Ettore Castelloni arrived in Vellumis at the age of three in his mother's arms, along with his parents part of the steady trickle of refugees slipping out of the Chelish-dominated Isger. His parents found work as day laborers, in the city, but the Church of Iomedae funded a little education for children so they could know the Laws and a little more for brighter ones so they could write and read, and Ettore proved to be bright. He also proved to be talented, diligent, healthy, and, in the opinions of his teachers, disturbingly Lawful. He explained to a fellow student that it was obvious why you followed the rules. Iomedae was the god of things doing better for people. She made the rules. Therefore, the rules were good, because She wouldn't have made them if they weren't. She's smarter than us. That's what that means. If She wanted us to do something else, She would have told us.

The possibility of careers in the officer corps, in the civil service, and as a wizard were all raised as possibilities, but at age fourteen Iomedae preempted Her country by selecting him as an inquisitor. He finished training in the traditional form, foiled plots faked by his superiors - at one point sneaking out of his superior's mansion to deliver evidence of his apparent treason to Vigil directly, a week-long journey overland and moving by stealth in which he used himself as a decoy and hired a carter to deliver the actual information - and -non, and steadily, with work, helped mitigate his fundamental flaw as an inquisitor, his tendency to mistake incompetence for enemy action and so accuse even the innocent of deliberate sabotage.

(He was not the first inquisitor-in-training of Iomedae to make that mistake, nor the hundredth. Her church has a lot of experience dealing with it, in Lastwall.)

After completing his apprenticeship he was assigned to the eternal duty of Vellumis counterespionage, the most common posting for new inquisitors as they attempt to root out Asmodean infiltration of the city, and his talent continued to show itself with capable, unambitious work cleaning out the most humble of Chelish assets. The possibility of foreign service was mooted, and he made his first tour to the Worldwound was in his twenties, thus adding longbow and longsword training and a persistent hatred of demons to his list of valuable job skills. His superiors' reports about him included the usual warnings about "wishes he had more Detect Thoughts spells daily so he could always read everyone's thoughts, even though that would not actually be allowed" and "does not ever stop concentrating on Detect Evil, even in his sleep" , but also the increasingly obvious facts that he seems to be functionally incorruptible and that he's pretty good at his job.

And then Vigil gets notice that the head inquisitor in Kenabres is dead in the demon sack of the city, which isn't surprising, and that he was reportedly killed by others among the city's defenders, after he went mad, decided everyone was a demon, and started murdering people.

...they'll raise him. He's fourth circle and that's above the present bar for a Raise Dead. But also they're going to recall him for an investigation, and assign someone else out to Kenabres.

The fundamental situation of the Church of Iomedae in Lastwall and in Mendev is like this: 

Iomedae founded Lastwall personally and built all its institutions herself more or less from scratch. She wrote its laws and the procedures by which it'd change its laws in response to new information about what actually worked best to run a Lawful Good military and a Lawful Good country. She hired and trained its first administrators and its first generals and its first spies. She spent years varying her sermons and then doing intensive questioning of peasants afterwards to see what they retained.  Lastwall has access not just to her holy books but to writings that she did not ultimately decide to make public, usually because they turned out to lend themselves to disastrous misinterpretations: the records of her conversations and her diplomatic work in Oppara and her early plans and her extensive Communes with Aroden trying to unravel the mysteries of ascension and the universe.

Lastwall knows how to Commune with Her, how to fix their intent firmly in their mind so it's readily visible to Her what will happen if she gives each answer, which is often cheaper for gods to see than the literal words spoken; how to ask questions on which they are as uncertain as possible so as to maximize how much they get from Iomedae's limited intervention budget, how to combine questions to stretch Iomedae's insight farther. 

Mendev was a poor feudal monarchy far enough north that the population was sparse, the growing season short, and overland trade with the rest of the world slow and expensive, when a rift opened up in the world and its Queen pledged herself to the Inheritor, begging Her for aid. 

Lastwall is very flattered that nations in desperate peril turn to Iomedae for aid, because She's in fact the best person for it. And no one can criticize the determination of Mendev's people, the tenacity which with they've risen to the challenge of defending a border with the Abyss itself. 

They don't, actually, know all that much about Iomedae. They do not have institutions that She crafted. They don't even want to replace their existing government with them! (Lastwall did offer.). They don't want to do the thing where Iomedae's resources are throughout the world first and foremost Hers, allocated across fronts however they're needed; they want their specific country to not be overrun by demons. (Which is in fact reasonably high on Lastwall's prioritization, but - it's a different spirit.)

Mendev, Ettore will be told, should not really be thought of as an Iomedaen country, so much as an ordinary country which, faced with destruction by Evil, had the sense to notice Iomedae was the goddess to turn to. He'll see the difference shortly. 

Ettore did have a brief assignment in Caliphas, thanks to ancient treaty part of free Ustalav even though it is the main port city for the region which includes the city of Vigil, so he thinks he has some idea what that means. It means that everything will be horribly ruled and everyone will be corrupt and the laws will be terribly written and selectively enforced (which is an abomination unto something much more important than Iomedae) and there will be perpetual conflict between every institution in the state and outside of it, and he is very not happy about this assignment.

Nonetheless, he does what his bosses tell him to do because they do what Iomedae wants them to do and she's right so they're right, and so he will pray and pack his gear and talk to people who have been there about the situation, and fill his Bag of Holding with supplies that veteran visitors tell him he should pack, and so get ready for the teleport to the Worldwound line, this time to the east side instead of the south.

They'll tell him that Kenabres has, since the Third Crusade, had a serious problem with demonic infiltration! And that Hulrun was a problem for the inquisition's reputation because he burned a lot of people at the stake but that, to be fair to him, an astounding number of them were in fact secretly in the service of Baphomet or worshipping a random succubus living in their basement or had had it Suggested they should slit the throats of sleeping paladins. And so on. Hulrun was not doing proper inquisiting at all but also the alternative circa the Third Crusade was mobs (themselves Suggested by demons) tearing apart suspected cultists in the streets, so, you know. 

They'll tell him that in Mendev the Iomedaen inquisition does not have the authority to arrest nobles without the direct permission of the Queen, so investigations into their activities have to tread very carefully.

They'll tell him that the very confused reports out of Kenabres so far claim Deskari showed up in person and Terendelev is dead and her body missing and there were some direct and expensive miracles and the city's still full of demons but the Wardstone's holding. And Galfrey's called a fifth crusade? No one's clear why she did that. She didn't even send for a Commune about it. 

(In Lastwall the miraculous interventions of the goddess they serve are not spoken of primarily with reverence and awe, but with vague shame. Every occasion Iomedae had to intervene directly is a failure by those who should have acted for Her, and let Her save Her resources.)

Good luck, Inquisitor.

The inquisition building in Kenabres looks like it has been recently sacked, when they arrive. Furniture is strewn everywhere; so is paperwork; there's a stray dog in the corner of the records room, bleeding from an arrow wound. The door to the dungeons is barred with magic. There's someone kneeling in the shrine to Iomedae, scrubbing the floor; it's been drenched with manure and blood.

Is the person Evil and/or Chaotic? Are there Evil and/or Chaotic creatures in range of his Detect? Is the dog Evil and/or Chaotic?

(he'd like to cast Detect Thoughts on it to check if it's intelligent, but doesn't have the spells.)

Also, he'll nod to the servant with a ghoulish attempt at something resembling a smile on his face.

"Inquisitor Castelloni."

No one is visibly Evil or Chaotic.

“-ah,” says the servant, not entirely happily, though also not terrified. “Lastwall sent someone. Uh, welcome. We’ll have the place cleaned up tomorrow, probably.” And a bit defensively, “We were busy moving everything back from the new lines.”

"Understandable," he says, still spectacularly bad at not being terrifying. (He is wearing a mildly enchanted breastplate and has a mildly enchanted sword.) "What is your name, please?"

Yeah now the servant is a bit nervous. "Mard, sir."

Hulrun didn't go after anyone who his magic told him was a servant of Iomedae but Mard didn't actually ask if that was a rule the whole inquisition followed. Though you'd expect it to be. They're supposed to persecute everyone else.

They aren't, actually, but Ettore doesn't know that!

"Mard, thank you." He'll turn to one of his inquisitorial assistants. "Silvio, would you take over the job here?"

Silvio Zavala (Orcish on his father's side and with army experience on the Belkzen frontier as well as in the Worldwound) nods. The job, as he knows, is to get the building more secure and, well, clean, and to make sure nobody runs off with Ettore's supplies.

"Where would the Count be, or whoever is handling his duties?" He'd like to present his credentials to the local governor, assuming he survived the disaster, and that's apparently the local nobleman.

Mard can give directions to the Count's mansion! Some of the landmarks given in the directions may even still be standing. "...of course," he says, only when he's finished giving those directions, "I guess maybe he's got to build himself a new mansion, depending where the new barrier-line runs."

Blink. "New barrier line?"

" - well, see, sir, Deskari picked up the wardstone and he threw it halfway across the city. That's why we've been having so much trouble."

"... Thank you. Silvio will handle clearing and unpacking a space for us."

And then he and his other assistants can follow the directions (as best they can) to go find Count Arendae's manor, assuming he's there. They're prepared to ask for directions and assassinate invisible or shapeshifted quasits along the way, of course.

There are, indeed, invisible and shapeshifted quasits along the way, and a lot of bodies human and demonic, and some looters picking over abandoned buildings, and eventually Count Arendae's mansion, whose guards refuse to open the door to let them in. 

"HE'S NOT HERE" someone shouts through the door. "PLENTY OF GUARDS ARE THOUGH".

Invisible and shapeshifted quasits will probably be very surprised to be immediately shot several times with unerring accuracy and cold iron arrows!

"I am Inquisitor Ettore Castelloni of the Church of Iomedae," he says, "here to speak with Count Daeran Arendae, Her Majesty Queen Galfrey's regent in Kenabres."

Is this an ambush? Possibly. That's what inquisitorial assistants are for.

There is some internal squabbling.

Someone'll open the door. 

"He's not here," they say. (This is a lie, if one is Discerning those.) "We can take a message, though." (This isn't).

Actually, he's just using a truly implausible level of ability to detect people lying to him, since it is What His Job Is All About.

This is a Spectacularly Bad Sign. Either Count Arendae has something to hide, or this is a stupid status play, or he's just fascinatingly incompetent. What Ettore's instincts are telling him to do is storm the palace, but his are unfortunately something he needs to overrule because Iomedae Knows Best.

"Tell Count Arendae," he says, slightly gritting his teeth, "that Hulrun's replacement as Chief Inquisitor is here to speak to the lord of Kenabres regarding the state of the city." Is that enough 'the spiritual power is here to speak with the secular power' to do the trick?

"....Yes, Inquisitor, we'll tell him that, as soon as he gets back." This is mostly not a lie aside from the 'gets back' and the fact that this guard is very sure Count Arendae won't care at all. 

"Count Arendae appreciates all your work on keeping the city safe," someone else says soothingly from behind the first person. This is definitely a lie.

He HATES Caliphvaso nobles.

"Do," he says drily.

Next stage: He would like one of his other assistants, Francesca de Ybarra, to ask locals who's in charge in Kenabres. Does she get the answer 'Count Arendae?' from random surviving citygoers?

"Terendelev, but she's dead."

"Prelate Hulrun."

"Prelate Hulrun. He's dead but the church'll fix it."

"Oh, I suppose technically it's Count Arendae. But he's, you know."

"Count Arendae and Prelate Hulrun, and if both of them are dead the city'll be all the better for it."

"Irabeth Tirabade, the Eagle's Watch commander. if you're wondering who might actually fix anything for you."

"Thank you," says de Ybarra with a distant smile, whose aura of regal grace is almost entirely a perpetual state of social panic.

And then, to Inquisitor Castelloni, "Irabeth Tirabede of the Eagle Watch."

Can they get directions to... wherever she is?

The Eagle Watch is manning some improvised barriers along the new wardstone-line and has a camp a bit back from that as part of where the Fifth Crusade is forming up to march on Drezen.

Irabeth Tirabade turns out to be a paladin of Iomedae, half-orc, the first person since Inquisitor Castelloni arrived in Kenabres to look happy to see him. "Pleased to meet you! I'm Irabeth, Commander of the Eagle Watch. What do you need from me?"

"You as well," he'll say, because social customs are done. "Ettore Castelloni, Inquisitor of Iomedae on assignment from Lastwall, and information on the situation. What has happened since Kenabres was attacked?"

"Right. Well, that was eight days ago. Deskari showed up in person and slew Terendelev, and then he took the Wardstone and moved it, and at that the city's defenses pretty much collapsed. The city was overrun by demons. It turned out - always does - that there were cultists waiting for that moment to strike. We formed up at the Defender's Heart, sheltered everyone we could, had small teams of adventurers going back out into the city to rescue civilians and reclaim bodies. And then we learned that Deskari wasn't, in moving the Wardstone, done, and had some kind of plan to corrupt it or destroy it or something. - I don't know if you know the border around here. If we lost Kenabres it's Tenerefe to Cormugal, there's no segment anywhere that big. I don't know what happens, if you stretch the line that thin.

The Church here had two emergency scrolls of Sending. We used them when Deskari showed up and when the wardstone moved. And two fourth circle spellcasters, Hulrun and Terendelev, and both of them dead. So - we figured, gather everyone who'd survived the previous week of fighting, go charge the garrison where the demons were doing whatever they were doing to the wardstone, try to stop them.

There was a lilitu." She does not need to say, specifically, that that's a fight for which Lastwall would send its single most senior adventuring team, and not with total confidence they'd win. "But our soldiers were courageous, and Iomedae sent a miracle and gave us the strength to destroy them." She does not have Lastwall's complicated relationship with Iomedaen miracles; she is happy and grateful.

"A miracle?" he says, in an inviting-to-say-more tone.

Alternate explanation: The lilitu shapeshifted into the provider of the miracle, faked its death with a minion with Alter Self, and the entire city is now under a more powerful demon's control. Is this likely? No. Does Ettore suspect it anyway? Yes. Miracles are rarer than demons with clever tricks.

"I was fighting in a different part of the building at the time" she says. "But the people who were there said they felt some greater power rush over them and had strength and speed no spell could give them. And they cut through the demons easily, and the lilitu Teleported out, and when the rest of us staggered up the stairs to see if the Wardstone was still standing, so it was, and its defenders glowing with holy light."

"Thank you," he says.

"My remaining questions are - are you presently in secular command of the city? If not, do you know who, in fact, is? And do you know where I might find any of Inquisitor Hulrun's former subordinates? And what do you most need help with?"

