Altarrin would not want him to be distracted. Altarrin would want him to be focused and in control and leverage this bizarre situation to the good of the Empire (and if he can also make it work for his own interests, a bonus, but the Empire comes first.) 

He takes a deep breath, and - steps back - the world is on the other side of a pane of glass - 

"I'm getting the feeling that Altarrin held back rather a lot of what he was planning with you," he says quietly. "I want to know everything." 

"The artifacts I can make, with the metal that - the gods just stopped us from refining - they can do a lot. The body-changing, the headbands, I bribed Merda with an artifact that makes her a bit of a limited Thoughtsenser. I can make you that too, on top of the translation item I'm delivering next week. And...my magic can be taught, it doesn't run in the blood like Gifts do. I was ....arguably the best in the world, where I'm from, you won't get a lot more of me, but you can get people competent to make the minor items -  at home, I had actually developed an assembly-line process so they could be made by less experienced crafters in pieces that are individually easier to learn. 

We didn't want to - plan things the gods could see and counter. I guess we failed at that. I'm inexperienced at planning around Foresight, where I'm from it's broken and the gods are blinded. If not for that I'd ask you for help identifying promising students I could tutor in the basics. Now, of course, I'm nervous about moving too visibly-to-Foresight, too fast."

'Tell me everything' is an inconvenient order, from someone she's bound to obey, when there's in fact a lot she's not interested in telling him. Doesn't serve the Empire for him to learn of Altarrin's immortality, or her own ambitions on that front, because if it did Altarrin would've told him; Altarrin knows a lot more than her about what serves the Empire so she's not going to share things he didn't. 

She lets the order tug her into rambling about magic education in Cheliax. "You can see who's smart enough not just to pick up Prestidigitation but to get really good, and it's at least a tenth of them, more if children don't go hungry much. You learn magic best under pressure, so most academies are very dangerous, and my home country deployed us to the front lines of a war with the Abyss for ten years once we graduated. ...of course, we had afterlives, it'd be sort of awful doing the same thing here..."

He's so hot now is not the time to be thinking with his dick. This is - maybe the most important thing to have happened in the entire history of the Empire - this could change everything - Altarrin was right, to take it seriously, he remembers being mildly puzzled by how hard Altarrin was pushing on the mine so that his new girl could use her "Wild Gift" and now he thinks that almost certainly Altarrin didn't take it seriously enough...

He does, just barely, manage to remember to communication-spell his senior guard again and stand down the high alert. It would be so embarrassing if a troop of. guards stormed in to incapacitate his lover, and even more awkward if this doesn't work - he assumes Caris also took precautions and who knows what they are - 

He has a lot of questions about Caris' home world! He takes notes. He doesn't let himself get too distracted by digressions - their world is what's important, once it's clear that Caris has no idea how to find it again, and if Altarrin had thought that was feasible he would have himself prioritized it more highly. But he wants to know about their afterlives - so that's why Caris had that idea, when asked what he would do with the power of the gods (it's so hot) - and how exactly they ended up at war with the Abyss. He wants to know how the gods were blinded because if they could do that here, that - might be the most transformative possible path.

(Though not a priority until they're more secure in their position and resources, since one assumes the gods will very much notice the ripples-back-in-time from that and throw even more resources at stopping it.) 

He asks some probing questions about the government structure in Cheliax. Do they use an equivalent of compulsions? It sounds like their rate of people who are anywhere near equivalently powerful to Master-and-higher mages is not that different from the Empire's rate of Gifts, and the weakest levels of wizardry aren't more destabilizing than having widespread magical artifacts to take care of household tasks (which they don't have yet, not in small villages and farmers' homes, but someday...) But the magic has such different capabilities - the bodychanging in particular is terrifying for spies and assassins - and Cheliax doesn't also have mages - it seems like it could easily be politically destabilizing, to make this project public and push hard, what they would need to do to earn that world where one in ten children have even some some of the powers Caris does... 

