Iomedae glances at Marit, who nods.

Iomedae thinks Jan guessed correctly. So -

"I have been doing some operational and intelligence work for the Fifth Mendevian Crusade this week," he says, now that it's not a further update. "I like Knight-Commander Korva, and I think resources sent there will be somewhat less wasted than I'd expect them to externally look. ....also I've been worrying about catching the attention of your inquisition. I don't know if you have a standard procedure I could employ for that."

"...I or a different member of our leadership can provide you with a signed and sealed letter certifying that you are operating with our knowledge and permission and that the inquisition is not to interfere with your business if it's merely suspicious and resembles espionage rather than being obviously evil or in violation of our mandate. Three times in four they'll let you go if you show it to them and give your word under truth spell that it's legitimate and to your knowledge was not given to you for corrupt purposes. The fourth time they'll give you a harder time. Do you happen to know who the inquisition has stationed up there, I don't off the top of my head - "

It is the turn of the Shining Crusade crowd to be kind of unimpressed with Lastwall for only a seventy five percent success rate at letting off their own agents when they have signed and sealed letters and testify under truth spell to the legitimacy of their mandate. 

Well, Marit's annoyed but also he is charmed. "I work with half a dozen called outsiders, will they be more likely than not safe with a letter?"

"...Even the one in four inquisitors will only detain you while they conduct an investigation into whether I'm up to something nefarious, which almost always gets cleared up within a day. What kinds of outsiders do you work with? Standard procedure for called outsiders a suspect has with them is to either require their dismissal or imprison them as well, depending on the circumstances. If neither of these is possible, inquisitors are authorized to release or execute them at their discretion, with a strong bias towards release. I should check the records because this does not come up much, but I do not know of any cases where a non-fiend outsider was executed without trial for connection to suspected espionage."

"I work with elementals and archons and the occasional agathion. That sounds adequate, I'll take the letter. The Inquisitor is Castelloni. I don't know much about him, I - didn't want to count on your having reasonable policies, in light of the Mendevian complaints about the Church."

"The first account we got of the Church's activities in your world was from a little girl who was nearly burned at the stake alongside her father, on suspicion of being a witch. - it didn't take very long to infer the dynamic with Mendev, and it is not an obvious error, but it was troubling."

"...Recently? That did happen in the third crusade, we've made policy changes to try to make that outcome less likely, I think if it's still happening the inquisition should know about it and the fact that no report about that has hit my desk yet is a serious problem."

"Elf child. She said the burning was a while ago, and the burn scars did not look recent, but that the responsible party, a Prelate Hulrun, was still in power in Kenabres."

"...Hm." He calms down slightly but is still quite visibly displeased. "I will have words with the Inquisition about this - we could not afford to dismiss everyone involved in the Third Crusade witchhunts, and while they made mistakes and showed imperfect judgement but given the scale it happened at the majority of the blame clearly falls on bad policies, so we mostly tried to change policies to prevent it happening again rather than dismissing inquisitors - but I thought we had reassigned everyone we kept to a new post, far from the old ones. And even most of those have retired from field positions by now."

"I don't know your constraints. I am satisfied that with more resources things will be better instead of worse."

"It's really a pretty ludicrous situation with the Baphomet cultists," Marit says charitably. "I think one needs a fairly unusual amount of skill to operate in a city with dozens of Baphomet cultists influenced by varying degrees of mind control and not have some serious institutional erosion problems. - maybe you should talk to more of the Baphomet cultists, see if there's a standardizable strategy."

"I can try but I doubt I'll have anything to give you, I was leaning on splendour for it.. ...I guess Cheliax is going to have a bunch of analogous problems."

"Is there any other business that touches on your involvement at the worldwound, or should I start calling in the rest of my council to figure out how to allocate our resources between worlds?"

"Just the note, and then I have no further questions which touch on that."

Then the rest of the council can file in as they finish up with other more urgent business and they can start getting on the same page about what resources they have across two worlds and where they need them most.

The Shining Crusade is - fairly rich in magic items and magic weaponry, for being from a much poorer time period. It attracts a lot of true believers and has a lot of them crafting in the offseason and has many of its soldiers taking their pay in items and Taldor was very persuadable by its shining soon to be goddess. It also has more emergency operational resources, because of having an archmage.

(Iomedae gives a shorter summary of the archmage situation to everything else. Alfirin is a very dangerous person and she doesn't trust all possible people Alfirin might be nine hundred years into the future, but she trusts hers in this capacity, quite confidently; she doesn't expect them to do so, necessarily, unless the goddess Iomedae confirms that she's right. She gave Zima lots more detail, they can ask him if relevant.)

They'll be at this a while.

Marit will leave after he's unpacked the files from the Secret Chest for Iomedae and with the permission of Lastwall's leadership given her back her sword and armor and headband. (They didn't want any of Iomedae's actually valuable magic items to go with her into Lastwall, but she'll feel more comfortable now, having them.)

Enormously so. (This means a sufficiently perceptive person might, barely, notice.)

And Marit will wish them all good work and look slightly baffled by any religious blessings he gets in return and walk out until he can Teleport out and back to Korva. 

It's early evening.

