"Yes, many of our recommendations are going to be around how the Church can provide more support in Westcrown. It will come at the expense of many other things but that's the nature of the business. My current impression is that we intend to replace your lay priest advisors with one lay priest and one empowered priest. I think we might be able to trade well-disciplined troops one to one, now that there have been some reforms and we can be confident it'll be possible for them to behave Lawfully here, but I'll have to go back to Lastwall to figure that out.... we should also consider getting you and the other Menadorans some security and staff on an emergency basis. You currently have no guards or staff remaining?"

"Currently, we are entirely reliant on the generosity of the Duchess of Chelam. Everyone we brought who is not related to a delegate is dead. If it's cheaper for you to supply teleports than to assign staff, we should have passable replacements in Menador, but anything that will stand up to a genuine concerted effort to do us harm will be a much larger operational sacrifice. Nearly all wound supply goes through Menador, and that the wizards exist doesn't mean it's necessarily worth it to reassign them."

(Drip.)

Lastwall, too, is in a position where any Teleports requisitioned for all of this are coming out of ones for Worldwound supply, or war supply, and paid for in lives. "I don't think we - nor, it sounds like, you - can afford security sufficient against a serious second attempt on your lives. I suppose that as the people who will bear the costs of a second attempt if it succeeds the archmages might be interested in paying to prevent it, if you have in mind a way they could that they aren't doing yet. 

I would predict that not having any staff would significantly reduce your ability to do the work of the Convention, is that right?"

"It will. It also makes it harder for the Duchess of Chelam, who is sharing hers, and who is involved enough in convention organizing - the primary organizer, really, not counting Cotonnet - that that's probably the greater loss to all of us."

"We have staff capable of doing the job, just not here. The only difficulty is transit. We should... probably just pay for the teleports to send for them in Kantaria and Taggun Hold. They're going for absurd rates in the city, these days, but I worry that the convention is moving quickly enough that the need for support is quite urgent. If you do want to assign someone yourself, though, it would at least make it easier to coordinate with the church about the convention. Having someone at the mansion, even shared between myself, the duchess, and Archduke Blanxart, seems worthwhile. But the priests you plan to assign may be sufficient."

"We will endeavor to assign someone who can be a point of contact for the three of you with the Church. I'd stay myself but the northern armies don't have a third circle paladin in Teleport range of the Worldwound as long as I'm here and that is the sort of thing that features in another incident report, down the road." Third circle paladins can give everyone around them a smite and this is the ability that saves a fortress every year or so. 

"My guess is that it's worth your paying for the Teleports to send for additional staff, for the reasons you just laid out. ...also, if Teleports are unusually valuable in the city right now, conceivably some of the Worldwound wizards should be ferrying frantic merchants about the Inner Sea this week, if you have the organizational flexibility and the supply margins at the Wound for that." Abadarans like to say that prices allocate goods efficiently. In his experience of the world this is not true - prices allocate goods away from Worldwound forts and critical staffing needs and towards panicky merchants -

- but precisely because it is not true if you go and do the highest-priced activities sometimes you end up wealthier and can then, yourself, allocate goods efficiently using your reason rather than prices.

Drip.

"That's possible. I'll consider who we have and send some letters. Supply is at least the sort of thing that permits a little flexibility, even if we can't afford to use them for ongoing security."

"Did you have other questions for me?"

"No particular ones. Thank you."

"All right. And outside the incident report, you mentioned wanting spiritual counseling. Can I be helpful to you there, or did the incident report cover most of your concerns?"

"I suppose it answered the most immediate one. You think - I should have told everyone to fire into the crowd. Even if it looked worse. But also that this is not the most important aspect of the situation to have gotten right, and that any agonizing is better spent thinking about avoiding such situations in the first place."

"Hmmm.... I think that would probably have been a better option. Or given one of our priests the command of your men, so if there were any questions about the decisions they would be the ones to answer for them, though I don't know if they were competent for that command. But I think it speaks well of you, that you were trying very hard to minimize how much of a terrible thing had to happen, and that it's generally a much better habit of mind to be - trying very hard to find those things, even though it will tend to result in errors in this direction, than to be not trying at that."

"...I don't really think they were. I think very highly of the priests you sent, but they were young men, and - even if I got things tactically wrong, by trying to be moral, I don't really think we should expect it would have gone much better to hand command to Arn."

"I suppose I wonder a little whether we should have gone with Ramirez's plan and let them kill us. I'd like to say we could have anticipated being raised, but going back it doesn't actually seem especially obvious, and doesn't seem obvious that the crowd wouldn't have stormed the house afterwards anyway. ... couldn't have asked Aniol to go out, in any case, and I don't know how many they were looking for."

