"That sounds good to me. Fortune favor you, Korva."

"Well, it has so far," says Korva. "Good luck to you, too."

And she'll be off again.

The Fifth Crusade's next priority is a remotely functional justice system. She digs up the existing Mendevian regulations, which are complicated and in Hallit and leave a huge number of things up to officer discretion, and bear little resemblance to what anyone, including the Mendevians, have actually been doing for as long as they've been here. 

She talks to Dorgelinda first, since her story is still that Dorgelinda's theft is what prompted the response, and she wants to be open with everyone about that. Dorgelinda says she's willing to go along with it. She gathers a council. Regill, Lann, Daeran, Seelah, Harmattan, Dorgelinda, Chief Sull, the Wintersun representative, Early Sunset, and Irabeth. It's more people than she usually brings together, for decisions like this, but she wants to have the buy-in of as many people as possible without making the project unmanageable. No Marit. He would stick out, in this company, and - she does, actually, think that she can come up with something workable with just the people here.

The plan is not a full new legal code; they don't have time to do that correctly, and it would be a very big change to expect of everyone. It's a simplified version of the Mendevian regulations, with standardized penalties and a process for officers to formally request exemptions - so that all of the reasoning about whether they've erred in a punishment can at least be done out in the open, and not by sweeping infractions under the rug. There's a lot of argument, even about that much. Regill favors Chelish punishments, and Early Sunset is appalled. Chief Sull wants the Neathers to remain mostly independent, and Lann wants to hold their combat units to the same standards so that they're just as ready to fight demons as anyone else. Harmattan wants everyone to receive backpay before doing anything like this. Daeran offers several arguments that corruption is good, actually, since it gives you more flexibility to send resources where you really need them.

They do not get everything done, obviously. She assigns Harmattan to keep working on a draft based on their notes from the meeting, which they can all look over again in a few days, since this sort of thing is kind of a part of Harmattan's core job. 

It's not going to be perfect. It's going to be a pretty quick and dirty version of the thing that it is. But she's pretty hopeful that, by the end of the week, it'll at least exist in a form that they can actually use.

The Shining Crusade is delighted to host Lastwall's representatives, and is - not totally sure in what capacity they are hosting them. 'As a diplomatic delegation from an allied polity' works, but probably underutilizes them, and of course the Crusade makes all actual diplomatic delegations stay in Vellumis so that trouble they cause is limited to Vellumis, which they don't want to do here because they trust these people. They're thinking maybe just ...as advisors to Iomedae personally, which affords some flexibility about them doing things that aren't for the Shining Crusade.  

"The thing I'm actually concerned with," Iomedae says once she's introduced Lastwall's people to Pereza and Karlenius and Arnisant and Alfirin and Kovets, her civilian-administration spymaster who is normally based out of Vellumis but who is going to be in the command tent in Marit's absence, "is that we and Lastwall are in fact two different countries with distinctly different cultures and will have lots of misunderstandings while we acclimate to one another, and this will cause more consternation than usual because we are more ambitiously allies than is usual. - for instance I'm sending them probably around four hundred thousand Absalom pounds of magic items because it's our best guess that they serve Good more there. I really want to be able to do this, this is the thing I've always really wanted to be able to do, this is in some ways the highest ideal of the Church, and also we should expect it to be so much work to do right."

          "Four hundred thousand?" says Pereza very unhappily. "How bad are things there? Don't we leave all this stuff to them anyway?"

Pereza can have a copy of her allocation proposals. They won't make him feel any better.

"Quite bad! And much of the magic items we left to them have been sold at various points, usually for good reasons - the equipment for high-level adventuring is different than the priorities for building a country. They could use it now, though."

                     "I don't know how you plan to spin this but it'll be wildly unpopular with the men," Arnisant says. "That's pulling some precious stuff out of - nearly every unit -"

"No," Iomedae says, "I suspect we're going to put nearly everything on the wizards and buy their forgiveness with all the spell improvements from the next nine hundred years. Did you know that someone got Rope Trick down to second circle? That doesn't make any sense to me! It felt like a bargain at third!! Unseen Servant's at first! Continual Flame is at second! You can detect magic through a scry, not just a greater scry, if you land it right!"

"Separately from the considerations of morale and the amount of use we'd get out of the items here, I am concerned that such a large transfer of resources across worlds will be noticeable. To Cheliax, once they start being put to use on the other end, and to Tar-Baphon much more immediately when we start collections."