There are these things about Knight-Commander Korva's whole quest, that might inspire suspicion, or, you know, the belief that she was secretly the lilitu witch Minagho in disguise. Like, say, how the demons fled before her sword; how she cast only first-circle spells, totally unremarkable, until the Drezen crisis. About her supposed defeat of Minagho, who was in any respect a seducer more interested in manipulating others and luring innocents to destruction than in head-on confrontation.

Or like how she's followed around at all times by a succubus, a Callistrian thief with demonic blood, a professional assassin, and the sole survivor of an ancient noble family with divine powers who claims to be an atheist and detects Evil, facts which are not suspicious at all, especially not in combination. When some time ago the new head inquisitor for Drezen had suggested to the Knight-Commander that they should... investigate... the known and obvious thief... he was, instead, avoided, stonewalled, and generally maneuvered into backing off. This could just be Chaotic Good not properly valuing the fabric of society (because Iomedae knows nobody in Mendev does), or this could be the obvious demonic attempt at infiltration.

And she is now being followed around by a so-called-Lawful-Good adventurer who seems very capable and serious and a positive influence in every way, which is probably a positive sign, except that Ettore Castelloni was not, actually, told about it, which almost any Lawful Good organization providing advisors to the Queen would have done exactly so in this sort of situation the Church of Iomedae and the Knight-Commander's allies didn't trip over each other. And Lawful Good people tend to form organizations.

Given how the last time he tried to look into the - ambiguously aligned - status of one of the Knight-Commander's advisors went, his plan this time was to just going to be asking Lastwall in the next Sending if this Tuvan swordsman fellow was one of their agents because he was quite suspicious.

The response he got back - fairly quickly - was the simple No Information response; he isn't one of our people, and we don't know what's going on with him.

It was shortly after that that Ettore Castelloni saw an empty patch of air that detected as Lawful and Good spying on him while he trailed a suspected cultist down a street, paused and let the cultist pass briefly, and then told the empty patch of air, "You're under arrest."

" - me?" says the empty patch of air. "- okay. Please don't kill me, I'm not a demon!"

"Don't worry," he says, "I am an agent of Iomedae. Come with me, please."

And, with Detect Good active, he would like to lead the empty patch of air that glows Good back to his inquisitorial HQ, and only then ask it to drop Invisibility.

It's, in fact, not a demon. It's a spyglass archon, a variant kind that's very small, with invisibility from a magic item and an hour's remaining duration of a communal nondetection, split this morning among some other agents, some air elementals, some archons, one agathion with spell-like invisibility and a cheerful trill that sounded like a birds'.  

It's name is Kristett. It's story, which is will cheerfully repeat under truth magic if needed, is very simple. Three days ago it was summoned and, after a brief conversation, called to this plane so it could stay longer, by a serious, clever man in a cheerful, well-lit room who said he could be called Tuvan and said Kristett had been recommended to him by a friend, Jreeetha, who would totally have recommended Kristett for this, because he had a extremely dangerous spy mission on the Material. He said, quite seriously, that he lost his soldiers sometimes, not often because he's very careful but sometimes. Four times in the last twenty years. He had a necklace tucked under his armor, with four rings on it. He said he did not ever want to forget that it was the final loss, if he made a mistake doing this. 

And yet he thought it was worth doing anyway, sometimes, with people who agreed with him that it was worth doing anyway sometimes. He did not actively want them to seek out danger. (Kristett was kind of disappointed. He definitely had been dreaming of the kind of spy mission in which you seek out danger and die gloriously.) He wanted them to be invisible, and flying, and very stealthy and very careful, and to patiently figure out, for every person in this city except the Iomedaen inquisition and the Knight-Commander and her companions (he had sketches), whether they were secretly up to crimes or worshipping Baphomet. He promised he was also looking into additional people but had more experienced agents doing it because those people were dangerous. 

He had, he said, the permission of the Knight-Commander of the city, to do this work, for the safety and wellbeing of the city's inhabitants, and he swore that he believed the work would serve the city and its people, and he said that he had long served Iomedae - who is, Kristett tells the inquisitor, in case he doesn't know, the Lawful Good goddess of defeating Evil -

- and the work was very badly needed, because the city was full of bad people and demons - some of the bad people had recently been caught by agents like Kristett but more experienced in the middle of a plot to soul trap people and bring their souls to Baphomet - and he didn't have many people he trusted who could do it, and so he has reached out to Heaven, to Kristett, to ask Kristett to refer him someone who might want to do this.

Kristett was indignant and said that Tuvan had better let him do it himself, after saying all of that. And Tuvan thanked him gravely and spent three hours with him in very entertaining training in which he pretended to be various kinds of suspicious and unsuspicious human and also tried to catch Kristett sneaking, and then set him loose. 

With orders to surrender to the inquisition if they requested it. Kristett would've done that anyway, because the inquisition also works for Iomedae who is the Lawful Good goddess of defeating Evil, but Tuvan said he had really better.

He's seen the man Teleport, and he casts Communal Nondetection extended and it lasts twenty-eight hours. That'd suggest enough power for seventh circle, done by a wizard, though the man is a swordmage and the way those work is much more obscure.