"We don't have anything like compulsions. We do routine loyalty checks with our Thoughtsensers, announced and unannounced, for people important enough to be dangerous, and powerful wizards, who are the greatest defection risk, have sold their souls, so disobedience would be punished in the afterlife....Cheliax had a state church. Our god was Asmodeus, and He's - well, I was planning to overthrow him. I don't really mind all the torture or all the slavery but I thought He was being wasteful, destroying people, making them - not even want to keep existing -"

"- Your country belonged to a god? Like Iftel? That -" Shiver. He doesn't actually try to hide it. "I can't actually decide if I like him better than Vkandis because at least Cheliax is wealthy, or whether he's even worse because as far as I know Vkandis doesn't bother to torture people. ...Doesn't bother to give their souls anywhere to go, either, I suppose that's just as wasteful in a way."

Frown. "I imagine Altarrin was - very opposed."

Altarrin is very rarely angry, but - he would have been, about that. The Emperor spends a few moments trying to figure out if he should also feel that way, if he's just - failing to produce much emotion either way because there's so much else to worry about, and then mentally shrugs and moves on. It's not like Altarrin would approve of him having a lot of feelings about things in other worlds that he can't do anything about, not when there's so much to be done right here. 

"People tend to be very opposed to Asmodeus." She's still avoiding bringing up Keltham, and the compulsions don't like it. It's a really terrible idea to tell the man you're seducing about your ludicrously complicated relationship with your ex, though. Doesn't serve the Empire for him to end up not liking Caris. Doesn't serve the Empire for him to end up not liking Caris.

The Emperor's current feelings toward Caris - in the romantic sense - are hard to read. He is definitely rapt, there's growing respect and admiration, but he's very -controlled. Mostly it seems like he's suppressing any attraction or arousal very, very hard, focusing entirely on the content of his report. He's tense. 

Eventually he gets around to asking which of her artifacts she's currently wearing. "I can't - see them at all - I didn't know that was possible -"

It's terrifying. Caris probably could have assassinated him and instead chose to seduce him and this is one of the hottest thoughts he's ever had. (At this point, it's going to be more noticeable to Caris that the Emperor is aroused and failing to squash it.) 

A nice thing about Cheliax is that it gives you very low expectations; the Emperor hasn't in fact had him tortured for his insolence yet so this is clearly going great. 

He's pretty sure the seduction situation is - still in reach, though the precise next move isn't obvious.

"The ring is magical with a spell called Nondetection hiding it, and, uh, my hair is actually a magic item disguising itself and my headband, also with Nondetection. If you take that one off, or ask me to, I'll revert to the physical form I was born in - it's female - and also be a bit less witty." That's not even meant to be misleading understatement, just humor; he's explained by now what the headbands do.

Bastran has given no sign of being the sort of Emperor who has people tortured for insolence! (He's pretty clearly comfortable with having people executed, even with major civilian casualties, and with keeping the former Kings of outlying provinces as mind-controlled puppets - one of his questions earlier was whether Carissa's magic would risk having that strategy stop working - but he doesn't seem to have considered that casual torture is particularly an option.) 

"That's very useful - and I want to keep it an extremely closely-held state secret, I think. I see why Altarrin was so secretive about you. We'll need to make more of it public eventually, but - it can be once you're confident that you have magic items to counter most of our magic that could be used to harm you." 

Slight frown. "...Altarrin gave you - Carissa - a talisman to block Thoughtsensing, right? Did you decide not to wear it, for this - I ordered a Thoughtsenser to read you on the first night, you were so - mysterious - and I didn't get a report of anything suspicious - they would have told me immediately if they couldn't read you -" 

"Yeah, I figured the game would be up immediately if I was wearing it. I was trying to just - think about you and hope they couldn't quite interpret anything sufficiently bizarre that crossed my mind. I've been spending most of my time as Caris crafting, which I think just looks like bizarrely specific daydreaming if you don't know what you're looking for, and thinking about my duties and you and nothing more complicated." Shrug. "Ellitrea knows everything, if you want to have me mindread properly while I'm not distracting myself."

