He has some letters from relatively geographically-convenient nobles who want to inquire as to why various people were demoted! Some of them are claiming to believe that this is all a "misunderstanding" that can be "resolved", although they do not seem to be trying very hard to make this anything more than a polite fiction. Some of them are implying that this will make them more reluctant to support the Crusade. Some of them are making insinuations about what the Queen would be doing in his place.

Well he's not allowed to lie but he might be able to put numerical estimates on the damage each demotee did before getting caught in case that is how they would like to "resolve" the "misunderstanding" about whether the embezzlers "had friends who were good for all the money and merely made terrible procedural errors about when and where to acquire it". ...he will run this idea by Daeran. The Queen is welcome to earmark funds for the personal use of arbitrary persons if she wishes to do this and if she does he will see that they get them with as much diligence as he sees that the Crusade funds are spent on Crusading... he will run that by Daeran also actually.

His first suggestion has some precedent in the (very rare) cases prior to his arrival when someone was so flagrant about their personal appropriations of army funds that they managed to provoke someone into intervening, though the structure is a little different. He suspects the Knight-Commander may be imagining a rather different outcome in the event that someone does manage to pay it back, and it may be prudent to proactively clarify.

He does not recommend encouraging everyone with a grievance against him to bring it to his dear cousin.

Would he care to elaborate on this advice? What are people going to expect if "procedural errors netting less money for the Crusade" gets bumped down to "procedural errors that in the long run 'didn't do that'", reinstatement of the procedural-error-makers? He doesn't like it but it's not absolutely out of the question, some people can learn their lesson if they're caught embarrassingly enough once and their friends don't want to have to bail them out again. Does Daeran have a recommendation about how to respond to Queen-related insinuations.

It's hard to be certain what people will expect to happen in a situation as comparatively unusual as this; the rare cases that did rise to the level of severity to provoke actual consequences were often so undeniably egregious as to pose a risk of rather more serious consequences than demotion. Daeran does expect that for the sort of financial practices the Knight-Commander has been demoting people for, anyone inclined to cover the missing funds would expect this to result in the reinstatement of whoever they were interceding for (and in some cases would be conceptualizing this as a bribe to the Knight-Commander, though of course that doesn't prevent the Knight-Commander from then spending those funds on the Crusade).

Ideally he wants to maintain a tone in his letters that suggests confidence that the Queen would back him if it became relevant, without actually encouraging them to do this or saying in so many words that he believes it to be the case that she would.

Will the count help him draft language to this effect?

Yes, he can do that. ...If the Knight-Commander's prohibition on lying extends to social pleasantries, he should consider finding a secretary who does not share this limitation, but for now Daeran will try to avoid making it too conspicuous to the Knight-Commander's correspondents that he's being selective about which ones he uses.

There is not a specified exception for social pleasantries or the speech might have been easier to write.

Well, for the time being Daeran can supply some pleasantries that also happen to be true.

When Daeran has finished drafting the letter, one of Blai's subordinates informs him that Nurah has a report on how the geography of the area they're marching through has changed since the Wardstones were placed, and what that might imply about local hazards on the rest of their march.

Good to know, she should copy the scouts on that but he'll have a look.

Great! Here are their best existing previous maps, which even mostly agree with each other! Here's a quick summary of some of the ways those maps have been wrong so far—

Someone outside screams!

 "To arms!"

  "Knight-Commander! The demons are attacking!"

   "Fuck, vrocks, I hate vrocks—"

- yes, of course vrocks take priority.

From the size of the attacking force, it seems likely that this was the larger demonic attack the scouts warned about. The demonic force is still in the process of teleporting in, but many of the ones that have already arrived are setting themselves to attacking the crusader army with the singlemindedness of creatures under a Dominate. Flying vrocks telekinetically barrage his troops with rocks; droning deraknis befuddle weaker-willed troops into turning on their fellow soldiers; a nabasu's gaze leeches the life-force from everyone within six paces; lesser demons, too many to count, teleport into a battle they have slim chances of surviving, from brimoraks hurling fireballs to babaus charging at full speed, spears at the ready. Some of the demons teleport directly on top of the army, and promptly find themselves impaled on the end of a lucerne hammer.

(Nurah knows how to use a crossbow, but she's here as a historian, not a warrior! She ducks away, presumably to take cover.)

Whether Nurah ought to be taking some different action in this circumstance can be addressed later probably. He's out and slinging spells.

