"Inside the war college it's debated. I expect if he lives to your age without losing his wits it won't be, though."

"It is the grand destiny and the birthright of men to surpass their fathers and eventually their gods," says Iomedae, quoting Aroden. "If we can't have Cyprian, does the war college have anyone who has been yearning all their life to run the offensive in Barstoi we apparently should've tried? Who'd be good at it?"

"Plenty of people who have dreamed it up on paper, fewer who are actually qualified to run it. You'll want to ask Zima for recommendations, I've been out of the active service for decades and only have rumor to go on for who makes a good commander in the actual field."

"We can put the rumor about we're launching a front in Barstoi, have that as the discoverable explanation for the item reassignments and Marit presumed to be scouting with a small team, and decide later if we actually want to do anything in Barstoi," Pereza says.

Pedrotti, perhaps emboldened by Falkner's example, pipes up. "Interrupt me if none of this is new, but the way we'd do something like that in Lastwall is - send a request down the chain of command for anyone serving who's from Barstoi, pull some of your sneakiest scouts and - if you're not actually doing anything in Barstoi or not committed yet, send them and some of the soldiers you've identified as being from the area into hiding. Or on assignment on another front against another enemy if you can't afford to have them out of commission entirely."

Most of the Shining Crusade command is not trying as hard as Iomedae to avoid glowing in pride at their BABIES who have, actually, a very mature and developed solution to the natural necessity of deception in war and the natural aversion of paladins to lying. 

"That sounds like a cleaner and more systematic solution than we'd probably have arrived at," Iomedae says truthfully. "The other thing we can do to make it less likely Tar-Baphon intervenes and less catastrophic if he does is target and kill those lieutenants he might send if we assume him reluctant to go himself and not confident a Dominate or a Command Undead would hold across the worlds. It's not usually worth the bother, but if we specifically want them out of commission for the next few weeks, I expect it's doable.

I'm rather assuming Lastwall can handle themselves with respect to how they'll utilize stuff without tipping their hand. They're fighting on - kind of a lot of fronts, there's more built-in confusion."

"I trust you thought pretty closely about these tradeoffs," Karlenius says, "but  - we're going to lose a lot of men, for a cause we can't tell them about, and that's upsetting to me."

"Yeah. I've been thinking about it in terms of - if the Worldwound opened up in our world, if Belkzen attacked, if the western Empire were overrun by the Church of Asmodeus, we would obviously - I was open about this in the charter - send aid where we could. The soldiers would demand that we did, frankly. We can't tell them that those things happened, but - I think it matters that if we did, they'd be glad to hear we were handling it. And that they'd expect to hear we were handling it. 

And that, if Lastwall were doing much better than us and had less need of aid, they'd send us some. I am sure of them, in that. If we are in a god-compact with them - and it's probably a bad idea for most people to think of it that way because you'll use the concept wrong - but if we are in a god-compact with them it's one that calls us here to aid them, because it's an observable feature of them that they'd aid us if we needed it more."

"About eight hundred adults die in the western empire every day."

"Next item of business. But I guess that's a great way to introduce it.

Lord Cansellarion wanted 'A hundred thousand soldiers, four teleportation circles, a miracle to stop planar travel and communications in and around Egorian, you and Karlenius and Arnisant and Marit and anyone else who's as good in a fight but didn't get into the histories, a top-rate navy, and a gold dragon.' Navy's negotiable with more Teleportation Circles. Dragon's not really a necessity and I think I substitute for some of its symbolic value. 

If we are willing to use Cyprian's soldiers we could probably do that next week. If we want to use ours, we need a Miracle from Nethys to let Alfirin and Morgethai have an intertimeline teleportation circle, though His High Priest in the other timeline thought he'd oblige. And they need time to, uh, invent the spell, I don't know how long that'll take. 

I don't know how much we'd be giving up if we use Cyprian's forces. - well, concretely, we'd be giving up 'we build the country', and we'd be giving up some - clarity and authority around the victory which it'd ideally possess. I want everyone in Cheliax to understand that Iomedae and Asmodeus fought and Iomedae won. 

I'm not sure how much I should be willing to pay for it.

- also pulling all of us out, even temporarily, will be extremely destabilizing here, but I have some ideas for that. I want to get a bunch of our retired wizards back with the promise of all the new spells, and I want to just ask Aroden to pay a lot extra and push Narthoc to ninth and leave him with the diamonds."

"The remaining diamonds after you use one for a Miracle in ...Egorian - why Egorian - and one for a Miracle for the Teleportation Circle?" asks Peraza. "So that's zero diamonds."

"Egorian is the capital of Cheliax now. House Thrune relocated upriver after they won the civil war." Nobody present knows the size of Lastwall's strategic diamond reserve, so they're not going to volunteer it.

"Presumably Lastwall has at least one. And we've got two churches of Abadar we can buy from. And the secret of intertemporal trade to buy with, or at least supposedly we will."

"I think if I leave Narthoc with two and leave one of us back - and Cansellarion didn't know Alfirin existed, so I bet he can make do without Arnisant - then it'll hold for two weeks and I want the fighting over inside two weeks anyway. 

It's actually not clear to me if Lastwall will give us a diamond to blockade Egorian. ...maybe they'll give us a diamond out of the Goodness of their hearts and then we can use one of ours on Egorian. But they're trying at neutrality. I do expect the Church of Abadar will give us five, on successfully offering them interworld contact, and maybe three on our promise it's under development and we'll offer it when we have it."

"She's not just out of the holy books they have no idea she existed?" says Karlenius.

"The backup copies were stolen. - Marit offers you two to one that future-you did it, incidentally," she says to Alfirin.

"Hmmm. How unflattering were you planning to be?"

Scribble scribble.

"I have spent the last two days having the most unpleasant vouching-for-you conversations in which I say 'look, I don't know for sure that she isn't Areelu Vorlesh, but she'd have a really good reason if she were' - besides, making you look bad makes me look very bad. It's clearly to my advantage to present you as obviously totally trustworthy so that the fact I trusted you totally does not look insane."

- and then she cuts it out with the joking tone. 

"You have given your life to this work, and I am very grateful. I have since met some other archmages and that persuaded me that I probably, in the original holy book, underrated you - but only because you made it easy to take for granted your carefulness and dedication and your disinterest in abusing the astounding cosmic power you possess."

"...No bet."

"I would've had the holy book say that you matched Norgorber for never getting caught at anything," says Karlenius. "- and He erased all records of his mortal life too."

Scribble scribble! De Luna is going to fix the historical record so hard.

"Well, if you put that in the holy books," says Arnisant, "and then she turns out evil later, that does look pretty bad."