runsforcelery wrote:..
SNIP (Too many quotes)
About Aivah/Nynian, I will say only this. She was born with the primary capability which has made it so difficult for Merlin to figure out how she communicates with her friends back home in the Temple Lands.
Well, I'll say this, too. As she already told him, she sends very, very few messages to them. She gets more messages
from them, but Merlin's always known she has spies scattered around the Temple Lands, most of whom were recruited the same way
Archbishop Jaysn's secretary was. That is, she reached out to them after identifying them as potential recruited by some as yet unknown means. (Merlin presumes it was through reports from some of those people he still hasn't located and identified, but that's only an untestable hypothesis at this time.) These people --- i.e., the spies he knows about --- are clearly
not part of the group conducting active operations against the Vicarate, however, and he knows exactly how most of their messages are reaching her, mostly through an assortment of innocent-seeming commercial and personal mail which moves freely inside the Temple Lands and the Border States and only has to be smuggled the last little bit into Siddarmark. (The smuggling, by the way, is a service provided by some of the
many smugglers with whom she routinely dealt in various of her businesswoman personae before she moved to Siddar City. Most of those smugglers still believe they're smuggling goods and services in defiance of Clyntahn's edict [upon which --- and whom --- they spit, figuratively speaking] and they really
are moving commodities for her, with the spies' reports hidden among the bric-a-bat. That part of her communications net has never been a mystery to Merlin although I suppose I might have been a bit more definitive by what I meant when he reflected that he still hadn't caught her communicating with her people back home.
Hope that helps.
