Intelligence
The IRIS — an unbroken pre-colonial intelligence service that has continued operating in secret on Callidore for three thousand years, headquartered beneath a cover criminal gang in Farise.
The IRIS — the Internal Research & Intelligence Service — is the great hidden institution revealed in Practical Adept: a pre-colonial human intelligence agency that never stopped operating. While the Magocracy rose and fell and the Narasi Conquest rewrote the surface of the world, the IRIS simply kept watching from beneath it. Its headquarters in Farise sits behind a criminal syndicate of the same name — "the Iris" — whose street-level smuggling operations give the real service cover, funding, and reach across the southern seas.
Minalan pieces it together when he enters the building and recognises the logo in the stained glass:
The picture itself is in the form of an eye — the Eye that the Contramara fear — but is actually the logo of the Internal Research & Intelligence Service, though it looks a little less creepy in stained-glass. The Iris. Of which I assume this is the headquarters.Minalan, Practical Adept
The cover-gang is described by one of its own chiefs — with only the surface truth on display:
One of the heads of an international criminal syndicate that controls smuggling from here to Unstara — and I would have been telling you the absolute truth. Just not all of it.Practical Adept
The IRIS is old in a way almost nothing else on the Dry is old. Forseti's colonial archives at Unger Station list it among the surviving pre-colonial agencies whose records were preserved:
Colonial Defense Force, the Colonial Science Foundation, Colonial Strategic Command, the Survey and Exploration Corps, Internal Research & Intelligence, Colonial Vital Statistics, the Colonial Education Board…Ariel, reading Forseti's archives, Practical Adept
Bartharis, a senior IRIS officer, tells Minalan bluntly:
My loyalty is to the IRIS, and ultimately to the colony. We didn't survive centuries on this world as an institution by giving away our secret bases.Bartharis, Practical Adept
The IRIS's explicit mandate is to watch — watch for threats to the colony that predate and outlast any human kingdom. Minalan's takeover of Farise as Doge Mirkandar I brings him into direct negotiation with them, and he ends Practical Adept with a promise of future conversation: "I think we have a lot to talk about."
| Type | Intelligence |
| Status | Active |