A few minutes, his imperial ass.

The alarm rings simultaneous with her entry into the room. It takes four seconds for the shift his independent-assignment-lieutenant-with-implausible-authorizations stationed on eight-hour alert to form up and draw weapons - leaping out of bed as they throw power into their activated talismans. One Gater per squad opens a mass horizontal gate and they all fire simultaneously a moment before they're dropped through the mass vertical gates, shields ready and already firing.

From Alfirin's perspective, thirty-six different sorcerers in three different twelve-sorcerer teams will immediately fire through Gates towards her from above before, unexpectedly, twelve of them* appear from completely different Gates to land on the floor and fire from there. She is presently being hit with force-daggers, lightning bolts, fireballs, and, of course, most of all, the specialist Adept-killer weapons that are functionally enchanted sling bullets that fire force-daggers on impact with probably-the-target's-shields and then immediately fireball through the hole the force-daggers tear.

(In fact the majority of Kastil's strike teams are not Adepts. Masters positioned near existing lay-lines, as these were, and equipped with powerful artifacts, as these are, with little need to do more than use their artifacts to shield their squads and then spend their energy on throwing compulsions and firing their Adept-killers as fast as possible, can serve nearly as well as Adepts in combat.)

Alfirin is immediately attempted-compulsioned with separate orders to take no volitional actions and to immediately disable all of her spells, shot with a very large number of projectiles, surrounded in a vast haze of fire and lightning that incinerates anything near her, and have Adepts trying to sever all compulsions on her and the worrying one she placed on Aritha as quickly as possible. Any who can't complete their tasks will just shoot her a lot.

(*: That's all that could fit in Aritha's room.)

Aritha dies instantly because she's a normal human being.

Compulsions have no effect on her; they settle on her enchantment foil and she understands them but is not, in the least, compelled. The mages trying to cut her spells flail blindly. A master's spells will do nothing to her, an adept's will fail most of the time. (Tar-Baphon can only do slightly better than fifty-fifty, if he hasn't dispelled her spell resistance, which he almost always does.) Sling bullets bounce off her robes as if they were enchanted steel plates, or swerve away from her person to impact the walls behind her. But a few of them get through, and if the fire doesn't hurt the force-daggers do.

This is mildly inconvenient and Aritha is dead, which is also mildly inconvenient.

If she decided to stick around for three or four rounds they could probably even kill her. She could end everyone attacking her now with a circle of death but she doesn't, actually, prefer that, and doesn't prefer to keep doing that to every successive wave of reinforcements. Even though it would send a stronger message about not fucking around with archmages, since apparently the last one didn't sink in.

She can grab hold of Aritha's corpse with one hand and her metamagic rod with the other and quickened greater fucking teleport away from here. Look, she didn't kill anyone unnecessarily even though they were trying their absolute best to do the same to her. Iomedae would be so fucking proud.

They will try and fail to counterspell her teleporting out and, meanwhile, sound the general alert to the extent it has not already been completely sounded.

Altarrin is going to go slightly over the time limit Alfirin gave him, in the mindscape, but only by 90 seconds or so. He's still in the records cache they picked for this purpose, back on the main continent but at the far southwestern edge of it - past it, in fact, on an offshore island, maximally far from the Empire. 

Cure Moderate Wounds.

"...She looks dead, I thought you were planning for her to not be dead."

"There was an ambush. Aiming for me, obviously, but not very discriminatingly. Time to see if the local gods make this a problem."

Raise Dead

Altarrin, who when Alfirin arrives is still asleep on the bedroll he dug out for this, will wake up from the mindscape just as she's finishing - he's instantly rising to a sitting position, flinging out mage-sight, looking around - 

- and Aritha, from her perspective, wakes up somewhere unfamiliar , feeling like she was recently dropped off a tall building or something -

- screams for help -

He isn't going to compulsion her to not scream, it's - fine, actually, if she screams, it's not risking anyone overhearing her. If she tries to Gate back that's going to be a problem but she's a researcher, not a combat specialist, she's not going to be incredibly fast at emergency Gates and may not have the skill for unscaffolded Gates at all. 

He scrambles over to get himself into her field of view, holds up both hands. "Aritha. You are safe here." 

" - Archmage-General? Where are we - who is -" She gestures at the person next to him, both of them are just invisible to mage-sight like there's nothing there -

- also there's a fox? What? Why's there a fox?

"It is a long story. Right now we are in - a secure location known only to me, several thousand miles from the Empire, but we need to leave this world as soon as possible - are you all right -?" Her compulsions are gone, which he hadn't realized was part of the plan, and he's expecting her to panic about it as soon as she notices. 

"I feel terrible -"

She pauses to try to get slightly more information about that, and then she notices -

- he cut her compulsions. 

If he cut her compulsions, it's because he wanted her this way, and there's no advantage to being - angry, or horrified, or - 

- it does rule out, though, what she'd been hoping for a second ago, which was that he hadn't defected and had just been doing something terribly important and secret -

'we need to leave the world as soon as possible' -

"We're working for Iomedae now?" she says calmly. She's not planning on working for Iomedae, but this is the kind of thing one doesn't say and preferably doesn't even think.

"Not quite. You're a prisoner but if you don't want to betray your Empire you can remain a prisoner, or a statue, or die in martyrdom if that's your preference. I was hoping we could have had this conversation before removing your compulsions but they came off when you died. For what it's worth, I'm sorry about this." Dominate Person

- that is the coolest spell she has ever seen and she is terrified of whatever it's presumably doing to her that this woman thought she should be sorry for but this is actually only a secondary line of thought behind -

"When I died?"

"The Empire objected to me kidnapping you. I don't know if they were trying to kill you to prevent it or just insufficiently concerned with your survival to use less-lethal methods on me. They were mostly aiming for me."

- no, the confusing thing here is not that Aritha died given that someone Gated in to kidnap Aritha, the confusing thing is that Aritha is here given that she died.

"...And I can return people from the dead."

And now the lack of compulsions is making her feel dizzy, because - because she could, right, just work for the people who can return the dead to life - who did it for her - she wants to -

- she told the Emperor, specifically, 'even if they cut my compulsions' - she did not really imagine a scenario where they retrieved her from the dead -

- no one has actually asked her anything. She doesn't need opinions. 

She pulls her face together and - nods, at the revelation that the woman in front of her raised her from the dead.

"Aritha," he says, seriously. "We are not going to ask you to break your word. I know Bastran would have asked, and - whether it not it was a fair situation to ask it of you, I imagine you preferred having the option to - make promises that would be believed. And Iomedae's people take that even more seriously than I do. I - you will be safe regardless of what you decide to do, and - my hope is that we will find a way not to be enemies with the Empire, it is very stupid, and then you could go back. But I cannot say how long it will take."