The part that's not specifically for officers is not all that long or all that complicated. (That would make it bad for peoples' Law.) It mostly prohibits things that are crimes everywhere, like murder and theft and unagreed-to mind control, plus things specific to armies, like desertion and espionage and failure to discharge duties and fraternization (prohibited in your chain of command or in a manner that could endanger a child).

Most matters are punished mildly on a first offense and severely on a second, except things like murder which you can't really let people get away with once.

The rules for officers are a lot more comprehensive and punished a lot more harshly. (This is probably because officers can be presumed to be literate; this section also doesn't stick as determinedly to short words). 

...they have rules about who you can sleep with? Like, besides 'don't rape people'? Why?

Anyway, "mild" and "harsh" are relative terms that she suspects may mean different things to different people, perhaps especially people who are her. Her basic problem, if she's being honest, is that she was flogged nearly to death when she was fifteen years old, and she's still a little bit undecided on whether this was reasonable or not - and if not, whether it was unreasonable in a way where you shouldn't flog people half to death for failing their classes, or whether you shouldn't flog specifically fifteen year old girls half to death, or whether you should do that to people but then offer them a channel energy immediately afterwards, or whether you should flog people a normal amount (whatever that is) that isn't likely to kill them (and under what circumstances?), or whether you should actually probably just not flog people most of the time and should do something else to them. That sort of thing.

...and, if she's honest, that she keeps imagining Hypothetical Returned Woljif running afoul of some rule of hers, and having to do to him what was done to her when she was fifteen, and wanting to vomit at the entire idea. They would probably not be friends after, and - she doesn't really want to think about that. But she doesn't know, see, where the lines between necessary and horrible punishment are, or whether the spaces inconveniently overlap.

Does the legal code include specific standard penalties?

Yep. They do include flogging, for some offenses, with healing afterwards and not half to death. The offenses are more like 'rape' than 'failing your classes'. 

As Marit told her earlier the Shining Crusade executes people for murder and deliberate betrayal to Tar-Baphon and deliberate desertion and theft and embezzlement on a scale that costs lives, counting 'ignorance, youth, manipulation, lack of malicious intent, impossibility of a similar future incident' as grounds for lighter punishments, and executes senior officers for those plus conveying false orders, lying in formal reports, abuse of power, and giving unconscionable orders.

If someone were caught stealing they'd be obliged to confess before their fellow soldiers and lose pay for three months. Fraternization is handled similarly except, of course, where a child results or a child's parentage is relatedly uncertain, in which case pay is docked for fourteen years.

Oh, right, Shining Crusade troops are consistently paid. That probably helps. Not that she doesn't try to pay people, but... still. Reminder that her circumstances are really different from those of the Shining Crusade, in terms of desperation and in terms of previous norms and in terms of how well she's taking care of people and in terms of how unambiguously all of her people did or did not sign up for any of this of their own free will.

She really wants to talk to Marit about her entire tangle of intuitions here. She also kind of doesn't. There's probably no way to do it without complaining, and she's still acutely feeling the thing where she's been acting like a particularly needy toddler. But who else is she going to talk to about it, Seelah? Early Sunset? Regill?

Yeah, no. She can bother him about it tomorrow. But not when he's training the troops. She can be a toddler with a tiny bit of basic consideration and self awareness.

Iomedae stripped of all her magic items and outside her time, obliged to talk about her least favorite topic (Alfirin's trustworthiness and reasons someone may hypothetically have hidden some Alfirin related facts for being embarrassing to her Church) is - she's not not at all impressive. But she's not the kind of person who makes you think she will inevitably be a god or already is one.

Iomedae with all her magic items and the (paper representations of) the treasures of her Crusade laid out before her, with the topic being what resources her faith in one world can lend her faith in another, is the kind of person who makes you think she'll inevitably be a god, and not just because she can show off spells she learned from Arazni which no one else can cast. ("We did try to teach them, of course. It didn't work. Arazni said it's about - whether the world thinks it ought to listen to you or to the underlying laws of mechanical reality.")

