Is there anyone else here she should talk to? Is there anyone the guards treat particularly badly?

...The guards treat them fine? It's not comfortable, here, but they don't seem to single anyone out for especially bad (or good) treatment.

Probably no one else is going to want to talk to Iomedae. She can try, if she wants.

If they don't want to, she's not going to make them. 

"Thank you for speaking to me. I'll try to come back within two weeks. I hope I'll have news for you then." It's a good habit, to limit the odds of retaliation against anyone who spoke to her, and (if they set this all up in a hurry when she asked) to force them to keep it this way. She doesn't expect either, in this case, but it's not the kind of thing to only be careful of when you expect it to be a problem.

The next thing she'd like to see is the writings of Kiyamvir Ma'ar, if Urtho has them.

Urtho (or more accurately, Urtho's hertasi secretary) keeps a file of all the letters that Kiyamvir has sent him since departing the Tower, and is happy to provide them to Iomedae if she has a way of...reading...them, given the language barrier. If necessary she can have a Thoughtsenser to "read them out loud" in Mindspeech? 

It's very inconvenient, but she would like them just read to her in Mindspeech. The man's character is just very important to what kind of peace talks and ultimate settlement will be possible and will be lasting, and she has...mixed impressions, so far, to put it mildly. 

(It seems implausible to her that Ma'ar did not realize he was racing to the brink of war with Tantara. Not impossible; little is impossible. But by all accounts the man is a military and strategic genius, and those tend to be people who track the threats to them and the people they pose a threat to; it is a stretch, to imagine he did not contemplate the risk of angering his larger and much more powerful southern neighbor whose archmage was sending him letters forcefully condemning his behavior. And there's an obvious explanation for why he'd put about that he had been shocked by the invasion; Predain can then be unified in terror of the unprovoked aggressor, and in their own righteous grievance at being invaded. (Their own invasions don't count; those countries were poor and volatile, and their residents grateful. Sure. Iomedae, again, is uncertain - but she doubts it. She has not met that many grateful conquered peoples, no matter how dramatically the conquerers improved on the previous rulers. She has met many more conquered people who will anxiously profess their gratitude.)

His intelligence on Tantara is reportedly excellent. And yet he missed their growing dismay at him, their plans for a war? Possible, of course, that his intelligence is excellent now after having been incredibly deficient before the war; or that the now-dead king successfully sowed misinformation about his intent. But more likely, he knew how frightening his actions looked, and knew when Tantara began preparing for war.

He wanted his country to be prosperous. Entirely reasonable; she has no reason to suspect it of being a pretense. ...it's hard to extend as charitable a lens for the conquests. If your country is desperately poor and your only concern for its prosperity, why spend its gold on toppling its neighbors? Why repeatedly aggravate your only candidate trading partner with blatant violations of all their taboos on the use of human sacrifices?

He seems genuinely popular. He also runs a lot of his military on mind control. Efficient and ruthless, fitting her previous impressions; advantageous for his personal power, obviously; an ugly precedent, absolutely. Plenty of those being set. And when someone openly uses a lot of mind control you should often assume they subtly use a lot more mind control than that. 

The King wants to appoint Ma'ar as his successor, rather than his own sons. Sure. (Again, it could be. Nothing is impossible. Some things are better explained by extensive use of known mind control powers than by other things.)

He is probably not Lawful. The blood-magic is a bad sign; it's obviously one of those bright lines nations maintain because the alternative is to maintain much, much larger standing armies in anticipation of the other side's ability to convert conquest into more military power into more conquest into more military power, depopulating areas as they go. She's glad magic doesn't work that way in her home world; it'd be a fucking nightmare. Expropriating temples is a much worse sign; that's not the behavior of someone who anticipates doing any international diplomacy, or attracting external investment. (Though it might, actually, mean much less than it would at home; the gods seem less interventionist, and their churches less crucial as institutions.)

Urtho doesn't think they can trust a parley and Iomedae, if she closes her eyes and tries to see the world the way a god would, all the possible futures ahead of her... doesn't think she can trust it either. The man evidently has the places where he draws a line; everyone agrees he treats prisoners well, everyone agrees he keeps his soldiers on an unusually tight leash when sacking cities. But she has no idea which are the places where he draws a line, and whether a parley would be on the right side of it.)

They’ll provide a hertasi Mindspeaker to translate letters for her.