"I am not formally in secular command of the city, just of the Watch, but the Watch has responsibility for - most things you'd think of. Defense, coordination with adventurers, prisons, trials - not that we've been doing that - I can't collect taxes and I can't write Nerosyan, but that's all I've run into that hasn't been delegated to us.

Count Arendae's around here somewhere technically being the Queen's representative. Last I saw him he was too drunk to walk. Though to his credit he fought, when we needed him. He was in the garrison with us."

He nods. "And my men?"

"Hulrun's guards died defending him, and some more of his people in the assault on the garrison. The surviving ones were working on retrieving bodies for the Church, last I heard, or hanging around where the Crusade's forming up to make sure demons don't interfere with that. 

The Watch doesn't need much, aside from the obvious. More men, more food, more cold iron arrows, fewer demon cultists.

You know, I'll be straight with you - I don't think there's going to be a Kenabres, not really, in the long run. There was Kenabres because there was Terendelev. Every other border fort is a dreary miserable place where everything's scarce and everyone's cold and hungry, but Kenabres had celebrations and important visitors and fancy feats of sorcery and we weren't stuck begging distant places that don't care - no offense intended -

- we weren't stuck begging anyone for help when the demons came in too fast to fight, she'd spread her wings and take them down. The Sellen was safe to travel down, in these parts. This is why we had a cultist problem in the first place, because we were a city not a fortress. People could just live, here.

What's going to happen now is most everyone who can leave, will. With the Crusade, if they're bold, or for somewhere farther from the borders, if they're not. I've been asked to travel with the Crusade. Most of the Watch'll go. And we'll leave enough to guard the line, or not enough but as many as everywhere else has."

"Fort Korbas, three years," he says. Maybe someone can manage a True Resurrection on Terendelev with a hoarded scroll or the borrowing of one of the world's mightiest priests, but maybe not. And if not, this seems like a very reasonable strategic judgement.

He'll deliver the report back with the rest of his first Sending, when he has it sent. (Lastwall has a set of one-word codes for messages, with 'I suspect the head of the city may be a demon' being three different word options depending on confidence level and level of the need.)

He'd like directions to places where she has some vague idea where his subordinates might be so he can get reports from people who are less busy and go investigate. Under the circumstances, Ettore would like to piece his command together if he at all can.

"Well, if pressed I'd guess there's someone at the temple with the inquisition building attached, because there's a prison there and I should hope they wouldn't just have abandoned the prisoners, and I'd check the contingent forming up for the Crusade, right over the hill. We march in two days, someone said. If we don't make Drezen before the snow gets deep I suppose I'll next see you in Heaven."

"There was a servant mopping the floor," he says drily. "We'll meet again in Heaven, in victory or defeat. Inheritor's blessing on you."

"And you as well."

Irabeth will get back to attempting to set up an organized defense for the city before they leave in two days.

And Ettore will go off over the hill to find the Crusade and go investigate what happened to everyone working for his predecessor, shooting the inevitable invisible and/or polymorphed quasits along the way!

Three of Hulrun's not-very-powerful, not Iomedae-selected lieutenants are still alive, and with the Crusade. They were ...expecting Hulrun to be Raised, really. They don't say it but it's visible on their faces. 

"What are your instructions, Inquisitor?"

Yeah, Ettore is used to having that effect on people. Any of them Evil or Chaotic? "Report to me on the strategic situation in Kenabres."

(Also, what's the Crusade look like militarily, based on his experience with armies?)

Not Evil or Chaotic. (Not likely powerful enough he'd see it if they were.)

"Well, the city's overrun by traitors and cultists and demons, sir."

"No doubt," he says drily. "In slightly more detail." What happened? Who, if anyone, do they think is in charge? Who were they answering to while Hulrun was dead and Ettore hadn't arrived? He's not asking for any classified information they know, just what their picture of the disaster looks like.

What happened was that Hulrun was murdered while defending the city, by adventurers who were probably either Baphomet cultists, or just common looters, or conceivably traitorous Desnans. Hulrun's second-in-command, Inquisitor Correve, had already been killed in the fighting. This left it very unclear who to answer to. (Count Daeran is Evil. And channels positive energy. It's very suspicious.) Irabeth Tirabade, who coordinated the city's defense, is probably not a traitor or a cultist because she's a paladin of Iomedae, and what remained of Hulrun's people attacked the garrison on her orders with her. After that they tried to get those bodies that the Church might be able to afford to raise - they have those in the dungeons under the Inquisitorial building right now, it was the most secure place remaining - and are now trying to catch the demons and cultists who are definitely at work with this Crusade, not directly under Tirabade because she is a paladin and doesn't approve of doing what it takes to stop cultists and demons.

They answer to him. Should he die before he can draw up a revised chain with all inquisitors known and in their proper positions, they will answer to Silvio Zavala, his most senior assistant, until the Church of Iomedae can provide a replacement as chief inquisitor. He will not be taking over Hulrun's responsibilities as prelate of the city, a separate cleric will be appointed for that.

Unless there are specific, known cultists and demons they are ready to arrest right now now that they have him and two of his assistants for backup, they should help him track down any other surviving inquistors and then return to the temple so they can establish common knowledge of the situation and the resources available to them and make organized plans, so they don't need to operate on their own with insufficient support.

They don't specifically know for sure of any cultists and demons, though for any given person they arrest the odds they will turn out to be a cultist or demon are quite high. 

They can head back to the temple, or try first to find the one remaining coworker they believe to be alive, who was also planning to meet them back at the temple.

They should try to find their remaining coworker, and ideally if there are any other living coworkers they can find news of, that would be great, but he's not holding out hope.

(He's flickering his Sight for Good and Law occasionally, but his chief objective is to make sure they aren't Literal Demons In Disguise, with Chaos useful as a double-check that Evil people aren't just regular mundane evil people.)

They encounter only one literal demon in disguise along the way to where the remaining living coworker was last seen! It's a succubus pretending to be a crusader.

This sounds like a situation where a lot of sneak attacks with cold iron weapons are the most appropriate solution!

The crusader's colleagues are startled and then grateful. Two people had gone missing from their unit and they hadn't known why. 

Right. That's why. Next time people are mysteriously disappearing from your unit, let the Iomedaean Inquisition know; no harm will come to you if you report it, even if you waste our time or you did something under a Suggestion you now regret, and harm will come to you if a succubus eats you.

Are the remaining crusaders currently evil/chaotic/enchanted/etc/etc or can he go back to looking for the possibly-surviving inquisitor?

Not evil not chaotic not enchanted!!

The surviving inquisitor is found, uh, extrajurisdictionally clearing out some abandoned shops of valuables.

"Do tell me," Ettore will say drily, "is this something other what it looks like?"

"The Church will need these resources for the Crusade!"

"What the Church needs for the Crusade," says Inquisitor Castelloni very firmly, projecting his voice so that the people in the street hear but not shouting, "is that every subject of Queen Galfrey knows that the Church is obedient to the Will of Iomedae, and the Laws that She Herself has decreed Her church obey, and that since these laws specify that those in Her service do not steal from subjects of Her anointed monarch, those in Her service will not steal from subjects of Her appointed monarch. I am placing you under arrest for the crime of theft, and you will have the right to speak in your defense at your trial."

The guy is so indignant that Lastwall sent some asshole instead of just sending Hulrun back. ....Hulrun would also have been annoyed but he wouldn't have ARRESTED you about it.

He will, obviously, have his assistant tie the ex-junior-inquisitor's hands, because it would be very cruel to ask the guy's former companions to do it for him.

(He'd like to post a guard outside the station, but he frankly expects all of the other junior inquisitors to abandon the inquisition as soon as they see the chance, and he'd like that to be quitting as soon as they reach the station instead of deserting, for the sake of their Law, their Good, and their ability to survive without becoming outlaws.)

He would also like to post a guard outside this shop for the sake of having it not just be ransacked by some random goon who doesn't work for the inquisition, but he can't, because there are exactly four people in this city he mostly trusts.

... Irabeth's not too bad. Five people in the city he more than fifty percent trusts.

Then they can make it back to the inquisition building, where Mard has mostly gotten the floor clean.

With help from Silvio, presumably, who has in the interim picked up useful information about Mard and about the situation that he can pass on to Inquisitor Castelloni?

Silvio thinks that Mard might be all right; most of the servants fled. Mard said that Hulrun was a good inquisitor disliked because almost everyone in the city was disloyal or insane, and that he wasn't dangerous to any sincere Iomedaens. He did seem to have picked a politically unpopular fight with the Church of Desna for some reason quite recently; Mard didn't know the details. 

Mard is pretty sure there are living prisoners in the magically locked dungeons along with some bodies for the Church's pickup, but he doesn't know and wasn't actually charged with keeping them alive or anything. He doesn't think anyone was charged with that. The situation was a bit messy. 

Shit.

Right.

... The dungeons are magically locked?

Yep. Arcane lock, cast by a second circle wizard who is now dead or deserted. Probably dead, he was a sincere Iomedaen.

Right. So he'll need to get a Dispel Magic or break down the door, and do it fast before the prisoners die of dehydration. Silvio, I'll want you to take a look at it in a moment, but right now -

- Right now the tied-up ex-inquisitor will be briefly locked "- until we've cleared a cell for you -" in a clean, dry closet.

And then he can gather everyone and explain:

"Our purpose," he says, "is to prevent demons from infiltrating and taking control of the city. This is a vitally important purpose in the crusade, for which we are entrusted with responsibilities and honors beyond those of other men."

"For this purpose, we are allies of every citizen of Kenabres who is not a worshipper of demons. We are enemies of the demons. The cultists are not our enemies, they are idiot pawns of our enemies."

"We do not attack our allies. We do not steal from our allies. We do not lie to our allies. We do not betray our allies."

"Why do we not do that? Because it is our orders. Because it is the law. But though these should be sufficient, one of the reasons it is the Law is that, if citizens trust us, they will come to us when crusaders in their squad begin disappearing because they are being seduced and murdered by a succubus, and if they do not, they will not. And if they do not, we end up with Kenabres today. Do you think the citizens of Kenabres did not know of the cultist armies in their midst? They knew. But they feared the law, and so Hulrun is dead."

"And for all these reasons I will enforce the Law of Iomedae within my organization." Francesca can hold up a stack of simple, easy-to-read booklets mass produced with Scrivener's Chant. "The Law of Iomedae is not the full legal code of the state. It is simple, it is logical, it is short, and I will expect all in my service to memorize it and to abide by it in their investigations."

"If any of you desire to leave, I request but do not require that you provide me with more information about the local situation before I leave, but I will not compel this or any other service from you if you will not remain in my service. Should you desire to go I will absolve you of any oaths you have sworn to the inquisition or other commitments you have made that it is within my power to absolve before you do. I will accept none who will not abide by this Law, and as this is a heavier burden than you have borne before, so too I cannot compel you to take it."

"We are the servants of Iomedae, and it is in Her service that I do this. Thus do I swear. Now. Will you stay or will you go?"

....some of them will go. If it's allowed.  Especially the friends of the guy he just arrested. They still want to fight demons but they can do that in, you know, the Crusade, which is going to be normal about it. 

The majority will, in fact, stay. Iomedae just miraculously saved their city. And it's hard to argue that Hulrun is dead because the Inquisition was insufficiently trusted.

They can go with his blessing. It's allowed. He hopes they will serve well in the crusade, and earn glory, and reach Heaven when they die. Everyone else gets a copy of the very short easy-to-memorize operating code, which can in fact be read out loud if they are illiterate, and then Inquisitor Castelloni will ask Silvio to take a look at the Arcane Lock vis-a-vis getting it open ideally (but not necessarily) in a manner that lets them close it again, while he tries to track down the records, the supplies, and any spare locks they have.

Silvio can figure out the Arcane Lock if he takes some time about it. In the meantime, the records were ransacked by cultists and the remaining paper is stacked in that corner though they can't vouch for its accuracy and not-planted-by-cultists status. They have spare locks and spare manacles and so on. 

Kastil is not surprised. While all of his assistants happen to be in the room, incidentally, he'll check the alignments of everyone sticking with him, and then if any of them have been impersonated by demons he can handle that, and then he'll spend an actual spell checking if they're all Iomedaeans.

They are all Iomedaeans and not impersonated by demons! Even Mard, who is currently boarding up a smashed window.

They get the lock.

Great. What do they have in their dungeons?

Some dead bodies (only one of whom appears to have died in their custody; the others were brought here for safekeeping and have Gentle Repose spells active) and three badly dehydrated people.

Let's get some water into the badly dehydrated people, and, also, ask them what they're in for.

(And check if they are Iomedaeans, and if any of them visible alignments.)

(He is not, incidentally, going to tell them Hulrun is dead until he has some idea what's going on. He is going to tell them that he is a representative of the Inquisition, inform them of their rights, and either ignore or say 'no comment' to questions about the situation in Kenabres until he has some idea what is happening.)

(They are not of visible alignments, and are not Iomedaeans.)

One will tell him, hoarsely, to just hurry up and put him to death, and if further pressed will concede that he was arrested on suspicion of being a cultist of Baphomet.

The other claims to be a case of mistaken identity with his brother who was admittedly a wanted criminal.

The third is very insistent that she is Desnan and was arrested by Hulrun for that and is serving Good, really, Hulrun's got it wrong.

He'll go by his instincts for how worried to be, but whatever they say, he'll tell them that he'll ask them these questions under Zone of Truth when he casts the spell later today and that if they're innocent they will then be released, and for the moment can provide them with water and trail rations (it's the food he has) and putting them in actually sanitary cells, as improvised as those have to be.

His instincts are that the first one is a cultist of Baphomet and the second one is probably a wanted criminal and the third - well, he might want some external account of Hulrun's dealings with the Desnans? She's probably not lying about being Desnan, though.

Right.

Any other emergencies that are urgent and On Him In Particular? No? Any quasits in the building? Looks like a no...

... At this point.

Well, while his loyal sidekicks go through the paperwork / do repairs / continue the quasit checks slightly less effectively:

"Tell me about the crusade." He wants to hear all about the battle with this lilitu, who was involved, what the miracle looked like, and what the leadership of the crusade looks like, from anyone who was there or who talked to someone who was there, as close as he can get, lots of individual conversations while the rest of his new command help turn his new headquarters into something that was not sacked by demons.