The Shining Crusade has had a week to think about this, and has its stuff and people ranked by how badly it'll hurt them to lose it, and also has a list of what they need the most from the other world and of important open questions such as "is it costly to Iomedae to empower Aroden's paladins? Is there a way for Aroden to keep empowering them? If someone has sold their soul to Hell in one timeline, and travels to another where they haven’t sold their soul, is it sold or no?” Iomedae means to ask Aroden most of these - He has more slack in his budget right now than the goddess Iomedae does, so anything that can be put to Him should be - but it means telling Him everything, and while she trusts Him very deeply she did want to check with the goddess Iomedae if there was some reason not to do that.

Related questions, assuming they can bring Aroden in: should they expend resources on conveying messages more specific than ‘what mortals think happened when Aroden died’ from god-Iomedae to Aroden? Are there any lingering powerful formerly- empowered priests of Aroden - they’d have to be elves or something, but still - who might want to return to a world where their god exists and help out the Shining Crusade?

On the whole, though, their opening analysis is that the Shining Crusade has more slack, here. It’ll lose more men, if they have worse equipment and fewer potions and magic items, but - while the Shining Crusade’s command is acutely aware they could lose, and trying not to derive too much comfort from the fact that in another timeline they win - they mostly lose if Tar Baphon figures out something clever, rather than mostly losing from higher casualties. A thousand soldiers saved on Lastwall’s side is much more valuable, to the indestructible thing they all serve. So the Shining Crusade can send those resources over. 

The Precentors Martial are amazed, and impressed, and about as reverent towards Iomedae as you would expect from a group of devout Iomedans. They have a list of their best guesses of what forces they have deployed at each front, and what resources would make the greatest marginal impact at each. (Nobody indicates any doubt that Iomedae’s report of her own resources is perfectly accurate, even as they spell out the uncertainty in their own knowledge.) They have suggestions for resources - mostly magic items - that Lastwall has that they think are somewhat underutilized, that could maybe be put to better use in the Shining Crusade. Veena Heliu, Precentor Martial for Magic, has had one of her secretaries produce a list of spells known to have been improved or newly invented in the last nine hundred years (It’s a short list, because she didn’t have much time. She’ll have a more comprehensive list in a few days).

Jan Zima's mood, over the course of the first few hours of this, sours considerably. Jan Zima, being first and foremost a general, a soldier second, and a politician a moderately distant third, makes no attempt to hide this, given how almost everyone else in the room would be able to notice anyways.

With the headband on he's not nearly as hard to figure out, even across what is in fact a sizable culture gap, if one everyone involved is inclined to underestimate in their eagerness to be the idealized Iomedaen all-resources-where-they-purchase-the-most organization they want to now be. 

Jan Zima thinks that Iomedae's a bit of an idiot, that's her read. Or, well, a person, who is wrong about many things as is the propensity of people, but with a Splendour in the range where -

…well, it's well understood that wizards who get as Intelligent as Iomedae is Splendid do ludicrously foolish magical experiments that everyone else was too unintelligent to rationalize themselves into. And it's not as if you can't walk yourself off just as much of a cliff by having your persuasion outstrip your sense. 

She's been passing the headband around as they contemplate matters, but passing around one's artifact headband is not exactly surrendering the social advantage offered by one's artifact headband.

And it's not as if she has the option of sending someone else and staying well out of this, either, because the fact that Iomedae is their god is - in fact going to let her and let them achieve far more than they'd be able to achieve if some other Lawful Good crusade had bumped into them. Those would be negotiating trading resources. They wouldn't be doing all this, with the sort of full and open trust that it requires. 

She spends a while delighting at the progress in magic over the last nine hundred years - she's not a wizard, but she doesn't need to be, when so many of these portend cheaper things that people need and an easier grip on the pieces of reality and also a major strategic advantage for her Crusade. She says that she'll probably be able to sign up for the Shining Crusade nearly all of the high level wizards who aren't signed up already by offering them access to these spells. 

Her helmet gives her telepathy, at battlefield range. She speaks to him privately. I could do this work at a distance and leave the direct communication to people who won't overawe them. My guess is that it would not be worth the costs but if your guess is otherwise I will probably do that; you know your people better.

I'll talk with them after and they'll get over it. Or they'll decide I'm reacting badly to having a rival source of authority, even when that rival source of authority is Iomedae herself. Either way, you leaving this to a subordinate wouldn't help.

She nods.