There are several hundred of them, over a period of almost twenty years. It’s pretty clear that they make up half of an ongoing conversation, referencing content presumably in Urtho’s letters, which he didn’t keep spare copies of. 

The tone of the early letters, when Ma’ar would have been a young man, are serious and earnest and clearly seeking Urtho’s advice and approval. Ma’ar talks mostly about his magical research rather than his politicking, though reading between the lines, it’s clear that he was already advancing rapidly in Predain’s government. When he mentions the political side at all,  he mostly seems to find it tedious, a necessary price for accomplishing the things that actually excite him.

Later on, his letters are full of statistics, as he introduces various social programs in Predain. They’re training mages in weather-working; he has a table of figures estimating lives saved, a cost-benefit analysis comparing it to other efforts he’s considering. Again, he asks Urtho’s advice.

There are sections that must be following up on arguments or criticisms brought up from Urtho’s side; it’s pretty hard to follow, with the amount of context he’s missing, but overall the tone on Ma’ar’s side is one of friendly debate rather than genuine deep conflict. It continues to be clear that he respects Urtho and looks to him and also does not at all take any of his claims on faith.

He has tables of figures about the blood-magic, too, upper and lower bound estimates on how many children didn’t starve because their region had aqueducts and canals and roads for transporting goods, how much the life of each criminal bought for their country’s future. He goes into the compulsions less, but mentions the safety improvements in major cities, and how bandits convicted of non-capital crimes can be released safely with much lower risk of repeat crimes.

In the letters leading up to the starting date of the war, he does, in fact, in almost every letter, provide repeated earnest reassurances of Predain’s friendly and non-aggressive intent toward Tantara, and that he considers it in no ways in their interests to try to invade. The actual arguments he makes are oddly, well, non-political. Tantara is a beautiful and prosperous place, he writes. We have no desire to see that compromised, and are grateful to be so lucky as to have Tantara as our neighbor.

In his first letters after the war, he doesn’t seem angry. I understand why Tantara has acted as you have, he writes, but I think both of our kingdoms are paying a high price for outcomes that are not even what we wanted. 

He does, indeed, suggest parleys, offers locations they could meet on neutral ground, precautions they could take. From Iomedae’s perspective the offers are oddly underspecified, as though there doesn’t exist any standard language for negotiating those terms. He acknowledges, a little, the constraints both of them are under, in their respective positions as advisors and not themselves rulers, but he seems to mostly see this as a question for him and Urtho to resolve to their own satisfaction before presenting a solution to their respective Kings.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that Urtho didn’t feel reassured. But it certainly seems like Ma’ar is trying. 

And even in those final recent letters, he still addresses Urtho as ‘teacher’ and ‘friend’.

She stays up very late into the night, listening. (Trying to learn the language, trying to check that the hertasi isn't editing on the fly.)

There are still lots of possibilities, of course, but fewer, with twenty years of letters to hand. Not all that many people can successfully maintain a pretense for twenty years; the ability to speak like you hold values you no longer care about at all degrades, for most people, in time.

A very long game, or, more likely, a man who earnestly believes he's doing the right thing.

Which is not not a dangerous kind of man, especially if it goes hand in hand with being not persuadable that he is doing the wrong thing.

And war changes people, makes them more ruthless and more dangerous, often makes them start inventing rationalizations for breaking the rules that once meant a great deal to them.

But -

- a man she'd be willing to risk meeting face to face, she thinks, if the ceasefire is granted and sticks. 

She sleeps.

She wakes before anyone else and prays to Aroden and finds nothing in response. Which is not the biggest problem in the world - the pearls of power mean that she should be able to keep her existing spells indefinitely - but there's no similar convenient mechanism to get more healing.

And no advice, which she could genuinely use. 

It's not surprising. Aroden is, in the scheme of things, a new god with small reach. (She tries Abadar and Erastil and Sarenrae, in case either of them are present here, but if they are they don't think it's worth responding, which would be unsurprising even if they're here.)

Urtho will make himself available to meet her whenever she wants. He spent most of the evening repeatedly drafting and discarding letters to Ma’ar requesting a ceasefire. He would appreciate Iomedae’s counsel, now that she’s had a chance to learn more about the situation.

(He’s also very curious to hear how the conversations with the Predain prisoners went, and whether she’s still optimistic about turning any of them to send back into Predain as spies.)

They mostly don't want to talk to her, which makes some sense; Predain seems suspicious of the gods. She thinks she can get there in time, if they have the time, but plausibly too slowly to be at all useful. She was going to go back today or tomorrow with some gifts for the woman who talked to her, which should get some more of them to consider talking to her. 