"I want to do that." 

Sigh. 

"Caris. You're very attractive and very compelling. But I - need to think. It's - it changes a lot, if we're working together on the most important project in the history of the Empire." 

He ducks his head, and looks uncertain again. Shy. His body language is open and unguarded - mostly, it's pretty clear he still hasn't dropped any of his situational awareness - and he looks much more Bastran the naive young harpist who lives to serve his betters, than Bastran the ruthless and decisive (well, not by Cheliax standards, but enough to get by here) Emperor of the most powerful Empire in the world. 

"...I don't know. I - am very attracted to you, you're incredible at this, I don't know who taught you to seduce Emperors but they did a good job. Just, I don't normally, well, mix work and pleasure. It's– it adds complications, right. I don't know if I can afford complications when the stakes are just this high." 

It's terrible how the one thing the Church wasn't lying to her about was how annoying and useless Good people are. 

"The deal I'm offering is that you'll be mine as long as you like it and I'll do this work in the service of the Empire as well as I possibly can. I am not actually offering another deal where you nobly refuse me and then I toil away in a workroom because it's the right thing to do, I'm not really into that."

He doesn't technically need Caris to agree to this

(Is that...true? Normally - yes, obviously - even in this case Caris is under the standard compulsions, should have to obey the Emperor's orders - but it's....less obviously true than usual.) 

It's intensely unreasonable how much of a turn-on that is. 

Does Caris need him to agree to this deal okay that one is definitely thinking with his dick. He's not entirely sure that Caris doesn't have compulsion-like magic but he's - pretty sure that using compulsions on the Emperor is not going to look like a good idea from where Caris is standing. 

(....He's going to go for it. This is - predictably what he always does. And then very plausibly it's going to be a mess in some way, and a distraction, and - he's going for it, he - does not actually have the willpower to decide it's too much to risk, and Altarrin isn't here to tell him otherwise, is he.) 

"I...I need to think," he repeats. 

He'll summon Ellitrea for mindreading services. It'll be a couple of minutes. Apparently Ellitrea had arranged to be conveniently nearby. 

"I won't refuse you that, but do be reasonably efficient about it." Caris would light himself on fire, at this point, were he an Emperor.

Ellitrea is there a few minutes later. She looks - relieved, mostly, it looks like however this went the Emperor isn't furious or something. 

What's Carissa Caris thinking. Wow that's bizarre. Ellitrea hasn't actually spent a lot of time in the presence of boy Carissa. 

Caris thinks this is going quite well though he is kind of judging everyone slightly for their unwillingness to call him on his most outrageous behavior (by which he means, break a few bones or light him on fire or whatever). He's used to external checks on that, and is going to have to be careful if there simply aren't any. Presumably at some point something bad still happens if you keep pushing. 

He likes the Emperor, aside from the Goodness, which he can probably beat out of him once he's better calibrated about how to do that so your victim has fun. He's not Abrogail but probably, in fact, people shouldn't be Abrogail. A satisfying sex life seems very attainable and Caris can switch up bodies before the Emperor gets bored. He thinks he got lucky, in a way, that the Emperor was busy moping about Altarrin; it made him more Good, but also less of his anger was directed at Caris or something. He shouldn't be glad Altarrin died in front of Ellitrea, she won't appreciate that. (It's not that he's glad Altarrin died. It's just that it's not sad the way most people dying would be because ugggh stop that line of thought.) He didn't know Altarrin as well as either of them; he lost an acquaintance and they lost a long-standing friend. 

Ellitrea internally makes a face at "he can probably beat out of him" but...in context...it actually seems like this is fine. It's not like it's news to her that some people like pain in bed, or punishment, or being asked to serve and punished for failing, or being humiliated, or being put under compulsions - that's actually quite popular. (As a Thoughtsenser, one sees rather a lot about other people's sex lives. 

