Marit has limited, narrow-in-scope international espionage operations by four months into his crusade. Some people in Ustalav to keep an eye on supply shipments winding their way up the Sellen, some people in Nerosyan who presumably work for the Queen or one of her rivals there but will at least tell him what those people want him to know, someone in Absalom who reads him all the international gossip over a scry once a week.

He wants to start getting reports from Lastwall, but it's looking like it'll be a tough nut to crack. Fort Lorrin is run more like a fortress than a city, never mind that it's been nearly a thousand years since it was needed in its capacity as a fortress. They appear to be well-prepared for and well-defended against Chelish attempts to spy on them, which is in fact the first good sign he's seen about them after a long strong of very bad signs, but deeply inconvenient since Cheliax has more resources than he does.

He ends up binding a couple of spyglass archons, wearing a false face, and telling them that he's a wizard who just wants non-secret updates about things that they may legally pass along to him, and that they should of course surrender if asked to do so, and gets a couple of weeks of ‘non-secret updates' about things that are nonetheless useful for inferring secret things before he loses contact.

(Banished, not killed, looks like. But if killing them would've deterred him from trying again, and it would have, then it's on shaky ground to try again on the grounds they were banished instead.)

He first visits Alfirin's gardens three weeks after he's arrived in this world, almost as soon as things have calmed down and the scroll of Gate he purchased is available. He writes her a note before he goes, so that if she murders him on the spot she can subsequently acquaint herself with his reasoning and decides if she wants to raise him. It's a risk, but it's not a large risk and it is a necessary one. There are no signs she's still active in the world. She's not scryably in an afterlife either. She is probably an ally if she is still around, and if she's trapped or petrified somewhere then retrieving her is one of his most urgent priorities. He doesn't know where to look, but the gardens are the place to start. He expects that she would want him, from his current state of information, to look for her. He has obviously taken care not to betray her demiplane to anyone; he doesn't have ready access to Mind Blank but he has a pretty good Nondetection up. 

People change, in nine hundred years, but the Alfirin he knows would, if she’d killed him, read the note and then raise him.

The gardens are as tidy and colorful and alive as they always are. He doesn’t think that's any information about whether Alfirin is still active; She learned from Arazni, her gardens probably tend to themselves. There are simple mundane clothes, some minor magic items. A silent alarm that he thinks tripped when he entered, but no immediate response, and none of the plants attack him. Rabbits, eerily trusting for rabbits - some of them approach him instead of running away. The bowers and alcoves where he has known Alfirin to keep clones (though surely not the only places she keeps clones) are empty. The antimagic cells are empty. The cottage that was Alfirin's workshop is gone, with the outline of its foundation marked out neatly by its lack of grass.

He sets two tuning forks; it'll take a while but he doesn't need to babysit the whole of it. Walks the place, carefully. Pets the rabbits. 

The absence of clones is not a good sign. The bowers should hold one indefinitely, even if she was petrified somewhere. 

He contemplates leaving a note, and decides against. He doesn't take the magic items, either, though he spends a while looking closely for anything that might be a concealed tuning fork to another demiplane, or anything that could be used for communication.

If there's another tuning fork here, there aren't any clues as to where. There are certainly none in sight or in easily accessible hiding places, but without digging up all the dirt and liquefying all the stone fixtures he can't rule out that there's still one hidden there somewhere. There are some wands of sending, but nothing that looks like it's designed for visitors to contact Alfirin if she's otherwise inaccessible.

He harvests some spell components that'll grow back inside a couple of weeks, finishes the tuning forks, identifies the magic items, and heads out. He's very busy and it's not suggesting an obvious next step; he can come back later when he has more time. 

He ends up not returning until after they take Drezen. 

The Knight-Commander sends recruiters to Absalom. He knows how a crusade recruiting tour works; probably the state of the art hasn't changed too much. He has dramatizations of their victories in Kenabres, some demon heads on pikes, a map of the Crusade's progress, and then the things adventurers care most about: stories about adventurers getting wildly more powerful in short spans of time. Also, pay. You might expect it to be inconsistent given the reputation of the last four Mendevian crusades but it is reasonable, paid out every month without fail, and spent lavishly by some crusaders on vacation here in Absalom to tell the stories of the scrapes they've gotten into. 

(He doesn't come himself because he's far too busy. Anyway, he trusts Daeran with this responsibility.)

Catherine de Litran intends, some day, to be queen of Cheliax, which means she intends, some day, to overthrow the current Chelish monarchy, which means she intends, some day, to be able to win a fight with a pair of pit fiends without particularly breaking a sweat. Killing demons isn't exactly the same, but it's a way to get stronger and to find capable allies, and as a nice bonus the treaty should keep her safe from a Thrune assassination. And from Cyprian. It's not a hard decision, even if the pay turns out to be much less reliable than advertised. She drops into a seat across from the Aasimar doing the pitching and asks, "So, what do you do for the Crusade besides look pretty?"

He turns delightedly to look back at her. "Being as pretty as I am is a serious responsibility and I wouldn't want other ones distracting me from it."

"Oh! You get paid just to look pretty? And drink in all the finest establishments in Absalom, which is really quite far from the worldwound - A nice gig if you can get it."

"Well, I should warn you, some demons will envy your beauty and come run up to try to mar it, and you've got to be quick on your feet. Or have healing powers. I have those, in case I miss a step dancing."

"None of those myself, though I don't think I've missed a step in years. Never been to the wound, though, care to go a round and tell me if my pretty face stands a chance up there?"

He'd be delighted. They have a pretty good pitch down, by this point. The demons thought Kenabres would be a slaughter, and they were right, but they were wrong about who'd get slaughtered; when the relief army arrived there was nothing for them to do, except press inwards towards Drezen, so the Queen called a crusade and that is what they did. Daeran makes a bit of a face at the part about the Queen but doesn't linger on it. The Knight-Commander is very deadly and very smart, and has no patience for incompetence or corruption but plenty for making soldiers out of men. They'll be in Drezen before winter. "There'll be lots of dancing. And plenty of drinking too, I suspect."

Well, there's just a couple possible hangups, as Catherine sees it - one is whether or not the Knight-Commander has any patience for making soldiers out of women, she is one you see, and somewhat more sensitized to the fact for having lived in Osirion recently. The other one is this Queen Daeran mentioned. Is that going to be, you know, a problem, she asks, letting a bit more of her Galtan accent slip into her speech.

Daeran seems to find this tremendously funny. The Queen, he tells her, is a paladin, and her greatest personal vice is being such a paladin, and her second greatest is being a Queen, and these are hardly small vices but they don't tend to affect other people very much unless you're Daeran and have the misfortune of being her cousin. The revolution will probably have to wait to come to Mendev until the demon problem is handled, but he hopes it does come then as it'd be stupendously funny and probably a great improvement too.

Oh, and she doesn't need to worry about being a woman. Between Galfrey and Iomedae the people of Mendev are if anything more sure women can be great warrior heroes of legend than that men can. 

A toast, then! To a demon-free future and all that implies!

Catherine's not an idiot. She doesn't sign on until the next morning when it still seems like a good idea sober.

The Knight-Commander said when he conceived of the plan to recruit adventurers in Absalom that he could call in some favors and get them Teleports.

True to his word, an elven woman with the range to go from Mendev to Absalom in one hop does three round trips a day - taking recruits to Mendev along with major purchases from magic item supplies in Absalom. If anyone tries scrying her, it won't work, but this isn't surprising - the kind of wizard who can do that trip in one hop can do a lot of things.

What is her name? Where does she live? Does she take other work for hire, or only favors from old friends? Catherine takes mental notes; She's going to want to know all the wizards of note she can.

She smilingly declines to answer every one of these questions. (She's Polymorphed into this form, though you need to beat a very good Nondetection or have True Seeing to notice this.)

(Alfirin does not, yet, have True Seeing up very often, nor will she risk casting it in front of a talented spellcaster. She suspects a disguise, though, because she expects an elf with this range to have been known to her already.)

The Absalom-based recruits don't meet the Knight-Commander until the day after Catherine arrives, when another day's trips have brought another dozen of them. The day that Catherine arrives they meet Irabeth, who is a half-orc paladin of Iomedae dedicated to training people to defend themselves and their homeland and their planet against the Worldwound. She is a very admirable and very unsurprising instance of her type. 

She mostly ensures they have the crucial mutual vocabulary with the locals and the basic equipment they'll need and enough comprehension of the local geography to not wander off into the Wound by accident. 

Does that happen very often, Catherine asks? People just…wandering into the worldwound by accident? Isn't the wardstone barrier pretty noticeable?

Not at night or in a snowstorm or in sufficiently thick fog, unless you can detect magic. Anyway - though she doesn't quite say this in so many words - the fundamental philosophy of the Knight-Commander is that people will make every single mistake you haven't trained them not to make, plus many you have trained them not to make, and if you cannot afford to lose half of them you'd better train them in chewing their food before they swallow it. This is probably more crucial with the Mendevian recruits than with adventurers in Absalom, who have often already survived their fair share of scrapes and the stupid ones perished, but still - navigation. Don't underestimate it. 

Once they've all been assembled over the next few days and Daeran's returned the Knight-Commander returns, too, from a different trip nearby, and Irabeth has them line up to meet him. 

Even after nine hundred years it would be difficult not to recognize him. What.

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 -"

Three invisible, three flying, one Telepathic Bond between Knight-Commander Aspex, who leads first team, and Regill, who leads second, and Irabeth, who'll remain at the command center. 

