:Yes.:

:Understood. I'll let them know.:

She is delighted to hear that and will be fairly discreet about checking if it is at all true.

The orders are not very loud, so if she's being discreet it may take her a bit to find it, but yes. He's not making a moral case about it, just shifting assignments so a smaller subset of mages (if she investigates, the ones with the most imperial training, mostly from "Tozoa Province") are handling the work.

She could probably have been substantially pushier. She represents a lot of leverage and therefore has a lot of leverage. 

But if she’s going to make the man a King she wants him to in fact be competent to make tradeoffs among his concerns, to have her as a resource in that respect rather than purely an obnoxious external power base to appease. She doesn’t have enough swords to make everyone in the world Good at the point of a sword and also that’s not what Good is. 

And he’s not wrong that a lot of things that would be nice to have will also lose them the war, if the Empire does possess the means to counter her.

She does another miracle at sunset, using the pearl of power to get the spell back. This time she alerts them in advance so people can crowd around.

The Army of Oris is not quite as fast and organized as a Golarion force would be, but it's not doing badly, for people who have to completely improvise to get every injured person within forty feet of her instead of having it as a drilled response.

And it’s probably good drill practice!

Iomedae closes her eyes and casts Prayer not as it was given to her by Aroden but as a stranger, stronger thing, and they are all healed.

MIRACLES OF ARODEN!

Meanwhile, Altarrin continues to have problems on his hands related to the crisis.

Tolmassar is one of the empire's largest provinces by population, established across a vast expanse of what sure looked to the Jaconans frozen tundra back before there was settlement there, back before they cleared the forests and dammed the rivers and built the mines and planted farms and founded towns from which cities grew, and Tolmassar began to matter. Tolmassar guards most of the northern and western borders of the Empire, has been a core part of the emperor and its governor commands more soldiers than that of any except the Archmage-General of Jacona.

Archmage-General Norean should have been a very simply Good Candidate For Governor; ambitious, yes, but not overly so, and capable, with real military experience, and very sensibly paranoid about implausible coincidences, divine influence, and anything the Ifteli Vkandis-cultists thought was a good idea. Altarrin had selected loyal people to support him, and then the usual coincidences had caught up to them, and now apparently this paranoia has started applying to other things, like, say, the odds that the central government was planning to haul him back home and execute him. Norean has declared himself emperor, cut access to the strategically vital Widow's Pass into Tozoa, and started moving east, capturing Gate-terminals in a line to Jacona in a flurry of raids before his access was sensibly cut. He's now consolidating, getting ready to head further east, having declared himself the true most loyal servant of Emperor Bastran, out to rescue him from the evil advisors who have no doubt compulsioned the righteous and benevolent sovereign, but this is very unlikely to actually mean anything.

Advantages to going after him: He is, actually, very good at his job, if nowhere near as good as Altarrin, and if Altarrin lets him sit around doing things he will keep doing things that causing problems. Tolmassar being economically cut off from the rest of the Empire is very bad; it's a core province, very well integrated, and as long as trade and taxes have been disrupted, the Empire will have serious supply-line problems.

On the other hand, there's the other crisis.

Taymyrr is not a key province. It's just the province that blocks the Empire of Holy Ithik from coming north. It can't support a very large army. It just has a very large army, because you want a very large army to stop the Empire of Holy Ithik.

And its army is concentrated - Norean needs to watch his back, needs troops to garrison cities that are uncomfortable with being mutinous, needs to make sure Iftel doesn't invade. The governor of Taymyrr, Mage-General Jovin, just needs to worry about Ithik (and, technically, Zoskin, which, technically, exists, tiny and desperately trying to stay neutral, but that is very technical) and Iftel is all for him. Jovin got his job as a hard-driving manager with a knack for seeking out and suppressing divine cults, but he would not, actually, the first persecutor to suddenly find religion, and Ithik is offering him significant loans in exchange for him marrying a relative of the Holy Emperor and making various Ithik-friendly trade deals after he takes the throne. He's declared himself rightful Emperor of the East, and his armies are heading east to make that claim on Jacona.

Advantages to going after him: If Altarrin does, he can cut Ithik off from any non-Gate-based supply for his other enemies. He has much less territory to retreat into, making it much easier to actually end him as a threat. He's shielding the Orisan rebels' flank, and if there's actual loyal imperial troops there their revolution will have much more difficulty concentrating troops.

On the other hand, he's the most likely to collapse under his own weight; he doesn't have the financial base to support his army, and troops who aren't getting paid are very unhappy about this as a rule. And if the people of Taymyrr revolt behind him, that would basically eliminate his ability to function. Still, both of these will make him more desperate, i.e., much more likely to be a problem sooner rather than later.

