"What do you know about Granch?" I asked Jeort, causing him to look up in alarm.

"Having those fucking monsters in my head won't help me break the oath," he said, "and frankly I might rather die. They're a solution worse than any problem you could solve with them. What were we... what were we talking about a moment ago?"

Interesting. "So you're familiar with them. Good. Though the thing about them being a bad solution seems a bit hypocritical, since it's Halenvar that uses them."

He tried to shrug, but we'd tied him up well enough that it didn't really work. "We have, occasionally. In cases where the subject is too important to kill, and where other methods aren't an option. If they have an oath that would conflict with any we could put on them, or if they're very likely to undergo skilled mental probing by someone that would break through our other measures. Or... just hypothetically... if we were hoping they would be mentally examined."

Why would... ah. "By someone that didn't know how to recognize a Granch colony and would carelessly trigger it?"

He smiled. "I can't go into specifics, of course."

Jeort had said 'I can't go into specifics' to almost every question I'd asked during our earlier round of questions. He'd given us a fair amount of semi-interesting information, things I didn't know but which were probably not particularly secret. I didn't know how much to trust, so I had decided to move on to phase two. "Well here's the thing. I have a colony myself, and I've decided that if you don't give me something really good I'm going to feed you to them. Feel free to resist, of course, but they get excited when people struggle."

He paled. "You said you wouldn't torture me and then you threaten to have a spirit beast devour my mind? No. No, just execute me."

"Yesrin's tits, you go back and forth so much I don't know how to keep track. I'll never talk! Okay I'll talk. No, I won't. Actually, I'll cooperate entirely. Nah, murder me. Make up your fucking mind, you squirmy little shit. And before you do, just to make this very clear, whether or not you get gobbled up is entirely up to you. I'm still open to helping you if you start giving me something useful."

"You're calling me a... 'squirmy little shit'? Do you know who I am?"

He sneered, a little bit of spittle flying out as he started to rant at me. I leaned down and bit his nose. I'd considered trying what I'd done with Helma, pulling Jeort's mind into my memory palace to better control him, but in the end I realized it wasn't going to help get past the oath and it also would mean I couldn't - for example - bite him without risking him bouncing back to his body.

"You bit me! What the fuck?"

"I'm establishing dominance, like a fucking dog. It seemed like that was about the level of intelligence you're ready for. Wow, that's bleeding a lot. I damn near took that beak of yours off, that's wild. Anyway, champ, I watched you gleefully splatter a bunch of people in - admittedly - a very impressive and cool way, so don't think I'm going to be impressed with your name and titles or whatever, but for the record I know who and what you are better than you do, actually. I can do the speech for you, tell me if this is what you were going to say.

"Hi, I'm Jeort Itzeilae. I'm one of the last remaining big strike team leaders for Halenvar so I'm technically important, but really that's only because they wanted me to make something cool with some of Brinkmar's mana batteries. I'm good at that shit, but too stupid or prideful to avoid isolating myself from my support and defense crew so it doesn't matter. Speaking of, my soldiers don't respect me and I've never satisfied a woman in bed. I also lack the mental or emotional strength to actually die for a cause, not that this cause is worth dying for.

"I get it. You're scary, when you have time and resources and a bunch of people supporting you and no lock on your Dumine. If that situation comes up again, I will be properly respectful and bow down and beg for my life. Well, no, probably not. Anyway, to get this back on track I guess I should get on your level and ask... do you know who I am?"

He hesitated. "No... I suppose I don't." The fight was going out of him, yet again. This guy waffled back and forth like a metronome, though that could partly be because of his current state. I was stress-testing, seeing how... stable... he was before I questioned him properly.

"I'm the one that killed Telen. I've also had several run-ins with the Behemoth - no, you know what, fuck that. He doesn't get a title. I've had several run-ins with Henden, and you might notice that I'm standing here just fine. So, if you were going to compare yourself to Telen and Henden - in terms of how scared of you I should be - what would you say?"

His eyes were wide. "You're Calliope Smith. Fuck. Shit. Oh, fuck, you do have Granch. Why aren't you with Lord Protector Hammersmith or off on some secure facility? Why would they let you run free?"

"Let me? No, I killed the person in charge of the place they had me at and busted my way out. So let's cut the shit and stop acting like I need to respect you."

He nodded, looking at me as if trying to weigh me up. "I won't struggle. But I literally can't tell you the things you want. You heard the oath, what I can tell you of it. It's too thorough."

