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Fostering all the nobility in your court is clever. She thinks it'd be hard to accumulate enough power to pull it off in the first place, but once you had - the thing about nobles is that since so much goes by birthrights they'd probably genuinely be dissuaded from rebelling by the fact it'll get their children executed, even though you'd think that no sensible person would have children if they cared that much about them. It's such a reasonable system. She bets Abrogail would be jealous.

 

She probably shouldn't care much what Mage-General Kottras wants, if he won't kill her, but she suspects that somewhere in the Conspiracy she did herself a stupid internal injury around sleeping with people when she doesn't want to and she needs to unravel that.

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(No interruptions from Carissa with questions? Moving on, then.) 


There are other relevant army factions. Most importantly, the leader of the supply-logistics department has a lot of implicit power - but Carissa isn't likely to encounter him face to face (though, in case she does, Major Effan and he looks like this). His is a position with far more implicit power than visibility or prestige; he has a house in the capital, but well away from the palace itself, and he's hardly ever there, he spends most of his time traveling via Gate-network inspecting their supply depots and personally checking in with his subordinates. Altarrin likes him. 

 

...Sigh. Here are the various nobles at court who Carissa probably will encounter if she spends any length of time there. They, too, are predictable in their own way (a way that Altarrin personally considers very tiresome). They are, generally, the sons of lords who weren't owed quite enough favors to obtain an official position for them in either the army or administration, or at least not enough to make up for a severe lack of either skills or interest in that. They spend most of their time trying to spy on each other and compulsion each other's servants toward that cause, presumably with the eventual goal of "proving" someone else's disloyalty to the Emperor, and thus themselves earning his favor and, if they're lucky, some material thank-you gifts. 

This is, incidentally, one of the potential routes of advancement open to a mage, and especially appealing to a mage of common birth but with sufficient talent to alter compulsions subtly. It's not one Altarrin would recommend, especially since it generally tends to result in being under an unusually complex and potentially-conflicting pile of compulsions oneself, and working for the sort of noble son who chooses to spend his time playing that particular game. But he's seen it work out for people, at least better than any of their realistic alternatives, and - well, it's easy for him to say, when he has so many more alternatives than they do...

- and, of course, the Emperor would really prefer that the most skilled mages end up personally loyal to him. Which is generally a good outcome for anyone who can attain it! (If they have the political skill to survive that attention, but– well, he'll get into that later.) And the current Emperor at the very least doesn't have any glaring vices that make this a regrettable choice. But, of course, not everyone can hope for that lofty perch. The issue is that being caught by one of the Emperor's people, carrying out that kind of political subterfuge for one of the court lords, is also not very good for one's career. 

(There is no sign in Altarrin's thoughts that by "not very good for one's career" he means torture followed by murder! Sometimes death is involved, but more likely the punishment includes being put under a very restrictive set of compulsions and sent off to be a house-mage for a particularly boring rural baron, one who the Emperor knows won't have any mages good enough to break those many-layered compulsions.) 

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Well, maybe that's why he has so much of a spying problem, not doing nearly enough torture and murder about it.

 

....Carissa thinks about the man caught spying on one of House Thrune, the one she had called to her so she could complain about her life to someone and then kill him, and feels - vaguely sick. It's the obvious way for any society to end up, it's inefficient to be any other way, but - she thinks she doesn't like it, actually. Maybe the Emperor doesn't either. ....and is weirdly sure that this weakness won't get him himself killed.

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The noble lords outside the capital are a more interesting case.

Carissa won't meet them - at least not by accident at court - but in some ways they hold far more power than the factions of the "nobility" that hold reign here in the capital. They may be approximately all under loyalty compulsions to Empire and Emperor, thanks to the Hall of Learning, but there's a reason why Altarrin pushed so hard to keep it in that order, even though there are apparently very strong underlying incentives that nudge it back toward the reverse anytime he's gone for any length of time. He knows well enough by direct experience how far you can push "loyalty to the Empire", if you keep in mind that your superiors are being complete idiots. Not far enough to assassinate the Emperor, of course - 

 

(You can still get pretty far by delegating, if you're skilled enough at avoiding thinking about things. But no matter how clever someone is, training the skill of 'carefully avoiding thinking about the results of your actions, so that you can slip things past your compulsions' is in tension with other relevant strategic skills, like 'understanding how the world works' or 'updating from your mistakes'. People do get frustratingly good at this strategically-not-thinking skill, and it leads to endless headaches in court politics, but...not more than that. If you're running an internal delusion on the premise that you'll be able to prove a subordinate or rival's incompetence to the Emperor alongside proving his disloyalty, you have to actually believe that they're incompetent. It's possible to lie to yourself skillfully enough to assassinate people, this way, but the rate of people assassinating the Emperor that way is...well. Low enough to be acceptable. In Altarrin's experience, there's a cost-benefit tradeoff in terms of precautions and paranoia, there, and it's not really worth the cost of getting it down all the way to zero.) 