May any powers that happen to feel like it bless them all in their endeavors. 

Some people would call it a pretty well-oiled operation but only because they haven't seen a real well-oiled operation. 

First team is himself and Daeran and Nenio and Ember. It would be objectively stupid to have him and Alfirin, the two people wildly more powerful than they're pretending to be, on the same team so he never does it even though he really enjoys watching her fight. He has opportunities when they're not moving as two teams. She's gotten good with a sword, somewhere in there. He wants to compare notes on spellcasting in armor but he wants to not ruin the game even more.

And they find themselves just outside the Sarkorin village of Wintersun, where the villagers have nailed the crusaders to posts and left them to die. 

"Shall I go ahead and -"

If it's a trap it's not a magical trap; there are no signs of magic as far as Detect Magic can see. It's also not a mechanical trap; the ground is uneven and overgrown, lumpy with the roots of trees, but doesn't contain any dug pits or hazardous land formations.

They're still flying.

"Go ahead." 

Daeran pulls the nails out and heals the dying crusader. The man was far enough gone to have a bit of a hard time with being abruptly restored to full health; it probably isn't helping with his disorientation that his rescuers are invisible. 

He pulls himself together and explains that they got disoriented in the fog, saw a village, went to the village, and were then attacked and nearly all killed by the villagers. Throwing stones and carrying sharp sticks. Dozens of them, and they weren't expecting it -

"- is everyone else dead?"

"Yes."

He calls the second team. Possibly the village is cursed, possibly it's just religious and obeying their understanding of some stupid god which could very well be Iomedae, regardless you'd rather have a full complement of people on-site. 

Ember teleports team two; they arrive visible and on-foot since Ember doesn't have invisibility. Seelah summons Arnisant and mounts up immediately.

Orders, knight-commander?

"We don't know where we are, we Teleported. Presumably this village is in Mendev and near the fortress where this patrol was expected, but we don't know that, someone could've moved the prisoner for many reasons including 'causing an international incident of some kind'. We're going to ride up and say hello, and do nothing that could reasonably be illegal if the village isn't in fact in Mendev and we're now in, I don't know, Ustalav. Invisible and flying people will remain that way. Catherine and Seelah can do the talking." That was his policy before he learned who Catherine was, because she seemed to like it and be good at it. 

"Yes, sir." Catherine in front, Seelah in the rear until they reach the village, Regill guarding Ember in the middle. They approach the village.

Hello villagers?

Alfirin isn't a Good person, and - he was never sure how strongly these facts were related - did not particularly like being treated as one. She'd save civilians, of course, if the opportunity presented itself, maybe just out of personal loyalty to Iomedae, maybe because it was what the rules said to do, maybe because it was the right thing to do, but she would tend to avoid their adulation. He was never sure what to make of it. In any event she seems to have grown out of it; Catherine likes playing the hero. Of course, Catherine plans - he's very sure at this point, he looked up the relevant Galtan history - to take the throne of Cheliax from Abrogail Thrune. This obviously requires to accept the adulation of crowds, to be seen as a good person and be comfortable in that spotlight.

Psychoanalyzing a person off who they were nine hundred years ago is probably a fool's errand. 

The guards at the walls of the village - it has pretty impressive walls, eighteen to twenty feet up and made of logs planted like trees closely together, enough to deter most things that plague villages and are corporeal and cannot fly -

- cry out an alarm and set their spears against the ground. "Demons!!"

"Did you hear that? I think they think we're demons."

"Cut the chatter Litran. Defensive positions!" Which mostly means that he and Seelah move up in front of Ember.

Knight-Commander?

Message. "Wall of Force, Nenio." Message. "Ember, pretend you cast it." For some time to think where they at least will not be mobbed by villagers they'll have to either slaughter or risk being overrun by as the patrol was. 

This is almost certainly an elaborate trap laid by a demon. The question is which of the many possible elaborate traps laid by a demon. The one Marit thought of first and already warned his men about is for the injured crusader to have been moved - for this to be a village on the southern border which Lastwall controls, or a village which has a dragon protector, or something - so that when they kill the people in this village who are now predictably trying to kill them it'll cause some problem for them. Or, alternatively, if they hesitate to kill the people, they'll get killed.

But demons aren't Tar-Baphon. This is extraordinarily fortunate in many respects but it makes demon traps harder to predict, because Tar-Baphon chooses from the set of good ideas, and demons choose from the set of all ideas. 

There is, he can see now that he's looking intently for it, illusion magic in the air, spread so thin the aura is masked. "Nenio, figure out what that illusion is doing," he says. ...loudly enough that Alfirin can hear him. He wants her eyes on this too.

Catherine zoned out for a moment or two while Team Two was waiting around for Team One to call them in, and somehow this resulted in one of the people using her eyes doing so with arcane sight. Funny how that happens sometimes when Marit's not around. And, yep, subtle illusions everywhere, probably related to the thing where the villagers think they're all demons.

Not that Alfirin is going to act on this information in any way unless it's really quite the emergency. Nenio will figure it out; Nenio's good at illusions and is decent at investigating a puzzle once it's been pointed out to her.

Indeed, Nenio's Wall of Force hasn't yet dissipated when she declares triumphantly that the illusions cast over this region make demons look like crusaders, and crusaders look like demons, to the villagers. 

Marit misses fighting Tar-Baphon. 

All right, second team pull back, he tells Regill. There's an illusion up that makes outsiders look like demons. ...and demons look like crusaders, apparently. I have a number of theories but my leading one is 'someone thought that was funny'.

"Withdraw in good order."

Like they ever do it any other way. She rolls her eyes a tiny bit because she's not actually worried and the wall of force is still there.

The villagers don't pursue them, which is the behavior you'd expect of villagers who think they saw demons. 

- aaaand then Lann is the first to notice and call out that there are some actual demons approaching from the other direction, and an actual fight on their hands. 

"Are we sure they're not villagers?"

"They're Evil," offers Seelah.

"Withdraw some more, villagers won't chase us."

Nor do the demons. ...possible non-demons. Creatures with the outwards appearance of demons.

They continue to withdraw in good order. Regill is not proud because that is the bare minimum he expects from soldiers under his command.

In a sense Marit actually likes this place. It'd make a good training exercise. 

"First team will go look invisibly around the village and find out if whatever's creating the effect is present or if it's a standing unsupervised effect. Second team will try to find the effect boundary, while avoiding apparent-demons and apparent-humans alike and preferentially using nonlethal force if avoidance isn't working. Don't trust your eyes and don't trust your divinations."

"Ember, join Seelah on Arnisant on point to the west and detect magic. Litran, left flank, eyes peeled. You heard the Commander, we strike to wound not to kill."

"I don't think that's what he meant. Sir."

"Wounded peasants are cheap to heal and I won't have you losing an arm because you tried to punch out a babau. Ember can try sleeping them first," he concedes.

First team enters the village invisibly over the rooftops and immediately sees demons. Eight or ten of them, walking casually down the street without any concern from the apparent-humans. He confirms that's what the rest of his team sees as well.

It's a weird number of demons. Villages outside the Wound are at risk of being ravaged by demons, but the usual character of that risk is that one, or a few, demons might slip through, and be too strong for a village to bring down at any price. These demons are not moving as a pack; one of them is getting its hide brushed, a few are in clusters having conversations with people, and one quasit is....nursing??? on a woman who is admittedly admonishing it to stop biting.

"Nenio, can you Polymorph into a demon?"

"What an interesting idea! I could do that tomorrow."

"I don't think we'll stay that long."

"I don't like this," Seelah complains. "Not knowing who's on your side, who's a demon -"

"Mm. Definitely not my favorite kind of situation."

"Are humans and demons really so different?"

"Substantially."

(What is with that child?)

"I don't think this is a Mendevian village."

"Say more?"

"The shrine." It has a naked woman reaching out from the waters to place the sun in the sky. "Not a classical depiction of Iomedae."

He wouldn't really have been that surprised if it was. "There are lots of other gods worshipped in Mendev."

"Sure. But there are healthy men in this village. They'd have been called to service, and they'd have learned how to be respectful of the delicate feelings of our precious gods."

It is useful to have a local consultant sometimes even if the local consultant is Daeran."Acknowledged, thank you."

At this moment a fight breaks out between one of the apparent-demons and one of the apparent-humans in the village before them; the human says something angrily to the demon, who reaches over and plunges a claw straight through the human, killing him - not instantly, but swiftly. 

         "Oh, come on, grow up," another demon says irritably to the one who just murdered a man. 

"He started it!"

        "The Lady of the Lake's going to be mad at you now!"

                "Yeah!" says another villager, more angry than frightened. "The Lady of the Lake's coming for you!"

They're barely half a mile from the village when Ember announces that the illusion is gone. Regill calls a halt, and informs Aspex telepathically.

"That doesn't make any sense, surely the villagers go farther from the village than this, and then they'd see through it - There's still farms that way!"

"Our greatest salvation against the unending hordes of the Abyss is their inveterate sloth."

"Maybe the demons just stay in the village center - but then who's protecting all these farms?"

"Perhaps no-one. Apart from the demons, the Worldwound can be a remarkably safe place. And if all the demons here decided to play their little game..."

Creature which looked like a demon just killed a creature which looked like a human and was, in retaliation, eaten by a creature which looked like a white dragon, and which may be worshipped by the locals as a god. First team withdrawing. That resembles an explanation and is as much of an explanation as I expect to get.

