"What was in the shipment?"

"Nonmagical weapons, armor, and food, mostly. Here, we've got a list of what we're missing." She'll go dig up another list.

"With your permission, Knight Commander, I want to talk to the soldiers who survived the bandit attack."

"Sure, be my guest."

 Then Marit will not ask further questions in this meeting. 

There's not a ton more meeting; Korva makes some copies of the list and heads out a little while later.

"Do you want to work on this, first thing, then?"

"I do, if that's all right with you. Do I have your permission to mindread the soldiers?"

"...ugh. Granted. Uh, Cheliax uses routine mindreading to catch heresy. I hate the optics of doing the same thing, and everyone else will, too, but also we managed to make it all the way to Drezen before figuring out that one of the last batch of advisors that Galfrey sent was a Deskari cultist. So - if you think something's up, yeah."

He winces. "That's good to know, thank you. I'll see if I can do without, but I do think something's up, yeah. ...as a general tendency I think something's up slightly more often than there's something up. But nine veteran crusaders escorting some nonmagical gear isn't a soft target. Bandits wouldn't normally go after it."

"Yeah. Seelah's not wrong that the attack on Kenabres left a lot of people without homes and livelihoods, and I'm sure people do desperate things in winter, up here, but - it'd still be a baffling decision. Not that we've been low on people making baffling decisions, around here."

"I absolutely expect you have a bandit problem. But desperate people who fled Kenabres this summer aren't now a large, organized force, and it'd have to be a large organized force that can take down nine veteran crusaders. Or a single mid-level enchanter but then the men will tell me that, and you will probably want to check if they're telling the truth."

"Yeah. Arsinoe should be able to do a truth spell first-circle, if we want to ask her."

Marit observes troop training that afternoon, speaks to the officers, proposes a schedule for him to work with their men starting tomorrow, and commends their hard work. Then he talks to some soldiers escorting the bandit caravan.

Then he lets an air elemental friend of his out of his Bag of Holding and puts on a ring of invisibility and does some wandering around. Then he casts some Alter Self and does the same thing. Then he wanders down to the accounting department to review some records. When he wants a break, he tries to bait paladins into telling him their unit composition. 

It is the following evening, after the first day of training with the Crusader troops, that he requests a meeting with Korva and with Regill, if it's convenient.

Yes, absolutely.

Marit sits. He looks - well, about as hard to read as always. 

"I believe that all of the soldiers who survived the theft of the shipment they were guarding were operating on orders from Dorgelinda Stranglehold," he says first. "I mindread three of them, all of whom had been told that some of their fellows were going to defect with the supplies on the way back from Kenabres, and that they'd simply have to state that they'd been asleep when the goods were stolen and knew nothing of it. I believe Stranglehold has a cleric loyal to her who she expects to boff a truth spell in the case of an investigation, but I don't know who the cleric is; the most straightforward route would be to tell her you're conducting an investigation and see who she assigns. 

Furthermore, there are half a dozen self-identified Baphomet cultists living beneath the chapel; three are soldiers. I have not actually observed them to break any laws. Likewise the Zon-Kuthon worshipper with elaborate self-scarification who has arranged himself a position as a guard in your dungeons; I am suspicious of his motives, but have not yet had time to dig up those bodies that might provide more definitive proof of wrongdoing.

Woljif is a fence for a tiefling organized crime ring.

The jeweler, Master Sunhammer, also appears to be selling delayed-trigger soul-trapping cursed rings. Nenio should really have had the spellcraft to catch that; I am not sure I buy her affect of utter incompetence. No one else here has spellcraft such that their not having noticed is obvious negligence.

Also, I think Captain Harmattan may be planning a coup, though it is possible he is merely planning for what he will do if someone else does a coup he's not actually planning."

Of course. Wow. Okay.

"Do you, uh, have any idea what the jeweler is planning to do with the delayed-trigger soul-trapping cursed rings?"