"Oh, that won't be a problem. But listen, I'm tired of you changing your mind. Literally the very next time you insist you're willing to die for Gilbrect fucking Halenvar - and man, what a sad choice of people to die for - you will immediately get your wish and I'll question someone else. I have access to as many people with this knowledge as I want; you are utterly disposable."

He scoffed. Actually scoffed. "I seriously doubt that."

Good. He still had no idea. "Well let's try an experiment. How about you tell me, to the best of your ability, what the current status of things are here in Brinkmar. Don't worry about what the oath would allow, I've made sure you're free of that restriction."

"That's ridiculous, nobody can remove the loyalty oath." He didn't sound confident, so I just smiled and waited for him to speak. "Fine. The Endless Empire forces came in at the second priority portal, which indicated their probability experts are better than ours. I... shouldn't have been able to say that."

"Continue. Remember what happens if you lie or argue, and know that I am swearing to you, right now, that I will absolutely let you leave alive if you help me. That's a guarantee."

He shoved his back against the wall to stand, and did his best to stick a hand out for a shake. Ah. Yeah, why not. I cut his hands free - he wasn't a threat - and took his hand. "It's an official bargain," I said, "I swear on my life that if you tell me everything I ask about to the best of your ability - including avoiding lies of omission or being deliberately deceptive - I will make sure you leave here unharmed by me or anyone else. After that you're on your own."

"How did you remove an oath? No. You wouldn't share that sort of information, would you? Hmm. This... changes everything. I don't actually give a shit about Gilbrecht Halenvar, in fact at this point I hope you gut him like a fish. You said I'm free of it - you're telling me that the oath is removed, not suppressed?"

"You are, now and forever, unbound from any oaths. When I let you go, you'll be free to do whatever you want."

"They did better than we'd hoped getting past our initial forces," he continued, rubbing his wrists, "but I used my creation to keep them from regrouping. Their priority has been Trallanar, but roving patrols have been skirmishing throughout Brinkmar. They're winning. Turash was injured, maybe killed. His support team rushed him away, chances are they were able to heal him but I heard he was missing limbs and then we had a communications breakdown and I never got an update. I know Henden arrived with some reinforcements from a secret portal in an abandoned outpost on Calnon, we'd found and secured it about a year ago. I don't know for certain where he is, but I assume Trallanar."

"Henden can open the portals?"

"There are ways to change who has permission, but Gilbrecht doesn't have the ability to permanently grant access. Instead he has a sort of key, officially he'd given it to Telen but Henden must have ended up with it - not a bad choice considering how hard he is to kill."

I wanted that key, less for me to have and more so that nobody else would have it. "On the topic of dead Halenvar commanders, what about Cyra? Is she for sure gone?"

"We believe so, for the better part of a year in fact, but we didn't recover her body. She was trying to track down one of the other artifacts smuggled out of Brinkmar, and got into some altercation at the edge of the Free States - some shithole town, I forget the name. A few of her people got away and were going to follow up, but then the Empire suddenly seemed to know everything we were doing and priorities shifted."

"What was she looking for?"

"The Clockmaker's spellbook and the linked crown. Those, Yesrin's Loom, and a key to the vault here were all taken out by different knights during the evacuation, with orders to protect them and keep anyone from using them."

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I'd already had all those pieces; I knew the knights had taken stuff out of Brinkmar, the artificer at Storm's Keep had asked about a crown in relation to the spellbook, and I knew there had been some altercation with Katrin and Errod's dad over the spellbook. I just hadn't stopped to think that he might have been the one to kill one of Halenvar's big bads. Kicking ass seemed to run in the family. "How does the crown work with the spellbook?"

He leaned against the wall, trying to look casual. Probably he was actually thinking about ways to escape, the poor thing. He had no idea how trapped he was. "I'm not certain. I read what little we had on it, but that was full of holes. They were linked in some way, the spellbook was the more important part but the crown made it... better? Easier? Something like that. Tantek, the guy who was maybe the queen's son or maybe the guy who killed the queen's son? He was put in charge of Trallanar and was researching the Clockmaker's old projects and found the spellbook and crown. That's presumably how he ended up being able to nearly take over Brinkmar, so you can imagine why Gilbrecht wants to recover it - but it can't be tracked directly, and whoever has it has kept it hidden or on the move."