The lilitu and some of her powerful associates were going to corrupt the wardstone, or destroy the wardstone, or destroy all the wardstones in a chain reaction of corruption, or just haul the wardstone through a Gate to the Abyss. The forces of Good such as remained in the city went to stop them. The new Knight-Commander was one of those. Tien royalty, very fancy, a paladin of Shizuru with a Evil tiefling sister/lover/advisor/companion/daughter/??? and a sizable retinue when they arrived which had been pretty much wiped out by the time of the final confrontation. The new Knight-Commander survived Deskari's arrival and the sack of the city, somehow, and reemerged having acquired the sword of an angel and the support of the mongrels - there are underground mongrels. If he's not local he might not have known. They've been there forever/for a hundred years/since the Third Crusade/don't really exist, depending who you ask.

They confronted the lilitu in front of the wardstone and the new Knight-Commander glowed with impossible light/became possessed by a god/smote all Evil in a single strike/made the demons flee before him without moving at all/was surrounded and aided by a host of angels. Depending who you ask. The demons definitely fled or died, though. 

The leadership of the Crusade is, well, the new Knight-Commander, and any of his own surviving staff and advisors and sister/companion/???, and some of the mongrels he won to his service, and Irabeth Tirabade the One Competent Person still alive in Kenabres, and the Queen further pressed into the Crusade's service Count Arendae and some of her own advisors. 

This is obviously unbelievably suspicious. 'Oh yeah, I'm royalty from Tian Xia' lets you get the mystique of royalty without anyone ever being able to call you on it, and 'paladin of Shizuru' gets you people treating you as a paladin without any organization or god that can strip you of your status.

He, of course, has more questions. Like 'underground mongrels?' 'Mongrels?' Did the Queen say why she was appointing this Tian nobleman to lead the Crusade?

... Is the Tien 'paladin' a tiefling himself?

He is not! One of the people who claimed the tiefling is his sister claims that they are half-sisters by different women in the royal harem obviously.

The underground mongrels are people who are disgusting and malformed and tough and live underground, where they've been corrupted by the forces of Evil. Hulrun ordered them to stay belowground and killed some of the ones who came up to fight. 

The Queen said she was appointing this Tien nobleman to lead the Crusade because of his courage and extraordinary fortune and abilities and also the really blatant miracle (probably from Iomedae? It'd also make sense for it to be Shizuru given that the new Knight-Commander is a paladin of Shizuru but no one knows anything about Shizuru and giving people the miraculous strength to fight off demons is a known Iomedae sort of miracle, right?).

Obviously.

No doubt he detected evil on them first Ettore is discovering new and exciting ways he hates Mendev.

He'll add the 'check Iomedae confirm knight commander crusade' to his list of questions for Lastwall to send off when he has enough for a sending and someone to Send to.

What paladin things have people witnessed the new Knight-Commander doing, how many witnesses were there to this miracle who saw it firsthand, and who are they?

This takes a lot more question-asking but he can figure it out eventually. 

There were seven witnesses to the miracle, besides the Knight-Commander and his tiefling sister. Count Arendae, Camellia (a rich Kenabres-native adventurer), a ...homeless elf girl, and a tiefling thief out on parole to help save the city. And then three ritualists who were there to do the activation of the Wardstone in order to hit all the demons in the city.

Okay, that's fair. He can in fact figure out where the party came from and what it was doing. And that ritual is... not something he knew about, but the sort of thing that makes the plan make sense. (He'll want to interview the people there eventually, those of them he can track down. 'Is the party a bunch of demons and cultists' is something he might be able to find out from that.)

... Mostly. Homeless elf girl?

Yeah, several people will corroborate that. The Tien adventurers were running around with a homeless elf girl who had magic powers. 

(The Inquisition will clarify, awkwardly, that Ember is a witch, known to them, almost burned at the stake once and not technically acquitted at any subsequent point but burning at the stake wasn't allowed anymore by the time they figured out it was the same person.)

... Do they know what her patron is or if she was almost burned for a specific reason or just 'is a witch', or what alignment she detects as? Or what she has... done... while she was running around as a homeless girl with magic powers?

She and her father were initially burned at the stake on suspicion of being cultists of some demon lord or another, probably Baphomet. They don't know who her patron is but the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of Baphomet cultists in the city. She's Neutral Good, though that's after the sack of the city and subsequent events, she didn't register before it.  While she was running around as a homeless girl with magic powers, she mostly went around talking to wild animals and wasting her healing on them, though she'd also heal any people who asked her.

ETTORE HATES MENDEV.

Right. So.

He's interested in hearing if, if any of these people (other than Count Arendae) are still alive, what happened to them? Does anyone know anything about Camellia, or the thief (is he still out?), or the ritualists?

Oh, they all survived thanks to the miracle. 

....actually someone heard that Camellia's dead. There was a big fuss. Apparently her father is Horgus Gwerm, local nobleman and generous supporter of the Crusade, and now he's under investigation or something? 

What the absolute - 

He's going to want to hear that rumor, and hear who the guy who heard the rumor heard it from.

Oh, he heard it from Jannah, with the Houndhearts, and she heard it from Seelah, who's one of the adventuring companions of the Knight-Commander, and a paladin of Iomedae, so you know she wasn't just making things up drunk, paladins stay sober no matter how many rounds they down. 

He was, himself, quite drunk, though, and so was Jannah, so things may have gotten mangled at those stages of the chain.

Right. Of course. Thank you.

He'll add "interview Jannah" to his Ridiculously Long List Of Tasks.

What's the deal with the thief? (He suspects it's 'the obvious', i.e., 'we'll let you go if you help us sneak up to the Wardstone', but he won't say what 'the obvious' is to avoid minions telling you what you want to hear.)

Yeah Irabeth authorized his release in exchange for his help with dismantling traps and finding secret passages and so on. He's got a bit of wizardry, too, and can read scrolls, and that's not something to blink at with things as bad as they are.

He's still around, he didn't cut and run after the wardstone was back up?

Still around. Planning to travel with the Crusade, as far as anyone's heard.

Right.

And the ritualists?

Most people have no idea who they were. Someone is pretty sure they were affiliated with Aravashniel and someone else is pretty sure they worked closely with Terendelev and someone else thinks they were Tien like the Knight-Commander.

No one knows where they are now.

So. The witnesses are:

His first chief suspect,

His second chief suspect,

An Evil and corrupt nobleman,

Someone who was just murdered,

A witch who barely escaped death at the Inquisition's hands,

And a professional thief.

Oh, and some people who have mysteriously disappeared.

(He hopes they have not actually mysteriously disappeared and just nobody knows what room they're staying in. He hopes.)

ETTORE HATES MENDEV.

... He's heard some stuff about the church of Desna. What's the story there?

Some Desnans snuck into the wardstone fortress two days before Deskari's attack. They claimed to have learned of a threat to the Wardstone and decided to thwart it by sneaking in for some reason. Hulrun, of course, threw them into the dungeons and put out orders for the arrest of the rest of their order. 

Hmm. Did they claim to have had orders to do this from their superiors, or that it was their own decision?

They're Desnans! They don't even formally have superiors! They are all equals!

And the most powerful priest of Desna who has the strongest spells - what circle is he, by the way? - and the most senior and wisest one, what would they say about that?

The most powerful priest of Desna was third circle, and killed infiltrating the Wardstone fortress. Ramien, who is most senior and wisest but is only second circle, said that the warning came from their god and that Hulrun should heed it, and then advised his people to flee justice and fled himself. He...might still be around or might've been killed in the fighting, no one is sure.

The Desnan currently in custody isn't even a Desna-empowered priest, just a song-sorceress who worships Desna. Hulrun arrested her shortly before the confrontation in which he was killed.

Right.

At present, his judgement is that Hulrun was wrong to arrest the rest of the order based on the infiltration attempt; he was correct to throw the people responsible in jail until an investigation could be carried out and a sentence could be passed, but incorrect to believe that the rest of the order were functionally accessories to the crime - both ethically wrong and tactically wrong; they can't throw the entire city in jail and Desnan priests behaving stupidly are in fact less likely to be demon spies than anyone who doesn't detect good. Having the additional healing and spells Desnan priests provide is useful, and as long as they detect good it is very unlikely they are in fact demon cultists. He understands the temptation, because breaking into the wardstone fortress is a crime, but failure to maintain discipline in a religious order is not a crime and neither is failure to report well-intentioned but illegal actions.

Is the whole of the case against that song-sorceress that she was under suspicion of being an accessory to this break-in due to her status as a coreligionist of the criminals, or is there more?

....no it's pretty much just that, when you put it like that. She did also vocally defend the breakin?

If you arrest people for saying they support very stupid things, they'll keep quiet and you won't have advance warning that they're going to do very stupid things.

(Also, defending criminals is not itself a crime by the Laws of Iomedae, which Kastil is in charge of enforcing. He cannot speak to the Laws of Mendev, however, so he does not know if Hulrun's action is legal or not. Either way, his course is clear.)

No one argues this with him. No one would really defend the claim that Hulrun's decisions in the city's final days were wise.

Then his next step is as follows: If anyone has new prisoners or specific targets for arrest, they arrest them. If not, he intends to hold trials. These trials will be open to the public, or at least that fraction of the public that does not show up with weapons and armor, but he needs to hold them somewhere secure and ideally a very short walk from inquisitorial headquarters. What would the appropriate place be?

(Given the crisis, he is willing to hold today's trials in the headquarters, or in the square in front of the headquarters, but he'd rather not.)

There's a temple of Iomedae, but it's not that secure and not that short a walk from inquisitorial headquarters. The most secure place in the city is the wardstone fortress and after that it's all kinda messy.

Hulrun usually held trials and executions in Market Square. It has a chasm in the middle but it's what people will expect.

Right.

They're not going to do that.

In that case, he wants Silvio and his other assistant Enric to take some of his new staff and see if the square just in front of the inquisitorial headquarters can be secured for today. At the same time, he is going to go down into the prisons, he'd like to talk to the Desnan they have locked up, who nobody wants to bring any charges against.

His assistants can go look into securing the square. 

The Desnan is in the corner of her cell clinging to her glass of water, her eyes still a bit glazed. She looks despairingly up at the Inquisitor when he comes in.

"The Iomedaean Inquisition has no reason to suspect you of anything and you are free to go." Best to get that out first. "If you would like to leave now, you may. If you would like to have any further conversation in my office, you may. Any criticisms of the Iomedaean Inquistion you would like to offer I will listen to."

- a cough, or maybe a giggle, and then a coughing fit that might be hysterical laughter. "If I - have any criticisms - of the Iomedaen Inquisition -

- please let me out of here, I haven't seen the sun in days -"

He'll do that, then! Escort her straight out the front door, then say, loudly, "The Iomedaean Inquisition has no reason to suspect you of any crime or heresy and you are free to go, with my apologies for your arrest." It is not something he can apologize for because he didn't know, but right now he's the voice of an organization that should have.

She blinks a bit wonderingly at the sun. 

"Right," she says faintly. "My objections to the Iomedaean inquisition are, you're all imbeciles, you didn't catch the actual cultists which is your only fucking job, you didn't even protect the Wardstone after we warned you there was an attack planned, you killed Klerets and he was better at his job than any of you, Hulrun's a murderer, you didn't give me any water, and if your stupid goddess actually showed up, which she won't because she sucks and never does anything, you'd probably just burn her at the stake, those are my objections to the Iomedaean inquisition."

He nods. "Your objections are reasonable," he says. "Hulrun is presently under investigation. I hope you will not still have them in a year's time."

She looks like she wants to slap him but is successfully recovering enough sense to not do that. "You could quit," she says, "and go work for something that isn't about hurting people."

He doesn't have a response to that?

(Properly understanding the extent to which Ettore considers that a non sequitur requires getting into the mindset that he is, say, a house carpenter, or a plowman, or one of the wizards using Scrivener's Chant to copy books. Ettore is not going to say something like 'my job is to only hurt bad people' or 'but then we'd be stuck with Hulrun doing it' because he has so thoroughly internalized the mindset that comes from his life in Lastwall that he does not really understand how someone can do things other than attempt to aim one's actions at being the ones that take you to the correct destination. And he knows that saying 'I do what Iomedae says' would be the wrong thing to say.)

After a while of being glared at he will say, "I do not know what the purpose of Hulrun's inquisition was, but the purpose of Iomedae's inquisition is to catch demon cultists. To do, as you say, our only job, which is what I have been sent to do. And that is all."

- she'll nod, stiffly, and leave, on fairly shaky feet until she sings herself something to steady them.

What he would like to do next is trials for the people who might be guilty of something. What he is going to do instead is figure out an org chart so he has any idea which of his flunkies have what jobs. How are his sidekicks' attempts to make sense of this going?

Hulrun didn't really trust anyone except his second-in-command so everyone reported directly to him or the now dead second-in-command. There were about fifteen people in the inquisition, most of them just in security roles. There are now five left.

Okay. And... funding sources for hiring more people? Does the inquisition have income coming in from anywhere, which it can use to hire people?

(Ettore hopes but does not expect any other answer than "they were allowed to seize the possessions of heretics.")

They are funded by Mendev! Intermittently and unpredictably. They were in fact also allowed to seize the possessions of heretics, and to fundraise at executions.

Okay, the incentive structure for this is all wrong and at some point he is going to need to establish a sane system of payments, possibly involving tracking down Count Arendae and shaking him until money comes out try to make a persuasive argument to him that an inquisition that needs to execute people to fund itself is insane. Maybe he can have Yberra do that, she is Technically A Noble for when that is relevant.

... Also, he observes that he here has four people he knows are competent working for him, unless any of them have been murdered and replaced yet.

(ETTORE HATES MENDEV.)

Okay. So, his long term plan -

- He is going to need to hire - jailers, prison guards, pick up some Continual Flames, start building a network of informants (a strategy he automatically assumes involves a lot of Zone of Truth)... if his income stays unpredictable, figure out how to fund the inquisition on a fraction of it and make investments, so he has something to support the inquisition when it has no other funds... he'll need to talk to Abadarians about that, clerics of Abadar are easy to recognize and fairly common and definitely not Deskari cultists...

The best way to get new inquisitors when Iomedae doesn't choose them for him is to recruit soldiers who are healthy, clean-living, obedient to orders, don't gamble, don't have any desperately ill children, are ideally happily married, celibate, or only interested in the same sex, and worship Iomedae, then pay them more than they got in the army. His prospects for doing that... may not be great, given just how few people Hulrun had and just how large Kenabres is. (Or was.)

Probably his first priority is going to have to be trials, though.

