She lights her sword. "Well, I haven't been renounced yet," she says, shrugging. "And you know what I think, personally? I think if I were Iomedae, I'd be very tired of being the goddess of losing, and excited about some paladins who have plans for me to instead be the goddess of winning."

"Idiot child, the real gods would never have permitted Iomedae to ascend if she were going to be actually useful to anybody. She's as weak and useless as all of you."

"This all sounds like an argument for an alliance against Asmodeus, not an argument against it. Baphomet's one of the few entities out there that dares to properly hate Asmodeus. Most of them are bought off, or too scared to. And of course, he's one of the few to have successfully defied Him and lived to tell the tale."

"Great plan. You should contact Baphomet at once to propose that you enter into his service for the purpose of defeating Asmodeus. He'll be honored, I have no doubt."

"I don't want a deal with Baphomet. I want a deal with you. I want to pull off your plan to soultrap a country's entire nobility at once - but I want to do it in Cheliax. Not a soft target like Mendev where everyone's an idiot and will put on anything pretty you wave in front of their faces. Perhaps we'll have to get detailed specifications for, and then secretly swap out, actual powerful magic items that Chelish nobles wear. Perhaps we'll have to forcibly swap them and erase their memories. But I want Cheliax to fall overnight, and you're the first person I've spoken to who could come close to actually doing it."

He's glaring at her suspiciously. "Are you even a paladin?"

"What, you want me to smite you? I'm not actually sure if it feels like anything other than, you know, the getting stabbed by a sword afterwards, which feels like getting stabbed by a sword. Either I'm a paladin, in which case I'll tell you I'm a paladin, or I'm not a paladin and don't mind lying and will tell you I'm a paladin. I am in any event not from the part of Iomedae's Church that ineptly bumbles around the Worldwound. My aim is to take Cheliax out of Asmodean hands and I'm offering you a job helping me do it."

"Or what, you'll kill me?"

"Oh, come on, that'd be stupid even for the inept bumbling part of the Church! You have a clone! Obviously the thing to do is petrify you!"

"Oh, I see how this is. The cheerful suit of armor doesn't want to enslave me towards her purposes, that wouldn't be nice. But threatening me with death until I agree to work for her, now, that's not slavery, that's being merciful. If you expect me to be thankful you're as much of an idiot as the rest of the church."

"Oh, it's not that slavery wouldn't be nice. It's that it wouldn't be Lawful. There are rules about where we can Dominate powerful spellcasters and force them to labor towards our ends and you happened to fall into a Fifth-Mendevian-Crusade-shaped hole in them.

And I'm not, remotely, being merciful here. I want you to go in with me on Cheliax because you are impressive, the project is nearly impossible, pulling it off would be an achievement people will speak of for thousands of years, Baphomet himself will never stop telling of it, and, you know, it will save the souls of innocents from damnation and liberate the oppressed and so on and I am a paladin."

"You won't be, if you do this. Soul-trapping Chelish nobles in the service of Baphomet? I wasn't joking, when I said your sad little god will renounce you."

"What if we say she's my mentor, and I her student, and that if she objects to me trying to actually win she can take her magic powers and go back to Heaven with them."

"The problem is that Cheliax is not a benighted backwater full of idiots, and contains some impressive spellcasters, who will notice if their magic items are replaced by soul-trapping ones."

"I agree that the details of the old plan probably won't work. You'll need some combination of a better means of disguising the jewelry, a way to swap it on the targets unnoticed, a way to move very fast once our key two or three people are vulnerable, or a plan where this gets a bunch of lesser nobles while we go after Westcrown some other way. But - no one who serves Asmodeus is that bright. You're telling me you can't figure out how to beat them?"

The capital of Cheliax is Egorian. 

There's something very strange afoot here.

"I can figure out how to beat them."

"Good. What working environment do you need?"

A few hours later, the Council On Civilized Warfare, based in Absalom, with membership from the churches of Abadar, Aroden, Shizuru, Torag, and Gorum, receives in the highest degree of confidence standard notice from the Shining Crusade of a context in which a prisoner is engaged in labor towards their benefit. The rule is that these matters must be reported. That's - all. There is not so much Law in Golarion that a rule that you can't force your prisoners to labor towards your benefit, which would be very costly, would be adhered to. But it must be reported, and since it must be reported people are constrained by their own unwillingness to put to pen sufficiently embarrassing things.

This letter states that, in the course of operations on a different planet, a man ordinarily an officer of the Shining Crusade but assigned to a local commander identified an eighth circle wizard who was distributing soul-trapping magic items in the service of Baphomet, who was attempting to weaken the defenses around an Abyssal rift so he could take the world over. The locals possessed a legal code with limited direct applicability to this situation. The Shining Crusade officer proposed to the local commander that this eighth circle wizard be brought to the Shining Crusade, which would be more equipped to handle such problems; the Shining Crusade accepted responsibility for the prisoner. Iomedae has since convinced the prisoner to work in Baphomet's service against the Church of Asmodeus, which is also making a power play on the other world. 

The situation being unusual in many respects Iomedae requests that a monitor be appointed (she'll pay for it) to ongoingly ensure compliance with the charter of the Shining Crusade and the standards of the Council On Civilized Warfare. Relevantly: Iomedae has not clarified to the prisoner that he is on a different world and expects the following personal benefits to accrue to her from his service blah blah blah up to and including the rule of the Western Empire in an alternate timeline where it's ruled by Asmodeus. 

Right. 

They'll, uh, dig through the bylaws and appoint that monitor, then. They acknowledge the receipt of this communication and confirm the Shining Crusade appears to be in compliance with relevant regulations. 