She is happy to help draft a request for a ceasefire. She doesn't know the local conventions but apparently there are fewer of those here than in places where you sometimes need an airtight same-day treaty with the fucking church of Asmodeus.

…Yeah, it kind of hasn’t come up. Tantara hasn’t had a war in living memory, certainly not in Urtho’s own lifetime. Urtho would deeply appreciate Iomedae’s help in drafting a letter.

Tantara requests a ceasefire, beginning in two days' time at sunrise ("do they have the same calendar system?") and lasting three days, until sunrise again,  unless further communications should extend it ("normally I'd aim for much longer up front, but we're calling a ceasefire with your country half-occupied and so we're going to need to push the lines back and I don't want to give them much chance to settle into them.")

The proposed lines of disengagement are such and such and such and such ("are all of those absolutely unambiguous?") ("you want to include a map on which they are brightly labelled?") ("the likeliest way this fails if they agree to it and are trying to keep it is that you do not have the same maps") ("can it be a river? even if it's a river well into territory Tantara controls, no one can pretend they accidentally wandered across a river") ("you can mention that this is where we think the front is, but it's not the line of disengagement because it's where we think the front is, it's the line of disengagement even if we're entirely wrong and the front's somewhere else"). Both sides will withdraw their troops five hundred paces from the line, where it's not a river, and restrict aerial activities within six thousand paces of the line ("people will pull so much shit about where in the air they were".)

Neither side will engage in forward movement into areas on their side of the disengagement lines, where they're in fact drawn wrongly and not at the front. 

The proposed prohibited activities are such and such and such and such ("can you think of other things they might do that would be easy to misinterpret as a prohibited activity? you don't want to forbid them Gating their soldiers out, bored hungry soldiers on your territory are going to be a problem.")

The provisions for monitoring of the ceasefire are as follows. Tantara puts these names forward for their side and Predain can have as many. Monitors will be here, and here, and here, and possessed with lines of communication to both sides. Uses of magic permitted to the monitors are as follows. Civilians can make reports to the monitors of unauthorized activity of which they were the target. ("All of the proposed lines of disengagement are in Tantaran territory, does that mean all the locals will speak your language?")

Tantara represents that there are no military forces operating under Tantaran banners with which the Tantaran government is out of contact ("really? are you sure?") and no mercenaries employed by the Tantaran government etcetera etcetera etcetera ("anyone else who works for you who could kill any of them?")

That's so detailed and specific! Urtho is really impressed! He has a lot of questions about why she wants to bring up particular points or phrase things carefully in particular ways. 

He's going to have to look up answers to specific questions, and in many cases fail to find them in his piles of notes and have to dispatch one of his hertasi staff to go track down the relevant map or the reports from his commanders. It's also pretty clear that paranoia and contingency-planning in case of unlucky miscommunications is not a skill that comes naturally to Urtho. 

He can confirm that they don't employ any mercenaries. All military units should have either Mindspeakers or mages powerful enough to use the long range communication-spell, so they really should be in contact. ...He can order more frequent reports in, if Iomedae thinks that's a good idea? Obviously he needs to have updates passed to all units anyway, to communicate that the ceasefire is being considered. 

(He does express, a couple of times, that Ma'ar will probably find all of this - carefulness and specificity - quite reassuring.) 

Ma'ar should, because it's necessary to make sure they only end up slaughtering each other if someone actually expects to gain by it and not just because it's the tragic default. (And if it also communicates that someone careful and competent has picked up the war on Tantara's side, she's fine with that at this point.) She is happy to explain every single clarification and specific wording in her proposal, though nothing in it rests on specific wordings, so long as there is no interpretation of the wording that means something completely different, and everything important in it is said three different ways at least.

More frequent updates are a very good idea while there's a ceasefire under consideration. If there's an accidental or small-scale breach of it, learning about it sooner makes it more likely it doesn't explode into a full-fledged collapse of the temporary peace.

And if there's a large-scale breach of it, she wants to be immediately ready to take Tantara on the offensive. She will be mindful that mistakes and miscommunications and breakdowns of the chain of command are very common, but she is also acutely aware that Ma'ar, recalculating as he inevitably will be, may well breach the ceasefire to try to mount an attack decisive enough even she can't win from there, and she is committed to not letting him. She would much much rather avoid this fight and has, if that fails, no intention of losing it.