The procedure for trials in Lastwall is not, actually, that complicated. Barring courts-martial for people with extremely classified information, all trials are held in buildings open to the public; a magistrate, ideally someone who Iomedae has personally blessed with divine power (but if yea or nay on that, always someone who regularly swears under Zone of Truth to have not knowingly given dishonest, illegal or unjust trial results) sits at a bench, listens to an accusation brought either by a wronged civilian or an agent of the court, questions the accused under Zone of Truth, calls witnesses if necessary, and passes sentence; if the accused resists the spell, this is considered evidence-but-not-proof of guilt, and if the case cannot be settled without it then agents of the court will beat them unconscious (with a Merciful weapon, if the court has one) and keep them that way until the second casting. A scribe will stand by to record all this (in shorthand, normally, on wax tablets, to be copied to very small amounts of paper or parchment later), and the complete testimony will be kept recorded for the magistrate's regular performance reviews.

In normal conditions, these trials will be announced at least a day in advance, a week for capital crimes, with placards posted in the city or at least a town crier to spread the news, during which time friends of the accused can negotiate for extensions if they need more time to find witnesses, while the magistrate tries to talk down anyone who can give testimony on either case. Mitigating conditions (and anti-mitigating conditions) are considered, punishments are usually light, and if the punishment isn't light, then after the sentence the accused will be held for three days to allow them time to come to terms with their lives, write or dictate their wills, and seek the prospect of any final acts of atonement that can be done from a jail cell before they are sent to their final fate.

In extraordinary conditions, Lastwall uses Command and Suggestion to make suspects talk and for capital crimes holds the executions five minutes after the trial completes. It can get through twenty trials a day, if it has the spells.

Right now, Kastil has two questions for his people before he carries out the trial: Does anyone know where - or if - he can find a low-ranking cleric of Iomedae or Sarenrae or any nonchaotic Good god in the city, and does anyone know what is done with thieves and who deals with them, by the Law of Kenabres?

There's a city court, with a magistrate appointed by the city council. It punishes theft with anything between an agreement for restitution and a hanging, depending on who is accused and the mood of the crowd. In general one would contact the Eagle Watch about a thief, if they wanted the thief to actually go to trial.

There are probably priests of Iomedae at the temple thereof. Sarenrae doesn't have a particularly established faith this far north and Her priest in Kenabres, who is now dead, worked out of the Iomedaen temple. There's also a single priest of Erastil, who is apprenticed to Vissaliy Rathimus, the priest of Abadar, because the more senior priest of Erastil in the city died about four years back, on the front lines. 

Understood. Then he's going to head over to the temple of Iomedae with a couple bodyguards (murdering any demons he sees along the way, obviously) to talk to the Church of Iomedae about getting him some support for his trials.

The Church of Iomedae in Kenabres has a single surviving priest who hasn't been commanded to go with the Crusade, a bright-eyed young woman who has been a priest of Iomedae for less than a year. A week ago she worked for Terendelev and now she is wildly out of her depth. 

" - hi," she says to Inquisitor Castelloni, anxiously. "I mean. Inquisitor. What do you need."

He would like to give a reassuring smile but anything he does will look sinister. "Select," he says. "I have an accused cultist of Baphomet who I suspect is guilty and who, if so, will be executed shortly thereafter. The laws for conducting trials say that if possible, he should have a spiritual comforter before he is executed to help him calm his soul, turn his thoughts towards atonement, and so reduce his odds of damnation. Can you fill this role yourself or provide or recommend someone to do so?"

- blink blink blink blink blink. "- right. 

Do you have to kill him? There's a lot of Baphomet cultists around here - they should stop that but I don't actually see how it makes anything better if we kill them for it. I can talk to him about his soul but what'll really calm him down is - you know. Getting older. Never met a forty-year-old Baphomet cultist."

"I see no other option," he says. "I do not have the manpower to guard him on his way to exile, he cannot be conscripted to the army so long as it marches against his god, and should he be a traitor then to pardon him or release him with a whipping or maiming would leave the problem, that of an active armed force hidden inside the city that attempted to take it by treasonous attack, unresolved." 

She looks down at his feet. "Yes, Inquisitor. I will speak to him, if you like, though it might be wiser to get Kyado if my participation in the execution is also expected, because I would expect that to somewhat undermine anything I said to him."

Mediocre attendance by the rest of the empowered Church at Hulrun's executions was a point of contention, before the world ended. Terendelev said that she knew little about the form human justice ought to take and was too busy defending the city. Irabeth was also often frequently too busy. Hulrun thought it made the Church look weak and divided, and while no one could accuse Terendelev or Irabeth of sympathy for demons anyone else who missed one would probably be so accused. 

The old priest, Saatar, said it was worse before they were told to stop executing people by burning, because the Inquisition couldn't use Iomedae's divine power to light dozens of fires in a day and the clerics of course could.

"No one's participation in the execution is required except the executioner," he says flatly. "I have been sent to relieve Hulrun because his procedures were not endorsed by the Church of Iomedae. Sympathy for demons is not a crime; Iomedae Herself possessed it. Supporting demons is, but the crime is the act not the emotion, which is a virtuous emotion if often ill-guided. If you believe Kyado will be better at the job, I will seek him out, if not, this is the sole duty I ask of you in my courts, unless you happen to see a crime against the Laws of Iomedae committed and wish to testify."

Startled blink. " - oh. No, in that case I'll probably be better, Kyado's a wreck. 

I didn't mean to say anything against Hulrun. The city'd have fallen long ago without him."

Ettore nods stiffly. "Hulrun's skills were considerable." But he's also absolutely terrible for the reputation of Iomedae and the Inquisition.

Saatar used to say, it's cheaper for the goddess to see things when you look, so you look very hard with your eyes wide open, and it's cheaper for the goddess to do things when we ask, so you ask for everything, but ultimately everything's very big and very strange and you can't expect you'll get answers, or like the ones you get, and nothing's better if you don't serve Her. If that would be better She'd stop empowering you. 

She feels like she is supposed to have a question, but she doesn't know what it is. 

Oh, no, actually, it's obvious. "Am I supposed to have different procedures now? If the old ones were wrong?"

"I do not know the procedures you follow, so I cannot say whether or not it is wrong. This -" he digs out his pocket copy of the Laws of Iomedae, he has spare copies and anyway he's got it memorized "- is the code the Church of Iomedae instructed me to enforce, but it presumes many features of government not present in Mendev, and ignores those that are there. What procedures do you presently follow?"

" - I make clean water first for the city and then for farmers who'll pay for it, and I do channels at high noon and sunset, and I did house calls for the dying and for women in childbirth, back when we had Terendelev, and I used to teach a class after sundown in the room with the Continual Flame, about why to be Lawful Good, but we stopped it because people weren't safe in the streets going home after, and I read from the books at services and try to make them sound exciting, and I keep the church clean and respectable and I report common crimes to the Eagle Watch, though I guess I can't do that anymore because they're marching out, and I report suspected cultists to Hulrun - to you - and I give the collections money to Irabeth direct and tell her if the building's broken or if we're out of food and she gives me a bit back for that. 

- I guess my big problems are that I don't know who to bring the collections money or who to report crimes to, without the Eagle Watch."

"All this sounds wholly reasonable," he says, in the voice of a Competent, Organized Person. "I do not yet know who to deliver money or report crimes to, but I expect I will tomorrow, and I can tell you then. In your place, I would wait to report minor crimes, report major crimes to me, and store money in a bank of Abadar, if there is one in the city."

“Rathimus is leaving with the Crusade too,” she says. “- the priest of Abadar, who also ran their bank. If you’ll know tomorrow that’ll do, though. Inheritor’s blessing go with you.”

"And with you."

And then he needs to go scream, but he cannot actually do this, because he's in charge. So his next step is...

... To track down Irabeth and ask her what the legal system looks like with her gone, and hopefully Rathimus. Then he can hold the trial and actually solve the problem.

(What he thinks they should do is get Count Arendae or his steward, Irabeth, him, and some of the merchant leaders to discuss what things will look like with them gone, and, yes, he is reinventing the idea of a city council. But he's still setting off traps wherever he places his feet.)

Blah blah blah find Irabeth blah blah blah shoot any demons between him and Irabeth blah blah blah?

There are either very few demons left or word has gotten out about him; there is only opportunity to shoot one.

Irabeth says, a bit sheepishly, that the Eagle Watch were mostly functioning as a semiofficial city guard since the actual city guard was compromised and everyone knew it. "You'll have to hire them wholly anew, I suspect. It's not even that they're mostly cultists it's that they're on the take from everybody and his cousin, and lazy, and cowards. The city magistrates aren't as bad, but I never could guess how they were going to rule on things, unless money was in the picture. 

- a lot of this is Arendae's fault. There've been all kinds of wild incidents around him, and it hasn't gone well for anyone who looked into it, and you can see what sort of person that leaves behind."

... He nods. "Wild incidents?"

(He can REALLY understand how Hulrun ended up practically running the city.)

"I have not, myself, looked into it," says Irabeth dryly. "...but for an example, the Count was kidnapped, once, and his guards killed, and then he was rescued by some adventurers who killed all the kidnappers, and then he claimed he'd actually hired the kidnappers himself as a joke."

Ettore Castelloni does not have enough Bluff to conceal that he finds this the most morally repellent thing he's ever heard, though he will try. "And faced no legal sanction for this, because of his noble status," he says flatly. "And because anyone who investigated 'had it go badly for them.'"

"Yes," says Irabeth, tiredly. "Hulrun wrote his superiors in the Church - not just about that incident, about several different ones - and we got orders to leave the Count be. Hopefully because they have a specialist on it, but maybe because the Count is Queen Galfrey's cousin, or maybe because Lastwall's secretly run by Baphomet cultists by now, I don't know."

"I am confident that Lastwall is not run by Baphomet cultists," says Ettore.

And then - "Are there any honest and competent people in Kenabres who are not being taken on crusade?"

"I left sixty men back to hold the wardstone and its border under Elin the Tall, he's green but he's a quick study and a good man. They've got some good archers and good horses and six empowered paladins and it won't be the worst-defended segment of the border, though it sure isn't Terendelev. 

I think the main temple of Iomedae left someone back so the city still has healing and water. I don't know who they picked but the goddess chooses carefully, I'd trust any of them. 

I would've said Horgus Gwerm is a good man and an honest one but apparently he's...not even Horgus Gwerm, so I guess that says so much for my judgment. 

 Fyllemen Frulliatros, who runs the magic shop, is dead, but he was a rich man and had made arrangements so maybe he won't stay that way. He's a wizard and honest and does Steeds for the border every day and, as you might expect of the owner of a magic shop, passionately favors the rule of Law, and he's too old to go on Crusade.

....that's about it, though."

"Thank you." He did, in fact, already trust the Select in question, but it's nice to know that there is another person, and maybe even another two people.

"... Horgus Gwerm?" He's half-dreading the answer.

"Local nobleman, the only survivor of a demon attack on his family's estate when he was a child. He was wealthy and occasionally generous, hosted events for visiting important people, outfitted pretty much the whole of the Eagle Watch but in secret, Anevia had to figure out it was even him...

It came out two days ago that, firstly, Camellia was his illegitimate daughter, and secondly, that she was a crazed serial killer, and thirdly, that he knew and covered for her, and fourthly, that in fact he wasn't Horgus Gwerm and was a random servant's child who'd been the sole survivor of the attack on the mansion and decided to play Gwerm when found."

Kastil will shake his head sympathetically, radiating an aura of I-am-too-tired-for-this-shit that he usually tries to keep suppressed. "... It came out how?"

"Camellia attacked the Knight-Commander's sister after the Knight-Commander's sister confronted Camellia about the murders. They orchestrated it in advance, asked me if I could come and witness, but it was the literal hour the Queen was arriving so I couldn't. Seelah was there, though, and she's an empowered paladin, and she confirmed to me that Jinruo - the sister - confronted Camellia with evidence of the murders, said she hadn't yet told anyone else, said she wouldn't tell Ruoshi because he's a paladin and would be a paladin about it, and asked Camellia to swear under Zone of Truth to stop killings except of enemies in the field. 

And then Jinruo turned her back, and Camellia attempted to kill her, and the rest of them killed Camellia, and then brought up Gwern before a truth spell to ask if he'd known which is when the rest came out."

That's an assassination, pure and simple. Maybe of a guilty party, could easily be, but it takes exactly one Suggestion spell from a good caster to make the whole thing play out exactly the way Seelah saw with an innocent victim, and Iomedae wouldn't strip her of her powers for being mislead.

... Two Suggestions, the other for -

"And who cast the Zone of Truth?"

"The Zone of Truth for the conversation with Gwerm was cast by the priest of Shelyn, Sosiel, who Queen Galfrey brought with her to provide cleric support to the Crusade."

... Ettore Castelloni has some grudging respect for this assassination. It's a very well planned-out trap.

"So Gwerm's been arrested. Does he have an heir to take his place?" Or is the Knight-Commander - or Queen Galfrey, who appointed Sosiel and whose man he presumably is - going to confiscate his wealth, to fund the Crusade or 'to fund the Crusade'?

"He is without an heir and even if he had one I guess he might not count. Galfrey's reviewing the situation but realistically I think she'll order the estate sold, she just declared a crusade and it's a rich estate."

He nods. "I understand." He does understand. The Knight-Commander just arranged the destruction of a wealthy man, possibly a good man or possibly a bad one, for what may genuinely have been a serious crime or may have been a lie, very precisely timed. "Returning to my most urgent topic, how has your - cooperation - with the city council been?" Is that a source of good-but-incompetent or bad-but-competent people he can tap at need, or is it incompetent idiots all the way down?"

"Well, Gwerm was on it, and Hulrun obviously, and Vassiliy who's marching out with us, and Terendelev though mostly only in a symbolic capacity, and Ramien was on it, and if he's not furious with us it's better luck than we deserve, and then Oris Chets, who was Hulrun's man, and the Lady Emeretta, who had her security Teleport her out in the first hour and is staying a while at her family estate halfway across the country."

"So, Oris Chets, me or the lady Select, and Ramien." He pauses. "Tell me about Oris Chets."

Irabeth visibly dithers.

"Hulrun had a difficult job. I do not think he took particular joy in it. The people who tended to enjoy his company -"

"You do not need to fear that I am going to be unhappy if you tell me that Hulrun had faults," he says drily. "The Church of Iomedae knows he had faults, which are why I am here. Tell me about Oris Chets; good or bad I will need to deal with him."

"There's a tiefling smuggling ring in the city. A bunch of scoundrels, some of them practically still children and some of them rotten to the core. I don't - actually know any tieflings who I am confident aren't in it. Oris felt we should simply hang all tieflings, or at least arrest all tieflings and let them go only if they could testify they'd never done any crime.

The city has a big problem with family members of cultists not turning them in, because they don't want to see their loved ones hang and they figure they don't really mean anything by it. Oris proposed we solve this by making it a capital crime to fail to report a Baphomet cultist.