A white dragon they could handle tonight  - and of course he had Daeran put up Protection from Cold the instant they saw it - but he doesn't want to count on it being a white dragon, once there's certainly illusion magic in the air.

Second team will hold position for rendezvous.

They're there swiftly; they're all flying. 

Marit likes to explain his reasoning, with his adventurers. After all, they're going to have to learn how to do this themselves. "It appears the village is protected by a white dragon who eats demons who don't nicely play the game the other demons are playing. If that's what's actually happening, then we probably want to kill the dragon and evacuate the people. But we still don't know where we are relative to Drezen, though I'm now betting 'in the Wound', and we have nowhere for the people to go. And, it'd be idiocy to assume that the orchestrator of all this is a white dragon, even if that's the form I saw. So, we're leaving, unless anyone can think of a reason we should instead stay."

"...If it really is a dragon that's a lot of treasure for the amount of danger? I don't think that's a good enough reason to stay but it's any reason. Sir." And Seelah's going to say 'Protecting the innocent' but would feel bad if Catherine pre-empted her on that and then said this wasn't the best way for them to spend their resources doing that.

" - these people are being - tricked into murdering crusaders, and preyed on by demons!"

"Yes, they are, and quite plausibly we could solve that tonight, but if we fail everything will be much worse for them and for all the other people in all the other villages," he says to Seelah. " - and the treasure will still be here once we've got some True Seeing."

There's a brief pause, then,

"I hear no further reasons to stay, Commander."

Then back to Drezen. 

More than the lives of the villagers, the fact weighs on him that going back there to fix the place will take four more Teleports that wouldn't've been needed if they handled it now. But it's a stupid risk, or would be if they didn't have an archmage who totally probably had True Seeing up, and he's not going to make an assumption-necessary-for-mission-success that he understands Alfirin's motives and precisely the game she's playing right now.

Wise of him, since said archmage is somewhat impaired at the moment and further limited in her spellcasting by the need to hide it. She did not have a True Seeing up.

"Pity about all the hypothetical treasure we never even saw. Wherever it was it was probably illusory anyways - Are we still on standby Commander, or are we done for the day?"

"Dismissed." Is that more than he'd have smiled at her if he didn't know her secret? He doesn't think so. He thinks it's the precisely correct amount of smile.

It was a liiiitle more of a smile than he'd have given to anyone else. The knight-commander isn't the most expressive person but Catherine is pretty good at reading people. She smiles back. "Care to join us at the half measure?"

It's hard to hew closely to the answer he would have given if he hadn't known her secret, because before he knew her secret, he was perpetually melancholic. However, while it might be convincing to Alfirin, acting like a person who eagerly awaits their death is a silly thing to do if you can avoid it. If she correctly infers that the reason he's full of optimism is her, well, good for her. 

"I think I will."

See, that? That is a man who likes her. The knight-commander is usually only slightly more eager to go to the tavern than Regill is. The group of them set off (except Regill, who stays behind with his maps. Of course.)

He doesn't like being drunk, but he's aware that it makes one an enormous killjoy to go to a bar and then drink nothing and make all your subordinates feel awkward, so he orders quite a lot of ale and then uses magic to render it harmless. 

"To our glorious triumph over the demons today!"

"To our swift return to free those people! - Daeran, what are you talking about, we didn't fight any demons."

"Sssshhh, Seelah, no one knows if your glorious victories are made up or not unless you tell them."

The knight-Commander can sure hold his drink.

She gets a cup of wine and drinks half of it and asks Daeran to dance, because Daeran is the only other person in this demon-infested backwater who knows how to dance. And also because he's actually pretty fun.

Okay, now she's just messing with him. It won't work. He will absolutely not betray anything in his facial expression just because Alfirin, archmage of the Shining Crusade, who had Iomedae herself in love with her, is entertaining the worst nobleman in Mendev. He simply won't. She cannot win that easily. 

Well it's not like there are any other candidates she knows well who aren't GAY or REGILL or less strictly-speaking humanoid than her tastes run - Lann's a sweetheart, really, but the scales in fact give her the creeps.

He resolves to catch her at being an archmage. It'll be hard, because she's trying not to let him, but not as hard, because she doesn't know he knows she is one. He has Nenio put up illusions, when they're training, which very few people would see through but Alfirin should with ease, because it seems like it'd be hard to guess what percentage of the time you should act like an illusion is working on you when it isn't, which is in any event hard to do. He spars with her, trying to see if he can catch her cheating to keep up. He spars with all of his other companions because he doesn't want to betray himself by paying more attention to her and so that means paying more attention to all of them. 

He spies on her, which betrays little because he spies on everyone. They keep turning out to be working for the demons.

His espionage only turns up an ordinary noble swordswoman's life - or at least what he imagines that to be. Certainly no signs of archmagery. She spars with him; Aspex consistently beats her, to which she responds with delighted frustration, but never any evident cheating. She considers challenging him to some bouts without armor, but decides against it; she'd win those, and that'd take half the fun out of losing their normal matches.  She sees through Nenio's illusions, occasionally, at about the rate you'd expect from a swordswoman of her skill. A little more often once she figures it's a test and starts checking for them every day. She goes to bed with Daeren and shapechanges away the child and he thinks, for a moment, that he's caught her, but it turns out she just has a magic shirt.

She is winning, in the sense that if he didn't know it was her he's not at all sure how he'd tell. He is in fact confused enough to look up, at one point, whether Catherine had a twin. (Catherine did not have a twin.) But, no, there's only the one of her. That's Alfirin. Just playing a very long game, with the patience of a very old person. 

The hard part of solving the little village in the Abyss of course is evacuating all the civilians once you've wrecked the demon's playplace, not fighting the dragon (which turns out to be white, even after True Seeing.) He consults with Mendev's leadership and finds some place that got butchered by demons where they can be resettled. They're back only six days later. It's good practice for the fight against a larger, scarier red dragon that they know is on their plates sometime soon.

She slipped on the ice, in that fight, and while she was recovering got smacked pretty hard by the dragon's tail. It had far too much momentum for her to turn aside easily with her little sword. Getting hit is really her least favorite part of combat, even if Sosiel fixed the broken ribs as soon as the dragon was dead.

She and Lann enlist some help to build a frankly insane contraption out of ropes under tension and spend a few days practicing dodging as it swings logs at them. Even after all that, she still can't parry one. No wonder Aspex always wins their fights.

Marit's problem, here, is that he's predictable. The Marit she knew would be spying on his subordinates to make sure they're not, themselves, spies, or secretly fiends plotting against him, or any of dozens of other possibilities best dealt with in Marit's mind by spying on everyone he knows. The facts that his Crusade is full of Baphomet cultists and one prior member of his adventuring party kept eating his men and half his advisors have betrayed him already aren't going to be making him any less paranoid.

Marit is, predictably, spying on Catherine, so Catherine will go along having nothing whatsoever to hide. It's only when Alfirin is very very sure that Marit is otherwise busy that she does anything which might clue him in to her presence. That means it takes her a while to do anything she wants to hide from him, but - she's patient. She'd be a very foolish person to make the choices she's made with her lives if she weren't capable of being patient.

She has a list of names. They're the names of outsiders who Marit meets with regularly in heaven, some socially and some professionally, names he'd been consistent about for at least a century -

She has dozens more lists of names of outsiders, whose main virtue in this case is that they were compiled by people other than her for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Marit. She finds three of the names on her list kind of close together on one of the other lists - then two more a little later. Perfect.

She goes seven up the public list from the first intersection and starts doing planar bindings when she can. She wears a different face and says she's looking for people who want to take a longer binding starting in about a month for operations against the forces of Hell, here are the requirements. She gets some takers, some that decline for various reasons. One of the ones she's interested in seems conflicted. It's fine, really, she says, if it has other things that are important, she's got a lot more angel names to try - well, it's not that it's important, exactly, it's more of a social thing, but the whole group cancels if one person does, most of them have important work in Heaven and don't answer planar ally spells - oh, that's very human of it - well it did used to be mortal, after all - well, at any rate, it's quite alright, should she cross this angel's name off her list or would it still be interested in shorter-term bindings - Oh, shorter-term bindings aren't a problem, this angel only has hard commitments every one-hundred twenty-eighth day - Alright, blessings on you, have fun with your heavenly social thing -

...She gets two more commitments to round out the operations that she is, actually, starting to plan over in Cheliax' Arcadian colonies.

Well. That doesn't really prove anything except that he's thorough, but it's certainly suggestive.

If she ever confirms that the Marit on crusade is somehow not the Marit who died and went to Heaven, and can figure out how to send a message without revealing any of her own secrets, she'll let the Marit in Heaven know that this particular friendship is a hole in his security. She doesn't really expect to be able to, though.

The fight with the ancient red dragon is in fact anticlimatic. Fights with dragons usually are, if you get to choose the venue and you know the type. They're immune to nearly everything it can do and have Protection from Fire and Resist Fire in abundance. They smite it. They slaughter it.

He doesn't have to use any spells, though he's not that careful about doing so with this group - Nenio, who doesn't care, Seelah and Lann, who don't know and wouldn't think to do anything about it if they did, Alfirin, who does know and is presumably enjoying herself immensely whenever she catches him at it, and Sosiel, who isn't particularly imaginative and has fairly shoddy spellcraft for being, now, sixth circle. He's more careful when they're travelling with Regill, but the Hellknights are out solving a different problem. (Regill should in principle have no way to detect magic at all short of seeing it cast, but Regill is competent and would, if he did notice something, follow up on it in an unpredictable way depending what he believed was going on.)