Caris mostly just has - very weird Cheliax-shaped priors about what amount of punishment is how significant, and - right, also the weird magic durability that may or may not be a wizard thing or a Golarion thing, maybe being lit on fire just doesn't damage her much. Someone should, uh, probably...talk to her...about the fact that if she lights the Emperor on fire when he doesn't specifically have a heat-absorption shield up, she could hurt him quite badly and scare his guards even more badly and actually she just shouldn't do that even if the Emperor finds it a turn-on, which Ellitrea does not put past him. 

(Usually one's compulsions would prevent even attempting this, but higher-level compulsions - the ones that affect planning on a broader scale - are significantly interpreted via intent, and it does not seem like Caris thinks that being set on fire would especially be harming him.) 

- she's going to make Merda do that because it sounds incredibly awkward. Doesn't seem urgent, anyway, Caris is being appropriately careful. 

The Emperor suggests a time for them to meet again, tomorrow night after his meetings are done; he's not actually in the correct mood, right now, to play the game where Caris gets to decide that. 

He doesn't initiate hugging or kissing Caris goodbye but he's not going to object if Caris does. 

(Vague wistful thought, earlier he had been imagining falling asleep in Caris' arms, which isn't meaningfully more vulnerable than being pinned to the bed and fucked - all the alarms and protections are still in place - but would have felt like it.) 

Caris bows, and says "I'll look forward to it," and departs.

He is...cautiously optimistic. He's sure the Emperor will think about refusing him and putting him to work anyway but it wouldn't work all that well and they both know it. And...he's not getting the sense that the Emperor wants to refuse him, just that he thinks he's supposed to.

When something goes wrong and a top advisor of the emperor mysteriously dies in the Eastern Empire, the Office of Inquiry is alerted, and an investigation is called for.

They already know what the investigation will produce; the conclusion is already theirs. The gods did it. It is possible that they did it via fanatical assassins, or via corrupt government officials, or via a ridiculous and implausible chain of events that could not be stopped except in theory. Either way: The gods did it. Ultimately, all paths end in that one conclusion; this is a failure analysis, not a murder mystery, and so the Office of Inquiry considers it. The bottom line is already written, and all that remains is the details, for those tell the Empire what to do better next time.

(The Office of Inquiry has born many names in the past, and will in the future - 'agents in things', 'the inspectors of the grain department', 'the extraordinary commission'. Mysteriously, whenever these are found to be corrupt and dissolved, a new one will spring up worked by most of the same men, doing the same duties. It's quite odd, how such a despised institution is so immortal. One might, perhaps, wonder if there was some figure in the Eastern Empire who always wanted to be able to thwart the gods at every turn - or, perhaps, if some even older and less human puppetmaster might want there to be an institution in the Eastern Empire, ready to point fingers at whoever needed to be disposed of...)

And so Mage-Inquisitor Kastil, top agent of the Office, has arrived at a collapsed mine near the northwest border of the empire, compulsion-bound soldiers and mages sweeping in his train. (He cast the compulsions, because if he let someone else do it they might have been subverted by the gods; none of the soldiers have made it out of his mage-sight except Darmas and Cedren, both of whom are watched by Lyentha and Cestin who are within his sight and who he can clearly see if any compulsions on them were invoked, changed, or altered...) His hair is white because a mage's hair is white, but his face is still young except where the lines of exhaustion have scarred it. He is not, particularly, thinking about things, or to be more accurate the main thing he is thinking about is that of course Altarrin should have taken more precautions, who would the gods want to kill more, he is going to find out what tools they used and break them until nothing remains. He does not think this will discourage the gods, per se; one cannot discourage the gods, who mean to destroy the empire as the sole agent capable of threatening their power. But he will investigate, nonetheless.

