Alfirin manages not to stare mostly by virtue of not having control of her eyes. It - makes some sense, maybe, that given Mendev's reputation for competence Heaven might send one of their own to manage the crusade again - But surely if they were doing that they'd do it openly, the better to attract support - and if he was doing it secretly, she wouldn't actually expect Marit to do it only halfway - maybe he would, if nobody alive would recognize him -

He has a short speech, well-delivered, along the obvious lines. The Worldwound is dangerous; some of them will die; some of them will become scarier than the demons. He can teach them how to fight under these conditions, and he can ensure the men at their side are neither idiots nor cowards, but ultimately they'll live or die by whether they're good at what they do. The Crusade welcomes them. They are few enough they'll all get to introduce themselves individually. 

It's not just the face; his cadence speaking, the way he moves - Marit can disguise those if he wants but he's not - He must really think there's nobody who'd recognize him. He'll probably kick himself if he realizes Alfirin is here, though there are enough other things he might do or try that she's not going to tell him - in some ways it is really quite unlike him. She wonders why he changed the name, then, given that it wouldn't stand out -

He shakes Catherine's hand. Gives her an intense stare but the same intense stare as he's given everyone else. "What are you here to accomplish?"

"Kill demons, make friends, become the greatest fighter in the world. The usual, I imagine."

He has his baby adventures fight summoned demons first, for a week, and then has them shadow Worldwound patrols. He can afford to outfit them with potions adequate for an emergency, but only if they'll use them in genuine emergencies and not otherwise; he watches them to get a sense of that. Sometimes he intervenes, invisible, to save their lives; sometimes he can't, or doesn't. A lot of things can be taught, but there's a fundamental sensibility under pressure that's hard to teach.

Catherine has it. Also he's short a member of his own adventuring party because Camellia on close inspection is a serial killer. He does some reasonable amount of due diligence about whether Catherine too is a serial killer, including on one occasion reading her mind, and then invites her to travel with them, scouting ahead of the main host and occasionally dipping by Teleport into the Wound to raid abandoned positions for things they can use for their Crusade.

Iomedae by this point would be assembling her inner circle, her advisors and friends and confidants and the people to whom she can delegate her work as the workload grows. He …isn't doing anywhere near enough of that. It's a skill issue; he doesn't know how. None of these people seem possible to trust enough to delegate anything to them. Irabeth and Anevia are all right, and he trusts them enough to leave important things in their hands, but they're not confidants. He's paying the priest of Abadar to do all the accounting because he doesn't trust his accountants. His inner circle has ended up being the people who are getting stronger fastest, and he can't say he really likes them.

After puzzling over this for a while he concludes that the difference is that Iomedae - well, was wildly more socially skilled, for one thing, he's good at it but he's no Iomedae - but also that she trusted people instinctively, a stupid habit he spent decades chiding her for. She offered him a job in their first meeting. She did it to thousands of people, probably, and then let them grow at her side, and he can imitate the behavior but not the instinctive conviction that underlay it. 

He tries to teach his people that they can correct him when he's in error. Unfortunately he's usually not in error, so it ends up feeling like a bit of a hollow lesson. 

When the Hellknight company commanded by Regill Derenge is in trouble he brings Catherine and Amadeus and Daeran and Nenio and Lann and Seelah and Sosiel to go dig them out of it.

He thereby acquires the first person he's found in this world who obviously belongs in an inner circle of advisors, except the man is a Hellknight, a member of a flatly bizarre order that worships Iomedae and Asmodeus.

Marit can't even object. The holy books are inaccurate. The Iomedae he knew wouldn't have lied in them. Arazni is an undead prisoner reigning in Geb, and that all by itself tells you - not everything you need to know, but enough to know that you don't know anything. Hulrun was a maniac and a murderer. Irabeth is a lovely (half-)human being any Lawful Good god would paladin. 

What does he know, really, about the goddess Iomedae? Maybe She is buddies with Asmodeus.

Catherine objects plenty. You can't just cobble together five gods who happen to be lawful and share an interest in containing the worldwound and expect to get something that makes sense as anything other than an anti-worldwound pact. Which is all it is, despite the order's attempts to build some sort of coherent wider ideology out of it. Also, maybe Aspex didn't notice, but in most places in the world Asmodeanism is correctly recognized as a vile and unconscionable practice.

This gets Catherine a sincere smile out of Aspex, who rations them to about one per person per month. He assures her that he is not in doubt about whether Asmodeanism is a vile and unconscionable practice but just about whether the other gods the order names themselves realize this.

Well, he should talk to a priest about that. Catherine's understanding of theology isn't great, she obviously didn't have access to clerics of other gods growing up, but she's pretty sure they all hate Asmodeus and He hates them all back.

In a sense it is unsurprising that he next visits the gardens when he's desperately lonely. 

Things are going well. They took Drezen before the winter rolled in. He is spending most of his time training his men and adventuring with a select group of people - twenty, at first, now down to twelve but the spellcasters fifth circle - and rooting out cultists and checking and double-checking the books. Rathimus, who he hired to do the accounting, got turned into a ghoul and they fixed it but he decided to retire after that. He tried letting Galfrey’s appointed people do the accounting and they promptly stole from him. There are an astonishing number of cultists. The situation would be totally untenable without what is at this point a small army of allied outsiders, mostly celestials, which he has surveilling the city. They all report directly to him since he has yet to reveal to anyone on the face of this planet that he is a swordmage. When this many people want you dead you need every advantage you can get.

