"I don't think Cheliax is at the top of Lastwall's to do list? - no, I guess I wouldn't know for sure, I don't particularly know what Lastwall is up to apart from guarding Tar Baphon and holding the Worldwound and defending itself from obvious threats, which is really already quite a to-do list. And I haven't had extensive interactions with them, this is all third hand or worse for you. I'd appreciate a better picture of that situation if you piece one together yourself."

"It seems likely that there are a bunch of pieces of context that you won't have until you come back with us, if you can be spared and we can manage that, but anything else coming to mind that seems high priority to understand?"

"There's nothing I am immediately thinking of except things I expect Iomedae will want to say herself."

Yep.

If she is going to be relying on Korva's Elysium-granted interworld transit to go to Korva's world, and she strongly predicts that her top priority there is in fact not going to be the Worldwound but the Asmodean takeover of the Western Empire, then she needs to actually tell Korva that. Which will be awkward, because however Korva feels about it she doesn't want to make geopolitical enemies of the Asmodeans, but - it'd be a substantial betrayal, to represent them as coming to help when intending primarily to conquer a different country.

"I can do that now, I suppose," she muses in the command tent. "I kind of want the headband for it but I suspect that's on some level an unlawful impulse."

"A bit of one. You can borrow mine if you want one with less charm."

"I'd appreciate that, actually. - can you tell Marit to tell them I'll be right over?"

"Of course." She hands over the headband and sends the message through the scry.

" - yeah," Marit goes on after a beat, "she says she'll be right over."

" - oh. All right."

And she enters. Marit stands at attention. 

" - there is one more important conversation we ought to have," she says quietly. "I'm willing to have Paralictor Derenge present for it, on his oath to keep it secret, or we can speak alone if you would prefer that."

She likes Marit, but she doesn't actually want to be alone in an important conversation with Iomedae, she doesn't think.

"Regill, are you comfortable promising that?"

"Depending on the specific conditions. Do you intend to swear the Knight Commander to secrecy as well?"

"I do not consider myself entitled under the circumstances to ask that, as I don't think she'd be advantaged by agreeing."

"Then I would prefer to swear that I will not in any way reveal what I learn in this conversation, unless Knight Commander Tallandria orders me to do otherwise. Is that acceptable?"

"Yes, presuming her to be in her right mind and not coerced."

Nod. "I swear that I will in no way reveal what I learn in this conversation, unless Knight Commander Tallandria, freely and in her right mind, orders me to do otherwise."

Marit will put up a Mage's Private Sanctum, which will kill the scry back in the command tent but also block Korva's companions, and whoever sent her here if it isn't a god.

"I want," says Iomedae carefully, "to give you notice that a Queen with a pact with Asmodeus ruling Cheliax is the sort of thing that would, ordinarily, be among my highest priorities. I have no firm intentions at this time, because I don't know enough about the details of the situation, but my prediction is that, should I send forces through to your world, and should they confirm broadly what you've told me here today, I'll find it unacceptable for Cheliax to be so ruled, and remove the ruler in question.  I may not do that. It may be that the situation is not as unacceptable to me as it sounds in that summary. It may be that I won't have the resources, or that there will be other, even higher, priorities, potentially including the Crusade. And I will certainly honor commitments of forces I make to your Crusade, whatever the situation elsewhere. 

I want to tell you this because it is by your power that my people will have the capacity to travel to your world at first. I am not asking for your permission; I don't think I could reasonably ask it, or you meaningfully grant it. But you have approached us as a would-be ally, and so if I am to send Marit with you back to your world, it will not be with secret orders that might make you regret having approached me for alliance. 

You have the right, if you want, to try to negotiate for our assistance to come with a promise not to intervene in Cheliax, though I expect I won't grant that. You can much more easily ask for a lot more help, to mitigate any trouble it may cause your crusade should I intervene elsewhere. And you of course have the right to decide that in light of this you don't want our help after all."

Korva is - okay, firstly she's pretty overwhelmed, because she has in fact made a lot of decisions as Knight Commander, but she doesn't think she's made any individual decisions of this magnitude. Maybe the decision not to run away after Galfrey appointed her Knight Commander, which did feel kind of like this, now that she remembers it.