The region of Isk where Altarrin's mine was placed is in the tundra, the kind where meltwater pools and mosses and ground-plants flower during a brief summer, but the underlying permafrost never thaws. It's not quite perfectly flat; there are ponds and hillocks and even low, flattened rolling hills, but there are no trees. Nothing to break the northern horizon, all the way to the Icepack sea, where icebergs drift past even at the height of summer, when the sun processes around the horizon more than it exactly rises and sets, and for a time there is no night at all. 

The summer is over - there's frost at night already, and rimes of ice on the pools, despite the fact that further south the harvest has yet to arrive. It's not yet winter, those endless months of darkness, but they days are quickly shortening, and the wind at night is bitter. 

The mine is not much inconvenienced by the weather. It was built in stages, starting with an open excavated pit, carved out the sod well below the permafrost line and all the way down to bedrock, drained and sealed and then neatly sheltered from the elements by a permanent weather-barrier; all further work was done once that was in place. The dome covers the small on-site administrative office in a blocky sod-and-brick building, some utilitarian roofed but open-sided storage shacks, some equipment for ore-sorting and processing before the semi-purified results are Gated to a centralized metallurgy facility (based somewhere less miserably cold). There is, or rather was, an additional gazebo-like shelter over the primary mine-shaft, which drives down through five hundred feet of bedrock. (Though the deepest parts don't, yet, have any side tunnels.) The sleeping quarters for the mine staff, about fifty people (eight mages) were also underground, though not dug in nearly as deeply. 

From underground, it's easier to use detection spells to hone the initial survey results, and make further decisions on which ways to excavate. Even barely a month in, there were over a thousand feet of reinforced tunnels, measured horizontally. (Thirty deaths; node-energy is sparse up here, and thirty is actually somewhat below the standard allocation for a project of this scale. When and where to use blood-power was a call made by the administrative project manager and the lead mage-engineer, according to centuries-old protocols.) 

The area has a very productive seam of iron, probably the main finding that caused the Empire's surveyors to mark it down as a potential future site – but it does also have an area with rich ore deposits of a new metal, one that apparently has magical properties that interact with a rare Wild Gift. 

That section is where things went wrong. 

It doesn't look awful, from the outside. The artifact powering the permanent weather-barrier is down; there appears to be a temporary mage-barrier replacing it, which is not very successfully keeping in the heat; there's a barrel of water outside the administrative building, whether for drinking or washing is hard to tell, and it has a skin of ice.  

Documentation - copied to offsite - includes a rash of accidents dating back a week. Weird accidents, both of the 'could well be sabotage' kind, and the kind that definitely couldn't have been done on purpose but are still suspicious and implausible. Debriefs and questioning the mine workers and swapping around shift schedules to break up a possible conspiracy all failed to halt the pattern.

Altarrin, for some reason, traveled north in person - one communication-spell-relay report claims that he mentioned casually it was 'on his way', but this makes less than total sense given that his previous assignment was in the far south, and Gate-cost scales with distance, albeit less so when one is using the permanent Gate-network and, like the Archmage-General, has the authorization level to go from any point direct to any other point if both are on the main network, rather than needing to route through a centralized nexus (staffed by mages to check compulsions and cargo or baggage, and with randomly-determined Thoughtsenser coverage.) 

Altarrin looked at personnel records, and asked for three particular staff to be detained and questioned, on suspicion of being agents for Vkandis. He did not have a Thoughtsenser with him, at the time, but delegated the task to a mage who should have been more than capable of it, and didn't venture into the mine itself to inspect the scene until it (should have been) entirely evacuated. The time would have been two candlemarks before noon – not long after dawn, on these short days.

There is a gap in their records of several candlemarks, when Altarrin's mage-secretary was only passing occasional and un-detailed status reports; the communication spell is tiring from deep underground. They have no particular indication that something was going wrong, but they don't have much information at all. 