He also wanted to walk the whole city through a zone of truth, which I've been tempted to do myself, and ask if they've ever committed any crime or disloyalty, which I haven't been tempted to do myself - I did get him to shut up about that one. I did it by proposing we just take out a loan for a Forbiddance stretching across all the major streets so as to just destroy everyone who wasn't Lawful Good. ...he isn't. Lawful or Good, I suspect, though he doesn't have the strength where I could smell it."

Ettore is very tempted to walk the entire city through a Zone of Truth and ask if they've ever committed any crime! For the list of crimes forbidden by the laws of Iomedae which fit in one small booklet that fits in his pocket. He doesn't, because he has orders to the contrary and because it would damage the people's trust in Iomedae and because he doesn't control the city anyway, but those are fundamentally reasons of 'he does what he's told' and "not a good tactical idea," not any fundamental reason. Still, he's getting an idea of who this person is.

"I see," he says grimly. "Thank you. Does he have an official post?"

"A week ago he was the head of the city commission for public order. He's probably accumulated himself some titles since then."

Ettore will nod. Ettore is UNHAPPY. "Does he have any adventuring experience, or any corps of armed supporters?" Pause. "Where do his wealth and power come from?"

"He served in the fourth crusade, and settled down after it with a rich widow with a minor title. She died a few years back, and the title isn't his, but he kept the house and income. He has a staff of - well, a week ago it was forty, I don't know how they all fared. The house isn't in the city, it's downriver two miles, it was plausibly unaffected."

Ettore's face is grim. He's dealt with - nonpaladins - before, who are always happy to boast and torment the so-called wicked without being able to live up the standards of a champion of Iomedae before; if the man served in the fourth crusade, there are some limits to how much of a fool he can be, but that doesn't stop him from being harsher than any soldier while he's safely behind the front lines. This one is either weak (which does not mean that he couldn't beat Ettore in a fight, especially with a few clever tricks) or True Neutral or goes around with Undetectable Alignment up, and Ettore will need to find out which.

"Wizard, warrior...?"

"He served as a warrior. If he can spellcast he hasn't shown it. He has a wizard on his security staff and would loan her out to Hulrun sometimes."

POTENTIALLY VALUABLE STRATEGIC ASSET - "Do you know what circle or if she survived?"

(well, probably actually an evil plot to corrupt Hulrun and take over Kenabres, but it won't hurt to plan for things going well, just so he has some idea what he'd do if they did.)

"Third. I don't know how his staff fared generally but they didn't participate in the battle for the garrison."

She can read the grimace, he's not trying to conceal it much. "I see." It is actually possible that was a reasonable idea, considering that he's currently modeling the tiefling sister (Jinruo?) as the average alignment of tieflings, but this doesn't stop him from finding the whole situation distasteful and, frankly, threatening.

He'll ask any other obvious questions, and then he's curious about the miracle and the people who witnessed it? In particular, the ones who are still alive?

"Well, it wouldn't be the first time Iomedae's done a miracle to save a wardstone," Irabeth says. "And it might be the first time for Shizuru but She doesn't usually have people nearby. Or it could be something else entirely, though I don't know what. They walked out - moving with a speed and surety no spell could lend you, splattered with the guts of demons they should not have been able to survive a moment against. The Knight-Commander's companions are all marching out with him, I think, but you could meet them. - except Camellia, she's the one who turned out to be a serial killer. Ember and Woljif and Count Arendae are alive and well."

He nods. "I'd like that. Where can I find Ember or Woljif?"

"- around the crusader camp somewhere, I'm sorry I don't know more specifically. Woljik is a tiefling and a bit of a wizard. Ember's a half-elf with fairly severe burn scarring."

He nods. "Thank you."

He'd also like directions to the cleric of Abadar and then he's going to go seek out whichever one of these people he sees first!

Ember! She's sitting by a campfire with some soldiers, engrossed in someone's (drunken) story about their father.

He'll approach her. "Miss?" 

(Ettore is looming, but only passively.)

"Oh, hello!"

"Inquisitor Castelloni. I'd like to speak with you, if you have a moment."

"Of course!" She looks simultaneously terrified of him and very very pitying of him.

Once they can talk comparatively privately, "First, I know no reason to suspect you of any crime justifying the punishment of burning," this is true, "and I wish to apologize for Hulrun's past actions." Another true thing! Hopefully he has the social skills for her not to notice that he totally suspects her of being an associate in a demonic plot to fake a miracle and subvert Kenabres.

"You aren't responsible for other peoples' mistakes," she says to him very seriously. 

"Thank you," he says.

"I am a newcomer to the city. May I ask you questions about the recent events in Kenabres, as you understood them?"

"Yes," she says, but more quietly.

"May I ask when did you encounter the Knight-Commander, and under what circumstances?"

"Well, there were these men who had grabbed me in the street, and thought that they needed to sacrifice me to Iomedae to get blessings from her. They didn't mean to be doing something terrible, they were just very confused. And the Knight-Commander and his friends heard them, and said that they shouldn't do that, and asked me why the men had wanted to hurt me. And Woljif was with them, and Woljif and I were friends, when he was smaller, before he and his friends decided to throw rocks at me all the time. 

I told the Knight-Commander about my powers and the Knight-Commander said I should go with him and help stop demons by making them sleep and by casting spells for him. So I did that."

"Iomedae does not grant blessings through human sacrifice," he confirms, just in case there was any possible confusion about this anywhere. Ettore hates Mendev.

"That seems very reasonable." Can he get her to explain more of what happened, with the objective of covering the Grey Garrison incident?

She cast a lot of healing spells and made a lot of demons sleep, after which other people would kill them. (Her affect is that she thinks this was kind of sad, but understandable of them.) Eventually the Knight-Commander said they were going to attack the Grey Garrison to make the wardstone make the demons go away, and they fought their way through it, and then the Knight-Commander blazed with impossible strength and everyone around him felt the impossible strength too and they beat all the demons back. 

People say it was a miracle.

Oh? Fascinating. Can she say more about the battle where the Knight-Commander blazed with impossible strength? What did it feel like?

Well, it felt like being able to move much faster, and withstand much more, and kill things much more easily. She didn't really like it. It was over very quickly. Minagho was very afraid, and fled even though she was also afraid of what she'd face if she failed. Most of the other demons were killed. Some of the feeling lingered, the way hunger does, an ever-present cry for something that can't be had.

Some of the feeling lingered, the way hunger does, an ever-present cry for something that can't be had.

If this is a snow job it's a hell of a snow job.

He wants to hear that again in, like, four times as many words, if that is at all possible?

Well, it's like she was suddenly full to bursting with something that she hadn't even known you could be full to bursting with, and it drained away, but not completely, and since it hadn't drained away completely, she could now notice not being full with it, and that was not very nice, the way being hungry isn't very nice? It's not very terrible, either - being hungry isn't very terrible - but she doesn't feel exactly the same as before it happened.

... Right.

Can he ask her to tell him about the Knight-Commander?

"I think he is a kind man who is trying very hard to do the right thing, and very brave, and very good at killing demons."

... He'd also like her opinion on the Knight-Commander's other companions?

"Woljif used to be my friend, but he's ashamed of how he treated me, so he doesn't talk to me anymore. He wants friends, but he doesn't want to be the kind of person who wrongly thinks they've found them. Seelah is brave and a good warrior, but she has been taught to respect only strength, by war, which sometimes, terribly, teaches that, and so she thinks I should be like her, and doesn't like it that I'm not. She thinks she's doing me a favor when she tells me to be like her, but she only hurts us both. Jinhao doesn't see a lot of the things that matter in people, but she loves her brother, and she might learn, if anyone knows the right sort of explanation. Lann is brave and strong and terribly frightened of dying before he's achieved anything. Nenio doesn't know herself, and doesn't want to, and doesn't want there to be anything to learn. Daeran is very afraid all of the time and hates being bored, or feeling like he's wasting his time, and he is kind of like me in that when people try to do the right thing he is reminded of all the ways they have hurt him saying how right and noble they are, but he doesn't know how to forgive them, or doesn't want to."

Ettore will refrain from taking notes, and consciously remind himself that, well, he thought witches used Cunning, but apparently this one casts from Splendor, and he is not immune.

(Or she's a succubus, or Mindagho, under Undetectable Alignment. Also a very good explanation for why she acts like she has a perpetual greater headband.)

"And Camellia? What was she like?"

"Camellia liked hurting people, and thought that if she hurt enough people she would be happy, but it wouldn't have worked, and she didn't know how to do any of the things that might have worked."

Right.

... Can he ask her to point him in the direction of Woljif or Vassily Rathsmus? Ettore feels a very strong desire to not be in this particular place right now.

"Woljif is hiding from you," she says patiently. "Rathimus is in that tent, over there."

"You may inform him when you see him that I am interested in him as a witness to a wonder, not as a thief," he says, which is true, but he will go talk to Rathimus nonetheless.

Rathimus is at least sixty and sitting with Kyado, the young cleric of Erastil who resembles a startled deer, in one of the larger tents. "Can I help you?"

"Cicerone." He bows. "I am Inquisitor Castelloni of the Church of Iomedae. I wish to confidentially consult with the Church of Abadar regarding the situation in Kenabres. What is your fee?"

"A hundred fifty pounds," he says immediately.

Wow, that's a lot of money. Well, this is very valuable. "For how long a session?" (He suspects he'll have to pay anyway, but, Abadarians.)

"Two hours, but it's not less if you only want an hour, because most of the expense for me is being suspected of being entangled in this nasty business at all."

He nods. (Ettore has to actually think about this.) "Are there any other clerics of Abadar in Kenabres or with the Crusade?"

"There are not. I was thinking of taking an apprentice, but then I ended up looking out for Kyado, and then events - intervened."

"Thank you. Is there a smaller fee for purely financial consultations, or would that still leave your expenses where they are?"

"That I'll do for ten."

Castelloni will pay ten for the financial consultation, then!

And, once they're in private and he can't detect anyone invisible with an alignment, "I am presently trying to determine what, if any, financial resources Hulrun left me, whether or not any banks exist in Kenabres or in areas that can be reached from Kenabres, and what to do to turn my present highly unsteady and in many cases unethically sourced reserves of capital and sources of income into something more reliable, steady and ethical that can provide a steady stream of income to pay the salaries required to functionally protect Kenabres."

"A difficult task," says Rathimus wearily. "Hulrun had an account with me. It was in his name, not in that of the Church, so I'd need his authorization to give it to you, or I'll need to consult his will, which he also filed with me, if he's dead and staying that way. I can't disclose anything else about the account without that, like whether it was a deposit or some interest-bearing investments.

There's no bank in Kenabres except me, you'd have to go down the river to Nerosyan. I'll offer loans, specific terms to be negotiated in more depth but as my current best guess of the broad terms - up to twenty thousand pounds, thirty percent interest a year, ten percent if Lastwall's guaranteeing it and I'll go up to two hundred thousand if Lastwall's guaranteeing it. I carry less than a tenth that in metal, it'd be letters of credit.

Hulrun was at times a recipient of the Church of Abadar's own contributions to the defense of the world from the Wound; those are offered by the Church of Abadar to the governments of Mendev, Lastwall, Cheliax, and Irrisen, and Mendev's share dispersed from Nerosyan, and I don't know how Nerosyan makes decisions about distributing it. Probably with a lot of politics."

"I understand," he says. "He will be Raised, and I can get a report from Lastwall within a day." If he uses Sending, which he clearly needs to do, because this is at least a one percent chance of a seventy thousand gold crisis avertable with good information. "I will not need two hundred thousand and can get Lastwall's guarantee on any loan I need. How long will you remain capable of transacting business in Kenabres?"

"My understanding is that the Crusade plans to march out in three days, and while I do not intend to be in their vanguard I would hesitate to be more than two days behind them. I am supplying them with magic items and scrolls, at Her Majesty Queen Galfrey's request."

"Wholly reasonable." So he has three days to use sending and report back, maybe five. 

... He did, however, mean to deposit money in, not to withdraw it. He has funds; the question is if there's anywhere he can put them where they earn interest and are insured against theft.

(He'd also like to consult a priest of Abadar on the question of some of the Inquisition's money-making possibilities that could assist the defense of Kenabres; right now, his best ideas are spending spare minutes on his Zone of Truth spells verifying agreements (not quite as good as Abadar's Truthtelling, but he has an eye for it) and having some of the inquisition's staff set up a militia for nonevil nondemonworshippers (are there funders for that sort of benevolent project?) or providing combat training for a fee, similarly.)

He is technically accepting deposits and will give in exchange a certification that he has the deposit, good at any bank of Abadar with the resources to verify it, but he doesn't expect there to be one of those convenient to Inquisitor Castelloni once he's gone. 

...it actually seems possible, if the Inquisition is looking to make money, that it should consider taking over the banking services that he'll be leaving undone in Kenabres. He's happy to describe what those are and how much he makes on them and how long they take and what the risks are. He isn't sure if people will trust the Iomedaen inquisition as much as the priesthood of Abadar, and diplomatically doesn't quite say they shouldn't, but they should at least trust the Iomedaen inquisition more than most people not selected by a god for their Law.

That is fascinatingly tempting, and Ettore would be happy to suggest to the priesthood of Iomedae that it opens a bank, but he thinks that doing so himself would violate conflict of interest rules for the Inquisition in a way that running a militia and teaching self-defense classes in a city on the verge of being overrun by demons don't.

The basic problem with the inquisition's funding is that Mendev occasionally provides money and other than that it is expected to fund itself by voluntary donations and seizing the property of cultists and heretics, and there are obvious incentive problems, here; he doesn't object to the property of heretics being seized, but it obviously shouldn't go to the people who are in charge of the convictions. He's not sure if there's any way to launder that income to remove the incentive, but he figures a priest of Abadar might know if there is.

This wins him his first actual smile. Rathimus has not considered the problem in depth before - Hulrun didn't consider it one - but there are probably possibilities. For one thing, he could create a sort of stock in 'heretic properties seized by the Inquisition', entitling bearers to a share, and sell that, so then everyone who owns it stands to gain financially from the inquisition capturing more heretics (but by a small amount in each individual case, and the inquisition benefits not at all if it's committed to issuing no more stock). He is not sure this is good justice but it's good finance.

... Hmm. He has some worries about that - in the first case, it would be a lump-sum rather than a continual source of income, and the nearest bank is two hundred miles away through not particularly safe territory; in the second, he's worried about the expense of hiring honest bookkeepers required to keep track of the stock, and to make sure everyone who owns stock gets their share and nobody with a faked share or Disguise Self spell steals it.