"I don't have good guesses about how the mob would have responded, there. It is of course a perfectly reasonable thing to contemplate and might have been the right decision if it would have worked, but - it's not usually the kind of thing that's the right decision. Usually if I heard someone was considering it I would want to chide them to remember that Iomedae wants them alive and is not served by losing them, though I don't think you're exactly making that error, here."

"It's really that it's the only other thing any of us thought of, and it would be hard for anything to have gotten more people killed. But I'd rather not die, if it can be helped. I don't go around being especially afraid of it, but if we're assuming we don't get raised - though I think we can predict that we would have been - it's still quite a lot to give away for the sake of a hundred people bent on murder."

"Not a good trade," he says, fairly emphatically. "- the being raised contemplates it, but the raises are far from free for our allies. I don't think you had any good options, at that point, not really. Sometimes one really doesn't. To the extent that the Church put you in that position, which is certainly somewhat the case, I regret it, and will be thinking about what we could have done to avoid it."

Nod. "Well. If that's all you need - I can always use advice, but I think I can go a few days without making any awful decisions as long as nothing else extraordinarily dramatic happens in them."

"I will probably though only probably be less busy in a few days. I expect it is most useful for me to complete, and get you a copy of, the incident report, and introduce you also to your replacement priests, and then we can discuss any remaining matters that are better discussed with me than with them. Your confidential comments will not be included in the incident report at all, unless you let me know tomorrow that you want them included in the most secret version for the Church. ...that's not the standard way to handle confidentiality but I get the sense you have a hard time interacting with it and so am taking an additional level of caution around it."

"I'm afraid I'm not especially familiar with the Church's confidentiality procedures. I think - it risks losing the things that were gained, politically, if the gains are discussed publicly, and not particularly carefully."

"Usually I would just ask you with whom you wanted it shared, and do that. For matters more sensitive even than that, the policy is to share it with no one at all, treat it as utterly secret, unless on reflection a day later you authorize its further sharing. To give you more control over what is and ought to be your decision. If on reflection you want the private Church report to contain it, you can tell me that tomorrow. Otherwise it will not. Under no circumstances will the public version, for the reason you just gave."

Nod.

"All right. I have some letters to send, I think, and I'm sure you have other work as well."

"I am very grateful for your time." 

Even after the paladins leave, Narikopolus doesn't really think about all of his wizards, or why none of them are assigned to stay with him. He doesn't think about a mass grave of hastily-buried buried unwilling mistresses. He doesn't think about someone initially responding to the new justice orders by simply moving his torture garden inside. He doesn't think about annual sacrifices to devils that he hasn't bothered to confirm have definitely, positively been discontinued. He doesn't think about horrible crimes committed after the amnesty. He doesn't think of men who despair of ever escaping hell, and don't see the point in trying. He doesn't think about men who are on their best behavior, and whose best behavior is still terrifyingly, shockingly stupid.

He doesn't think about it because these men, too, serve Iomedae. They serve Her just as surely as the ones with hidden copies of the Acts once served Asmodeus. No private exercise of conscience can change whose army they fight for, or the fact that without them, basic military operations would crumple.

But Asmodeus did not see it that way, and Narikopolus thinks without thinking that Iomedae will not, either. Let the Church or the Crown - old or new - know that the hearts of men are complicated, and they will inevitably come to burn them for their imperfections.

Narikopolus has never in his life stuck his neck out for anyone, politically. If Iomedae's forces see this ugliness and order him to send half his teleports to hell, then Narikopolus will swing the sword himself, if commanded. But he won't point them out. He won't help his masters tear their own forces to shreds. If he runs them well enough, they may not ask. And if Iomedae's gaze does fall on them - well, then he can honestly say that he hadn't been aware of any serious crimes committed for months and months, and hadn't been thinking about the old ones (though the habit of thought is really for casual mind reading, and not meant to stand up to truth spells). It was an error not to report them then, of course, but he was much, much worse at being an Iomedan then, and still trying to keep his lands from falling apart.

It's possible that if Narikopolus were thinking about it, his assessment might now be different. He might have call to reassess whether the Iomedans are as wasteful or stupid in their pursuit of purity as the Asmodeans. He might be able to consider whether he could tell them anything under confidentiality, and expect that anything he revealed wouldn't immediately run to the top of their command chain. He might be able to have any of these people talk to Iomedans, and get a better sense of what the rules are. He might be able to trade teleport favors, and let the Church make better use of his resources in achieving their shared goals - because even worse than decimated, the fact is that Menador still has more slack in its teleport operations than Lastwall does.

Maybe it would matter. Maybe it wouldn't. But Narikopolus isn't looking there, so it is not possible for him to see another way.

He does send letters, asking for specific lower-circle wizards to be brought down. He asks Llei to write a few, too, as Taggun Hold has more wizards than anywhere else in Menador. But he doesn't call his teleporters to stay any longer than needed to drop them all off.