They get back and have celebratory drinks. He's pretending to be drunk. Alfirin is probably also pretending. Seelah is drunk sincerely and with abandon. He tries not to be too judgmental about this. People who do not have enough sense to lie to you seem better than people who possess enormous amounts of sense but might turn it towards that purpose. 

…and Seelah's most important qualification in some sense is that she does not remind him of Iomedae. At all. Not even slightly.

Catherine is genuinely slightly tipsy, though not enough to miss any steps dancing, and is pretending to be somewhat more drunk, though still not enough to miss any steps dancing. It was a good fight and she continues to live a charmed life and did not get so much as a scratch or a singe and most certainly not a collection of broken ribs from a tail strike - not for lack of trying on her part or on the dragon's, of course. She's having fun; she's safe here, more or less - safe from Cheliax at least - and getting stronger and making allies, she can afford to relax and it even probably helps, with the allies part. The knight-commander does not entirely approve so she looks him dead in the eye and does a complicated set of steps and twists and twirls to close out her dance that should leave him in absolutely no doubt as to her sobriety.

She still hasn't managed to drag Aspex on to the dance floor, but she gives it another try, raising an eyebrow at him and extending an arm in his direction.

(Alfirin is relaxed too, at least relative to how she was earlier today, riding along with Catherine's reckless abandon backed by the in-fact false presumption that she could be cheaply raised if anything happened. She doesn't like being drunk, it feels like she's always on the brink of making a mistake, but if she just doesn't take any actions then making mistakes will be a little harder. Not impossible, just harder. And at this point Catherine's character is well-enough established that avoiding the wine might be the mistake that clues Marit in to something.)

Marit catches the raised eyebrow and extended arm. He finds himself drawn away from all of the important and miserable questions he should really be contemplating by the sheer delight of contemplating his reply to it.

It's a profoundly silly game they're playing, at this point, but they are both of them too stubborn to be the first to give it up.  If he raises his eyebrow in response, is that ruining the fun? Does it make it too unambiguous that he's found her? (He has real reasons not to reveal this, even good ones, but he's well aware that at this point the stubbornness is half of his actual motivation.) What would he do, if Catherine, the charming swashbuckler, was throwing him glances while pretending to get drunk -

Well, he'd brush her off, because it would be terrifically unprofessional to involve himself with Catherine the charming swashbucker.

He shakes his head very slightly back at her and smiles and has another drink, or at least a sip of it before misplacing the rest, and then heads out, still smiling.

Things are under control, and he needs to figure out how to spend the winter. 

(Things are not perfectly under control by the high standards he is accustomed to. Another one of the civilian administrators that Galfrey sent turned out to be a Baphomet cultist. At this point on the administrative side he only trusts Irabeth, Anevia, Arsinoe, and summoned celestials and they're accordingly overworked. Lady Konomi has picked up that he trusts her substantially less far than he could throw her, and it's affecting their working relationship a bit even though he's been hosting all the parades for Galfrey she requests. He had to spend most of a week retrieving all the soul-trapping jewelry Darek Sunhammer had been leaving about. Response time to a Sending for help is north of two minutes if he doesn't just go himself, thanks to Nenio being distractible and frequently hard to find.

But - they're vanishingly rarely losing men on patrol. They're doing better about that than Lastwall; he went and snooped on Lastwall's records so he knew the rate to beat if he wanted to be smug, which he absolutely did. (He is smug even though he's spending more money than them to achieve this result; he did an analysis and he's pretty sure that his spending more money will save in the long run, at his expected rate of success at making his soldiers stronger.) They have six wizards at fourth circle, now, and two at fifth, and Nenio at sixth. He hasn't identified a Baphomet cultist meetup in a month; there are still some cultists, he's sure, but they are lying very low.

It's not the Shining Crusade. But in five years, it might be reminiscent.)

So he needs to figure out how to spend the winter. 

He sends Lastwall Commune requests as often as he'd send them if he thought they were probably not corrupt and their god probably worth obeying. He does not really trust the answers, obviously, but he does not openly defy them. 

(If Iomedae were really worth listening to and wanted people like Marit to cooperate with Her, She'd have arranged for it to be possible for him to ask her some more pointed questions that weren't filtered through the Church.) 

But in any event it'd be out of keeping with who he's pretending to be, not to ask whether they ought to spend the winter on the Crusade priorities still possible to accomplish then or on Her other work, and also he's kind of curious what Her church will say She answered. 

(The Iomedae he knew would be doing something about Cheliax. And maybe you have to close the Wound first or risk losing it during, but -)

He is examining a map of present-day Cheliax when she enters his office one day. 

- if it were anyone else entering unexpectedly he'd use an illusion to blanket the map, or come up with an excuse for it, but it's Alfirin so he does not bother.  He in fact wants her to see it, is willing to trade her some coins in the guessing-game for it. Here's what I'm thinking about. I'm sure you're thinking about it too. What's the plan?

"Aspex," she says, because it's Catherine speaking and that's the only name she knows him by. "I would say you're getting ahead of yourself, with the situation here still precarious, but it would make me the world's third greatest hypocrite so I shall keep my silence."

Who, he wonders, is the world's second greatest hypocrite. And where on the list would she rank their complicatedly dead mutual friend - this is not a productive line of thought. "The situation here has been precarious for a century," he observes. "One might not want to wait on it improving. Though apparently she does. Want to wait."

Catherine blinks confusedly once, but is clearly not supposed to be confused by that sentence so only once, and then moves on - Aspex can clarify if it's important and not just small talk - "Well, waiting for the right time is sometimes the wiser decision - I myself am waiting for the right time. That happens to be what I came to talk to you about, actually - to apologize. In advance. Because when I think I've found the right moment, when I leave this crusade, I'm afraid I'm going to be taking a lot of your best people with me. Not Derenge, obviously, and Nenio thinks you're a more interesting puzzle than I am, but - I think I can win over most of the rest and I don't want to catch you by surprise with it."

Well, in a sense it's what he wanted, which is for them to actually talk about the plan.

In another sense it's a strange, strange framing of it. Marit has been subjecting everyone he meets who can take it to the intense sustained pressure that strengthens them as fast as it can be done with acceptable casualties, and to anyone who has known him his entire life - and she has - it'll be obvious he's been doing it for that front as much as for this front. Obviously when there's an opening to handle Cheliax they'll put everyone there.

He would kind of have expected her to discuss, with him, when that moment is drawing close. Which perhaps is what she's doing, but - oddly direct for if they were still pretending not to know each other, oddly indirect if they are admitting that they do.

Well. This is Drezen. They have uprooted a truly astonishing number of cultists, spies, quasits, etcetera - and they're speaking out loud. She may just have adopted a policy of literally never saying anything out loud that would amount to an acknowledgement that she's (possessing? impersonating? reincarnated as?) Catherine. 

Also she could just be trying to throw him off balance even while they talk Cheliax, for fun. Either way, he can play that game too. "Huh!" he says. "It's a strange crusade commander who wouldn't hold that against you, an announced intent to run off with all my allies to go win back your own silly southern throne. Though I suppose it surpasses an unannounced intent. Either way I don't think you have the strength, yet." Obviously she doesn't or she'd have done it already. 

Something is a little off about that response - it doesn't seem quite in-character? Oh - Aspex isn't surprised, he already knew - he's just pretending this is new information...she doesn't know why.

"I don't, yet. I'll probably need to leave here before I do, to make more allies elsewhere. Reconcile with Cyprian, for one -  If you ask me to resign, for this, I will, without making a fuss of it. I'll come back to - steal your people - later, it wouldn't be fair to you to take them now when I don't need them yet and the ones I'm most sure of are your healers - Daeran likes me, Sosiel's Andoren - I could get Seelah too."

There's again a vague sense of strangeness, perhaps from comparing this Alfirin to the Alfirin in his memories which are much more recent than hers are. Some things are the same. Some things you'd expect to change, in nine hundred years, and in whatever happened with Iomedae, which must have hurt her as badly as it has hurt him. - he should just answer the explicit stated topic of conversation and not try to address any of the rest.

"It wouldn't be fair to yourself if you take them now, I'm better than you at making them stronger. And of course I'm not going to ask you to resign."

He shakes his head and smiles tiredly at the map of Cheliax. 

"I was - pleased when I realized you were positioned to go for it. There's no one I'd rather have it. I never imagined you wouldn't leave, once you were ready, and you're welcome here until then. I…" no, everything else he might conceivably say is something he certainly wouldn't say to Catherine. "...admire your swordsmanship."

(Her swordsmanship is excellent but of course he is mostly only impressed because he knows she's a ninth circle wizard. Most ninth circle wizards couldn't also be nearly his equal in a swordfight; he had in fact rather imagined he was the best swordfighter in the world among people who could also cast sixth-circle arcane spells, and this is still probably true but by a much smaller margin than he'd imagined. )

She's glad. She was pretty sure he'd back her, he's by all reports Lawful Good and - he was uncomfortable working with Regill, briefly, he's clearly not in denial about Hell being bad or Cheliax being a humanitarian nightmare - But it feels nice to have it confirmed, to not have it as an apparently poorly-kept secret. She smiles at him.

And he complimented her swordsmanship, which - he's done before, obviously but this time is different, more personal - a little bit awkward, hesitating - Aspex is shy with her. It's not really what she'd have expected from the man, but - it's flattering, and kind of cute. And at this rate he's never going to make the first move before she steals all his best people and runs off to fight a war and marry Cyprian in five years.