…and then she's plausibly going to annoy him even more, if it's the showing-off that bothers him,  because she's going to ask for five minutes of silence and close her eyes and do the thing where she sees the world like a god, break all the questions down into fragments her mortal mind can track and propagate back up into an answer she couldn't have found, and then propose a bunch of allocation changes on this basis. She can usually but not always reconstruct her reasoning; she represents that she is usually but not always right when she can't. She did not really attempt to describe this in the holy books; no one has ever been able to pick it up off her even reading her mind while she does it, so she doubted it was worth having people try to imitate. 

He's not annoyed when she's competent, he's annoyed that she's being flawless and splendid, and of course if she'd been this splendid from the beginning he'd probably be falling for it too. Showing off what she can do is fine but everyone else in the room is acting like she can't do any wrong and she's encouraging that, or at least enabling it.

It's just straightforwardly true that at home the people close to her are selected for being able to productively disagree with their commander-who-is-soon-to-be-their-god and this is not a selection that has been operative anywhere else. She will, obviously, thread the needle better as she gets more cultural context, but it is a needle to thread. 

Her best bet is that they'll get there with a bit of time. 

...she thinks that's their main business tonight, then, and she probably next has business elsewhere. She'll be back tomorrow to pick up anyone who'd like to come through with her to the Shining Crusade (in a Bag of Holding), she expects they should send someone because there's in fact a significant and important cultural context gap to close here but she doesn't know that it should be any of the people in this room who are very busy. She'll leave a list of her remaining questions for god-Iomedae, which should be handled ordinarily.

…can they please propose the best mechanism for convincing Lord Cansellarion that she is not the fiendish plot she's obviously going to seem to be.

"Well, he's retired so he won't know any of the latest codes and would still be suspicious even if he did. But we go way back, I can convince him I'm not an impostor and if he knows I'm genuine I can tell him about the commune - "

"Sure, convince him you're enchanted rather than polymorphed."

"Oh come now, I've never known Alexeara to be wrong about such things. If he says Endel is enchanted, he's enchanted. More relevantly, he's not blindly paranoid, he'll send to one of us not present and we can confirm the commune."

"He'll do that, maybe send all five of us, have you go through the forbiddance dance again, and then maybe smite you to be sure. But that'll convince him."

At that she does let herself glow with pride at them at least a little bit. "In that case I would like a Teleport there as soon as it's convenient. - should anything go wrong, which I do not expect, Sending Marit, who should already know." He has both a Status and the Telepathic Bond with her. 

"Veena, can you send someone to my office in about half an hour, I'm going to need to - "

"No, but Mirdeliendë will be there in an hour with a fresh bottle of the good wine -"

"I am sure Alexeara and Iomedae will appreciate the thinking wine immensely, but I am going for a social visit to my old friend and am going to get a bottle of something that actually tastes good for him."

She loves them. They're Lawful Good and they're careful and they're trying and they have so much on their shoulders and she never wanted to have biological children because it would have been an insane and unethical thing to do but she feels, suddenly, like she did get them after all, like she built a home for them and bore them out of her body when she abandoned it on the steps of the Cathedral and she tried to gesture, for them, at something they may now grasp better than she does, and she loves them, and this is a stupid and unstrategic and unworthy-of-them degree of emotion and needs to wait until she's home. …where she'll have to cry on Karlenius about it or something, Marit's out and she and Alfirin need to be More Careful. 

She'll wait for her Teleport.

Mirdeliendë is a quiet elf, with an air of sadness about her, one of those names listed that might choose to go back to the Shining Crusade, with an Eye of Aroden on a pendant around her neck next to one of the stylized swords Iomedae wound up settling on. She doesn't ask any questions or give any greetings, just hands Ranier the bottle and takes their hands for the teleport.

The Cansellarion estate is not close enough to the border that it needs to be a fortified castle, but it is anyways. There are armed sentries, in distinctly not-Lastwall livery, who demand their names and their business but don't actually give them too much trouble because Endel sent ahead and is expected. They're led in to a second-floor parlor with an open balcony overlooking the courtyard. (And covered by a private sanctum, of course, so the courtyard cannot look back)

"Endel! I am so glad you could find the time to visit. And who is your friend?"

"You will disbelieve the answer," says Endel's friend, who is sitting patient and still with her hand not at all near her sword. "...I am Iomedae, having found a way of travelling between worlds in different eras of history."