"I do not know. The obvious guess would be that he means to trigger them once he's distributed enough, to enough people, for whatever his aim, but it's also possible they transpose the victims with demons and he's aiming to take the city back, and it's barely possible he's innocent and someone else slipped him the rings." Marit would ordinarily have some suggestions about what to do about this but he's trying not to overstep, here. Just the facts. He wasn't expecting there to be quite so many facts.

"Okay. Thank you for bringing all of this to my attention. Given - the number of things that that is, I would like to work with the head of the closest thing we have to an actual intelligence team, Anevia, on further investigating some of them and deciding what to do. I realize that given what you say you've found it's going to sound completely ridiculous to say that I think she's competent, but - I do actually think that she's okay at what she does, compared to a lot of people around here, and is just working on a very hard problem? And I am nearly certain that she's not actively trying to sabotage us, which is better than I can say for a bunch of people right now. But under the circumstances I would like you to try to also verify that for yourself, if you haven't yet, before I go to her for help with any of these. And that'll take time, and some of these we shouldn't wait on."

"Anevia was not up to anything in the first ten minutes I spent looking but I have not looked thoroughly," he confirms.

Korva feels kind of uncomfortably like she's taking a test here, instead of trying to solve problems, but does have to actually come up with a way to solve the problems.

"Determining who's working with Dorgelinda seems like a good first step, on the shipment problem. I am... not incredibly shocked to learn that she's committed some fraud, but I'm surprised that she's faking bandit attacks, if that's what's going on. I'm, uh, not actually sure whether I have the authority to fire her, and I don't have anybody great to replace her with even if I do. I'm inclined to find the cleric and determine who else is involved, and learn more about what exactly she's been doing, and then... try to determine whether the thing that's going on is the same as the thing where Woljif and Daeran, who both grew up in Mendev, keep suggesting that I solve all of our operational problems with bribery and extortion because they believe that the best way to solve problems is bribery and extortion, or whether she's deliberately sabotaging the crusade for personal gain. If it's the former I... guess I can talk to her and demand that she clean up her act and stop lying to me, and if it's the latter I'm inclined to arrest her and send her back to Nerosyan to be tried there, and hope that Galfrey and the rest of the royal council don't have a fit about it."

"....of course, Dorgelinda was in charge of re-staffing the entire logistics team after she informed me that the last logistics team was corrupt and incompetent, so they're probably all just corrupt in a different direction now. I suppose it is distantly possible that the original team was fine and Dorgelinda was lying about that in order to replace them with people she selected, but knowing our staffing luck I am not actually optimistic about the original team having been any better. So it's likely that we'll have to make calls about how much fraud to let off with a warning or minor penalty for... everyone. Although the rest of them might be more inclined to clean up their act if Dorgelinda herself is actually removed about it."

"Knight Commander, I'm not clear on whether contextually that's a request for advice or just an explanation of your reasoning."

She looks a little pained. "Give advice if you have it, otherwise I'll be stuck deciding between whatever inadequate solution I come up with and whatever Regill thinks I should do, which is probably to execute Dorgelinda and flog everyone else involved."

"Which is not an impulse I'm wholly unsympathetic to, but -

- so, firstly, I think that corruption and shenanigans on this scale absolutely cause men to die who'd otherwise have lived. Not directly, maybe, but they're hungrier, and worse equipped, and you lose them, and that is squarely on Stranglehold's shoulders, whatever she thinks she's achieving here and I do suspect she thinks she's achieving something, this is not a good route to personal enrichment compared to accepting bribes from unit commanders for their units to actually end up equipped. Though she may also being doing that!