"I admire yours too," she says, and leans forward to kiss him.

(Alfirin, who has been watching Marit much more closely than she has Catherine, is as surprised by this as anyone)

- oh. 

Well.

He is really very very surprised. Surprised enough that for the first few seconds what he does is nothing, while he attempts to reevaluate - it's not that it doesn't make any sense - she was always an intensely private person, he had no idea who she had, if she had anyone -

‘It's unprofessional' is a little bit of a side note. They are both of them professionally in the business of picking up all the pieces of this shattered world and he's running a Crusade right now but it doesn't matter very much alongside the other things, as she just said very pointedly.

They shouldn't be stupid, but they are not operating in the context for which Iomedae lay out her rules, and also Iomedae was just a person making her own wild guesses off her own deep confusions -

Less of a side note is that Alfirin should of course be long dead, and that she did something such that Discern Locations aimed at her turn up nothing and Nightmares claim there is no one to find, and she can be found only by looking for Catherine de Litran. He's thought a little about how you'd pull that off, though surely much less than she thought about it in order to do it. It's more likely to be something resembling possession than simple impersonation. He doesn't need to know her plans, he doesn't need to know how she did it, but he does, in fact need -

...He's not reacting how she expected him to. He's kind of not noticeably reacting at all?

Catherine pulls back, confused and a little hurt. "I'm so sorry, I must have misread something - Thank you. For your support with Cheliax." She stands up and makes as though to leave.    

"- it's not a no," he says, hoarsely, though he still hasn't moved. "We should - talk first, though. Catherine. De Litran. Is she…dead?"

Catherine is now less hurt but only because she's too confused to be hurting, exactly.

(Alfirin understands what's happening but was caught off-guard and hasn't decided how to respond yet - )

"...That's the first time kissing a man has caused him to doubt that I'm alive. I'm not really sure what to say to that."

Now he is confused, and defaults to assuming they're being spied on, even though this really by rights ought to be very hard to do.

He scans the room for magic or movement, and when this gets him nothing throws out the heightened Glitterdust that beats even Tar-Baphon's Invisibility.

They both sparkle intensely, as does one of Marit's invisible spies, right where it's expected to be in the corner. Nothing else in the room does.

Well this is incredibly awkward now and she's not sure she wants to explain in front of one of Marit's archons. She glances in its direction.

It isn't authorized or able to listen, in his private quarters, just get help if needed, but he gives the signal to send it away anyway. 

"I'm sorry," Alfirin says when it's gone, "She's not dead, that was her, I have been avoiding taking actions around you lest you recognize me - how did you do it?"

Okay, possibly there are some downsides to being the kind of person that he and Alfirin both are. 

He feels like he's in free fall, suddenly attempting to recategorize months of interactions as having apparently been with Catherine, a woman he barely knows.

He did of course contemplate in advance whether he was willing to tell her if she asked, and decided that he was. Good decision, past Marit, because present Marit can hardly think at all right now. "- I visited the gardens. The first time there wasn't a clone but the second time there was. I -"

No, actually, he has absolutely no idea what he wants to say here, except that apparently and substantially to his own surprise he wishes the kiss had been real.

Alfirin is not sure what to address first and settles on practical matters because they're less uncomfortable. "I'm not going to ask for your forks but I do want to be able to find them all if anything happens to you."

...And then she realizes how that might sound and adds, "You are my only living friend and I wouldn't do anything to hurt you without reasons you'd agree are good enough."

That's her, all right. An enormous swirling pile of confusion about literally all of their interactions for the last six months but at least at the base of it there's something he does recognize.

(Does he believe the promise? He's not in the habit of believing promises, really, just separately tracking what it means if they're true and what it means if they're false. But. He comes closer to trusting her than anyone else alive or dead. And he cannot, actually, afford any of the precautions that'd be necessary were she an adversary. That's spending too much, in the worlds where she's not.)

'You are my only living friend'. He ...just does believe that, actually. It's how she would feel; he knows because it's how he feels.

"One on my person, in separated parts labelled ‘16' and ‘i', one on Sunhammer's demiplane encased in a block of copper. I bought a scroll of Gate off Morgethai to get there in the first place."

And that first time she wasn't keyed to the alarms, and the latter times - She hadn't thought she'd need alarms for plane shifts, knowing where all the tuning forks were. She was obviously wrong about that.

"Thank you - I know this does in fact make me the world's greatest hypocrite, but - When I looked for you in Heaven you were there. You're also here, a lot younger-looking than when we parted ways." She leaves the question implicit.

"I don't know what happened," he says. "It was 3824, and then I was in Kenabres, and they seemed to be having a truly astonishing array of problems caused by some combination or demons, incompetence or conspiracy. It took me a few weeks to confirm that this even purports to be the world I was familiar with. …the holy books were edited, or she was lying about what she meant to put in them -"

"Her church made changes, I helped make them stick. I'm not sure why She let me."

"Something went very wrong," he says flatly. "Beyond the blindingly obvious, though maybe related to it. She wouldn't have allowed - once things had settled down in Kenabres I pulled aside Her most senior priest in Mendev with a list of about forty questions so I could decide how far I could work with Her, and got told that only Lastwall is permitted Communes. Either the Church or the god has something to hide and even if it's the church - She shouldn't have allowed it."

"Cansellarion's alright, and planning to do something about Cheliax. I don't think the church as a whole is hiding something, so much as stubbornly convinced that their way of doing things is the best way and nobody else has anything to offer them more useful than unthinking obedience." She could say almost the same about Hell, though.

It's hardly exculpatory even if true and anyway Marit is not persuaded. He knows he has an inclination to see malice where incompetence is an adequate explanation, but also this inclination has served him well on this Crusade where people keep being Baphomet cultists. "Hmm," he says neutrally. "Well. As I thought I told you five minutes ago, I'll take everyone here who can handle it as far as they'll go and then you can have them for Cheliax. She can make herself useful if She sees fit." It would be very very hard to detect the bitterness and injury in his voice if one hadn't known him for his entire adult life. 

"I am not counting on Her help." Alfirin has had many more centuries of practice hiding bitterness and injury in her voice; The fact that he cannot detect any doesn't mean anything.

That's that, then. "Do I - need to apologize to Catherine - I had no intent to -" He's at this point deeply confused about what Catherine and Alfirin are doing - a voluntary body-sharing partnership seems too optimistic - but regardless he wouldn't have shown special friendliness to a young female subordinate if he'd had any idea she was there to interpret it at all -

Alfirin thinks, for a moment. "I don't think so. She wasn't feeling any - pressure - and she has an item for alter self. She will probably be disappointed but won't think you wronged her." She sighs. "I will talk to her and tell you if I'm mistaken about that."

Now he's even more confused about what that relationship is. He nods, though. "I don't think there's anything else - oh, Daeran's possessed by some kind of extremely powerful evil outsider who murders anyone which it realizes knows it exists." He thinks Alfirin is safer warned than not warned.

"Oh. That explains some things. Um, how powerful, Balor? Demon lord? Worse than that?"

"No idea. Everything I know it to have killed is weaker than us. One of Her inquisitors is looking into it. Liotr, not one of the idiots." And he of course has an archon spying on Liotr, and a few leads on independent research into Daeran's situation once he has the time, but Alfirin will take that as given.

She thinks about the rest of their adventuring companions, and what secrets they might have. "Do you know what's up with Nenio? Is Sosiel secretly part-demon, or just a terrible Shelynite for other reasons? - Oh, Ulbrig does seem to be legitimately Sarkorian if you weren't sure."

"He is not secretly part-demon to my knowledge. I sometimes suspect Galfrey deliberately only sent me people who are either of questionable character or cultists but I am known to assume ill intentions very readily. He is probably a terrible Shelynite because the Good gods are unfixably bad at conveying their priorities or because they are themselves terrible.

I am reasonably confident Nenio had her memories erased in some kind of encounter with Areshkegal which probably had other side effects but I don't have so many sixth circle wizards I can afford to be picky. The passphrase to make her amulet of natural armor strangle her is ‘rhinoceros glade silversmith'. - Sunhammer's crafting for me."

"Do you want me to do anything about that?"

If he trusts her enough it makes more sense for Sunhammer to be her Dominate than his; she was better at it nine hundred years ago and is probably better at it by a much larger margin now. If he doesn't trust her quite that much it changes the situation from ‘both of them could easily kill the other but only with great difficulty do it for good and without a lot of contingencies triggering' to one where her advantage is very large. This is also a question he pre-calculated in advance but he did so using evidence that turned out to be mistaken. "I'll think about it."

Well, that's a reasonable level of distrust for him to have, if not totally consistent with how he's reacted to other things in this conversation. "Of course."

She sighs, again. "You thought it was me, when Catherine kissed you."

Oh no, apparently they do have to talk about this instead of just meticulously never talking about this for the rest of their lives. "I had - presumed it was you all along since I saw the clone. In hindsight there were signs but they could also have been - precautions for third parties, precautions to fool me. You'd know I was watching, you'd be very careful - that was the lens through which I was seeing everything.

I -" what does he want to say here. I'm sorry for thinking it was you when the woman you're sharing a body with kissed me unexpectedly? He's not going to say that. He somewhat feels it but he's not going to say it. The thing to address about the situation is that he didn't decline her, except he can't think what he wants to say about that either. ‘I regret that it is now common knowledge that I would sleep with you if you weren't sharing a body with a random Galatian noblewoman.' He cannot say that either. 