Korva has a to-do list. She may kind of want to bite her own hand off just from the morning, but the only responsible thing to do with embarrassment is to figure out how to be less embarrassing.

First on the list: talk to Anevia about Dorgelinda, and tell her to keep an eye on the investigation she's going to have Dorgelinda run and on which people get pulled in. Anevia is aware of the skimming, but isn't thinking of it as a serious problem; if Korva does, though, she'll figure out the specifics without letting Dorgelinda know.

Second on the list: talk to Dorgelinda about starting an investigation into the missing shipment. She's not confident that the soldiers are telling the truth, and would like Dorgelinda to see that they're questioned under truth spell about what happened and where the shipment may have gotten to.

Third on the list: talk to Harmattan. She hasn't prepared particularly well for this conversation, and has decided that it doesn't matter. The upshot is that she knows that he hates her and is hoping she dies. That's fine. If she does die, her companions will recover her, but he can go on hating her if he likes. What he can't do is actively undermine the crusade's objectives. She does want to be decent to the people who are fighting here, but she can't do that without the help of her staff, and he is, in fact, a key member of her staff. To begin with, she'd like him to spend today and tomorrow overhauling the dungeon staffing; she has reason to believe that one of the guards is a Kuthite, and has very little confidence in the others. She'd like him to spend some time investigating abuses of prisoners that may have occurred in the previous months, and in the meantime come up with a new dungeon staff rotation that relies as much as possible on the Sarenite clerics.

Fourth on the list: briefly scream into a pillow. That wasn't originally on the list, but it suddenly seemed extremely necessary. This expands into moping into her room for half an hour and then slapping herself in case that helps her remember that people are going to die, if she doesn't straighten things out.

Fifth on the list: go up to the floating island, where Nenio has been "experimenting" with Mage's Magnificent Mansion. It is probably wrong and irresponsible and contemptible of her not to have revealed the crusade's extra resources as soon as she had them, given people are hungry, but Korva is a little irresponsible and a little contemptible and frequently wrong, and would like to tie the first public use of the mansion spell to her announcement that the crusade is going to be cracking down on corruption now. It will sting less, she thinks, and be a little less frightening to be told to trust her that much, if the announcement comes with warmth and a good meal. In the meantime, though, she's splitting the difference by having Nenio try to get the mansion to produce as much nonperishable food as possible, which is a little tricky because the mansion really wants to produce nine-course, ready-to-eat meals. Nenio is at least enjoying herself.

Sixth on the list: while she's up here, give Aranka and the other artists on the island the pitch about leaving the island for a while and going to Absalom or Isarn or some other large city and trying to get the crusade some valuable recruits and donations, particularly more spellcasters. The free crusaders are ambivalent about this, but let her know that they'll think about it. She tries not to let any of her frustration about these people show.

Seventh on the list: get confronted by Anevia in the courtyard, who tells her that Sunhammer is missing. Right. She really should have at least told Anevia about that. She lets her know that he was also a Baphomet cultist, and that he's been dealt with. Anevia says that's cool, as long as Korva has it under control, and gives her a rundown on what Dorgelinda has done so far and who she's pulled into her investigation.

It's really hard, some days, to just keep not biting her own hand off.

How is Marit doing.

Slept and is doing troop training exercises, as he’s purportedly here to do. His spies haven’t yet turned up any more pending disasters.

She'll wait, then. There are a bunch of strategy and logistics meetings she could be having with people, and a bunch of people who she could spar with so her form doesn't suck, and a bunch of books that she could read, and a bunch of people she could check in on so that they feel appreciated and believe she cares about them.

What she's actually going to do is alter self herself and then methodically prestidigitate clean everything in the army kitchens. Rationally she's aware that this is stupid and pointless and a waste of her time and shirking her important duties and probably what Harmattan hates about her, but it's mindless and soothing and something that it's possible to see progress being made on, at least if you ignore that it'll all be dirty again tomorrow.

When Marit is done training people, she wants to ask if he has any advice for how to confront Dorgelinda tomorrow. She feels kind of like a four year old who wants attention from mom every two minutes, but she does need to get this right, and it's not like either of them is confused and her competence level.

Well, firstly, she should assume some chance Dorgelinda tries to flee or tries to enchant her or tries to kill her, and have security. With that squared away -

Marit is a big believer in keeping half of what you know back, to see if once people are purportedly being candid with you they share it. He thinks Korva should go into the conversation decided about whether she is willing to arrest Dorgelinda at the end of it, and with an answer already in mind regarding under what circumstances she'd do that. And with a replacement in mind if she does do it. 

Reasonable advice that she probably hadn't thought about because it was unpleasant to think about.

The only plausible replacements she can think of off the top of her head are Wilcer Garms, the quartermaster during the campaign to take Drezen, and Arsinoe, the Abadaran cleric who currently manages the temple (and who doesn't, technically, work for her right now). She doesn't love either of those options and is not sure that either of them really has the necessary experience, but she has no reason to suspect either of them of theft. 

.....she is kind of inclined not to arrest Dorgelinda if Dorgelinda can give an account of what she did and why she did it, under truth spell and while Korva is detecting thoughts on her, that boils down to "I thought it was necessary to accomplish some crusade objective" and not "I was trying to personally enrich myself" or "I am actually working with demon cultists". This is an extremely low bar and a wishy washy policy and - it still feels unfair, if Dorgelinda was trying, to jump to arresting her instead of giving her the chance to clean up her act, given that everything in Drezen is kind of like this. And she's not actually sure if they can do better, on short notice.

"That seems entirely reasonable to me. Honestly, there's a wide range of policies that seem reasonable, you just want to - go in with one, not put yourself in a situation where you'll predictably have to make a call on the spot."