(OOC - Oops. There was no penalty for casting that last spell still.)
"Are there other magi or other wisewomen or men in the area we should consult as well?"
Tasia will also ask the same question in another way:
Posing the Silent Question [InMe20]: 25 (silent & still) - 3 (aura) + 0 roll = 22. I'm assuming my 5 botch-die reduction is enough to avoid a botch chance here.
The woman chuckles. "There are wisewomen and wisemen everywhere. Whether or not you should consult them is up to you." Posing the Silent Question reveals essentially the same answer: each village has its own practitioner of magic, but none are especially remarkable.
Scott
"I shall look forward to speaking with you again. I'm sure there is a lot we could share."
Just before she turns to leave, she asks via Posing the Silent Question, 'Did you lie to us today?'
((Posing the Silent Question [InMe20]: 25 (silent & still) - 3 (aura) + 2 x 8 roll = 38.))
Gregorius also bids the wisewoman farewell, before following Tasia from the house. Once decently away, he gestures to Theodoric to give them some privacy, and then comments,
"Not particularly helpful, unfortunately. Did you find anything from her mind?"
No, she didn't lie.
Scott
After leaving, "She was being truthful. While she may have a lot of information we want, I don't think she knows exactly what it is. It would probably take much more serious digging around in her mind to find out quickly."
Gregorius nods.
"She's going to be important to us somehow, I can tell, but whether for good or ill I don't know. Wretched aura. Did you get anything on what she had in mind learning from us? It could be that she just realises she doesn't yet know what it's possible for her to learn, but I'm a little wary. She doesn't have any power to force us into a specific bargain, I don't think, but I'd rather have a friend in the village than an enemy."
"I was more concerned with our needs than hers while questioning her mind. Checking for what she wants would certainly be advisable before making any sort of a deal with her. At this point I wonder if scouting the area, perhaps by air, might not be the most efficient thing to do."
"Beyond me, I'm afraid. Are you capable of a relevant spell? Unfortunately I think it's powerful enough that it would cause warping unless cast by or specifically designed for one. I suppose Viola might be able to acheive something spontaneously, although whether she'd be willing is another question. It is a shame we lost Aetos."
He pauses for a reply, and then continues on.
"There's another matter I wanted to ask you about. We've been sent covenfolk from all over the tribunal, and we're expected to have lots of Hermetic guests. If none of them have taken the opportunity to plant someone to report back to them, I'd be surprised. What's the legal status of checking for such things via Posing the Silent Question or similar spells?"
"Good thought." ((Code of Hermes: 2 + 5 (6 for peripheral code) + 1 roll = 8 or 9.)) Assuming I'm correct, "We should be able to scry upon ourselves as much as we want. We would need to be careful, making sure all members of the covenant are present and in agreement. Otherwise we would be scrying on each other in each other's own covenant, and that would definitely not work. But if we're all working together, we're only investigating our own servants. Even better, we could bring the servants into a sanctum and have the remainder of the magi just outside the sanctum and in agreement. Then, with the servants in his or her sanctum, that magus is even safer against a charge of scrying. Plus we have a quaesitor on hand who can confirm all the magi were in agreement."
"And if it reveals that another magus had ordered a servent to spy, it isn't a breach of code because we're in and protecting our covenant or sanctum, rather than scrying on their secrets?"
"I'll have a think about how we can make it non-obvious to the covenfolk what's going on - I can't see telling them that we're going to be reading their minds because we don't fully trust them increasing morale, and if they're all summoned somewhere one at a time, they're going to realise something's up, even if they don't know what. Would we definitely all need to be there? We could phrase the question to exclude ourselves from people having given such an order, in whuch case I'm sure you or I could just catch the grogs in conversation around the covenant over the season. In our aura I should be able to cast without sign, even if I can't do it in the village."
I seem to recall a couple of Peripheral Code rulings (from WGRE, I think) that might cover this, but it's a difficult area: normally, yes, using magic on someone else's covenfolk would be considered scrying, but sending grogs into someone else's covenant with the intent to spy is pushing the indulgence of any Tribunal. Perhaps more to the point, legally, once the covenfolk are employed by our covenant, they're the property of our magi, and bringing charges of scrying for spells cast on your own covenfolk is not likely to work, except in the minds of extreme Traditionalists (because it does still involve a use of magic to learn about a sodalis, and Traditionalists claim not to care about intent). I can't imagine your magi would be convicted, though having a case against you at Tribunal is not the way to make friends.
As for taking the covenfolk into a sanctum to cast a spell, I don't think that matters at all: the magus who's the victim of scrying has to be in the sanctum, not the magus's pawn. After all, you can't claim sanctum immunity for a spell cast at Arcane Connection range just because it's cast from your sanctum, right?
Scott
That wasn't the point. The point is that you can do whatever to defend your sanctum, even going so far as to kill other Hermetic magi. So you should inherently be allowed to scry on anything within your sanctum.
[Hmm. I suspect there are limits to that - if I kidnap another covenant's servant and then scry on him to discover your magical secrets in my own sanctum, I'm unlikely to escape punishment at tribunal, even if the taking of the mundane resource isn't a hermetic crime.]
True. But if it's servants of your own covenant in your sanctum and you want to be sure that they're their under your bidding and not someone else's, that should be fine. That would be a typical InMe check for intruders.
If you order the servants in expressly to check them, I don't think it counts as defending your sanctum, especially since the servants aren't inherently any threat there, like a magus would be. If you had an InMe enchantment in or on your sanctum, that might be a different matter, so long as it didn't look like you'd done that just to check out the servants.
Scott
[I suspect the key question is whether anyone is likely to be able to bring a successful prosecution if you discover via magic that they ordered one of your servants to spy on you. My opinion is that it's unlikely they could - few magi are going to be happy at the idea that they can't check their servants for loyalty for fear of accidently scrying on a magus, and will thus vote against a conviction.]
Moreover, I doubt that anyone would want to advertise the fact that they'd been spying on our covenant.