Secondly, Korva is pretty personally conflicted about the idea of Iomedae smiting the queen of Cheliax.

She has lots of good reasons to be professionally conflicted about it. Cheliax holds almost the entire northern border of the Worldwound, and is probably the only nation capable of doing so. And even if the northern forts would hold in such a situation - and she strongly suspects they won't - the absolute last thing the crusade needs is for her to be known to have knowingly aided in the assassination of all of House Thrune. As things that reflect on Mendev go, it's a pretty bad look.

Personally, of course - she may be ambivalent about claiming Cheliax as a homeland, these days, but it's still where she's spent most of her life. She grew up hearing stories about the thirty years of bloody civil war in Cheliax, about the enormous and honestly outright unbelievable supposed death tolls following the death of Aroden and over the course of a full generation of petty infighting. Then she found other books, after leaving, and it turned out that the widely believed numbers were in fact themselves pretty unbelievable. 

She doesn't, really, want to be the person who made all of Cheliax dissolve into another thirty years of bloody civil war.

"What are you imagining happens," she hears herself saying, after a moment, "After you remove the ruler in question."

"The likeliest scenario is that I would rule Cheliax myself. There are lots of other possibilities but if I tried to install anyone else they would be - extraordinarily vulnerable without me around, so I would have to stay around, and I think at that point it is most honest to rule the country openly."

Oh. Of course. Okay. She can trade an Asmodean state for an Iomedan theocracy, even more extreme than Lastwall and Mendev, more akin to whatever it is they're really doing in Osirion, except with the flavoring of Lastwall or Mendev, and a war of uncertain scope is the price of making that trade, if she wants to make it.

It would probably work, is the thing. Korva's always assumed that the reason the largest Asmodean temples contain shrines to a dozen different gods, but never Iomedae, is that the church still sees Iomedae as a possible competitor with Asmodeus for the true loyalties of the Chelish people. She is, after all, the Inheritor, the god most directly associated with Cheliax's previous patron deity, and she was, in life, a Chelish woman. But it would work the way that Mendev works, with the champions of purity obsessed with rooting out a huge variety of cultists - who will absolutely continue being there - and going after people like Ember and Daeran and Woljif in the process. And in places it may still dissolve into bloody revolution and anarchy, as it did in Galt.

She doesn't think she actually likes Mendev any more than she likes Cheliax. 

"The entire northern border of the Worldwound is held by Cheliax," she says, because she's still chewing on her personal feelings, but the professional ones have gotten at least that far. "If there's a major internal war, and it affects their deployment, as you'd expect it to, all of those forts might buckle."

"I understand. My guess would be that it would be worth preparing - conceivably for five to ten years - such that the war, when it happens, is very swift, decided in days and over in weeks. I think we'd have two archmages, and Cheliax has none. That's not the sort of conditions that produce a protracted war, and protracted wars are extremely bad for many reasons. I can't promise a swift one, but I'm wildly more likely to do it if I am very sure it will be quick."

"Could I ask you to commit to not starting one unless you honestly and confidently believe, based on the evidence, that it will be over in a matter of weeks, even if you get there and decide that the conditions there are immediately appalling to you. Is that the sort of thing that I might negotiate for."

"I would be willing to commit to not starting a war in Cheliax unless either I honestly and confidently believe, based on the evidence, that it will be over in a matter of weeks, or I successfully convince you - without Splendour, which you'll notice I am not employing - that it's worth doing worse than that. We'd need a good definition of 'over', if the previous monarchs have fled and not signed a peace but those armed forces in Cheliax and answering to it have all surrendered I'd want that to count. And a reasonable number for weeks, I'm inclined to say six."

"I don't care about the monarchs, I care about the people. And I care about the northern forts holding, and I care about it not being known that the knight commander of the Fifth Crusade is in any way responsible for an invasion of Cheliax, which I'm very sure is the sort of thing I am not supposed to be using my position for. - and I care about whether it violates the treaty, does it violate the treaty?"