Stock companies do exist and solve those problems successfully, though admittedly mostly in Absalom not in the middle of nowhere. If he's expecting to be doing a lot of business he could probably attract another priest of Abadar to conduct it; the problem is that no one expects there to be a Kenabres in five years, so no one wants to go to the expense and trouble.

Ettore believes that the Worldwound will not fall, and while it remains, there will be a place for Kenabres. He thinks that another priest of Abadar would still find a place here in a year, and is perfectly willing to tell Lastwall that himself.

(The question, which he does not say, is how much Iomedae will need to pay for the Worldwound not falling.)

And he believes a good deal of how stock companies solve this is, yes, that they are in Absalom, and he is not. But he's not sure that this program will succeed in this specific situation, and if they have additional time after the other matters are discussed, he would like to ask Vassily to use his remaining time thinking about this problem.

He'd be happy to. Were there other matters first?

Yes. Ettore would like to know what the possibilities look like for making the city's defense self-funding, or to finding sources of charitable contributions for it; with Terendelev and the Eagle Watch both leaving, he'd like to make sure the city can defend itself, and with limited resources he'd like an Abadarian's opinion on how to do that cheaply but efficiently.

The fundamental problem here is that Mendev can't actually pay for the defense of the Worldwound at the willingness-to-pay of its citizens, even though that's quite high, because Mendev is very poor and the time of the kind of people needed to hold the Worldwound is pretty valuable. The world should really all be paying for the defense of the Worldwound, and then it'd be paid for comfortably, but as Castelloni knows this isn't the situation, and there isn't a clever solution within Mendev for that.

The city could have higher taxes, but its tax base was just largely looted and lit on fire, so it won't help much. The city could conscript all the ragamuffins and layabouts and criminal elements, but this has historically had disadvantages. 

People do donate to the Church. His impression is that the collections of the Church from its congregation amounted to substantially less than would be a fair salary for the Church's own staff, who are mostly paid only in food and board (Rathimus disapproves). The collections money mostly went to, and was insufficient for, funding the Eagle Watch, which was funded the rest of the way by anonymous private donations (through him, obviously, and no more will be said about the source or whether future donations will be forthcoming, obviously). 

Hulrun was pretty good at getting a large share of Nerosyan's money, and so the inquisition has historically not lacked that badly for funds. Realistically Kastil will also have to get good at that, though it'll be harder for him, as he's not Mendevian. Or he'll have to find a wealthy patron. Or he'll have to rebuild the city's tax base but without Terendelev that seems difficult. Were Rathimus himself in this situation he'd be at the point of praying to his god to be miraculously pointed to a nearby mineable gold deposit. 

He will get his pay in Heaven. Ettore appreciates the warnings, but since he needs to try to do this anyway, he's more interested in the detailed questions he can use to try to protect the city anyway.

Who publicly donates to the church? Where do they live, can he track them down? Have they made statements as to why? Are there wealthy patrons who might be approachable? He's obviously not asking for secret or classified information, just the sort of nonclassified thing the Church of Abadar picks up. Who are the sort of people who Ettore might be able to go to who are in the general area who he can try to talk into pitching his case in Nerosyan on why they should give money to the Kenabres inquisition? Are there known people with martial skills or extreme probity who the Eagle Watch didn't employ for some reason (missing limbs, say) but who might be interested in taking poorly-paying-except-in-Heaven jobs with some well-reputed Iomedaean organization, even if not the Inquisition? Are there independent actors who defended the city below the radar of Terendelev, who aren't leaving on crusade, that he might be able to pitch on helping him?

... Has anyone ever succeeded in getting money out of Count Arendae or his steward for Saving The City purposes? Or for any useful purposes?

(He's hoping to leave the conversation with a stack of names to look into, or to delegate to his assistants that they look into.)

Rathimus can give him a stack of names: anyone who donates publicly, any adventurers who were often about, any famous retired people who might have some sympathy for Kenabres's plight. It's not a very long or a very encouraging one but he thinks of a few people Irabeth didn't.

The richest remaining supporter of the Church in Kenabres is of course Oris Chets.

Count Arendae hates the Church of Iomedae, has said as much publicly, and does not give it money. His steward will fund public works projects sometimes when he has the money spare or when (Rathimus says disapprovingly) the Count is threatened with prosecution for having destroyed something in the city. 

Does Count Arendae... do... anything. Other than occasionally destroy things in the city.

(ETTORE HATES CALIPHAS NOBLES.)

He throws a lot of parties with whores and hangers-on. He has been threatening to personally fund the whores coming along with the army out of Kenabres. He will sometimes do healing if it's an emergency and he doesn't have to interrupt his partying for it. He will sometimes ride gallantly out with his staff to deal with a beast in the woods, though half the time only so he can leave its penis on Hulrun's desk or something.

He has been making himself useful since the disaster, to be fair. He travelled with the Knight-Commander and helped fight demons.

... Could be worse, but Ettore still presumes that Vassily would not be willing to offer good odds on this being a genuine change of heart instead of a short-term hobby.

Vassiliy thinks that the Count's interest in crusading would already have expired except Galfrey personally ordered him to serve the commander for the duration of the crusade. Possibly this will actually last until the Count either redeems himself through a heroic death in Mendev's service or improves in character. 

That he'd give better odds on the first goes without saying.

So he's going to be out of the city for a while. Is who will manage his estate while he's away known, and does this person or these people do things?

... And does he have a known heir?

His steward will manage his estate, presumably. The man has more sense than his boss but is going to be frugal with his bosses' money. (Rathimus respects this).

Count Arendae has no known heir. No immediate family, either, as they were all killed by demons in an assault on the family estate when he was twelve. The title would actually revert to Galfrey - his cousin - should anything happen to him. 

"And they call her a paladin," he carefully does not say.

Well, he'll see if he can expand his book of names, and he'll spend what remaining time there is on Abadaran plans to make the inquisition self-funding, and then if Woljif hasn't decided to stop hiding from the inquisitors it's back to the city away from the crusade to...

... Talk to whoever is in charge of the watch. He thinks. Unless someone else interrupts him first.

(Inquisitor Castelloni is MISERABLE.)

The city watch? Oh, Oris has taken that over.

It is, actually, a fact about Iomedae, as admitted by her holy book, that she did establish her own legal system in Taldor, admittedly with their permission, that completely short-circuited their centuries of legal code, and then ran this in the territories under her control while completely ignoring the opinions of any legitimately appointed imperial official. That was a thing she did!

Ettore is THINKING about this because he is facing a very stark challenge. Right now, he has three possibilities.

First, he can work with Oris Chets no matter how bad he is, which will mean handing any prisoner who has not committed a crime inside the Inquisition's remit over to someone who is probably not Lawful or Good, to deliver anyone who falls into his hands into what passes for justice in an infamously corrupt society, one which a paladin was flatly unwilling to work with to the point of constructing her own system so she wouldn't have to tolerate the authority of this corrupt disaster. Second, he preempt Oris's seizure of power, establishes an Iomedaean legal system with whatever powers he can seize, and risk committing Lastwall to a political disaster and a rupture in their relations with Mendev. Third, he delays, buys time, consults his superiors, and misses his moment.

(There are other possibilities, but they all look like 'fourth, he appeals to someone who is probably the lilitu demon Minagho'.)

... He wants to spend hours talking to his spiritual advisors in Lastwall, or, better yet, humbly ask them for instructions, which he can then just obey. But what he thinks he has to do is to interrupt a coup right now.

He's going to show up to the city hall with three armed and armored bodyguards, sweeping through in his long inquisitor's coat and breastplate with the sword and scales of the Inquisition on it very very visibly, sword sheathed by his side and bow visible, and demand to see where in the official legal code it states how members of the city council are chosen.

The city clerks will - try to find that for him? Things are in a bit of disarray, see, they're very sorry. It's probably here somewhere. 

He also brought a well-trained clerk, who is not very noticeable trailing in after the bodyguards and whose usual specialty is in going through the books of people lying to him.

What is going to happen is division of labor, here. Inquisitor Castelloni is going to channel Hulrun's reputation, death-glare everyone present, say "If this city cannot even locate its laws, how does it follow them?" and make it very clear that he expects them to be able to turn up a copy of the city charter, that he disapproves of everyone involved, and suggest that probably if they cannot even do that this is deliberate malfeasance (and so hopefully scare them more than Oris is paying them, enough to get them actually helping), Guifre is going to find the charter, Enric is going to loom menacingly while his bird watches the building from the outside, and Silvio is going to catch anyone who sneaks off to warn Oris and bring them back with warnings that they may be participating in an illegal coup.

(He's done this before, see.)

....right okay in that case they can probably turn up the city charter. They did say it was around here somewhere. 

Hulrun has left Kastil plenty of reputation for scariness to rely on and these people are now very scared. 

And what does the city charter say about the rules for selecting members of the city council, the rules for members of the city council presently away from the city, the rules about calling for a quorum of the city council, or the rules about the city council's ability to appoint people, such as, for instance, the head of the police?

Because he's pretty sure they don't say "Oris Chet personally is the city council."

The city council makes appointments by the agreement of a majority vote of its members, and needs a quorum to call a session, though members planning a trip can delegate their vote to another member or to a member of their staff.

And are there formal records of these delegations, or of the current members of the city council, written down where he can get them? Or of how members of the city council are selected, at least?

(This is an investigation done by Guifre while the rest of the party packs up. They have a confrontation to carry out shortly.)

There aren't any standing delegations of power on the record but there might not be what with all of the chaos of recent events. The current members of the city council are, uh, Ramien, Hulrun, Count Arendae, Rathimus, Gwarm except he's been arrested which has unclear implications for his membership, the Lady Emeretta, and Chets. 

New council members are generally appointed by the vacating member or by the governing body that member was a part of (so the Church of Iomedae can replace Hulrun and Terendelev, the new Count would be the replacement for Arendae, etcetera.)

Then it's time for him to confront Oris Chet.

This will, of course, involve storming in with his holy symbol visible and his sidekicks on hand. (They are witnesses, as well as allies.) Weapons sheathed, obviously - this isn't a battle. And if it looks like Oris is sending messages to destroy documents, his assistants will make sure that doesn't happen.

(By Inquisitor Castelloni's model of the situation, if Oris Chet is not a cultist of Baphomet, he won't want to take the risk of attacking an Inquisitor of Iomedae, and if he is, he would have risen up with his brethren during the Wardstone attack.)

Oris Chet is a middle-aged, handsome man who is to all appearances delighted to see Kastil. "Inquisitor! We have all been praying for the Inheritor to send this city the aid in restoring the rule of law which it so desperately requires."

"I am pleased to hear it," he says. "Oris Chet, I presume?"

He does not trust this guy AT ALL. Does he have an alignment visible?

He does not have an alignment visible. "That's right. I'm an old friend of Hulrun's. You have big shoes to fill, son. Hulrun was a great man."

"Hulrun was an extraordinary warrior who consistently worked to oppose the demonic forces of the Worldwound," Ettore says, which is true. 

Oris's smile does not falter. "May the same be said of all of us, when our time comes. Listen, son, I have no doubt you're in the same mold as Hulrun. I have never known Iomedae to choose badly. But you're not from Mendev, so you're going to find it even more difficult than he found it to get Kenabres everything it needs. Have you met Count Arendae?"

"Not yet," he says.

"I'm glad you came here first. All right," he adds to his staff (leaving it conveniently ambiguous if he's also issuing orders to Kastil's people), "everybody out, the Inquisitor has enough to worry about without you lot lurking and listening -"

"Enric," he'll say quietly, and let the rest of his group slip out the door with them.

(Enric isn't a half-orc, isn't a woman, and can fade into the background almost as well as Silvio can.)

"A man in Hulrun's mold," he says approvingly. "Right, well, I'm trusting you that your people won't repeat this to Count Arendae, that'd make my life very difficult. The man is very hard to work with. He's a drunk, he's a lout, he specifically loathes doing the right thing for the right reasons but is often amenable to doing the right thing for stupid reasons, he parties hard and likes people who party with him.You should stay away from him, yourself, but buy a couple of his whores and get regular updates, just so nothing takes you by surprise. One of the better ways to get him to do something useful is to put it about that you'd be very annoyed if he did it before you could yourself. The most important thing about Arendae is that he's not, in fact, important in Nerosyan, and letting on some contempt for him there is perfectly safe, though one wants to stop short of suggesting a problem big enough Galfrey ought to do something about it; she doesn't like it when people bring her problems, see. You'll be spending a lot of time in Nerosyan because they decide how much funding Kenabres gets, and brave veterans endorsed by Iomedae are the best people to secure our share. 

The other important local nobles are Gwerm, who is a straightforward and Abadaran man you'll have no trouble with, and Emeretta, who I think moved here thinking to catch Daeran's eye. It hasn't worked. Somehow he's yet to persuade her to give up, but maybe the sack of the city will have done it. If she does move out I think I can persuade her to leave her city estate on loan to the Church, so long as it is taken good care of. Of course perhaps you are of the school of thought that Iomedae's servants should take no pay and live in sack clothes when the situation is ill-suited to armor, but personally I think that's terrible for morale."

"On my first visit to the Arendae estate," he says drily, "with demons walking the streets near-openly, his servants informed me that he was out but that he had a great many guards inside. I have no intention of repeating your words to him."

"You'll learn to manage him, but he takes some managing. He does not actually participate in the day to day operations of the city in any way; on a good day, he sends a deputy, but good days are few and far between."

"Mmm." When that isn't enough, "Tell me about Nerosyan."

"Oh, that'll be a much longer conversation, especially as you're not from Mendev. There are a lot of people to keep track of, and they're naturally suspicious of outsiders - there are ways around that, but they take time. Have you considered picking up a Mendevian wife? It's the sort of thing that helps make people feel like you're putting down roots here, like you're not - frankly - an agent of a foreign power who'll happily betray Mendev for it, which is how people sometimes - no doubt mistakenly - see Lastwall's people.

Anyway, you'll have a hard time in Nerosyan, but it's impossible to do your duties here without some serious connections there. Some of Nerosyan's most important noble families..." And he can speak on this for quite a while, from a mix of personal anecdote and implications of important connections himself.

Oh, Ettore is HAPPY to listen. He'd like to take notes but he can't, so instead he's trying to use his best mnemonics to keep it fresh and going over everything Oris says so he thinks he can get it down onto paper later and say "Mmm?" and "go on" a lot and look very interested, because he IS. (Hopefully Enric can provide a second voice on Ettore's reports, although this really isn't his specialty.) He's somewhat curious how many times Oris will admit to attempts to subvert the legal system in the speech, though he only really needs to do it once to arrest him.

