"Technically," says the Knight-Commander, comfortably adrift in the pile of notebooks, scrolls, unfathomably expensive magic items half-disassembled, stray pieces of paper, et cetera that serves as something between her command desk and what would be her bed if anyone had ever seen her sleep, "we did an analysis on my planar alignment last week on this after Sunhammer tried a Dismissal, I wasn't sure at the time if I'd just made my save, I am still metaphysically human." She taps the halo, and it makes a pleasant chiming noise. "But one cannot really expect the rank and file to understand such fine distinctions. The power of Heaven is with me; 'she's an angel' is close enough, especially if it reduces the rate of asking stupid questions. Does that answer your stupid question?" 

"Yes, commander," says Anevia, because she, unlike Irabeth, is allowed to lie. 

They say that the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade must secretly be a wizard, because no fighter is that clever without a headband, and also she wears a headband, the wizard kind. 

(Well, okay, these days she's got a crown that costs more than most countries that boosts all three mental stats, but like, before that.) 

Why would anyone not want, as an overriding top priority, to be better at math, the single best thing in the universe. 

"...my plate armor weighs more than you do," she says, to Woljif, who has just asked her for precisely the 103rd time if she's sure she's not secretly a wizard, after she glanced over his shoulder at his spellbook for about fifteen seconds and told him how to fix the selective sirocco he's been trying to hang for months. "Even the Signifers usually wear breastplates at best." 

She wouldn't put up with this for anyone else but Nenio but Woljif regularly tells her interesting facts about acids and so he gets considerable stupid-question privileges. 

"Yyyyesss," says Woljif, slowly, "but-- come on, Chief, it's a really cool secret to have but you can trust me--" 

"Trust is an illusion and you have the will save of a sorcerer with half your circles. But no, Woljif, you're not stupid, you'd notice. Nenio would notice and she wouldn't notice a demon taking up residence in her hat if it didn't do any novel magic. I have never in my life met anything I couldn't simply kill by stabbing it and learning practical magic is a waste of time I could be spending on more interesting things." 

They say the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade showed up out of nowhere halfway dead until Terendelev healed her in the middle of the festival square, bleeding all over the flagstones, and she bleeds gold, like she's all through holy light instead of flesh.

(That one's only half true. Her blood was a perfectly normal color until she touched Lariel's sword.) 

They say the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade-- wait, no, they say Kalika, who wasn't the Knight-Commander then, it's so easy to forget she wasn't always-- 

-- anyway, she's from Vudra, that's why she's like that about clerics.

Like how? 

"Compared to the Jistka we are but stone-wielding kobolds. I would like to conclude my thesis with a few words of wise counsel from Dagun, an advisor to the Pharaoh of Forgotten Plagues. I doubt you will comprehend the genius of his statement, but here it is nevertheless: 'a gadfly sees the ox, the ox pays no heed to the gadfly, but crimson fever takes them both'." 

"The support for your claim in the literature is shaky at best, Indarah," says a woman wearing a hodgepodge of scraps of steel armor that were all clearly scavenged from a series of unfortunate cultists within the last twenty-four hours, and who has not bothered to get up from her chair to say this. "Northern barbarians with no knowledge of our history may find you impressive, but I do not. If you had understood any of Dagun's writings you would know that he was saying this dismissive insult about the Jistka Empire, of which his patron the Pharoah of Forgotten Plagues, the clear referent of the metaphorical ox, was one of the greatest enemies. You, little gadfly, will be eaten by the demons in short order, if you pretend you are too important for them, and you will deserve it." 

They say the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade is so holy that the leader of the demon cultists beneath Kenabres turned on her own boss and killed him in a blaze of demonic fury.

"You know, Nenio, I really appreciate about you that you are a complete non-risk for political information security due to your fundamental nature as a person," says Kalika, philosophically, from her perch on a tree branch overlooking a pile of weird rocks Nenio is currently poking with a stick, watching the sky for gargoyles. "Anyway, no, the demonic power in that case was channeled through me," which obviously she cannot normally just say out loud to anyone else, "I think the rumormongers may've been confused because I spent most of the next twelve hours fighting things with Hosilla's glaive? Regardless all that particular power did was make quite a lot of fire. So even if we were sure your mystery is demonic and I hadn't committed to an alternative strategy," she taps her halo, "I would, alas, have no ability to exert splendour magic upon it to make it give up its secrets." Thoughtful pause. "It probably is demonic, though." 