"You are my only living friend as well," he settles on. "I've found your presence very comforting. Even if I was substantially wrong about some important facts about it."

He really is determined not to address this directly. Alfirin has played the game where she spends forty years meticulously avoiding any suggestion of intimacy with a comrade, and then centuries after their death wondering whether she should have done otherwise; She's not particularly inclined to do it again.

"Are you interested, given that Catherine is alive and sometimes conscious, assuming that she doesn't mind, which I do not know but I'm not going to ask her and risk upsetting her with it if you wouldn't be interested anyways."

"I think it probably depends on details of your situation with her which I assume you'd have volunteered if you wanted me to know. Do I want you, yes, do I want you and a prisoner, no, do I want you and an ally half-informed of the situation who won't remember anything happened - I'm going to go out for the evening and think back through six months I've been misreading and then I can get back to you about that as well as about whether you can have Sunhammer."

"That seems like the right thing to do, here. If you're confident of your control of Sunhammer I don't need or particularly want him." She stands up again and heads to the door.

He's running at least a little bit of a risk with Sunhammer. He doesn't say that. He really does need to think through all of the interactions that he processed as interactions with Alfirin and weren't. He waves her out, and puts the map of Cheliax away, and -

How do you answer a question like 'is it acceptable to sleep with your old friend who is sharing a body with your subordinate, possibly voluntarily -' 

It's not like he's built something new in the place in his heart where Iomedae and her way of seeing the world used to live merely because he's evicted her. He'll just have to get by without any kind of theory. 

"If Catherine is not inclined to spy on us, free to decide as she likes, gives her assent, and need not fear she'll end up with child, then I'm all right with it," he tells her, the next day, once they've verified they're alone.  The long list of conditions so she can convey a ‘yes' or a ‘no' without specifying which was violated. He's of course trusting her not to be lying, but - while he doesn't trust her not to be evil, he does trust her not to be stupid, and arranging to ruin their working relationship would just be stupid. "I think it's unlikely but not vanishingly so we'll have problems with Sunhammer; the demiplane fork is here."

"You really ought to be more careful about checking who you're speaking to, when we're in private. It is me, this time, but you shouldn't assume. I will tell you tomorrow, whether those conditions are met." She'd say that even if she knew all the answers now, but, in the event, she doesn't. She takes the fork. "Do you want me to take over managing Sunhammer or is this just so I have access if something goes wrong?"

"If you're willing to take it over I'd prefer you do so. Alternatively if you know any obscure curses I could be more sure of my hold. - if you're liable to leave soon I'll keep him, I'm not willing to put him to other purposes." 

He's not actually sure if that's Lastwall's rule - he didn't tell them about Sunhammer - and Mendev doesn't have a rule at all, but one has to draw the line somewhere. If he decides to give up on Lawful Good he wants it to be out of a principled conviction he should do something else and not out of disillusionment over Iomedae specifically. 

"You will only use the man to oppose his god and his god's allies, and not for anything else? An odd principle."

"He was convicted of crimes against the Crusade, the Crusade can punish him with service. He did not by committing crimes against the Crusade become my personal property."

"If someone convicted me for - various crimes - and sentenced me to permanent domination, I'd rather be their personal property if they were using me against Asmodeus than be put to use hunting down all of my great-grandchildren, or something, even if the sentencing body had a legitimate interest in hunting down my great-grandchildren."

"I won't use him for anything else, though, if that's where you've chosen to draw the line."

"The principle doesn't run through the interests of the prisoner. The legal code doesn't have any provisions for 'or a punishment mutually preferred by the judge and the convict' because the judge isn't in fact the injured body and everyone in Mendev is spectacularly corrupt and it'd make matters worse if judges can collect personal slaves by offering it as an alternative to the mines...I don't know if Mendev has mines, and the Crusade doesn't, but you take my meaning. 

I don't know how Iomedae'd do it but I'm - making a point of not trying to do everything her way, in case that's how we got into this mess in the first place." 

"Less discretion like that makes sense, if you're setting rules for other people and not just yourself."

She plane shifts. She dominates Sunhammer. She plane shifts again, this time to the gardens to have a conversation.

The next day Alfirin tells Marit that his conditions are not met. "Also, what weapon are you using these days? I might have someone to introduce you to who is a sword." It is related; she'd have avoided that introduction if she and Marit were sleeping together.

"It's funny you would say that because my current sword is, in fact, someone. Named Finnean. We're not clear on what happened. I would of course be happy to meet another sword." He's not going to give any indication of whether he's guessed which condition is unmet, and in fact he doesn't know - though he is quite interested in what the Alfirin and Catherine situation is.

"We'll have to go on a minor excursion to fetch him…next oathday, I think. He's in a secret tomb in Osirion, which I think should be no trouble for us to get through, but it only shows up one night each month. He goes by Frostbite, now."

"Would I recognize some other name he's gone by?"

"Probably not. After and before your time, not internationally famous." There's not much reason not to tell Marit, besides Alfirin's habitual reluctance to give away her secrets, or the fact that it'd be making it too easy for him, in the game they play. Which is reason enough, when there's nothing at stake.

Yeah, all right, he'll figure it out himself. 

"How long would you say it takes to - stop finding everybody either disappointing or excessively reminiscent."

"At least eight hundred eighty one years."

He invites Cansellarion to join them for the assault on the Ivory Sanctum. It's one of those things for which you will really want more powerful paladins than they actually have, and he's curious about the man. Alfirin doesn't vouch for many people. 

He's trying not to behave any differently about Catherine, and he's pretty good at it, but it's in fact a little awkward. He half-comforts himself that she clearly has enough autonomy she could say ‘help' once if she wanted to, and then points out to himself that he probably wouldn't help her if she did.

Seelah and Irabeth are both third circle. Nenio can now do seventh-circle spells if they’re illusions. 

If he keeps them all alive or retrievably dead for another year it'll be a force that can go to Iz and take down undead Terendelev and get her back. Without he or Alfirin tipping their hand. A year after that - with two archmages - maybe they can close the rift, and if that fails maybe they can plunge the relevant section of the Abyss into disorganized anarchy that precludes organized expeditions to the Material. 

He tries to keep an eye on Cansellarion inconspicuously. It's his first extended contact with a person formally part of Her church hierarchy since Hulrun. He's not sure how much of Hulrun's behavior was Iomedae's fault versus Her Church versus Her inquisition specifically. 

Catherine is still a bit unsettled, though she hides it well enough. Marit can tell. Sosiel and Regill can probably tell; Ulbrig, maybe.

Cansellarion, who's never met Catherine, almost certainly cannot, though he is keeping an eye on her as much as on Marit. Unlike Marit, he makes no particular attempts to hide his interest - Even if he did it's easy enough to infer. The Knight-Commander is a new factor in Avistani geopolitics, a competent, clever, powerful Lawful Good fighter who showed up out of nowhere; He may have ambitions beyond the worldwound, or be able to be convinced to grow such ambitions. The Duchess de Litran openly proclaims her membership in the Galtan royal family with its implicit claim to the Chelish throne and is openly opposed to Hell and its practices; it's not hard to tell what her ambitions are. They are both people he wants by his side when the time comes. Moreso if 'Aspex' is secretly a gold dragon in disguise.

Apart from his interest in the two of them his behavior is unremarkable. He smites demons. He's very efficient about it.

It doesn't give Marit much opportunity to form an impression of his character but of course Marit can respect people who control their presentation such that it's nearly impossible to form an impression of their character. 

They clear the place out, very competently. Jerribeth tries to negotiate; Marit does not really believe in negotiating with demons, though he does believe in making it clear you're not negotiating before you start the killing. Xanthir Vang is a horrendous swarm of insects; Fireballs work fine on him. They're out the same day, only a little battered, and with the news that there's an entrance to the Midnight Fane under Drezen. It takes more than that to make Marit look surprised, though it's in fact news with substantial strategic import.

"If the rift has spread that far then there's no hope of moving the line in."

"There wouldn't be," he agrees.

"...so, what's the plan."

"They could be lying about the location. Or wrong about it. Or it could be a separate rift. Or, with the opportunity to study the rift closely, there could be a way to shrink or close it. Or there could be another miracle not evidently worth what was paid for it. Or the world could be overrun by demons. Or something I haven't thought of could happen."

"That covers everything except a miracle that is worth what we paid for it."

"Not sure I've heard of any of those."

Galfrey asks to be present for the fight in the Fane. Marit is paranoid, of course, but he can hardly refuse, and it'll be useful to have her anyway. He asks Cansellarion again as well. It's a longer string of fights than the Sanctum, and a more stressful one, because the Fane's nature precludes teleportation, so there's no real resort if there is something here stronger than they can handle. 

(There are several resorts. Marit and Alfirin are both powerful spellcasters playing fighters. Marit's bag includes a truly astonishing array of spell options, up to and including an emergency scroll of Wish, which should work whatever the local teleportation conditions. But it would be genuinely extremely costly to have to use that here; they want it for Cheliax. He assumes Alfirin's supply situation is about the same, though he hasn't asked.)

It takes about sixteen bloody grinding hours. Marit dies once (well, his Talisman of Life's Breath is forced to activate) and Nenio dies twice. The (known) spellcasters use every spell they have above second circle and most of their weaker spells too. They're down to wands for healing by the time the place is finally cleared. 