Telen had seen it, but he died almost immediately after. Some other people had seen it, but probably wouldn't have any way of knowing what it was. Katrin had a leather cover over it now too, and she didn't flash it around in public unless we were fighting someone so... it was probably fine. "Okay cool. Hmm. It sounds like Halenvar has a more detailed history of what happened here in Brinkmar than what I was seeing in books, how about you give me a quick rundown?"

"I never worried about details, but I have more confidence in the chain of events than most. There was a lot of deliberate misinformation from the queen, she didn't want anyone else to know what a shitshow this place was and since it's already so isolated - they could open the portals any time back then but they kept it to once a month anyway - she was able to control things with propaganda better than most rulers. Tantek... as I said, he was researching old projects from the Clockmaker, he'd been able to get into some old labs that had been sealed up for ages. He figured out some stuff clearly, and he turned them against the queen. He locked down Trallanar, kinda sat on things for a while. He had all the time in the world, since he had the Crossroads facility in there with him.

"Anyway, this lasted for years. Nobody could get in to Trallanar, and this guy was just slowly working on breaking through all the Clockmaker's old wards and things. You asked about Granch earlier? He made those fuckers, hand crafted them to use against his enemies. He made other things - invisible assassin golems that could walk right up to people and slit their throats in the middle of a crowded room. Some sort of clockwork monster to act as his bodyguard. Oh, and of course the device that cursed this whole plane."

I tried to resist, I knew I should get things back on topic - especially since there was still a risk he would realize what was happening - but I had to ask. "What kind of clockwork monster? Is it still around?"

"Nah. If we have our history right, which we probably do, it was destroyed by the so-called Savior of Brinkmar. But you can always see the big one, the one he based it on. That thing supposedly still stalks the Clockmaker's palace on the prime plane, looking for its master and murdering anyone that gets too close. That's why the Endless Empire never lets anyone in. They say they're keeping it in perfect shape for the Clockmaker's return, but really anyone that goes in gets torn to bits. They've got this ritual, this fucked up thing where someone runs into the palace and... they ring a bell, or something. Anyway, about a third of the time they don't make it back out. They do this ritual every fucking day. They've done it every day since the Clockmaker died, or vanished, or whatever. Think about how many people that is!"

For all my problems with the Empire they'd never struck me as the type to ritually sacrifice people to a monster, but I didn't really have time to get into that. "Okay finish up the summary so I can ask my next question."

"Fine. While Tantek is doing whatever he's doing, the queen trains up someone and adopts them to grant them legacy security access. Once he's old enough, barely, she convinces everyone that he's some destined savior and sends him in. He turns out to be extremely effective, really gives Tantek a hard time, but then something goes wrong and he orders an evacuation. The curse was already in effect, everyone had already wanted to evacuate but they were being held back by the queen because she didn't want to admit defeat. Not sure what changed her mind, or if Tantek killed her, or what. Either way, everyone that was still alive left. The majority ended up in Halenvar, the king back then was a... what's the word, a consort to the queen.

"As part of the evacuation everything was locked down to make it as hard as possible to get back in. Nobody knows what became of the queen, or Tantek, or the 'savior' kid so we've mostly assumed that Tantek killed the queen, the savior killed Tantek, and then the savior died from... whatever. Maybe he was trying to get rid of the curse and set off a trap or something. It doesn't really matter, in the end."

Okay, not really anything new there. Back to the important shit. "What's the plan? Why is Halenvar doing this?"

Jeort leaned forward, eyes sparkling with excitement. "The Clockmaker... he captured fate itself, supposedly. Or a part of it, I don't know. He was going to build a device using that trapped fragment of divine machinery to ensure his empire lived on forever, but before he was finished he put it all away in a locked vault. Gilbrecht Halenvar is convinced that he just didn't have the power - he'd used the Grand Alignment to capture fate, but that meant he didn't finish fine-tuning the device until after that. And so if he needed it to be activated on the Grand Alignment as well, that would be this next one. Gilbrecht wants to activate it, but with himself in charge. The problem is that he's missing the main core of it, it's still sealed in that vault. He's had a whole string of experts come in to try and break through, but he can't do it.

"I was the first, but it's way beyond my level. Normally that might hurt my pride, but it's the fucking Clockmaker! How was I ever supposed to compete with that? Then some random other people who he ended up killing, then Ulren, and finally at Ulren's urging he brought the Hierophants of Oblivion in. Those fucking freaks. They got one of the three cells open, but it had some sort of planar terraforming device in it. Like a lot of other stuff there were partial plans in Tantek's lab, in this case because it was probably what he based the curse grinder on."

"The curse grinder?"