"Oh, yes, probably. We will have to find out later, I suppose, if you don't have an applicable novel trick up your sleeve for it. You channeled a demonic power of approximately similar magnitude to your angelic blessing?" says Nenio, interestedly. 

"And all it had in it was a large evocation? That's very odd, you know, the plurality of demons have conjuration or enchantment spell-like abilities but fewer make explosions. Brimoraks, for example. Do let me know if you find any other data points, it must have something to do with the unusual nature of the way your soul interacts with planar magic." 

"Right? I almost wish I'd kept that one just so I could stare at it for longer-- the aeon one too but at least we got a nice diagram of that one, before I got back to the Defender's Heart I didn't have any paper-- oh, you're a fox. At what point in this conversation did you become a fox, I wasn't paying attention." 

Shrug. "I wasn't either. Apparently I am a kitsune." 

"If we find Indarah again I'm making her teach you one single body awareness, that's embarrassing. You have a tail." 

They say the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade is so determined to win the war against the Abyss that she has gone to fight Deskari on his own turf and Queen Galfrey herself is the regent in Drezen because no one any less paladin could possibly hope to be as perfectly impartial a ruler as an angel. 

"........okay, yes, that one's on me, I did literally say the words 'if we aren't killing Deskari we aren't winning and I don't like losing,' to your face, I do remember that, but Galfrey, with the absolute total lack of respect that your station is apparently due, that is a stupid plan."

"It is a necessary plan," says the Queen, steadily, tiredly.  

"To do right now, today?" 

"We have no knowledge of how long the rift may stay open or for that matter how long it may remain pointing to a useful location. If anyone can do this, Knight-Commander, it is you. You are just as capable as you were twelve hours ago and you will be no less capable in twelve more." 

In many, many worlds, to many Knights-Commander, this would be an patently insane thing to say.

Nenio and Daeran are out of spells and will go down like a pair of sad little crumpled paper cranes if engaged in melee; even Woljif is out of spells and he's in theory considerably more competent with a knife but it's been months since he didn't go to bed with more spell slots saved for emergencies than most people at his circle wake up with and he looks a little bit like he might break down crying if asked to do even one additional task. 

But Kalika isn't a spellcaster; she does not run out of the ability to decapitate roughly one target every two seconds.

She doesn't need to sleep unless she for some reason does this zero times in an entire day and in principle if she feels like it she can just murder a passing pigeon.

Neither, for that matter, does anyone who was within fifty feet of her while she was doing it, which means regardless of where they are tonight Wenduag and Lann are going to spend it bickering until the wizards wake up. (Despite considerable experimentation on this point they've unfortunately determined conclusively that neither Nenio nor Woljif can prepare spells without at least the 2 hours of sleep you can get it down to with a ring of sustenance on, no matter how completely free of fatigue they may otherwise be. Poor Woljif is developing something of a dependency on potions of sleep.) This will be way less annoying if they have something productive to do and 'shoot infinity demons' is their favorite kind of productive. 

"...yes, all right," she sighs. "Don't touch our notes, some of them explode if you read them in the wrong order." 

They say the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade can see into your soul like a real Pharasmin angel and if you're really truly good and innocent in your heart she'll let you go instead of punishing you even if you got tricked into something really heinous, like trying to kill Ember, can you imagine. 

"....right, that one's going to be a problem, I absolutely do not have any power to detect True Intentions or whatever and if people think I do they're going to try to get me to show up for every trial of every idiot who thought his commanding officer's orders were a polite suggestion. Anevia, Camellia, thoughts?" 

Camellia drums her perfectly manicured pointed nails on the meeting room table. "You could just say no, commander. You don't actually have to do things that peasants ask you for."

"Rude but admittedly not false." 

