"I thought you'd say that, yes. For the first trip we'd need someone with Teleport to borrow who's been to Rahadoum, I'm not sure where best to locate one of those."

"I expect it would be possible to locate one in Absalom, owing to its unusually large wizard population, status as a central Teleport hub, and diverse range of perspectives, some of which are likely compatible with their unusual philosophy."

"I do at least know where to find a teleporter who has been to Absalom before."

"You know, if you're feeling short on cash, I'd be happy to hook you up with some great sources of cheap supplies!"

"He's not a thief, Woljif."

"Quite. Though as when this came up before if we are talking about objects looted from demons that's fine."

"How about teaching your men to hunt the local wildlife? That way they won't go hungry, even if you run out of surfacer money."

"You've suggested that before but I do not think it is in fact sustainable. Even if we happened on a herd of caribou at a convenient moment, we can't follow them when our business lies other than where they might care to roam, and they'd only feed an army of this size for so long, whereafter we'd have no particular way to encourage another one to swing within convenient hunting distance. If you'd like to run a class on it for anyone who's interested in supplementing their diet that is a more than all right way to pass the time but I cannot rely on it logistically, and it's also not what any of the enlisted were promised."

"Could you just go to all the nobles in Mendev and explain to them that it's really important that the Crusade succeeds?"

"I am planning something somewhat like a more targeted version of that strategy with the Count's direction. But with a Crusade called on average every couple of decades, no one who is moved by that argument has had more than a couple of decades to recoup whatever they gave last time. Also that plan would rely on my having more Splendor than a portcullis to work well."

"Step one, invent a spell to turn you into a portcullis, step two, cast an Eagle's Splendor..."

"Step one is dispensible. The trouble with step two is it doesn't last very long and my mysterious spell extension thing does not seem to work on spells that are short to begin with."

"There are headbands that do both but they're pricier. Does it have to be you or could you get someone more Splendid to do it?"

"It depends on whether whoever I'd be meeting with wants, specifically, the Knight-Commander, and would feel slighted by a representative even if the representative was a better conversationalist."

"Some wizards find it easier to interact with others when they can practice what they are going to say with their familiar first! Perhaps it would be helpful for you to expand your arcane studies beyond Prestidigitation."

"If they really want to do what's right it shouldn't matter whether you're a good speaker."

"No. It matters enormously. There are a lot of excellent causes they could put their resources towards and it is not even obviously the case that 'having savings for their own use' is not one of them. They cannot simply line up all of the cause advocates and read all our minds and then also pull a hundred-year-old scroll of miraculously functioning prophecy out of a bureau drawer and supplement with that to find out which of our motives are pure and which of our strategies will succeed at this or that noble goal. They must choose what to do by more pedestrian means."

"But whether or not you're a good speaker doesn't have anything to do with whether the Crusade is important!"

"It doesn't. But it has to do with whether I can explain it to other people."

"Perhaps you should send me to appeal to their consciences," says Count Arendae with a straight face. "No one can deny that I have the splendor for it."

"Sure we can."

"I suppose there's no accounting for taste."

"In all seriousness if you estimate that some of the people we settled on palatable methods to approach would take your visit as well or better than mine it would be a perfectly reasonable use of your time."

The Count is perfectly happy to speculate on this! That sounds much more pleasant than anything else the Knight-Commander is likely to put him up to!

And eventually, they approach the village. 

Ghouls aren't like zombies or skeletons, mindless undead with no will of their own. They're perfectly clever, even if their cleverness is pointed in a rather specific direction. In this case, that means that Blai's party is greeted by a few ghoul archers attempting to ambush them from behind a small group of trees.