The advantage of fighting a Dominated force is that it is fairly difficult to actually Dominate an army full of demons to behave with anything resembling tactical competence, even by demonic standards, without leaving them with flexibility that the demon responsible for the Dominate would rather not permit. The disadvantage of fighting a Dominated force is that it's usually not possible to get them to break and run (or Teleport, as the case may be), certainly not as soon as an army of mortals would. It's not impossible some of them will manage to throw off the Dominate once it becomes obvious the demonic side is doomed, the spell can't compel a demon to throw itself on the crusaders' lucerne hammers any more than it can compel a human to throw themself into a fire, but the battle is going to drag on far longer than would be ideal for the crusaders. 

Still, one by one, the demons start to drop. The losses are certainly heavier than the army's earlier battles, but a victory with losses is still a victory.

Frankly Blai has never found it fully satisfactory to win against demons by causing them to run away and pop up again at a time of their own choosing. It's not, strategically, wise to trade pieces against an infinite force, and he won't if he needn't, but there is a certain tidiness to demons permanently removed from the board which is lacking in demons routed to lick their wounds and plot revenge.

Any remotely competent Golarion army makes it a priority to be able to identify who died in battle as quickly as possible. You can't allocate Raises if you don't know who's dead; even for soldiers too weak to be worth Raising, it's not uncommon for them to have picked up little tricks that are sufficiently distinct that it really matters which miscellaneous archers made it through the battle. If it were going to take the Mendevian army weeks or months to determine who was dead, the Crusade would be a fairly doomed prospect.

...It will still take Blai's subordinates some time to have that information for him, though. Is there anything he's hoping to take care of before that happens.

He would also like an assessment of materiel loss and he can do a channel for survivors strong enough to absorb one of his.

They will do their best to get that to him as well!

The losses aren't unusually bad, considering the circumstances, but that still translates to quite a number of casualties. Nenio is dead, albeit unlikely to stay that way for long; considering the Crusade's shortage of arcane casters, she's easily worth a Raise. A pair of elite paladin-archers, one of whom accompanied him on the trip to rescue the Hellknights, are likewise dead and expected to merit a Raise. But by far the majority of the dead will stay that way: the Bless-sorcerer he traded for, the person who wanted to know if it was an illegal order to order someone to join a paladin order, one of the Sarenrite clerics he got along well with, two of the lower-ranking embezzlers, and (of course) many others who had never particularly risen to his individual attention. 

(They have the budget for the Raises, in the sense that the diamonds are already bought and paid for. Bringing back the dead costs more than a headband, more than a belt, but some people are useful enough to the war effort to be worth it, even with Mendev's ongoing budgetary woes.)

Materiel losses are thus far sustainable. They're going through cold iron arrows quickly, of course, but Garms was able to take Blai's advice about finding Chelish suppliers, and they're not in any danger of running short. They're having, if anything, the opposite problem with the demonsbane arrows; their archers tend to be reluctant to shoot them even in circumstances where it would be warranted. They have recovered the following items from the demons, most of which are pretty unimpressive but a few of which might be worthwhile (...probably due to being stolen from the Worldwound's defenders in years past, or at the very least it's not like they've got a better explanation for how the demons ended up with magical items).

Who've they got on Raises, is that literally just Rathimus?

Besides Rathimus, one of the Gorumites is fifth-circle (there's a bit of a stereotype that Gorumites tend to circle quickly or die, and while that's not entirely true it's also not entirely false), and in a sufficiently dire emergency they do also have a handful of scrolls, so they won't be out of luck if their Raise-capable clerics die. (There is technically also a fifth-circle Sarenrite with the army, but not usefully fifth-circle — at fifth he only gets his domain spell, which is apparently a thing that can happen somehow???)

...One of his advisors nervously suggests that he could see about pulling one off the Wardstone forts? Many of them were targeted during the coordinated attacks along the Wardstone line, but a fifth-circle cleric definitely merits a Raise, so they should all be back now. Whatever fort they pulled it from and all the forts nearby would be more vulnerable, but the Crusade is also pretty important!

What advantage would this have over Rathimus and the Gorumite, just throughput?

And on days when they don't need to Raise anyone they'd have more fifth-circle spell slots left for other purposes! You can never have too many fifth-circle clerics (...unless they're clerics of demon lords or something, he would definitely rather not encounter any of those).