And, yes, it makes a lot of sense that they want far more regular updates; they can't maintain that indefinitely, it wears out the Mindspeakers and the mages, but he can order hourly communications including overnight for the next...five days, it sounds like? Or until something else changes, one way or another. 

She should talk to his generals about making sure Tantara is ready for an offensive. Urtho can arrange a meeting for later today. 

He's - a little worried that Ma'ar isn't going to be the first person in Predain to learn of their ceasefire offer, and while obviously Ma'ar has most of his army mind controlled to be loyal, Urtho...still isn't sure if all of Ma'ar's subordinates actually want to end the war. 

Probably not. They should send the message through many different channels. If the communication they get is that Ma'ar wants to offer the ceasefire but is countermanded by his King, or that Ma'ar offers the ceasefire but does not control the units in a certain area, Iomedae will.....assess how tactically convenient that is for Ma'ar and then figure things out from there.

Her plan, if the ceasefire is betrayed or not agreed to, is an offensive, which she doesn't think would possibly win except that its first element is Ma'ar's assassination.

In those societies where assassination of military generals isn't against local custom (and it often is, since nobles set local custom), it's a very efficient way to solve a war. You kill one person, instead of tens of thousands; it doesn't depend a whole lot on the character of the one person whether that's a good trade (though for various other reasons you generally want to do it only to people who are unusually terrible, or a little terrible and unusually good at it). And this mess is clearly the product of the decisions of one specific person much more than most wars are. Both his supporters and detractors seem to agree that Predain is unified because of Ma'ar, that it began its expansionist phase because of Ma'ar, that the neighboring fiefdoms fell so quickly because of Ma'ar, that the loyalties of its soldiers are substantially to the person of Ma'ar. Urtho's efforts to communicate Tantara's growing hostility were entirely through private communication with Ma'ar; she suspects, based on what she has seen of the man and read of the letters he has, that they were somewhat incompetent, as efforts at diplomatic communication go, but they were also the letters of a mentor to his student, begging him to change course, and seem to have moved Ma'ar not at all on either level.

"Ma'ar is a strategic genius and a geopolitical complete idiot" is among her hypotheses, but far more likely is "Ma'ar knows what he's doing". He soothed Tantara for long enough to build his forces, then provoked them into war by conquering all his other neighbors and conveying only the least credible of reassurances. Tantara invaded, his people unified against their (racist, domineering) enemy, he killed the King and seized the capital, and now he's winning. Urtho said Ma'ar had impressively good intelligence in Tantara; Ma'ar probably has even better intelligence than Urtho knows, because that's not an area in which one shows one's full hand while winning comfortably. So he knows that she is here, she should assume, that the call for a ceasefire is from her. If he's smart and ruthless and possessed with only his own idiosyncratic scruples, he will probably try to kill her, and it probably won't work. 

And she should probably try to kill him, and it probably will work. 

It's not a perfect solution. There will probably continue to be a war, afterwards, with trust between Predain and Tantara even lower; she'll win that war, she's sure of it, but it'd be much much better to avoid fighting it. And the people of Predain, whose self-conception does seem substantially caught up in being the people of Kiyamvir Ma'ar, will be bitter in a fashion that will persist long into the peace. Killing people rarely discredits them.

(She could descend on him from the sky with a spectacular light show and angel's wings, kill him with a fiercely glowing holy sword, and then give a speech about precisely which elements of his behavior Heaven does and does not approve of. She does not hesitate to speak for Heaven, not when she knows full well what they'd say if they bothered being more interventionist.

But they're not a god-trusting people, the people of Predain, and she fears they'll interpret it as the rich and indifferent powers that always neglected them coming once again to kick the ladder away...)

The alternative is to beat him on the battlefield. That...might work or might not. She doesn't know how to effectively make use of the local kind of mage. She'll have to learn very fast, but she has a lot of flexibility this world hasn't yet witnessed and she can plausibly win most fights singlehandedly. Maybe they'll figure out fast how to counter her; maybe they'll figure out fast how to actually successfully assassinate her, but she's not easy to counter and she's not easy to assassinate. (She wishes she were more sure whether a Final Strike would do it.) Ma'ar is, probably, not an idiot; he won't make concessions while he's winning, but he might well make concessions once he's losing. Or he might get more desperate; he hasn't started using prisoners and civilians in captured territory for blood power yet, but he could. He knows that Tantara's grievance is with him particularly, he can't expect to survive defeat; he can do a great deal of damage in the course of slowly losing. 