Whatever the number is, once the speech is done, he'll say, "And what can you tell me about the situation inside the city?"

"We need you very badly," Oris says. "I've been trying to hold things together - the city watch turned out to be riddled through with cultists, we'll have to hire all new people, which I'm in the middle of - the city's defenses are going to be very precarious without Terendelev, even without everyone going on Crusade, and many of the city's most trustworthy defenders are leaving on Crusade on top of that. We can endure without them! Kenabres has great strengths, often underestimated. But in the short term, it's a mess. We have one remaining city magistrate, and need to rapidly appoint several more just to get through all the damnable cultists. Frankly, what Hulrun always needed to do, and what you need to do now, is force everyone to testify to not being a cultist under a Zone of Truth, and convict everyone who won't. There's no way the city can return to normalcy when everyone's seen their neighbors turn out to be traitors. We were insufficiently paranoid, and can't afford ever to be so again. And we have to restore the faith of the public in the law, by having city guards out there in uniform who aren't criminals or cultists and who will actually do their jobs."

"I understand," says Ettore. "- The Inquisition would be pleased to take the cultists off your hands, and I recognize that rebuilding a functional Watch must be a priority. What actions have you taken towards that goal?"

"I brought in my own staff. I've vetted them, they're not idiots, and they can keep an eye on the new hires, make sure they're doing their jobs. I've been hiring suitable candidates as quickly as I can, though I don't myself have truth magic so they're all probationary hires, sent out only with my staff, until you can check them. If the Church never sent anyone I figured I'd have Rathimus do it, but the man charges an arm and a leg so I hadn't yet. People are used to going to the Eagle Watch with crime, but the Eagle Watch is leaving. You should tell Tirabade to refer them back to the actual city watch, once it's been verified that the city watch is no longer full of cultists."

"How can you keep a Watch of the size needed for Kenabres paid, supplied, and disciplined?" Ettore is honestly curious what his answer is as much as anything else.

"The bad news is, half the city's Baphomet cultists. The good news, half the city's Baphomet cultists and so it's not going to be hard to pay the men out of confiscated property. I'm supplying them out of my personal stores, right now. Consider it a favor to you and to the Church. I'm far from made of money but I know when it's badly needed. And I've always been of the school of thought that public executions do wonders for discipline."

"I understand your position," he says. This is probably not an attempt to bribe an inquisitor.

(He does, actually, understand all of this. It makes perfect sense...)

(... Also he suspects that Rathimus would pay lower prices if he liked Oris more.)

"Explain Irabeth and the Eagle Watch to me."

"Eagle Watch did their jobs, for the most part. They wouldn't look half as good if anyone else had done their jobs at all, but I can't blame Tirabade for that. Politically, the woman is a liability and a half - can't fundraise, picks fights everywhere she goes, barely gets on with the rest of her own church, and - look, there's no kind way to say it, but she's got the face of a pug and the skin tone of a grasshopper so she can't get anywhere with the Mendevian nobility. Folks don't believe in the mixing of the races, around here. I don't care myself, except that everything diplomatic she wouldn't leave to Hulrun fell apart. It is great news that she's marching out, much as it leaves a mess for us to pick up. The front is a better place for her."

"Mmm. Why did no one report crimes to the Watch?"

"The city watch was full of cultists, and letting criminals go free. Hulrun knew it, and was trying to deal with it, but the thing cultists do is they learn the rules you have to follow and then try to strangle you with them. Just made sure he never had enough of an excuse." Oris looks sad. "I told him he had enough of an excuse, that the people who weren't cultists wouldn't mind being asked. - anyway, who's going to report crimes to a police force riddled with traitors? No one. This is how you get crime gangs, incidentally, when the guards' hands are too tied, and now we have crime gangs. I can tell you who's in them, though only if you'll actually string them up, I'm not going to make enemies like that if you have to tell me my word isn't enough."

"So I see."

"What can you tell me about the new Knight-Commander and his sister?"

"I've heard the same gossip as the whole rest of the city. All of it's unbelievable and probably only half of it is false. I have some men learning more, and I'll tell you what I hear, when I hear it, but it might be a few weeks. The new Knight-Commander has a lot of new friends, and it'll take some time to get anything interesting. - he's definitely Tien, and definitely good with a sword, and definitely the kind of blazingly heroic sort you want marching out in front of your crusade, if you're Galfrey."

He nods.

"Then my next question for you, Oris Chet, is, by what legal authority did you take command of the City Watch?"

"Inquisitor, when there's homes being robbed right in front of you, the first thing you do is have your men stop the robbers, and the second thing you do is go check the state of the city watch, and if the answer is 'went over to the side of the demons', then you tell the folks who haven't gone over to the demons that you'll get them a paycheck, and you make the city safe.

I'm not gonna tell you you can't come sweeping in here after it's all over with paperwork, but that's what you're doing, sweeping in here after it's all over with paperwork. You wanna call them Oris's private security working for free as a favor to his city, and not the city watch at all until someone tracks down Emeretta to sign off on it, sure, I don't care, so long as the streets are safe."

This is, actually, a fantastically hard decision for him to make. The choice isn't between good and evil; hard decisions never are. It's between two different strategies that might succeed; between a dream for a brighter future that may well be a delusion, and offending someone who comes offering the hand of friendship and who may well be True Neutral the way Aroden was Lawful Neutral, because he paid the price too many times.

He bows a moment, in prayer. He doesn't expect a miracle to relieve him of the choice. He doesn't get one.

Ultimately, it's a choice between trying to do something very hard...

... And doing what he knows will never work.

"Your immediate decisions have been wholly understandable, in the emergency. I cannot condemn you for your efforts to rebuild the City Watch, and I commend you for your expenditure of your own resources towards it."

"Nonetheless, you misunderstand two things: The Iomedaean Inquisition is Good. And the Iomedaean Inquisition is Lawful. The streets must be made safe, and the confidence of the people in the law must be restored, but this confidence was not lost yesterday. It was lost when Inquisitor Hulrun attempted to burn a child who came from Kyonin to help crusade on the suspicion of witchcraft - a child who participated in the battle against Minagho yesterday - and then when he attempted to arrest the entire church of Desna for warning the city of an attack."

"The reconstruction of this trust will not come with hangings on the word of one man, nor the arrest of the entire city with every child too frightened to speak being hanged. It will come when citizens believe that the watch is more likely to guard them than beat them, whatever their wealth or heritage, and so the innocent truly have nothing to fear."

"Oris Chet, I am placing you under arrest on suspicion of the crimes of bribery and subversion of the state. I sincerely hope you are innocent, and should you be I will apologize to you personally. If not, justice will be meted out by the Laws of Iomedae. Will you come peacefully?"

"Inquisitor," he says, as a man scolding a child. "Kenabres can't afford for you to be rash, here. If you have some specific allegation of some specific error I would be honored to assuage it. If you want to try to pin everything that's happened since the Third Crusade on me, because the Church can't bear for those to have been Hulrun's decisions - well, I've known Iomedae's church a long time. At its best, it's better than that. His calls, every one of them, and you're not going to make it long here until you understand why he made them, and why the goddess stood by him."

"Hulrun is under investigation by the Iomedaean Inquisition," he says. "They were his calls, every one of them."

And Enric will whistle sharply, and then they will have a Hold Person available if they need one.

"Well, that's how to lose a war in short order but I can't fault you for consistency. Do you have any specific allegation or do you mean to arrest me and then find one."

"'I can tell you who's in them, though only if you'll actually string them up, I'm not going to make enemies like that if you have to tell me my word isn't enough.' Incitement to murder and subversion of the law. But I also suspect abuses of power by your - personal guard - and I would rather have you in a jail cell while I ask the Watch the questions I suspect you will not like the answers to."

Iomedae, if I am making the wrong decision, please strip me of my powers.

Are his assistants still visibly Good?

Yes. 

"You don't understand this country," Oris Chets says. "You'll probably die before you do, but if you live, you'll look back in a few years and realize you were an idiot. But I am loyal to Kenabres, and Kenabres cannot afford this fight, so I am not going to have it. You can lock me up while you invent your reasons."

"You could not say better," he says, and will send Chets back under a guard (a couple of his inherited assistants, headed by Enric, who can take in a fight two inquisitorial assistants and a not-showing-alignment-yet warrior whose hands are tied by himself). Their instructions are to (of course) treat him decently, but not let him get away.

And then he can wait for the council to show up. Before the confrontation he used his wand of Whispering Wind (backed up by riders with written messages) to tell Irabeth, Ramien, Vassily Rathsmus, Irabeth's lieutenant Elin the Tall, the Select he met at the Temple of Iomedae, and Count Arendae that a meeting of the council was being assembled immediately and they should please either meet him at city hall or send delegates with their proxy for a vote. (Count Arendae is not going to meet him, but he has some hopes for the rest; Irabeth he asked to appoint Elin her proxy if she hadn't done that yet so he could speak for her if she didn't want to come.)

The next stage is to get to a room that people who are not good enough at lying to lie to him (he hopes) say is moderately secure, make sure there's nothing with an alignment in it, use his Prisoner's Ring to alert Lastwall that he really wants them to scry him so he can talk to them, and start writing a mildly secure message explaining some features of the crisis and that he really urgently needs the two seats the Church of Iomedae appoints on the City Council to be passed to him and the Select, and also please tell him the situation with Hulrun.

(He's also going to send Silvio and two of Hulrun's other former flunkies off to the watch HQ, if that's near enough the city hall, just to make sure they don't start murdering prisoners or anything.)

Lastwall will scry him from a crystal ball and - 

“Report.”

He's got most of it written and can fill in the rest with his voice when the scry hits. (In a language Lastwall speaks and hopefully Mendev doesn't.) His message for Lastwall is, roughly, a summary of what happened since he got here. The city was in chaos; he's killed more than a dozen demons just while walking the streets. There's no law and order; the people who were managing this are all going on Crusade and leaving a mess behind them.

Here's a summary of the events with Hulrun and the Church of Desna, he would like to know if Hulrun fell. The inquisition had a Desnan in its dungeons purely for disapproving of what Hulrun did, he released her. Here is some of the shit Hulrun got up to, everyone in the city hates him except Oris Chets. He'd kind of like to hear Hulrun's side of the story.

Here's a summary of Oris Chets, including the parts where he spent his own money to support the Watch / take over the Watch, his extremely illegal seizure of power that was arguably necessary in a crisis, his suggestion that Ettore immediately hang lots of people on his word, and his long working relationship with Hulrun. Ettore feels very conflicted about his recent decision to imprison him and would like any guidance on this from his superiors.

Everyone Iomedae picked is either great, or a disguised demon doing a very good job of impersonating someone great, except Hulrun. Irabeth and Select Stasia have greatly impressed him.

He commends the sterling work of all of his assistants; he's sent one of them to go talk to the Watch, who according to Oris have a vast number of cultists in their cells, who may or may not just be innocent people, once he has the legal authority to do something about that.

The inquisition is funded through seized property; can the Diplomacy With Mendev people turn that into a regular salary or something else less spiritually corrosive or is that his department?

Here's his brief summary of the miracle. He thinks the Knight Commander might be, or be puppeted by, the lilitu Minagho, based on this. The miracle sounds bizarre and uncharacteristic for Iomedae, and also the person he interviewed said it left a lingering hunger inside her, which sounds creepy as hell more likely to be Abyssal than Iomedaean. He thinks this is Really Important, and that it would be very good (possibly Commune-question-fraction good?) to know if the Knight-Commander (and his sister) 'is or serves a demon' or if the miracle 'was of a good god' because the Knight-Commander would be really useful if Minagho wasn't behind him. Also, here's the names of him and his sister, just in case the branch of the government that knows about Tian Xia knows anything about them.

He would really appreciate about a dozen men-at-arms who can serve as sergeants for a militia or the Watch, one competent officer who could put the Watch in order, and one competent officer who could run a militia. He thinks that will reduce the odds of Kenabres falling massively.

He would also like Lastwall to designate him and Select Stasia as official Iomedaean delegates to the city council because he's summoned a meeting so he can have the legal authority to try to help with the Watch... at all...

Hulrun was renounced by Iomedae at some point the day of his death. He apparently did not realize this until he was raised; he’d spent all his spells and limited-use abilities, and took the sudden lack of Detect Evil/Chaos/etc as powerful demonic magic. He is cooperating with the investigation.

Hulrun’s own account of himself isn’t a lot more complicated than ‘the city was full of demon infiltrators, including sophisticated ones using Suggestions undetected, on everyone around him and probably also on him, and he was trying to be paranoid enough to stop them, and nearly every time he arrested people on insufficient or flatly ridiculous grounds they did turn out to be demon cultists, and he didn’t have the resources to do better’. Lastwall notes that Hulrun’s after-the-fact identification of people as demon cultists may not have always been accurate, and on at least some occasions conflated “anti-Hulrun” with “pro-demon”.

The obvious cautions with respect to Chets are that Kastil has obviously now made a powerful enemy and equally obviously cannot go to particular lengths to convict the man for that reason if he wouldn’t otherwise have convicted him. That’s the kind of thing that’s hard enough for people to do that it’s often worth calling in an external investigator, not that they really have the resources to send one. If there’s anyone in the city who could do the investigation competently and lawfully, that’d be much better, even if they’ll do a somewhat worse job.

They can - try to arrange a salary that comes out to about the expected value of the confiscated property but doesn’t directly vary with it, and have the property go to the Church but not directly to the Inquisition. This is only slightly better what with how many people think of all Iomedae’s resources as fundamentally the same resource. Ideally the seized property would go to supporting the people of Kenabres who have lost family to demon attacks, or some other specific public cause. If Castelloni can figure out an appropriate cause and a non-inquisition non-corrupt person to administer the fund, Lastwall can provide him with funds to make up the difference. They expect to be able to recoup most of the loss through some combination of increased willingness by the people of Kenabres to tithe to Iomedae’s church and through diplomacy with Mendev.

That sure does sound like a suspicious miracle for Iomedae to grant and a convenient ‘miracle’ for someone else to grant. It’s worth mixing into a commune; As the person on the scene, what’s Castelloni’s best guess of how likely it is that the knight-commander is a disguised demon? Mind-controlled by a demon? Unwittingly under demonic influence? Galfrey of course did not ask before declaring the crusade, otherwise they could make inferences about the knight-commander from whether the crusade was endorsed.

Barring unexpected sudden personnel needs elsewhere, they expect Castelloni will get the men and officers he’s requested. They don’t know exactly when, though; they can have people available to send soon, but teleports are scarce. About a week, most likely, though it could be tomorrow if the teleport schedule is convenient.