When they return to the entrance to Drezen Galfrey and her guard are standing in front of the door, like people who mean to hold it, and Marit has the unpleasant but not uncommon sensation of getting confirmation he was not being excessively paranoid. 

"You've done good work," she says. 

"Thank you, Your Majesty."

"Mendev's only hope - the world's only hope - now lies in the Abyss."

She keeps talking, but he can barely hear her. Eight of her guards, most of them paladins, who are weak against him - he's not Evil - but may be fine against Alfirin. She'll side with him. …assuming it's her and not Catherine. He isn't sure if Catherine will side with him. Regill's oath is to Aspex personally and pointedly not to Galfrey, probably because Regill has seen this shit before. Seelah - will probably side with him but it'll be bad for her. If there's any Law in this stupid country at all he can see if he can get Seelah and one of Galfrey's people of equivalent strength to mutually stand aside. Daeran's with him but also having Daeran with him turns this political. Sosiel is - probably with him. Ember doesn't kill humans and while it'd be very useful to sleep them - better to try to get her to sit aside too - Nenio's effectively a commoner right now - Lann and Ulbrig are with him -

- Cansellarion's the most significant unknown, but really, every time he's thought that someone empowered by Iomedae might be a reasonable person he's been wrong -

"And so I charge you with going to Alushinyrra, and learning the answers we so badly need."

He doesn't think he'll need to use the Wish. He will probably need to use one and possibly both of the two scrolls of Dazing Intensified Fireball, which are precious to him on an emotional level because Arazni scribed them but much cheaper than the Wish. He's not an easy person to read, usually, but he's not very hard to read right now.  He does not wish there to be ambiguity about his intentions.

"No, your Majesty."

- Lann isn't an idiot and can tell when your tribe and another tribe are about to kill each other to the last man. He draws his bow. 

Well imagine that, someone with the guts to stick up to glorious Galfrey. It's going to be a fucking catastrophe and he may well be the sole survivor but he's so very much in favor.

This is no worse than he expected from the queen of Mendev. He eyes the field of battle - The Mendevians are the sorts of stupid people who would hold back smites from the battles with the demons to save them for this betrayal, so Regill is probably going to die first of anyone on his side. So be it. He positions himself in front of Daeran and picks out the traitor he'll take with him.

Well, this is bad - is Galfrey insane? If they go into the abyss right now they will probably all die, that's so obvious and everyone's tired and on edge and they're going to assume that's the plan -

...This has to be a misunderstanding, right? Galfrey means "I charge you with going to the Abyss tomorrow," right, she cannot possibly be intending to send them in when they've just been fighting for a whole day with no rest - even so he disagrees with the tactical call there -

Galfrey's face flickers slightly at the refusal, like she's surprised and disappointed. "Knight-Commander, we have no choice."

Whose benefit are they speaking for at this point, Seelah's and Cansellarion's? Galfrey's own paladins, who have to have a rationalization good enough they won't fall? Galfrey herself, who probably also needs that unless she's actually been faking being a paladin the whole time? 

"We have quite a few choices, which we can discuss at some length once we've returned to Drezen. We can send a better equipped team that has done some advance scouting, interrogated some demons, and understands what to expect. We can seal the rifts as they come. We can spend another two years here in which time I think I can have an archmage, and then try it. I look forward to discussing our options -"

"Do you think I'm an idiot, Knight-Commander? Do you think you can execute my loyal men and assuage me with parades? It's fascinating, how many people turn out to be traitors who had to die, when you're around. You meticulously conceal all your plans and your origins, you surround yourself with Our enemies, you all but make it known you have no love for Mendev or for Our goddess, and now you want to have this conversation in your stronghold. No. I'm not an idiot, Aspex, and whatever you want to say you'll say it here."

Oh, this is the part where her allies decide to kill each other over insufficient zeal and imagined betrayals to the cause.

OK this is clearly getting out of hand, but the problem is, Cansellarion has no context on local politics and does not want to jump to conclusions about who's right, and it's all moving so fast -

"Don't do this, Your Majesty." First, Dust of Disappearance, then he can spellcast. If the Fireball lands there it shouldn't hit his own people. He wants there, instead, if he's also trying to get Cansellarion.

"You and I have both sent many people on dangerous missions that needed doing. And from all I hear of your management of the crusade, I cannot imagine you take it well if they decide to refuse to go."

"I don't send my people on unnecessarily dangerous missions. I don't deny them time to prepare. I don't send them badly injured and low on spells straight into the Abyss without warning. This is an assassination and you're going to have to do it with your own damned sword."

"I hoped it wouldn't come to this," says Galfrey, "but if you're refusing your orders, then you're under arrest."

She does not want to get into a fight where she uses magic in front of Cansellarion, but dying and coming back in a clone might be worse - there are lots of reasons for someone aiming to take the Chelish throne to hide their spellcasting abilities -

"Majesty," interjects Catherine, or perhaps Alfirin, "I don't believe anyone on this side of the door - possibly excepting your cousin - is actually sworn to obey you. Rather than all the good - or at least lawful -" she glances at Regill "- people in this room drawing swords on each other, could we not turn to some outside party for arbitration? ...Sir Cansellarion, if this is too urgent to wait for the church of Abadar?"

Cansellarion counts as an outside party, right? She hopes he counts.

...Oh thank the Goddess.

"I would rather wait for the Abadarans myself," says Cansellarion, "but am willing to act as judge if necessary. And willing to help enforce the Abadaran judgement, if the concern is that commander Aspex would attempt to resist it."

The thing is that he is not, actually, going to lose this fight. He'll expend some resources he'd rather have saved for his actual enemies, the resulting geopolitical mess will be a nightmare, but Galfrey planned this on the wrong assumption they'd be low on spells and actually the two most powerful spellcasters in his command haven't spellcast at all today. 

And he has the Wish scroll. He could, right now, put his people in Drezen and Galfrey's on the Moon. 

The only way he dies here is if he agrees to the arbitration and it goes against him. He has to promise, now, to obey a process that is probably as stupid and corrupt as everything else in the modern world.

This is how everyone feels when they're starting a war. The entire point of Lawful Good - a point deeper and older than Iomedae - is that you can step away. This is the only way out, and you have to be looking, for ways out -

He doesn't actually know anything bad about the Church of Abadar in this world. Arsinoe and Rathimus were both completely ordinary Abadarans. 

"I will abide by the decision made by Abadaran arbitration," he says.

"You could drop the sword, then."

"You have not actually assented to arbitration, your majesty, but if you do agree, then I will gladly drop the sword."

"The matter strikes me as urgent," she says, "and I am reluctant to divert from this location those people required to go find a qualified priest of Abadar and hire them. Sir Cansellarion is right here, and his judgment I'd abide by."

"Ah, yes," says Daeran. "If the justice and judgment of the paladins is called into question, we can simply call in more paladins who can speak to whether the original paladins were questioned wrongly. Eventually there'll be enough paladins in the room that only justice could possibly result."

Yeah, no kidding, Galfrey thinks Cansellarion will side with a fellow member of the Church and the reigning monarch of an important geopolitical ally over an outsider.

He thinks she's probably wrong. Cansellarion wants to win in Cheliax. He's had the chance to see what 'Aspex' is doing here. He expects Cansellarion'd be quite reluctant to have him killed. And on the merits Galfrey's in the wrong. The Worldwound treaty does not permit this; if she's really still a paladin she'll probably fall for it. But it's of course his life he's staking on it. He cannot agree to arbitration and then resist the judgment because it is manifestly unjust; he has to make a choice, now, that he is willing to die by in ten minutes if he sized the man up wrong. 

Alfirin vouches for Cansellarion. Marit acknowledges that it is in an objective sense silly to count the fact the man is a paladin of Iomedae against him. 

The first time Alfirin saved his life, he was nineteen, and -

- the problem was partially caused by the fact that he gave his allies no reason whatsoever to trust him -

He wants Galfrey to die in a fury of Fireballs. It feels righteous and just, for her to have underestimated him and planned this betrayal and for it to fail because for once she tried to stab in the back someone whose back was armored. 

The world has no righteousness and no justice in it. It's just broken, and some of it is ruled by Hell. 

"I will abide by the decision made by Sir Cansellarion," he says. And drops the sword. 

"Very well," says Cansellarion, seeming pleased but perhaps not entirely pleased by this development, "To begin with, your Majesty, do you contest the claim that nobody in Aspex' company is sworn to your service?"

Daeran is having a coughing fit. It's dusty here in the Abyss.

"Count Arendae is," she says. 

…Marit realizes, belatedly though admittedly ten seconds ago he had a lot on his mind, that ‘Daeran's passenger gets nervous' is probably lethal to everyone in this room.

"Count Arendae was assigned to my service for as long as I had need of him," he says.

"What were the terms of Count Arendae's oath, and of the transfer of authority to Commander Aspex?"

Galfrey can give that; Daeran doesn't contest it. 

"In that case," Cansellarion says with a sigh, "It seems to me that these people are not obliged by specific oath to follow your Majesty's orders sending them to the Abyss, which means we've come to the reason I'd have preferred waiting for the church of Abadar - I am generally not stationed at the Worldwound, and I am not particularly familiar with the specific terms of the Worldwound treaty which may apply here, so we will have to adjourn for at least a few hours while I read the treaty, and the charter of the Fifth Crusade, and we will have to do it back in the citadel of Drezen unless someone here happens to have a copy in their pack."