Secondly, it is a to-me-unacceptable failure on every occasion where you put someone to death and they did not expect you to do that if you caught them. Because - the point of criminal penalties are to stop the behavior. You won't stop it every time. People commit crimes impulsively, or because they think they're smarter than you and won't get caught. But if they didn't think you'd think it was a big deal, or didn't think it was illegal, or didn't think that law was actually enforced - once there are failures of anticipating the consistent prosecution of crime on that scale, I don't think you can solve that with harsher penalties. You have to establish that the behavior actually will not be tolerated, and then stop tolerating it. So no, I don't think you should execute the woman. I think you may want to contemplate a general amnesty for conduct up to this point alongside a sweeping anti-corruption initiative, and make it clear that the first person to not take advantage of your mercy who keeps at it will, in fact, be prosecuted. And if Dornelinga's games here go beyond the appalling baseline for Mendevian nobility, then I think it's quite reasonable to go farther than that, but you gain very little by prosecuting anyone who sincerely thought they were playing the game everyone else was playing; you have to change everyone's baseline expectation about what kinds of games, on your crusades, get played.

Thirdly, we can bring in logistics staff who, while I only know for sure that they weren't corrupt in their previous context, I do expect are probably somewhat less likely to be corrupt than the locals.

Fourthly, if you have this much of a corruption problem, your men know. They know and they think you know. People aren't reporting things to you because they do not expect that to go well for them. You should expect that if you change that, you'll suddenly hear about quite a lot. And if you have this much of a corruption problem, your men hate it. They know that rich people far away are benefitting while they go hungry, and they figure you don't care. Handling corruption appropriately is an extremely popular thing to do."

The problem, a part of her feels, is that Korva dislikes law enforcement about as much as she dislikes criminals. She's spent half her adult life hiding from law enforcement, and the other half enslaved and hiding from different law enforcement. She can imagine justice, dimly, but not in enough detail to know what actions a just society would take.

Some part of her is still fifteen, the best student in the class today, and has just been handed the whip to use on the undeserving. Except there is no teacher, now, and no direct threat of violence against her if she just... doesn't. It's just that if she doesn't, no one will learn, and the gaggle of children before her will be slaughtered by demons.

She wishes she could say this. But it would be an excuse, and the only thing Marit could reasonably do about her weakness, if he took it seriously, would be to try to remove her. She would have wanted that, once. But - she made a promise to the angels. And she has to see it through, she thinks, even if it hurts as much as being fifteen again.

"I agree that everyone knows, and almost everyone is playing the game on some level. I agree that it is getting people killed, although whether it is getting more people killed than our best probably-incompetent attempt to get everyone to actually follow all of the rules would, I don't know. You will think - differently badly of me than you should, I guess, if you imagine that I didn't have any inkling of any of this. I am aware, for instance, that Woljif is a fence for the thieflings. He's been working with me since I convinced Irabeth to let him out of the dungeons in Kenabres to help me fight demons during the attack. He let me know about it back in Kenabres, and we used some of the items he had to fight the demons, before reinforcements could arrive. He's made no serious attempt to hide the fact that he's remained in contact with them and continued to fence things for them since then, apart from the month-long stretch when he deserted during a horrific demon attack, fell in with baphomet cultists, decided that he hated baphomet cultists actually, and then begged me to take him back. I have not told him to cut ties with the thieflings, and it would be completely unfair to punish him for it without first actually telling him to cut it out."

"And I suppose the same principle does, probably, apply equally well to everyone."

"I would like to get everyone to cut it out, if I knew how to actually do that without just ending up making everything even worse. But apparently the crusade's internal law enforcement, who were probably hired by Captain Harmattan, have been infiltrated by Kuthites. I suspect most existing ordinary Mendevian law enforcement is also corrupt in the way that Dorgelinda is corrupt, although I'm going to hope that the Kuthite is a one-off. We could ask the Iomedan inquisition, but you know what I think of the Iomedan inquisition. Another option is the hellknights, who I don't think have these problems, but who have the disadvantage of being hellknights."

"We could also attempt to redo the entire justice system and come up with appropriate and enforceable penalties ourselves, and tell people that if they don't stick to them they'll be removed, but I have no particular reason to believe that I have any idea what a good justice system even looks like. I have, honestly, spent much more of my life hiding from the law than enforcing it."

"That seems like - an important input into your conception of what a good justice system looks like, not a reason not to have one, and probably also true of many of the people you're trying to design your justice system for."