 

- but, anyway, if you're a Duke or Baron in a remote landholding, and you last saw the Emperor face to face when you were sixteen years old, you can still get far enough, without any subterfuge at all, just by holding up your required loyalty to the Empire against the fact that the Emperor's most recent orders seem clearly misguided, and must be the result of some politically-motivated officer trying to slip it past his desk. 

(And, as best as Altarrin can tell right now, most of those Dukes and Barons do have a genuine abiding loyalty to the Empire. Or at least to its canal-Gate networks and magically-maintained weather, which is hard to disentangle, but - at least until someone starts trying to murder their family members - it's generally not the case that they would rather be anywhere else.) 

And they have the land, that bears crops year after year, or provides mineable metals to an ever-hungry Empire. They have their people, and - especially further out in the reaches of the Empire - most of those people aren't going to be under any compulsions from higher-ups. (Of course, basically every noble house, even the most minor rural ones, has at least one compulsioned spy, but you have to assume that they aren't stupid, and can easily work around this.)

 

Sometimes they form alliances between multiple landholdings. Which are a common source of rebellion, obviously, but doomed rebellions. A team of elite military mages can defeat almost arbitrary numbers of un-Gifted men, plus or minus a few less-skilled mages – and the Emperor doesn't even just have control of the army and its elite mages, he also has bigger arbitrary numbers of men. 

The ones who don't rebel are more interesting. In Altarrin's opinion, their local alliances are a lot of what keeps holding the Empire together, at this point. In ways that can be an ongoing headache to him, but still. 

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Most places have a problem where an elite guard competent to put down any possible rebellions is also possible to, well, remove you, but maybe compulsions fix that.

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(This is not especially in the top level of Altarrin's thoughts, but it's somewhere floating in the background. A good Emperor isn't relying entirely, or even mostly, on the compulsions. Or even just on personal loyalty, though that tends to be a bigger piece of the pie. A good Emperor - and the current Emperor isn't the best, but he's... adequate - makes sure that the top ranks of his military know the cost, in lives but maybe more importantly in money and food and dead highly-trained mages - of a civil war, particularly one resulting from the obvious murder of an Emperor. And if the Emperor does that, and also makes sure that the current regime isn't too unpleasant or randomly terrifying for his top leaders - if they know that they can count on his protection, if someone tries to have them falsely accused of betrayal, because the Emperor knows how hard it is to replace someone in their position - then it seems to mostly work out okay. Plus, of course, you don't make it to the top ranks of the military without being personally able to defend against compulsions and mindreading. General Astar, the un-Gifted commander here at court, is unusual in not being himself at least a Master-potential mage, but also remarkable in that he learned to block Thoughtsensing anyway by the time he was fourteen. 

...Though, you know, Altarrin isn't sure how much of that is reliant on him personally pushing against something deeper, because it does seem like every time he has another inconvenient death, there tends to be a much higher frequency of inconvenient, pointlessly wasteful civil wars.) 

 

The administration, then. 

Most of the major ministers are theoretically based in the capital. Carissa is unlikely to encounter them by accident - they're busy, even when they're not travelling - but he might want to plan meetings. 

The Minister of the Army is a political appointee. He's insufferable. He is also almost eighty, and despite the unusual longevity of mages, not carrying his years well (the decades of late-night drinking parties may have something to do with that, and he's not a powerful mage). Altarrin does approximately all of his job, and is in a comfortable rhythm, and he's pretty sure he can avoid Carissa ever having to come to his attention, though just in case, he looks like this. 

Minister of Agriculture: reasonably competent and very boring. Altarrin prefers it that way. He looks like this, but Carissa is very unlikely to encounter him, he doesn't like the palace and prefers to work from his nicely-appointed mansion with his wife and their half a dozen children and - if he recalls correctly - first grandchild born last spring and next one arriving soon. 

Minister of Trade: risen from the ranks of the merchant class, very competent, looks like this. He's young and ambitious, and spends a great deal of time traveling on 'inspections', but Altarrin's current understanding is that he's courting a certain highborn potential wife. Carissa is unlikely to run into him. 

