The palace is willing to send Dolor up to the nice sitting room Aspexia-Isona and two of her cousins and a few palace servants briefly lent to her for the duration of the crisis occupy, then.

"Please, come in - I don't think I thanked you enough," Aspexia-Isona says. She very prominently wears a holy symbol of Iomedae-the-Inheritor. "If it wasn't for you I and my cousins might have been dead."

Dolor doesn't have any particular thoughts upon seeing the holy symbol; she never actually learned that vampires were supposed to be repelled by them, and in any case doesn't consider Iomedae's symbol to be anything other than a way to claim loyalty to the new regime. She considered wearing one herself for that reason, but until the archmage picked her to come try to fix the army she wasn't actually all that loyal or interested in pretending.

"It's always good to see bandits stopped in their tracks, though I won't deny that I rather expected them to scatter sooner. Did any of them try to trouble you once you went to ground?"

"No, things were quiet after the rains. I really don't understand what they were doing." 

"I had assumed at first it was the usual reasons for banditry - that's what the first people I found when I was heading out doing. They saw a bunch of other people were out who would distract the guards, not that they'd do much good anyway, and decided it'd be a great chance to steal some stuff and not get caught. I had to discourage several people from robbing stores, and you're a lot richer than they are, so it made some sense. But it doesn't explain why they kept at it once they started dying - even army patrols with a cleric of Asmodeus to keep them in line will start breaking once you kill enough of them, and they've got hell plate and bless. My best guess is that either there's some spell I haven't heard of that's stronger than Bless and makes people fearless, and someone cast it on them, or there were just so many of them in tight corners that once someone got to the front and realized it was a stupid plan there was nowhere to run. If you'd stuck to larger streets you could have avoided that and not been trapped in a dead end, but I suppose it did do something to help with the weight of their numbers."

Dolor thinks it was actually a really stupid tactical error that Aspexia-Isona should have seen coming a mile away, but criticizing officers like that never works so it's better to give her an excuse for why she did it and hope she learns better.

"I haven't been in a city before and I made a mistake and got seven people killed," she says. "I should've tried to use illusions to disperse the crowds out front, but I didn't think I could beat them in a fight and I thought we could slip out the back and not be noticed."

Huh! Wonder of wonders.

"I hope the palace is secure enough that it comes up again, but if something comes up to distract the archmages I wouldn't trust the guards as far as I can throw them. Do you have a plan for if it happens again while you're here, or for if the offer is temporary and you have to return to other lodgings? Where to go, what routes to get there, what spells you'll cast? I expect conditions on the ground will obviate any actual plan quickly but it's almost always better to have a plan you're improvising changes to than to have nothing and need to think on the spot."

"Is it after my brothers are back alive or not? I still don't have a good palace map, probably the best thing to do is to find a good hiding place and use illusions to make it a great one, the archmages are resurrecting everyone and if I burn to death I think they have better odds finding my bones that way than if I end up in an alleyway."

"I expect that would work if you were quick enough, but probably not if you didn't get to flee until they were already within sight. I'd either find a map or go exploring myself to find a spot, and then for good measure at least make sure I know which corridors lead out of the palace and which are dead ends, but I hadn't heard they were doing raises. Hmm. Someone could still spirit your body away, but there's hardly any money in it and it's always most efficient to focus on likely dangers. I don't know enough about wizardry to know if you need to practice whatever illusions you'd use on a hiding place, either, so I can't give any advice there."

How does she compliment a noble for being unusually willing to admit their mistakes and learn without offending them enough that they get pissy and stop doing it? There's probably not a way. 

"I take it from the new lodgings and the fact that you're a noble in Westcrown that you're a delegate at the convention. Are you on any committees?"

If they can't flee until the mob is in sight her retainers can hold the door, it's not that wide. "Inheritance," she says, "and Infrastructure. Are you?"

They probably don't have any opposing goals for the constitution, then, unless infrastructure wants to spend a ton of money on useless boondoggles and Aspexia is on that side of the argument there. She doubts it, the Abadarans are at least supposed to be good with money and one of them's chairing the committee. 

"Army and Education. My goal is to help get the army into good enough shape that the queen can use it to deal with Cheliax's bandit problems."

"May the gods bless your endeavor," she says politely. She's very skeptical that's possible.

She is too! But it might be more possible like this than it is by killing off whatever members screwed up enough to be vulnerable to her ambushes, and she's not going to give it up before she's tried. Dolor sticks around a bit longer for pleasantries, and then makes her excuses - there's supposed to be reclamation troops doing patrols now, and she wants to see what they're like for real rather than however the nobles of the committee portray them.

And Aspexia-Isona still owes Dolor a favor, and she's pretty sure Dolor knows that.

And she can go back to trying to find out how to recover, and just what the Bank of Abadar's interest rates on "we have the money, we swear, it's just physically located in northern Sirmium and we need to get it to your bank in southern Sirmium and then get the letter to you from the southern Sirmium bank" are.