How should the Church communicate its nomination of Castelloni and whoever he recommends to those roles in Kenabres’s government that are meant to be Church-appointed, is telling Castelloni enough? If so, consider it so ordered.

Ettore absolutely confirms that the city is full of demon infiltrators; also, he is not surprised that Hulrun fell. 

Ettore is looking forwards to releasing Chets peacefully, since that would mean he has the problem that he screwed up diplomacy with an ally and not the problem that the city was run by an enemy. He does not expect that to happen. He does not know if anyone in the city exists who is qualified to run the investigation who is not going off on crusade; he'd like to pass it to Irabeth (who is a professional, is either a paladin of Iomedae or a very good impersonator, and has done this before) but she's leaving on crusade; maybe she'll have a recommendation.

He would be fantastically happy to just donate the money to a good cause. He'll get back to them on that later, probably tomorrow, once he's figured out good causes. His obvious choice for a non-inquisition non-corrupt person to manage the fund would be Select Stasia, but he doesn't actually know if she's good at financial management, and the only priest of Abadar is leaving the city and doesn't have a successor. (If they can persuade a priest of Abadar that Kenabres is not going to collapse, he thinks that would be very good for both the city and his job, since he could just hire them to manage the fund.)

Right now... fifteen percent that it is entirely on the level, forty-five percent that the Knight-Commander is something in the vague category of "demon, demonically manipulated, under a demonic spell." If he had to put numbers on it - fifteen percent that he's a demon, five percent that he's not but his sister is (she's a tiefling arcane spellcaster of some sort on the surface), ten percent they're puppets or servants of a demon who isn't them, fifteen percent that it's more complicated than that but in the general category. Forty percent that there's an explanation that fits in neither of those two categories, this is making him extremely suspicious but it was not from the outside predictable that a miracle would be enough to make Galfrey declare a crusade without contacting Iomedae.

He will be very pleased to have the men; Kenabres is in chaos and the sooner he can start fixing things the better. (Also, not worth higher prioritization: If they can send someone who can reliably beat vrocks that would obviously be useful to have hanging out in the city even if they only show up for major crises - right now they need to rely on potions or wands to be able to handle any demon that won't die to massed fire, but he obviously does not expect to get anyone - he just wanted to register that Kenabres is one of the places they're needed.)

One other comment that was important but not urgent: Irabeth told him that everyone who had asked the Lastwall leadership about Count Arendae had been told to leave him alone. He would like to confirm that this is an actual order, and that it applies to him.

That is sufficient, thank you.

There is an inquisitor assigned to handling Count Arendae, Liotr; he may ask Castelloni for help and if he asks Castelloni should give it but he has given general instructions that no one should indicate such an investigation exists, or conduct one of their own, or participate in other investigations of Arendae.

His plans are acknowledged. Iomedae be with him.

And with them.

(Ettore now feels less like he is a tiny boat floating lost at sea out of sight of land, and more like that tiny boat feels after it spots a lighthouse.)

Assuming he doesn't hear back from Silvio first, he'll write down more records of the situation in a memorized cipher while he waits for everyone to arrive.

Ramien is a sturdy, quiet man of forty or fifty who arrives first but doesn't enter the building until Rathimus and Irabeth have arrived. Select Stasia arrives last and visibly (if you're good at reading people) wants to hide behind Irabeth but isn't going to do that because it'd be unprofessional so she goes over to stand next to Castelloni instead.

"I'm actually surprised Oris is leaving us waiting," says Irabeth, frowning, "is his location known?"

"Oris is presently in the inquisitorial prisons," Ettore says drily, "due to his attempt to persuade me to execute people on his word and on the assumption he repeatedly violated the law during the period in which he was seizing direct control of the Watch without any legal authority. I will be pleased to release him if my guesses as to his actions are false." Pause. "Hulrun Fell last night. Voyager, you have my apologies on behalf of the Inquisition for his past actions." Pause. "Select, you have been appointed to the second Iomedaean seat on the city council by Our superiors in the Church."

- Stasia swallows and nods. 

"Is it illegal to try to persuade you to execute people without trial?" asks Rathimus. 

"Ambiguous in the Law of Iomedae; incitement to an illegal act is a crime, but asking if an act is legal is not, nor is arguing that the act should be legal, and ignorance that the act was illegal is a complete defense."

Rathimus nods, satisfied.

"In the hopes of establishing common knowledge: I am Inquisitor Ettore Castelloni of the Iomedaean Inquisition. I have called this meeting because there is presently, essentially no functioning law or order in Kenabres. Because the crusade is leaving shortly with a large proportion of the members of the city council, it may take all hopes for assembling a decision-making quorum with it. I hope that, before the Crusade leaves, we can first establish some consensus as to our goals, and cause there to be someone with the legal right and responsibility to handle the restoration of order to the city, and then have all members of the City Council on crusade pass their status as delegates to appointed successors remaining behind in Kenabres."

"Elin can have my vote, or be appointed outright as representative of the Wardstone's defenders."

"I do not have an obvious successor," says Rathimus, "and I do not think it would be in keeping with the founding vision of Kenabres to cede my vote as well to Iomedae's church, giving it thereby, if I count right, an outright majority. I'll consider if there's anyone I would be willing to name."

There is a nervous silence.

Perceptible in the atmosphere of the room: Rathimus is not entirely confident that objections to the city being controlled by Iomedae's church are safe to express in front of the new Inquisitor, and everyone present is assuming it might be a great provocation and occasion for at minimum a long rant about to whom exactly Rathimus owes his life, possibly with swords drawn.

That Rathimus feels this way, and that he might be afraid to say it, are of course fairly extraordinary indictments of Iomedae's church, which normally does not make Abadar's church at all reluctant to work with them or reluctant to operate in cities they govern, but it's not an indictment that Irabeth or Stasia or Elin feel entitled to refute; they'll just watch the inquisitor, Irabeth ready to get between the inquisitor and Rathimus if the inquisitor takes tremendous offense. Stasia is unhappily noticing that she's standing where Liotr usually would stand and will be much worse than Liotr at talking an angry inquisitor down.

He nods. "I do not expect you to cede it to anyone; I simply request that you will fill it before you leave, ideally with someone qualified to handle the business of the council, so it is possible to legally carry out the administration of the city and to work to resolve its many problems."

(He doesn't miss this, but he thinks that acting offended or apologetic would make them feel more worried, not less. He is going to write SO MANY angry reports home about Hulrun.)

He'll add, "I have requested my superiors that they ask the Church of Abadar to send a replacement representative, but have no expectation that that will come soon enough to serve as a solution."

Rathimus nods. 

" - Thank you, Irabeth," he'll add, now that he's responded to the plausibly urgent thing.

"I currently believe the immediate priorities of the Council in the aftermath of the crisis are the reestablishment of a Watch to maintain order in the streets, as well as the ensuring of efforts to ensure the defense of the city and its rebuilding, and finding a way to fund these three important activities," he says, "with the task of protecting them from demonic infiltration that of the Iomedaean Inquisiton, though we would of course be pleased to have any assistance we can in accomplishing this. Are there any immediate priorities I am failing to think of?"

"I am aware of none," says the person opening the door and walking through.

"I beg forgiveness for the intrusion," says the tiefling following him.

(She has red skin. She has horns. She has a strong Evil aura. She has a long silk dress in black and silver that compliments her skin, and either it's magical or she brought enough dresses to fight off a surprise demonic attack and still have a clean, dry one.)

(He, meanwhile, looks like he's from a particularly unethical mercenary company's recruiting posters, aside from being foreign.

... Possibly one targeting women.

His aura is very strongly both Lawful and Good.)

- Stasia's instinct is to go for her weapon and her holy symbol simultaneously but she manages to hold herself back on how no one else is doing that. 

- right. Knight-Commander. Their ally. Not a demon. She'll bow. 

"I didn't realize you planned to attend," says Irabeth, a little dryly, "I'd have waited for you. - Council of Kenabres, these are our honored Knight-Commander Huang Ruoshi, and his sister Huang Jinruo."

"Honored," says Ettore, who is not going for his weapon and his holy symbol simultaneously because it wouldn't help. If he's just been cornered by Minagho do not think about that then changing the mental topic of conversation.

"Neither did I."

"I'm very sorry, Irabeth," he says, bowing. "I had an another engagement, but it ended faster than I had planned."

"Inquisitor Castelloni? I'm honored to meet you."

"I am grateful for the opportunity to meet the Knight-Commander of the Fifth Crusade in person," he says, even if he would have been more grateful for not that.

Jinruo will bow again very politely and limit her smirking to the INSIDE (unless you're very good at reading faces).

"And I to meet the man who will represent the goddess Iomedae here in Kenabres."

(He is.)

"To what do we owe this honor?" says Elin, suspiciously.

"We can't take all the supplies we'll need for the march to Drezhen with us, and Kenabres will be our supply base for the campaign. Given that, don't we need to know what its defense against the demons will look like?"

Elin nods stiffly. 

"I think the men can hold the border, presuming Deskari doesn't show up and no other demon manages to pull a substantial force together, but rebuilding the city is another matter entirely." Irabeth is watching the Inquisitor and the provocative evil tiefling with the same latent anxiety as when Rathimus said he didn't want the Church running the city. 

If he's going to take a swing at her, best it be right now, with no reasonable provocation, lots of witnesses, and her completely invincible brother in between the two of them.

"I'm pleased to hear it," he says, returning to the topic. He's going to need to publicly discuss the city's defenses in front of people who might be the enemy. He expects they'd get the information anyway, but that doesn't mean he needs to tell them it directly. (Only in this particular case he does have to, because trying to expel a fellow paladin will make him look like a paranoid lunatic, which Hulrun has gotten everyone worried about well in advance.)

"Given that the wardstone can stop lesser demons, my chief worries -" (because he knows perfectly well they can get that without him) "- are individual demons powerful enough to resist a wardstone's effects, proofed against cold iron well enough that no number of arrows can bring them down. You should not, to be clear, discuss precisely what precautions you have already taken, nor think about them openly, but such a demon, carrying out surprise attacks, might be able to replicate Deskari's successes on a far smaller scale without Terendelev to hold him off." And he does think the risk of raising this is worth it, given that (a) "throw vrocks at it" is a blatantly obvious tactic and (b) someone might have a solution to the problem where half-a-dozen vrocks could probably conquer Kenabres.

"I'd also like a larger pool of trained men for the troops to recruit from, but that's a later item on the agenda."

What is the point of a meeting where you can't say how Kenabres would presently handle a swarm of strong demons. "That does seem a risk with many of the city's strongest defenders gone," agrees Elin.

"We get something we can't handle, we call in the Teleport-capable strike team at Fort Glory near Nerosyan. In principle. I've never had to do it, and I don't know with what reliability they show. It's not quite as hopeless as it'd sound from that, though. Nothing's impervious to cold iron if you're smiting it, and there's empowered paladins with Elin's men."

... They got something they couldn't handle. Then they didn't call in the Teleport-capable strike team at Fort Glory near Nerosyan.

"They played no role in the recent conflagration?"

(Note to self, poke Irabeth when she's on her own and suggest that her scrolls of Sending might want to be distributed in several different places, to make it harder for a single hezrou or succubus to get rid of one of them, including backups with any casters in the city who can manage them.)

"Oh, we tried, and they said 'acknowledged, we can't fight Deskari either, likely no incoming', and then when we told them he'd gone and the wardstone had been thrown across the city 'army will be marching out to retake the city', and then we'd burned through all our available scrolls by the time we learned we had a different urgent problem with the wardstone."

Ettore hates Kenabres.

"I see," he says.

"- That's two scrolls," points out Huang Jinruo, who knows perfectly well that everyone will predict her to be Evil based on being Evil (and one-eighth oni) and therefore does not bother not being a gadfly when Ember isn't around.

"I had one, Hulrun had one. The temple had one that was destroyed by cultists when the temple was sacked by cultists simultaneous with Deskari showing up. Rathimus had a couple in stock that were purchased the day before the attack, presumably by cultists."

And the inquisition? What did Ettore do with the inquisition's scrolls?

What did Hulrun do with the inquisition's scrolls? Send messages to his superiors in the Church of Iomedae that never made it to Lastwall? Did he have superiors in the Church of Iomedae in Mendev?

"Moving on from the topic of external defense for now," Ettore says, "the recent crisis demonstrated the internal difficulties Kenabres faced. In spite of Hulrun's ceaseless hunts for cultists, the cultists were a well-trained, well-equipped force, capable of working together to maintain control of the streets for some hours. They had clearly prepared for it, and - barring the heroic efforts of the Eagle Watch and the soldiers defending the city - the people of Kenabres had not."

"What are the historical objections that have been raised against the establishment of a militia to defend Kenabres in time of urgency?"

"Gets taken over by cultists. - which is also what happened to the Eagle Watch for several years."

"A problem solved by placing a paladin in charge."

"That is how the Eagle Watch ended up solving it, yes, and the reason I left Elin in charge of the city's defense."

"Do we see any reason the same solution would not succeed here?"

"If I was a demon cultist trying to take over an organization run by a paladin," says Jinruo as if everyone in the room isn't thinking it, "I'd just recruit - or Dominate - whoever's doing his paperwork."

Please stop taunting the inquisitors, A-jie.

I know what I'm doing!

"Paladins aren't corruptible," Elin says. " - or if they are it's very conspicuous. That doesn't mean any one you pick will be any good at noticing if there's something wrong under their nose. The paladins we have remaining with the city are either even more inexperienced than me, or, uh -"

"Couple of them are senior but not that bright," says Irabeth. "Nothing wrong with saying it. If you're a strong, brave, good-hearted young person who goes to the front to fight demons and absolutely cannot learn to read or do any figuring or make any complicated plans, Iomedae can still pick you, and well She should, and you'll save hundreds of lives over the course of your own, and you shouldn't have a command." 

"Mmm. What circle was the most powerful cultist in the city during the attack?"

"Fourth." There were also a few succubi, but who knows if they were there before.

"Then if we restrict membership in the militia for worshippers of Iomedae none of whom are Chaotic or Evil, with occasional dispels followed by Zone of Truth spells, what is going to go wrong? I dislike the cultists having armed, trained reserves while we ourselves have none."

“I think it’s worth doing but I still expect they’ll find a way in. Hulrun did that for his own staff, and - they still got someone in sometimes.”

"One succubus can maintain a dozen Dominated minions proof against any Dispel a wizard below fifth circle can manage, and there's your twelve truthfully not-demon-worshipping Lawful Good officers all suborned."