 

And the list goes on. 

(The Minister of Cargo Transport is a deceptively sweet-faced man in his sixties who's had at least two rivals assassinated, but is likely to ignore Carissa entirely even if he learns of her magic, he's at best a weak Master-level mage himself and insecure about it. The Minister of Education is a once-brilliant mage, now aged 110, who is definitely far from senile but is starting to have less energy for day to day politics, though no one will dare to have him conveniently assassinated yet, he made a favorable impression on the Emperor during the Emperor's boyhood. The Minister of Engineering is an odious political appointee, but at least not a micromanager; he delegated nearly all of his day to day work to his subordinates, and spends his time on an estate just outside the capital....) 

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It's all very soothing, in a way. Helpful, without the slightest game to it which she can see even in his thoughts. She landed on the right person, in what was definitely not a coincidence. 

 

The Detect Thoughts runs out. She says so, in case he can't see it. 

" - thank you, my lord."

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He blinks. 

"- Right. I think I had not covered all of your questions? I was going to try to convey more about the current Emperor's favorites, which of course involves telling you more about the Emperor himself - and maybe more about which factions have relatively more power in the capital at this point, if that is not already clear to you...?" 

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" - not entirely clear, I think. I could guess but it'd be a bad thing to guess wrongly about. But you'll have to speak aloud; I didn't prepare the spell twice. I, uh, rather presumed that once you made your point you'd want me out of your head."

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"...I do generally prefer that, yes." 

(And, now that she's out of his head, he can go ahead and let himself think about how desperately he wishes that he had Thoughtsensing in this body, just so that he could directly, in real time, know what she was thinking right now.) 

"I will try to explain in a moment, then - I do think it will take more effort and consideration to convey in spoken words, and I confess that once I had let you into my head anyway, it was a relief to have that be easier. But I am curious to hear, first, while it is fresh – did reading my mind affect your trust in me? ...Also I am curious what if anything surprised you, that seemed like a cultural difference between our worlds, it might be useful to know for explaining things to you out loud." 

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"I think it mostly made sense. Abrogail - the Queen of Cheliax - couldn't get away with making all the nobles send their children to her to foster, I don't think, she'd surely do it if she could. I don't understand why you don't execute spies, beyond squeamishness. You'd probably have less of a spying problem. I'm not...entirely clear on the legal status of mages" and by extension Carissas. "Are they free? Do they come work here by choice?"

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He nods, seeming to immediately understand the gist of her question. 

"They are not slaves," he says. "Though no one in the Empire is entirely free, and mages are more likely than most to be, well, beholden to someone. The benefit of being a mage is that you are useful to the Empire, and so executing mages in factional disputes does not make good long-term policy, and is something I discourage – with more or less success, but right now I think mages are not especially at risk only for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The downside is, of course, that mages are useful to just about anyone, and so there is more competition over them, and it is harder to live a safe, boring life below anyone's notice." 

A fractional sigh. "I will not claim that everyone who works in the capital chose to do so freely. Mages who wish to remain below the Emperor's notice can often succeed at this, but it helps to have the protection of a local noble, and the local nobility is...variable. Rural duchies and baronies have more space for independence. Their Dukes and Barons attended the Hall of Learning as children and had their loyalties shaped there, and are of course under the standard compulsions, but one can push 'loyalty to the Empire' rather far, both in directions I approve of, and ones I very much do not. Being house-mage to a corrupt rural Baron is not ideal, but I would not call it slavery – legally speaking, mages are free to choose their employment, and practically speaking the loyalty-compulsions to one's current employer are the main limitation. But a clever person can work around that, and in most cases - aside from the top-level loyalty compulsions to the Empire and Emperor - that is entirely legal." 

A slight quirk of his lips. "Mages do have the advantage of being able to see the compulsions we are under, up to the limit of our training and skill. I am not sure if this is something you can replicate with your magic, and relying on my report of it obviously relies on trusting me." 

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"I don't exactly see why you'd bother lying, but we can see them and probably with time and practice learn to read them."

 

She does not think she understands the distinction he's drawing between slaves and mages. Slaves cannot legally leave, but may be able; mages can legally leave, but are not able unless the person who did their compulsions was incompetent? It's not that it's an unimportant distinction, but - she does not especially take much comfort in it. 

 

"I assume I shouldn't explain that I'm from another world? Can we assert that I'm just from faraway and they have advanced magic item manufacture there?"