Yeah, she doesn't like that plan. 'Push the extremely smart extremely ruthless mage with a spectacular number of options for atrocities when he's desperate, to the point of desperation, by beating him on the battlefield' does not sound like a plan that ends with a negotiated peace. It sounds like a plan that ends with her assassinating Ma'ar in a month when the costs are far higher, or being killed herself. It could go well. Iomedae does not, for the most part, make plans that could go well but whose default trajectory is to go spectacularly badly.

She is - has been from the second she arrived here - looking for ways to get that negotiated peace. Maybe they'll agree to the ceasefire; maybe they'll agree to extend it in three days. Maybe they'll agree to a prisoner exchange. Maybe she'll be able to build enough trust fast enough to meet the man face to face. 

But the default plan - as it has been since about twenty minutes after she arrived here - is to assassinate Kiyamvir Ma'ar, or die trying. (And presumably get raised back on her usual battlefield. She does not at all believe herself to be outside Creation, not when there are completely normal looking humans going around slinging Fireballs and Lightning Bolts. Her death would be a major loss to Tantara, to this world, but not to her.) 

She thinks she can do it, if Urtho has some way to stop the man from simply fleeing. Tar Baphon himself couldn't beat her in melee, and Kiyamvir Ma'ar does not have Time Stop. 

....Urtho doesn't like this plan.

He's pretty unhappy about it, actually! He thinks assassinating people is generally an awful thing to do and also, well, he...still cares about Ma'ar, and - feels sort of responsible, for Ma'ar having lost his way. 

He's not going to argue with her conclusion, though. It seems pretty clear that Iomedae is an expert in war, and Urtho isn't, and never wanted to be, and has been incredibly out of his depth for the last year. 

...He can't exactly prevent Ma'ar from Gating himself out of a situation he doesn't want to be in? You could probably do that with compulsions, theoretically, but as previously noted, Predain is comfortable using compulsions and Tantara isn't. 

She commends their taboo on mind control and does not intend to violate it, but there's in fact no other way to stop people from Gating? At home you could Dimension Lock and locally bar interplanar transit.

(It might be worth trying anyway, depending how long Gates take.)

.....There is not a known method to block Gating out of a particular area, no, that doesn't even seem like the sort of thing that could work in principle. At best you could maybe block Gating in via particular Gate-techniques, but even that is mostly theoretical, not a known kind of wards. 

Most mages need at least five seconds of uninterrupted focus to Gate. Ma'ar is....unusually good at Gates and unusually fast at casting in general. 

She is absolutely unsurprised by that; it was obvious already Ma'ar was by far Predain's most powerful mage, obvious since it was explained to her that it was an artifact of his personal make that took the palace in an instant. 

It might not be worth trying, if he's too likely to just leave, and certainly raises the threshold at which it's worth trying, though if he betrays the ceasefire with an attack in full force she's in fact not sure she can win a war against him from there without hundreds of thousands of deaths. A war with a desperate blood-power using mage does not sound fun.

Hopefully he will agree to the ceasefire. If he does, and it holds, then she'll go and speak with him, and end this whole thing peacefully. 

...Yes. Hopefully. 

Urtho will finalize a draft letter - it's much longer than most of his previous attempts, and doesn't end up sounding much like him at all - and dispatch it for one of his mages to carry to the nearest Predain camp. 

Ma'ar probably won't receive it until late tonight, if not tomorrow morning. What are Iomedae's priorities in the meantime? 

Getting ready for if the ceasefire is refused, or fails. Where are Tantara's forces, and where are the most promising locations for an offensive? What are their numbers like? Where do they have the most information about the movements of their enemy?

...Urtho feels very unsure about promising locations for an offensive, but he can get her some maps and logistics reports and spy-reports (and another hertasi Mindspeaker to translate them to her), and arrange meetings with some of his other top generals. 

Tantara's troops outnumber Predain's, and Tantara's mages even moreso outnumber Predain's mages– or at least they did, at the start of the war, but Tantara's casualties were much higher, he'll need to track down more recent reports if Iomedae wants exact details. 

In terms of Predain's movements, they have a lot more information about the un-Gifted troops - Predain doesn't have a permanent Gate-network, and so large-scale people transport is much more costly - but small strike teams of mages can be wherever they want to be on very short notice, and can often shield their movements against scrying.