"Yeah, that's what we call the thing that's cursing Brinkmar. There's other plans in there, but Ulren took most of them. He said he was building something that would get Gilbrecht in, but it looked wrong to me. I tried to warn everyone, tried to point out that it was Ulren that brought on the Hierophants and for all I knew might be one of them. You can't trust those people. But Gilbrecht... well, he was past the point of no return. The war had already started, and he knew that in the long run he couldn't stand up to the other nations. His only hope is getting that device working, and making all of reality bend to his will."

"For what it's worth, you're right about Ulren. His plan was to make a device that could go back in time, and then to make it work he'd get the existing world out of the way by having the Hierophants destroy everything."

"Everything as in... everything?"

"Yup! All of it."

Jeort looked almost excited about this news. "I knew it! Ha! I was right, that asshole was going to ruin everything! I'm glad you blew up his stupid lab. Good riddance."

Ah, so he didn't know Ulren - or a version of him - was still alive. "Okay, so he got the terraforming device out, I know that because they tried to kill me with it. And he doesn't have the fate thing out, because Ulren wasn't really helping him much."

"Right. Well, last I heard. It's got this planar lock on it, but it's impossible to open." Seeing the confused look on my face, he decided to expand on that. "The person that opens the door needs to have alignments with every plane. Normally people only have alignments with Ematse and Erima. Some people have more, sure, but nobody has all of them. I guess it's possible the Clockmaker did, but we think it's more likely someone tampered with the lock after the fact. Maybe Tantek didn't want anyone trying to use this thing. It's easier to add requirements than to remove them, so by adding every plane to the list he could keep it away indefinitely."

I asked a few more questions, but Jeort didn't seem to know all that much. He'd mentioned a communications breakdown, which was probably a deliberate attack from the Empire. So he could say that the Empire had probably taken Trallanar, and that Gilbrecht Halenvar was probably holed up there still, but he didn't actually know jack shit. He also didn't know how to get rid of Granch, or where the nearest evacuation portal was - he did know of some on the far side of the island, and one here that had been obliterated by the Hierophants.

"Okay. Oh! What the fuck is Tindelus?"

"That depends on who you ask. Some say it's a demon, some say it's a construct that was too dangerous to keep in action. There are wilder theories too, anything you can think of. We're almost positive it was a key factor in the Old Empire collapsing though, and anything that could give the Clockmaker trouble is something I don't want to mess with. Tantek threatened to release it, and Halenvar has implied he's willing to consider it in dire enough circumstances, though I can't personally figure out how that would help. Maybe just out of spite, I don't know."

Useless. Bah. "Last question, I think. Anything else we should be aware of? Anything you think I should have asked you?"

He shot a nervous glance at the door, but then did genuinely seem to be thinking about it. "There's someone else you can question, that might know some of these things. A demigod, trapped in a glass tube in Trallanar. His name is Betokat, and he's completely unhinged. He can almost certainly answer your Granch questions, and maybe some of the others."

A trapped demigod was interesting. Okay, time to cut this guy loose and report back to Katrin and Errod. "Thanks. Alright, the exit is through that door. Have a great life."

He very hesitantly walked to the door, clearly expecting me to stab him in the back. Still, it's not like he had any better plan and so after a moment he pulled the door open and saw the swirling mist on the other side. "What the fuck is this?"

"That's the edge of my domain. We're in Ematse. Go, run free little guy. Enjoy yourself."

"I don't... I don't understand."

"Honestly I was worried you'd notice that your nose wasn't bleeding anymore. It fixed itself a few minutes ago, and then you even kinda rubbed your face for a second and I was sure the jig was up."

"This can't be Ematse. It feels so real, and I... I had training. I should have pulled free, especially when you bit me."

"Free to where?" I asked, smiling. "This is your home. You're not Jeort, buddy. You're an oydirme that I captured and attached to him with a very special magic trick. You've been thinking with his brain, absorbing his memories and personality, but - and this is crucial - not his oaths. So. We have both fulfilled our parts of the bargain, and you can step on out of here unharmed. And then I'm going to go back to the real Jeort, and probably kill him so long as I can think of a way to do it that won't make Errod mad. At that point you'll start to kinda fade out until you're back to your old self and can go back to being in people's dreams."

He stared into the mist. "No. No. I... I'm a person. You're lying."

I shrugged, walking over to him. "Believe what you want, man. Good luck out there."

I launched him out of my domain, his scream fading as he vanished into the ethereal fog.

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