What's difficult is the constant betrayal. It's more depressing betrayal than he's accustomed to. Nurah lit their camp on fire, sabotaged his equipment, and passed information to the demons. The head of his staff council sabotaged his boots of Teleport in inventory to get him killed. They had the man’s trial last week. It wasn't even the first attempt. The man was irritated that Aspex was insufficiently loyal to Queen Galfrey. He carried out the execution this afternoon.

The Shining Crusade never had a deliberate (not mind control related) betrayal by a senior officer. If it'd happened they'd have discussed it for months, trying to figure out how they'd erred so badly, trying to change their procedures. The only procedure change he can think of is ‘don't trust Mendevians'. 

Anevia made a stab at being comforting. He is doing an excellent job of tracking down the troublemakers, she said. He is aware that this is true. He may be the most qualified person in history to run a discount Crusade beset mainly by internal betrayals. It's just an intensely demoralizing job. 

He figures he'll summon some earth elementals and have them burrow through the gardens without disturbing all the plants in case Alfirin left her secrets underground.

He doesn't get that far, because his plane shift lands him in a little clearing and over in the corner there is one of the clone-bowers, now with a body in it.

…he would not have predicted in advance the surge of hope and joy and relief that rushes up on him. He heads over towards it.

The strange thing, of course, is that he recognizes it, and that it's the body of someone who he never once thought was secretly a ninth-circle wizard.

What. 

It makes some scraps of sense once he starts thinking about it.

Alfirin clearly - based on everything he knew about her as a person - would want some way to be hard to find - impossible to find, ideally - something that blocked spells like Nightmare (yes, he tried that to see if it'd tell him if she was asleep or not) as well as Discern Location.

It's been nine hundred years. She'd have needed to invent immortality somewhere in there.

Clearly she also figured out - some way to have her default physical form be a different one. Or alternatively she's a ghost currently possessing the most convenient possible person to be possessing, a reasonable candidate for Cheliax's throne. Or -

- well, she's an archmage. There are really a lot of possibilities here. But Catherine de Litran is a reasonable person for Alfirin to want to be, and it's reasonable for Alfirin to have the ability to achieve this thing she would reasonably want, and so Alfirin is Catherine de Litran.

As for signing up to work for Marit - she must have been curious. He's not going around Polymorphed; he considered it and decided it wasn't worth it. He gets dispelled sometimes, or looked at with True Seeing occasionally, and it'd open up more risks than it'd address. No one alive knows what he looks like anyway, no one has any inkling that his face might be something he'd want to hide.

Except her.

She knows.

She has known this whole time.

She has been adventuring with him for several months now with both of them pretending to be swordsmen.

Marit hopes that she's having a tremendous amount of fun. He rather suddenly is.

He could confront her. There is absolutely no way he's going to do that. She knows who he is, and he knows who she is, but now he knows that she knows who he is and she doesn't know that he knows who she is. He's going to go home and play this game and try to figure out what she's trying to achieve, though he can see the outlines of it already, in Catherine's noble titles.

He returns to Drezen with a spring in his step and joy in his heart and when he next sees Alfirin he gives no indication at all that anything is amiss.

Greengates is a former Worldwound fortress, now well within the boundaries of the Wound. It was a major fort at one point and was lost abruptly, and is plausibly still possessed with some valuables that were not valuable enough to demons for any to bother dragging them off.

There is, however, one really good argument against ever going there, which is that he had a dream in which a succubus told him to. So they carefully mark it on their charts and never go within forty miles of the place.

A patrol went missing on the border between two forts; it looks like they got lost and wandered into the Wound. 

They have decent scry-based reporting down the whole section of the border that he's responsible for, by now, all powered by two crystal balls. He hears about it six hours after they fail to report, which is pretty good, though almost certainly too late to save them. He takes hair samples from his soldiers; he orders them scried.

He could, of course, ask Alfirin to do it; she has Greater Scrying and can do it in a heartbeat rather than an hour. But her seventh circle spell slots are valuable even if he has no idea what she's using them for, and the soldiers are almost certainly dead already, so -

- so he'll make sure she hears about it, and then she can decide herself if it's worth it. Doing anything differently than he'd do it if he had no idea who she was lets her know that he knows who she is, with some probability, but he'll honestly be very impressed if she figures it out just from this. He arranges for someone to ask Catherine and Regill and Nenio and Seelah and Daeran and Ember and Lann - two Teleports of people, his usual adventuring-group size - to join him in the command room.

He explains to them that people have just started a scry on the missing patrol, and they're almost certainly dead already, but if they aren't then he plans to jump out to the scried location and rescue them. They should be prepared to go in an hour, when the scries finish, though his best guess is they'll in fact have nothing to do, but he'd rather give them an hour's notice of probably-nothing than no notice of something.

There. Now Alfirin knows all he knows, and can decide for herself if she wants to do anything about it.

"Yes, sir." Catherine keeps her swords with her at all times, so she's more or less ready at all times. She checks her potion supplies, runs down to the quartermaster to restock on oils of bless weapon, and is back with ten minutes to spare. The Knight-Commander values being prepared.

It's good she's prepared, because the priest doing the scrying reports that one of the men is still alive. ....nailed to a post and obviously suffering horribly, but still alive. 

"Right! First team, invisible and flying, second team wait on our report. Nenio -"