At twelve minutes past noon, a routine guard-sweep found the mage sent to interrogate the prisoners unconscious, and both his clerk and the prisoners themselves missing.

A message was passed urgently to Altarrin's mage-secretary, who at sixteen minutes past noon provided a report that - seems to have gotten rather garbled in the transcription. It seems like there was...maybe a problem...? The secretary requested "non-urgent backup" and a Healer. What exactly the problem was, did not make it into the record. 

"Non-urgent" or not, the mine administrative manager reacted quickly; the site on-call Healer was sent down immediately along with the rest of Altarrin's personally-loyal mages. 

No further reports would be received from Altarrin or his crew. 

At twenty-one minutes past noon, there was a violent underground explosion - maybe a Final Strike, maybe an artifact, maybe not magical at all and just the result of one of those underground gas-pockets, though the surveyors hadn't suspected one. Impossible to tell without going underground to inspect the ruins for a close-up magical signature. 

The casualties, once tallied up, were actually less bad than feared. Altarrin, obviously. The assistant mage-engineer who had gone down to show Altarrin some of the accident sites, Altarrin's secretary and the mage-engineer's clerk. Five of Altarrin's mage-entourage. The Healer, unfortunately. But everyone else was on the surface, or under guard in the separately-dug-out barracks, and injuries were relatively minor. 

The blast took out the weather-barrier dome and mage-lighting, which was not ideal for coordinating a response, and damaged the Gate; it was ten minutes before the lead mage-engineer could repair it enough to send someone out with a report and an urgent request for a replacement Healer please. 

The site was too hot to check for survivors (or, more realistically, count the bodies), and by then the mine leadership had already received instructions to not touch anything, hold all mine personnel in their barracks under political prisoner-grade compulsions, and wait for the experts to come untangle this mess. 

Mage-Inquisitor Kastil hates mysteries. Someone who did not know his profession might think this odd, that an investigator hates mysteries; anyone in the Office of Inquiry, who had been in the Office of Inquiry for long enough, would nod, and take another pull at their glass, and say, "Gods."

The thing an amateur would take a good hard look at, for something strange and mysterious and wrong, would be when Altarrin made his arrests and everything went to shit. Then a crisis occurred for him to investigate deep underground, and then they sprung their trap. (Or so he thinks. He'll know more after he's interrogated everyone under compulsions.)

The thing someone less amateur would take a good hard look at would when the workers started acting strange; influence from Vkandis, no doubt, worshipped across the border in Iftel. (Mage-Inquisitor Kastil keeps sending requests for the emperor to conquer the bloody place, and they keep being rejected with some kind of mumbled magical explanation for why they can't. Gods.)

The place he would like to take a good hard look at is why in all the hells Altarrin cared about this mine. Recent expansions to investigate a new metal with valuable products useful for a rare wild gift, his ass.

The first step is, of course, to place everyone still at the mine under arrest on generalized suspicion, root out the local villages with Compulsions for anyone hiding among them who might be a cultist of Vkandis or an escapee from the mine, and begin the procedure of getting everyone's statements about everything written down properly so they can be compared, in triplicate, all copies compared with each other by people under his compulsions which he can check and monitor and confirm are still his afterwards.

But once he's gotten everyone to sit still for a moment, he'll want to place a focus for pastwatching so he can see exactly what happened with Altarrin's death.

The arrests go smoothly - almost everyone is at least slightly injured and very shaken, and the mages up here, aside from Altarrin's surviving mages, are not especially elite or combat-trained, unlike Kastil's. 

Three of Altarrin's mages are alive, and the clerk. The one who failed to stop the suspected cultists of Vkandis from escaping is semi-conscious - it looks like drugs, rather than injuries - and the other two are fully cooperative. There is nothing wrong with their compulsions, and when interrogated, their stories match. No, they're not sure why Altarrin made this trip himself, but it's not his first time visiting the mine in person; he's been very involved. A secret project, they think? They're not very senior and weren't cleared to know any details, and it's Altarrin, you don't ask. 