Eyeroll "Of course I don't. What I do have to do, Camellia, are things Queen Galfrey asks me for, or I wouldn't be here in the first place, and she wants every warm body that won't definitely commit more crimes still capable of holding a sword. I could tell her I can't do that and she'll say 'but the possibility will be so good for morale! you should attend all the trials to make people feel seen and heard and pardon people occasionally to encourage them it's possible to repent, you don't do anything else with your spare time I think is valuable anyway' and I will be both inconvenienced and annoyed." 

Sigh. Monarchy is so annoying, nobles shouldn't have to report to anyone. Especially not to a paladin. 

Okay then. "This is downstream of the Ember situation, right-- what even happened with her and you, you met her back in Kenabres and that's why she followed you here, right?" Annoyingly, it's really hard to get any kind of past information on Ember with any more content than raving about how she's a Nirvanan saint. You can go find her right now and she'll be preaching about goodness and light and forgiveness in some public square and healing anyone who asks, but ask what she did last week, oh, no, that might be espionage, you might have negative intentions, and if he's ever met her even a guy who'd snitch on his best friend for a beer will clam right up. 

Unfortunately (or fortunately; Irabeth has mixed feelings and she knows Anevia does too, on this point) it's not really a good plan to eject her whole cult from Drezen even despite the blindingly obvious huge security risk it poses. Partly, of course, because if you try you get a mass mutiny instantly, but mostly actually because Anevia spent several weeks following Ember around counting her healing output and then Kalika did a bunch of math with the medical budget and concluded that in expectation it's actually cheaper in crusade budget to let the witch do her thing even if she has a quite high risk of managing to invite a balor to tea so long as you suppose she's reasonably unlikely to do it twice. 

Irabeth does not comment. Irabeth mostly hasn't commented on anything without being specifically prompted since Light's Hope Chapel. 

"...what did happen with her, I remember being somewhat puzzled and then too busy to follow up..." Kalika consults her notes and then squints at them. "Some crusaders apparently took it into their heads to sacrifice her to Iomedae for power? I ignored this because it was lower priority than finding the nabasu that had nearly killed the Prelate approximately an hour earlier and in... the roughly ten seconds it took me to walk past... she had convinced them to repent of their choices. I concluded at the time that this was fully explainable by them being gibbering morons but on reflection you'd think either a person would be stupid enough to be difficult to reach by any kind of logical attempt to convince them otherwise or clever enough not to attempt it in the first place. So either she's so Splendid she should plausibly be modeled as an unusually friendly succubus or she's powerful enough to dispel a Suggestion from her knees on the ground without detectably casting a spell." 

"Ah. Well. Think those might both be true, being honest with you. So that sounds like the rumor's based on a real thing that happened but it's not you that forgave them for trying, it was her. .... S'pose you could let Ember attend all the trials, nobody's going to say she's inadequate to the purpose of seeing the true innocence in people's hearts and they need you too." 

"And when she inevitably asks me to pardon the idiots because they didn't mean it?"

"Again, you can simply not do things just because beggar children--"

"No, she's right, that has the mass martyr problem again." 

"Uuughghhh." 

"Is it actually untenable to just... let her have them? Call it a new branch of the Condemned and if they're at least as useful as the Condemned what exactly does that cost us in added expected risk..."

Oh no, math. 

Oh no, math. 

Oh no, math. 

Kalika surveys the expressions of her PR meeting staff, sighs "politicians, honestly," and starts scribbling and muttering to herself. "...usually on average about a third as useful as a normal soldier but that's sure not zero... related, haven't re-done the budget estimate on the expected cost of Balor Tea Party Emergency Response getting triggered since Seelah hit third circle, I'll do that properly later but quick guess on how much more Ember slack we have now.... we really should be decrementing our wild guess of the likelihood of catastrophic Ember-induced demon incidents for every time we have a demon incident and it turns out she had nothing to do with it, actually," she looks up, "have we even had any that turned out to be her?" 

...

...

"... you know, now that you mention it, we haven't, no. We keep saying it's obviously a matter of time, but..." 

"Right." Kalika taps her pen thoughtfully on the page. "Yeah, I think that's worth it, actually. Camellia, you're on writing her a nice fancy calligraphy invitation to sit in on any trials she cares to, I know you hate acknowedging she matters, suck it up."