All the armies assembled - Norean's, Jovin's, and the Orisan revolutionaries - are less than the loyal forces available to the Empire. But, also, the Empire has other borders to defend and other territory to garrison, and a few really large defeats for Bastran and Altarrin might make any imperial governors who are not actually restrained by compulsions or loyalty switch to what looks like the winning side. The odds are clearly in the Empire's favor. But, frankly, this is the kind of crisis it most needs Altarrin for.

(Now if only these crises came, say, fewer than once every sixty years...)

Sigh. Altarrin would, in fact, ideally want to personally command the response in Taymyrr, and also he would ideally command the response in Tolmassar, and he can't do that because even he can't be in two places at once, or split his attention that heavily. 

They really need Widow's Pass. They also really need the supply chains. And Norean is very experienced and very capable and if he's not being stupid about this, can probably capture a lot of the genuine loyalty of his province's populace, if he sells them on the story that he's out to save Bastran. No one with any political savviness will believe that's his true motive, but peasants and tradespeople and foot soldiers might, if he plays it right. Bastran is charismatic and likeable and is, for the most part, a popular Emperor. (Most of Altarrin's own visible actions in the broader Empire have been of the kind that gets you regarded as smart and competent and dangerous to oppose, but doesn't get you popularity.) And so they really can't afford to lose any of those battles. 

It's going to take a lot of military force to oppose Norean. It's...probably not going to be that complicated. Dozens of revolts like this have happened, over the Empire's history, and there are dozens of treatises on tactics covering them in and out. It takes more than textbook knowledge to improvise, and doing that - not to mention his unusual magical abilities for getting information he shouldn't really be able to have - are Altarrin's main advantages. But he has several candidates in mind - who are fairly personally loyal to Bastran, separate from their compulsions, he's not worried about them seeing an opportunity to be 'captured' in battle and turned to the other side - and who should be more than competent enough to handle this given plenty of resources. 

He'll command the response in Taymyrr. With his personal management, he thinks they can handle it with fewer men and fewer mages, freeing up more for Tolmassar. It's going to be messy and unpredictable and conditions might change fast, which is the kind of circumstances where Altarrin's skill is most valuable. He knows the area very well, having been involved, fairly recent, in conquering and pacifying it; Tolmassar was before his time. 

Not to mention it's close enough to Oris to be within very comfortable scrying range. (Tolmassar may border on Tozoa, but it's big.) 

Which means, inevitably, being gone from the capital for months at least. Longer than that, if the situation in Oris does deteriorate enough to need his on-site skill and not just a lot of men and mages thrown at it once they're available. He is inevitably going to come back to find that half a dozen minor simmering fires at court are in the process of exploding. 

He would really like if these crises came less often. But he's not, in fact, particularly worried. 

He delegates, and then starts making the preparations. Even with access to the canal-Gate network on the Lastun Province side, they'll be lucky if it takes less than a week to move all of their units into position. He's not very worried about anything exploding out of control before that, though, since his opponent is facing the exact same challenges with moving legions, and Taymyrr doesn't yet have full Imperial infrastructure; its canal is still in construction. He's just distantly frustrated at the inevitable delay before he can make the progress that will end this. 

(He's so tired. He'll be less tired tomorrow, though, getting three candlemarks of sleep hits him a lot harder than it did when he was young.) 

Well, before the week is up, the Army of Oris is going to fight another battle.

(That is the point, of marching in the early morning. So you can fight more battles, before the supplies you managed to beg, barter, steal and receive by divine intervention run out, and, of course, before the enemy gets their act together.)

Orestan is tracking the Imperial army - by rebel riders from individual small groups giving him the information they've collected, by the farmers he stops telling him, and, yes, by Farsight and scrying. They're tracking his, too. but only by scrying, and the Army of Oris follows the good old rule, "March divided, fight concentrated." Enough troops are going by little forest paths that they know about because they grew up here, few enough are going by road and by river, that Moris won't realize how outnumbered he is until he puts the facts together about just how many troops left Mahauna, and by that point it's too late to run.

(He may not know how he outnumbered is then, either. Getting accurate troop counts is hard.)

Mage-General Moris tries to run, anyway, after it's too late. If he can force-march his army to the nearest imperial canal with proper gates established (there are not very many proper imperial canals with gates established) he can evacuate them all and meet up with the Governor, who will then decisively outnumber the rebels as well as the rule of thumb that one imperial soldier can beat two foreigners. Moris leaves behind small garrisons to hold properly warded fortresses to keep Holy Ithik out, and everyone else he tries to get to the canal.