They both, with enough prompting, mention having maybe been slightly worried - not about specific events, but that Altarrin has been pushing himself intensely hard. A rumor from a servant in Stormhaven said he was barely sleeping at all, though he seemed functional enough. He ended up defusing a situation down there with a nest of their local godbotherers, and he did it very neatly, no casualties at all on the Empire's side, but he might have picked up some minor injuries? 

The mine workers are - not the cream of the crop. A number of them are convicts (of non-capital crimes, obviously, and not theft because you don't put thieves in a remote mine with a skeleton staff; many of them were involved in brawls or assaults that didn't cause deaths, one tried to con his way into marrying a noble lady with a falsified noble backstory.) They were vetted more carefully than usual, if anything, and under more compulsions. They only reason they can think of why Altarrin singled out the three missing personnel is that they were Isk locals, but they weren't the only Isk locals, and the other four can't think why Altarrin would have found them any more suspicious. 

The five largest towns in Isk come back clear, but it's going to take a while to hear back on searching all of the tiny hunting-villages for Vkandis worshippers. The locals do seem, overall, perhaps more sympathetic to Iftelis as nationality than one would prefer, even if they vehemently deny affiliation with the god. Iftel sends more merchants this way than the Empire proper, and sells them goods at fair prices. 

Several candlemarks earlier: 

The pastwatching spell is lossy, between the time interval and the fact that a lot of magic was used here. The Mage-Inquisitor can get sound, and even mage-sight, but it's blurry and many exact words are hard to catch.

Altarrin, who certainly shows no visible sign of being tired or injured at this point, strides through the mine, a haze of magical protections glimmering around him; it's hard to get exact details via the spell, but really doesn't look like he skimped. He's also wearing - some sort of odd, very bright artifact on his head, not a talisman against Thoughtsensing, something else. 

He dictates out loud to his mage-secretary, who takes notes. If Kastil is good enough with the spell, he might be able to get some of the content. None of it is very surprising; Altarrin is mostly seconding the conclusions found in the original incident reports, and then checking the staffing roster and assignments for the three names he singled out. 

(He's noting a correlation, but not one without exceptions - on multiple occasions he stops and frowns for a while, clearly trying to square how one of them could possibly have been involved. ...He does at some point also start checking for the remaining Iskan natives, but doesn't seem to find any correlation there at all.) 

Some minutes before the prisoner escape, Kastil can follow Altarrin to the very deepest section of the mine, the most recent area opened up for "spellsilver" production. (It's out of range of the surface, at least for a mage of Master-potential Gift like his secretary, though the secretary may have still been able to receive alerts.) 

It must be warm down there; at three minutes past noon, Altarrin sheds his jacket and folds it over his arm. 

(It's visible, just barely, that one or more of his layers of shielding clings to the jacket, not his body directly. He's still very well protected, though, he should be impossible to take down with anything short of a Final Strike. An Adept's Final Strike.) 

- at eight minutes past the hour, he seems to have trouble articulating a question, and then stumbles into a wall. His mage-secretary is instantly at his side, steadying him, saying something to him that's mostly lost in the blur, but part of Altarrin's response ("- short of breath - dizzy -") is audible once the Mage-Inquisitor replays the moment four times in a row. 

(Twelve minutes past the hour, the moment when the message was passed to the mage-secretary, comes and goes. The mage-secretary - maybe stops to "listen" to something? But he and the engineer are both maintaining high levels of situational awareness, scanning around them for any threat, it could just be that. He doesn't react with the visible alarm one might expect, and does not seem to go on to warn Altarrin.) 

They seem to react efficiently but with appropriate levels of concern. The chief mage-engineer puts his own shields on Altarrin and an air-purifying barrier around all of them, and the secretary hustles out with Altarrin leaning on him but still, apparently, alert and able to answer questions. They get him a level up, seal the way behind them, the secretary eases him to sit down and gets him water and then - probably that's the magical signature of a communication-spell, overpowered to reach the surface? 

