'Stealing' is such a harsh way to describe it. It's not like this is anything out of the ordinary — well, there might have been a bit more skimming than usual, but that's to be expected with all the attacks that happened along the line.

They... don't really know which individual people handled the money. They know which forts are on the way, he could write to the forts and ask?

Irabeth is pretty sure she knows who was handling it in Kenabres, at least.

"Careful, my dear Select, anyone with the privilege of handling the funds in Nerosyan will almost certainly have a patron on the Royal Council."

"What does that cash out to in practice?" What are they going to do, take his job?

"It may affect their desire to allocate additional funding or troops to the Crusade, insofar as they have any to allocate. Of course, sometimes it's worth risking their displeasure, and any individual faction can only bring so much influence to bear, but in this case you may well replace one bureaucrat with another just as interested in self-enrichment."

"I can attempt to be slightly more conciliatory in any letters that must go as far as Nerosyan's purse-managers. How beholden is the Queen to this council?"

"In principle they are merely an advisory body. In practice if the Council is united my dear cousin would be hard-pressed to refuse them."

"In what concrete sense would she be hard-pressed. They can hardly frighten her."

"Of course not. But they could, for example, make different choices as to what work they recommend to their most competent associates."

"Kindly unpack that for me."

He would not have expected this of all things to be a foreign concept to someone from Cheliax, but he supposes that Chelish politics may be even more different than he had imagined. 

"Anyone of significance has both a personal staff and a broader group of clients who benefit from their patronage. If they wish to support my dear cousin's endeavors, they will recommend their more competent associates for positions of relevance; if they do not, they will encourage those associates to take on other projects that they have more confidence in. She cannot simply avoid the problem entirely by hiring those with no preexisting patron, as anyone in Nerosyan unable to attract a patron at all surely has some deficits that make it so, and she cannot simply conscript people into an appropriate role in the bureaucracy because she does not necessarily know every single person who might be worthwhile to appoint."

Cheliax has this sort of thing but it is talked about differently and also Blai barely touched it in his life. "I see, thank you."

"Your situation is somewhat fortunate, in the sense that no one but cultists desires Mendev to be overrun by demons, but not very fortunate, in the sense that the Royal Council may or may not believe the Crusade likely to succeed."

"I will delay some letters for post-Drezen which will one way or another settle some questions of the matter."

He laughs mirthlessly. "I suppose it will."

...Is he really not going to let people do any skimming of the money that made it to the Crusade? Even if all the soldiers get the pay they're owed?

Is someone proposing that all of these thieves are politely meeting up and coordinating on their share of this pilfering so as to carefully ensure that there is enough left for the men? Because if they're not doing that, being able to make payroll is a coincidence, and one that Mendev is paying to make mathematically possible but not enough to make reliable. And? Also? If you have more money, you can use it for other things. Performance bonuses and equipment and hiring and emergency funds. The fact that he can still just barely say he's never paid a man late is not the only issue here.

They were sort of assuming he'd be apportioning the funds out to the captains, who could then apportion it to their subordinates, and so on, and as long as everyone knows roughly the wages owed to the men under them there shouldn't be a problem. ...Is he distributing pay some other way? Inquiring minds want to know (specifically, they want to know whether their embezzlement schemes are still feasible).