Lastwall's delegates, or at least the half of them with specific orders to investigate Alfirin in one way or another, turn to look at her. The spies even mostly manage to make it look natural. (The historian does not)

"I think we need a story Tar-Baphon can discover about what we're doing here. There's the magic items; there's the fact we've changed footing. Marit's gone. I'm not sure how much he can use the truth, but even a small chance he could Wish his way over is really very costly."

"Does the control granted by Command Undead function across worlds?" says Kovets.

" - no idea. I guess it's worth the experiment when we next send someone across."

"We'll need an undead to test in on, obviously. And I'm not confident that the results for command undead would generalize to animate dead, nor for that matter that results from a normal spellcaster creating their own undead would generalize to Tar-Baphon doing so, given that we know he's doing something nonstandard. I would expect command undead to hold and a normal necromancer's animate dead control to break, but I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong about either of those and I am less sure about Tar-Baphon's control because I don't understand what he's doing differently there."

"You may do an Animate Dead for the test if it's going to be substantively further useful to figuring out what's going on there. Of course if Tar-Baphon doesn't himself know he won't risk it, and it seems unlikely he'd be all that much more sure than we are, but he's been around for a long time, I don't know if bizarre alternate timelines are more like the kind of impossible thing that happens once ever or more like the kind of impossible thing that happens once every few thousand years."

       "Ah, yes, let's send Alfirin to Lastwall with her own army of the undead, that'll be very reassuring to them," says Karlenius.

"I don't suppose we have any recent casualties who volunteered to be temporarily reanimated for science, that not being the sort of thing we expect to do on Crusade enough to ask how people feel about it? Do we even have any onyxes, don't we usually destroy those when captured?"

"And I obviously wouldn't be bringing my army of the undead with to Lastwall, I'd be leaving them here, if I brought them to the other world they'd stay under my control and we wouldn't learn anything."

"We've got two days, we can probably just ask people now whether, should they die, they'd be all right with being temporarily reanimated for science, though this is yet another thing that makes me want a story about what we're up to which Tar-Baphon, spying, can discover."

       "Alfirin has taken over the Crusade and is turning it to Evil," says Karlenius. "- come on, really, it's perfect, explains everything. Recalling a bunch of gear, releasing a bunch of new spells, Marit's gone and unfindable even with Discern Location -"

The one-armed historian starts scribbling notes somewhat more intensely.

"Actually, I just realized we're all being idiots about animate dead because we're not necromancers. I can reanimate some rabbits from the kitchen. Moral quandry solved."

"I don't think it's plausible that I could turn the Crusade to evil with everyone present still alive. Iomedae's unenchantable, for starters."

"Ideally it's a secret that does not, if discovered by our own people, prompt them to heroically try to stop us."

       "I don't see why not, that's how you find your best people," Arnisant says since Marit isn't here to say it.

"I don't want to burn through Alfirin's clones in advance of the war with Cheliax and it's not that hard to kill her." 

"Much appreciated! Even if it would help us find all our best people, I'd rather find a deception that doesn't involve any of us dying repeatedly to sell it."

"We're redeploying a mostly-Teleport-capable force to Barstoi for an offensive there," Pereza says. "Marit's leading it and Mind Blanked. All of you have too much imagination."

"...This requires us to fake a Teleport-capable force in Barstoi. Which will probably be attacked shortly, and if it retreats immediately that kind of puts the lie to the whole thing."

"Actually," interjects Falkner, "A genuine second front in Barstoi would probably serve your interests well, and Marit's a good person to put in command of it - I realize he's not actually here, which does complicate things, but actually committing there would still produce enough organizational disruption to misplace...maybe not four hundred thousand pounds worth of materiel, but a good fraction of that."

"Maybe I can put Cyprian in charge of it," Iomedae says thoughtfully.

"Who?"

"Galt and the non-Imperial territories north of it are presently ruled by a military genius who, I'm told, everyone outside the war college agrees is the best commander since me, and seems like the kind of person who would care very much about removing that caveat, and is also kind of inconvenient for our current plans, and so I've been thinking about whether I can convince him to accept a command in the Shining Crusade."

"He'd be good at every part of that except for stopping if you order him to do that before he's conquered himself a country."

"This is while technically not in violation of the letter of my treaty obligations with respect to Ustalav definitely in violation of the spirit of them. Too bad, really."

          "Everyone outside the war college thinks he's the best general since you?" says Arnisant.

"The sentence was politely unfinished but I assume the war college thinks he's better. - war, being a science, has improved in the last nine hundred years, and we are now all of us ignorant of it. I should really have anticipated that but I in fact hadn't."