardless.)

She purchases some presumably-less-displeasing apples and leaves. She takes a right turn down a deserted alleyway, and—

:Did you see the woman who just went into the shop you were watching yesterday?:

:Yes. What about her?:

:Could you follow her home when she leaves and tell me where she lives?:

A few moments later, a perfectly ordinary thrush lands on the roof of the bakery, carrying a piece of bread in his mouth.

It's going to be a long time, but eventually she leaves by the side door, around the same time as the previous day.  Two streets over, she goes into a loud building that smells like stale beer and tallow smoke.

The thrush is a very clever and experienced bird, though, and can tell that this is not the kind of building that humans sleep in (it's not tall enough to have rooms with beds like his friend's, and it doesn't smell enough like food).  It will take Great Dedication but if he waits a while longer, he can see her leave this building and follow her again.  Fortunately he can be fortified in his quest- someone has eaten most of a mutton pie and dropped some crust on the opposite side of the street. 

But it's less of a long wait the second time, and the thrush can follow her back down the street and to a different building, a tall brick one with a good almond tree for perching on.  It has a lot of windows, so it takes some careful watching to figure out which is hers, but soon he can spot a not-flickering light like his friend makes on the second floor.  She seems to have two rooms: one with a lot of books and some fruit and other tasty food, one with some more books and a bed and other nice soft nest materials, and a low fire in the grate even though it's plenty warm out if you have feathers. 

Crust and useful information! What a great day! His friend is going to be so proud!

:I don't suppose you remember Norgorber's domains?: He's given the group his summary of what he knows, and they're discussing what to actually do about it.

:Uh, Evil, and I think Trickery, and then I'd be guessing for the rest. Probably Death, that seems like the sort of domain Norgorber'd have. Trickery gives Disguise Self at first.: She only remembers because it's one of Calistria's.

She didn't have a Disguise Self prepared, but the absence of a Disguise Self spell tells them fairly little. 

:Did you pick up on anything else that would help us tell one way or the other?:

:Just that she was working at the scriptorium. We do know they're selling third circle scrolls, so it isn't very surprising for her to have an aura in her own right, and for a wizard Nethys is the obvious guess.:

Nod.

:But we'd be staking a lot on a guess.: She doesn't trust a Norgorberite not to try to find a way to blackmail them, if they thought they could get away with it.

:Can you read her mind at dawn to check who she's praying to?:

:She'll have a decent chance of throwing it off. I don't know how lucky I got landing the Spell Gauge.:

:And if she doesn't pray for new spells every day it might not even work.:

:I expect I could land a Message on her without breaking invisibility. Do you think that would be better?:

:...Depends what you said. It'd be hard to avoid it sounding like a threat or a test.:

He does also have Charm Person but he's not going to try to charm someone he might be trying to work with, that's unethical (even setting aside the logistical complications). :But it probably wouldn't be less threatening if we knew who she was a cleric of?:

:Probably not, yeah. ...It might be less scary coming from another secret cleric, but I don't get Message.:

:You could have Ruscello drop her a note.: Message isn't great at communicating tone but it manages to come across as deadpan anyway.

:Not actually less scary. And it might work as a scrying focus.:

They spend the rest of the night working out the details of their plan. It's not perfect, there's really no way to make contact with a secret cleric without scaring them, but at the very least it's as safe as they can make it, not that that's a guarantee.

In the morning, a perfectly ordinary thrush is sitting on the rooftop of one of the buildings across the street from the new human's building. There is NO food here, which is terrible, but his friend told him he was proud of him and gave him some tasty seeds, which is a pretty good consolation.

It's a little tricky to get a view of the bed from over there, but he can just about manage the corner.

Soon enough, the sun peeks over the horizon and it's time for lazier birds to start singing.  The new human stirs and scrunches and pulls the blankets up over her head.

A few minutes later, she flings the blanket back off and stomps over to stoke up the fire and put a kettle on, then wanders sleepily into the sitting room to start slicing some bread.