But it is, actually, too late.

Marshal Orestan will alert Iomedae, the day before the battle, just in case there's anything special she'll need to do before it. They'll meet the imperials - somewhere between this stream here and that village, probably; they might be able to get in the imperials' path if they take a more diagonal route but Orestan would rather let the enemy think their line of retreat is open, so they're more likely to take it.

He proposes that Iomedae put herself in the left side of the right wing of the Orisan army, since north is the direction he and the imperial troops both want them to flee if they have to flee and that's more likely if the imperial-left breaks first and also the Orisans outnumber the imperials quite a lot, and go ahead of the men and see how many Imperial adepts she can kill while terrifying the rest of the army into submission, unless there's something else she'd do that makes more sense in which case he'd like her to pitch him on her plan.

(His tactical plan is not, actually, tremendously complex; he has good officers and well-trained troops and about a three-to-one numerical advantage, and he trusts his officers can manage it. He's mostly just hoping to shatter the imperial right by concentrating his heavy cavalry and magical firepower there, keep his light cavalry in reserve for the pursuit, and otherwise he's just hoping to wreck his enemy's morale as quickly as possible so the imperials rout before they inflict too heavy casualties on him.)

Iomedae thinks that's a perfectly reasonable plan and honestly expects it to go quite smoothly. She is inclined not to break out the flying in combat just yet; this isn't the hardest fight they'll be in and that is the sort of thing that works once before the Empire has the chance to plan how to handle it. She does not know how to identify Imperial adepts but if he can point them out she can almost certainly slaughter them.

She wants to request that they not kill noncombatants, presuming there are some travelling with the Imperial army. She is aware they can't realistically take them prisoner. She wants to let them run. There's good reason not to let the army run, to pursue it and destroy it; there's less good reason to go after their page-boys and healers and supply staff. (Not no reason. The game is taking unusually cheap trades.)

He can have someone identify the adepts for her. It's not that hard.

If Marshal Orestan tells his commanders of light cavalry to focus on the combatants and not worry about not letting the noncombatants get away, Iomedae should know that although that will probably save more than no lives, the order will also mostly not get down to the average cavalryman. If she wants him to pass her message on, he can do that; if she wants him to make sure everyone understands it, that's a good deal harder.

Yep. Perhaps he should try the harder thing. It'll be good practice for when they take the capital and he needs to have somehow conveyed all the way down through his ranks that they should minimize how much rape and murder they do.

Right.

"The Church of Aroden," "Orestan" explains to "his" chief cavalry officers, "supports us in our war - but."

(Samien is, in fact, very much in favor of this program, even if he knows Orestan isn't. But he's saying the lines he's given.)

"But?" says one flamboyantly dressed woman (a rarity, in the cavalry or indeed anywhere in the armies of Oris, but she's good.)

"But they're pretty hot on civilian casualties. Against, that is. Now, no, Imperial troops are not civilians. No imperial who sets foot in our territory is a civilian - every one of them is helping our conquerors. But. This is a showpiece, and this is the showpiece the invincible god-chosen hero out of legend wants. Iomedae is fine with us killing their soldiers, she understand we can't let them get away. But not healers, not clerks, not anyone who doesn't carry a weapon. We let them go back home and we only hang them if they come back after the war."

"Or if they pull a knife on you," she says.

"Only if you can give Iomedae the knife. She's got truth-magic - not compulsions, just a detector, but still. She will ask you, and I will be pissed if you make us look bad in front of the, again, invincible god-chosen hero out of legend. Do you want to go down in song and story as The Person Who Ticked Off The Person The Gods Like By Not Sparing People She Said To Spare?"

:Done.:

:Thank you. For what it's worth, to me it's not just a trade of - chances of success against enemy lives. When we get to the table, I mean for the Empire to understand that civilization is not something they've perfected or that only they possess, and I think it might - matter. It might make it easier for them to live next to us, and it might make it easier for them to give up and go home. 

Or it might not, in which case I'll kill more of them.:

:Well. I hope you're right.:

The next day is the day of the battle.

Iomedae tries to prepare spells, and is unsurprised when it doesn't work. She prays, loudly, before the soldiers, for Aroden to grant them a swift and glorious victory, and she puts about her auras that make everyone around her fearless and better at fighting, to a greater-than-usual range. She puts up Resist Energy (fire) and Resist Energy (lightning).

And she waits to be told when it's time to go.