(Sixteen minutes past the hour.) 

It takes some time for the Healer to reach them, not until nineteen or twenty minutes past noon, scarcely a minute before the explosion they know is coming. The guards set a perimeter and raise shields. (It really seems like they're taking a super reasonable quantity of precautions aside from, you know, failing to veto Altarrin going down into the mine personally in the first place.) 

The Healer kneels at Altarrin's side. Urges him to drink more water. Altarrin - maybe shakes his head when asked if he hasn't been sleeping? 

If Mage-Inquisitor Kastil has the spell-focus "pointed" at Altarrin for this moment, the fire is going to come from behind. 

It all happens very fast. It's - magical, it looks like, either a Final Strike by a very weak mage or a blood-magic-boosted fireball by an exceptionally powerful one; they don't look different from this vantage, not with the level of fidelity the spell offers. 

The mage-guards almost certainly die instantly. It's impossible to see what's going on except with the hazy ghost of mage-sight as conveyed forward from the past, which shows spells shattering and auras winking out. But Altarrin is at the center of all of the shields, and whatever's wrong with him, he reacts instantly and has time to - start to raise a Gate? Yeah, that's a Gate-signature. A threshold taking shape, even, horizontal under him so he'll fall through, but - not, quite, there yet, and it's visibly sloppy, he really must be feeling ill. 

- a second, much larger fireball engulfs him from behind, and the pastwatching spell whites out, and when it fades back in there is pitch blackness and unformed magical residue, though not even that much of it - like it was mostly a non-magical fireball - and mostly rock without a lot of air pockets, and no sign of shields or mage-auras at all. Bodies might be visible if they had a light, but there might not be any recognizable remains either. 

(In any case, they can't check the section of tunnel yet in person, only magically. For one, it's mostly collapsed, and two, it's unstable and likely to collapse more if they try to dig out the debris at this stage.) 

Once they've interrogated the locals, they can release them or pass them to the local authorities, as is appropriate; he can send out bulletins to local authorities for the arrest of the three missing workers Alive And Definitely Not Dead as suspects in a treason case, and although the latest purge of the local villagers for Vkandis cults is overdue, he doesn't have the manpower for it and it's the job of the Ministry of Cults anyway; he'll send a formal request for them to handle this, while his men focus on investigatory divinations here at the site. Until the search is complete, the focus is Altarrin. Altarrin, who was extremely important. Altarrin, who was involved in something - 

He'll send back for a report on just what he was up to; not since the mine opened, since three months before the mine opened. What changes were there in his routine? When did he open it, why did he care? Who was he feuding with, who was new in his circle, what was he thinking to come here and investigate in person?

His death was much less strange. Gate-striking is not, in fact, that unusual a technique in the Eastern Empire. As assassination techniques go, having some poor untrained fool below Master class laden with compulsions, glutted with blood magic, drugged to keep him from resisting the compulsions, and then told to Final Strike his overcharged corpse on top of someone you dislike is rather difficult to block. Two gate-strikes on top of someone having a heart attack (he wasn't that old, but if he was pushing himself - there's only so far healing can help you, Altarrin - and there's bad air in mines, but that kind of explosive gas would not have been normal - he'll have an investigation to see if mine safety protocols were falsified, but if they are or not, he knows it was the gods responsible.)

The gods. Always, the gods. They arranged for him to open the mine, lured him into the area tightly under Vkandis's influence, and then - Altarrin had rivals, everyone important has rivals. Maybe Iftel did it, maybe cultists of Vkandis, maybe an imperial official. 

His next major targets for investigation are Altarrin, the communications-spell to the surface (did Altarrin spot it? Did any of the mages there cast it, or was it someone elsewhere? Why didn't they make it all the way back up to the surface? What are Altarrin's mages for?) and more in-depth pastwatching, up on the surface.