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(Altarrin was not especially expecting her to find it reassuring. It's not a reassuring situation and he doesn't like it. He thinks he can make it work, in this case - he can generally make things work out with the mage-research division - but she should know what the risks are. And he doesn't have a particular reason to lie, she's accurately noticing that, but verifying it with Detect Thoughts would get expensive.) 

"I think we should prepare a story with more detail than that - I am still thinking through the details - but yes, I think we can claim that. We could say that you have a Wild Gift to explain it - there are Gifts that occur only as one-offs, rather than matching to any of the known ones." 

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"Understood." 

She feels suddenly desperately lonely, which she is definitely going to conceal to the best of her abilities.

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(Altarrin isn't particularly trying to read her concealed emotions, and might not succeed even if he was; he has centuries of practice, but often he could fall back on Thoughtsensing, and Cheliax trains people to a different and higher standard than the one he's used to. And loneliness isn't exactly something that would stand out to him as a fixable problem. He's been lonely for most of the last seven hundred years. It generally didn't get in his way.) 

...He's worried, though, and right now he feels very tired. And - scared, in a way that he's not sure makes sense. He can work with what he has, here. It's better than any of his previous options. Their backup option - fleeing the Empire entirely, with whoever's loyalty he can still call on, and carrying out Carissa's project on their own, on neutral territory far from the attention of any gods - is a tenable one, and anything that goes wrong will probably still let them do that. 

 

He sighs, slightly, and then collects the map from his piled-crates desk and spreads it out in front of Carissa. 

"We should decide what general region you claim to be from - ideally somewhere distant enough that none of the nobles will have trade contacts there to check our story against, but too distant will be interesting and might prompt someone to investigate. The Haighlei Empire, on the far western coast of the continent, is unfortunately not very plausible given their traditions around mage-craft, and the western interior is mostly uninhabitable." He frowns at her. "...I think we should not try to pass you off as Tayledras, though it would make it difficult to check your story. And we have too much trade interaction with Iftel. We could claim you are from one of the city-states near the southeastern coast. We know they have schools of mage-craft there that remember some of the traditions from before the Cataclysm, and can assume there are other more secretive schools, so we could claim you are from one of those and it would be difficult to check. At which point we just need an explanation for how you ended up in the Emperor's palace." 

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"Do you in fact have any explanation for that, I don't know how that it happened except that - from my perspective I should've expected it to do so somehow."

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"I do not have a satisfying explanation! The mechanism is unclear - it did trigger a magical alarm, but not one I recognized, and having seen more of your magic since, I think it was not exactly a spell. I have even more questions about why, because it seems - convenient, that you arrived in my office at this particular time. It seems like a situation that some power optimized for...something, I am not sure what." 

Shrug. "For our current purposes, we just need a story to tell, and so we should decide if we are claiming that this happened by coincidence, as the result of a magical accident, or if someone powerful sent you here deliberately. Where 'here' might just be the Emperor's palace, I think we could still claim that whose office you landed it was coincidental." 

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"No one's going to buy that it's a coincidence. I don't buy that. I don't know why anyone would've sent me to the Emperor's palace, though. It doesn't make sense as an assassination attempt or a favor. - do you travel? Could I have tried to do a cross-continent Teleport to you, is that the kind of thing this magic system can do?"

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"I am known to travel, including to unspecified destinations. Cross-continent Gates aimed at specific people, rather than known destinations, are not a generally-taught technique, but it is possible to Gate to a destination that someone shared with Mindspeech. And we can claim that you have a non-Gate alternative technique relying on a Wild Gift - though, can you actually teleport several thousand miles? If you cannot replicate it then we should claim that a more powerful instructor did it, either on your request or to dispatch you on a mission." 

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"I could probably design an item that can do it. Can't do it without an item yet."

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"Would it be plausible that you traveled here using an item that was left behind in transit? Either one you had designed, or one that your hypothetical secretive mage-school possessed." 

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"Yeah, the easiest version I could do would be single-use."

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"I think that explanation works, then. And - we probably do not have to actually explain your reasons for coming here, but we should at least decide the general outline of it. Clearly I was not expecting you, and it is simplest to say I did not recognize you, though we could maybe claim I met you before in my travels and you were disguised by illusion. But we should decide if you were seeking out the Empire or fleeing some danger. The version closest to the truth would be that you had plans for a major magical project, and knew that the Empire had the resources you would need to carry it out?" 

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"Seems right. And I was in some kind of danger at home, worse than I anticipated from teleporting into a foreign empire - regime change, probably -"

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