He wants to sleep and not stay awake for another two hours reading legal documents before pronouncing a high-stakes judgement, but apparently he's not getting that so he'd at least like to read the legal documents at a comfortable desk instead of a gore-spattered chunk of the Abyss.

"It will be much more difficult to enforce a ruling made in Drezen," says Galfrey. "We can send a runner for any relevant documents you need to review."

"The knight-commander is Lawful Good, your majesty, and besides that not a wizard. You can take his boots and he will not have the means to flee even if he decided to break his word to the contrary." (Cansellarion is pretty sure by now that Aspex is, tragically, not a dragon.)

Galfrey shakes her head tiredly. "He'll have hidden things in the citadel, he'll have allies that can Message him through the walls. I know he reads Lawful Good. A moderately clever Baphomet cultist could figure out how to pull that off."

"I in fact carry a copy of the Worldwound treaty," says Marit, who would have preferred not to bring this up if relocating to Drezen could have been achieved thereby but who can, actually, respect Galfrey's insistence that he shouldn't be assumed unable to Teleport under his own power just because he wears plate armor and no one has ever seen him cast a spell before. 

"Thank you, commander. Now everyone may as well make themselves comfortable while I review this."

He finds a relatively dry spot to sit.

"You are looking for Article four, section three, subsections twelve through twenty-three of the Treaty," volunteers Regill.

He's not, actually, going to take the word of a Hellknight on that, when said word was rather imprecisely given, even if it would save him a lot of effort.

"...Thank you, paralictor, but I still intend to review the full treaty in case there are any other applicable sections."

"There are not."

Marit doesn't need to eat, anymore, but he starts a pot of stew anyway. Almost wordlessly reaches to Alfirin for a rabbit before remembering that Catherine-Alfirin does not offer people rabbits at all times. Probably because it'd be a giveaway to him specifically, actually. She does still have them; when they went out to pick up Frostbite she used one.

"This is just a horrible misunderstanding," says Seelah. 

"This is a very comprehensible attempt to kill me," says Marit. "But by the grace of Iomedae" he doesn't even sound sarcastic "it is likely to fail in a way that leaves everyone alive, and really, what more than that can you ask of Law?"

"You could ask," says Catherine, somewhat unsettled, "That paladins not draw swords on each other in the first place. Nor try to assassinate their non-paladin allies on a vague suspicion that the latter are insufficiently committed to the cause."

"You could also ask that Iomedae's inquisitors not burn children at the stake in Her name," says Marit, "but if you go around asking for things like that you'll be very disappointed all the time. I cannot recommend it."

"You're very frightened and hurt," says Ember, "and the Queen is very frightened and hurt, and people are not kind to one another, when they are afraid and in pain."

"Isn't the whole point of Paladins that they don't make stupid mistakes because they're afraid?" Catherine retorts.

Commander Aspex isn't particularly opinionated about paladins. Marit doesn't really think there's a plausible way most people could guess his origins, but going around with an uncanny knowledge of the (old, possibly not current) Iomedaen orthodoxy would certainly invite questions. He adds wood to his fire. 

"I think that the goddess protects us from fear to help us avoid some kinds of mistake," Seelah says. "But I guess misunderstandings can still happen."

"No one here has misunderstood a damned thing," Daeran says. "She thought she could get away with it because she thought the commander wouldn't be willing to fight back or would lose if he did."

"Or because she thinks the law is arguably with her and that Cansellarion will be inclined to see it that way," says Marit, "in which case she will get away with it, so don't be too pleased with yourself."

"Ten to ten's not that much worse than ten to nine."

"Daeran for once in your life shut up." That is much sharper than Catherine usually is with him; usually they at least appear to be the best of friends.

"If he's with her, you are all ordered to surrender and I intend to," Marit says flatly. "I'm not entertaining discussion about that." Though now that he thinks about it it's not surprising Daeran is specifically prickly about ‘we will die without a fight as it's what honor demands', and it may not be an intentional effort to kick off a civil war.  

"I think it's remarkable," Lann says. "We were about to fight and then you… agreed to just decide who is in the right instead. It sounds like the kind of thing that shouldn't be possible."

"It's the kind of thing that is just barely possible," Marit says, still glaring at Daeran, "and half the time isn't. But a people who can't do it will certainly all be eaten by demons. …Regill, can you think of a reasonable interpretation of the treaty under which Galfrey can keep us out of Drezen?" It'd have to turn on something like the right of a fortress commander to deny entrance, though not other aid, to allied forces if they pose a security risk to the fortress.

"As queen of Mendev, Galfrey does not have the authority to order us into the Abyss, sir. We are obliged to obey her strategic directives, to the best of our ability, insofar as they relate to maintaining the defenses that protect Mendevian settlements. She may, at her own discretion, refuse to quarter us in Mendevian settlements, though she cannot refuse to supply us so long as we do not unnecessarily linger in the vicinity of her cities, nor can she refuse us passage past her cities - I do not know whether Drezen qualifies as a Mendevian city or as a fort controlled by the crusade. That would depend on your charter, which I am less familiar with than with the treaty."

Iomedae in her day had a lot of problems related to territory controlled by the crusade. Well, related to the fact she wanted to control it and not give it to Taldor. Marit had some of those problems in mind, when he was writing the proposed charter for Galfrey, but he also hadn't wanted to imitate the Shining Crusade too evidently. 

"It's not a Mendevian city and she can't deny us passage through it in her capacity as the Queen of Mendev. She can of course replace the Knight-Commander of the Crusade, and the Knight-Commander of the Crusade could refuse us passage through it - not past it, but in this case our only way out is through it."

"Or into the Abyss and hope Sosiel can plane shift us out right away. Not that I love that plan. If we're stuck here overnight maybe ask for it just in case, though."

Marit has a scroll of Plane Shift. He does not say this; no one needs to know, yet. 

"The Queen does have a point that the mission needs doing," says Seelah. "Someone has to track down Vang's boss, and there's no one but us."

"When Nenio has Discern Location," Marit says curtly. "At an absolute minimum, because running around the Abyss'll be an enormous waste of time without that. Plausibly she'll also need Gate. It has at no point escaped me that ending this may take a team with the skills to go kill Deskari in his home, and I mean to build one, but I don't have it yet."

Alfirin, or maybe Catherine, nods. "There's really no sense in rushing into the Abyss before we're ready - it's not like we have anyone here who knows how to navigate it, going in as we are we'd get lost even if we don't run into something strong enough to kill us all."

"We should look up that friendly succubus who kept sending you dreams again," says Daeran. 

"No."

"And while we're contemplating bright ideas, if you get fired by my darling cousin you can at last ask Catherine out like we can all see you want to."

"Daeran," Catherine says, faking a smile, "There's really no need to be jealous."

"Love, jealousy is the spice of life. All great romances are built upon it. Say, Regill, does that precious treaty of yours forbid me from challenging the Knight-Commander to a duel?"

"Duels between members of different organizations party to the treaty are forbidden. Duels within an organization are permitted according to the laws of that organization - Commander Aspex' charter rightly forbids them. They are bad for discipline and inefficient at suppressing pointless romantic drama."

They wait for Cansellarion. Marit does not pick up his sword. Iomedae would object that he's falsely representing himself as unarmed, which he absolutely is, but he never quite saw eye to eye with her about that even when he saw eye to eye with her about nearly everything.

Iomedae in this situation would just have told everyone the whole truth and would be being happily obeyed by her church. Marit…arguably also has this option, but he cannot imagine taking it. 

He waits.

A runner did need to be sent for a copy of the crusade's charter at one point, but finding one in Drezen is not hard, and Cansellarion is eventually done reading all the relevant documents. He stands up and announces his verdict, somewhat tiredly. "The Queen does not have the authority to order Aspex and his company into the Abyss, nor to deny them access to Drezen, which is a Crusade holding and not a Mendevian one. She does have the authority to declare the crusade successful, to dismiss knight-commander Aspex, or to recall count Arendae to her own service with two weeks' notice."

He knew that, but still wasn't expecting to hear it. He doesn't allow himself to feel at all relieved.

Galfrey looks furious. It's just like Lastwall's paladins to get hung up on technicalities and paperwork and never mind if that means leaving a cultist and murderer running the Crusade and now well aware they're onto him. - no. She can still change that.  "But the Knight-Commander can refuse this or any company access to Drezen, lawfully?"

"...Yes, your Majesty." He can't, with his heavily fatigued brain, figure why Aspex would want to deny his own party access to Drezen, but it's unambiguous that he has the right to.

"Right, then, I'm removing Aspex from command of the Crusade. I will serve myself in that capacity. And I refuse them all permission to enter Drezen."

"...As you say, your Majesty." Cansellarion does not look at all happy with this turn of events, but it is again unambiguously legal.

"Knight-Commander Galfrey of Mendev, you are obliged by the Worldwound Treaty, Article 2, Section three to provide this company with all supplies necessary for our upkeep for so long as we remain, through no fault of our own, unable to move out of your territory and towards our legitimate and self-chosen objectives." It's kind of trivial, the expenses of feeding less than a dozen people, but that doesn't mean Regill is going to let Galfrey get away with ignoring that obligation, and some of them do, in fact, need to eat.

Marit is very fond of Regill. "I will also formally request of the Knight-Commander that my personal property in Drezen be returned to me promptly, as well as that Crusade property purchased on a loan from the Church of Abadar for which I am personally liable and which was secured by my word and my collateral, or alternatively request that those loans are promptly renegotiated to not be under my name. A further concern is the sixty called outsiders serving in Drezen under my direct command; I want assurance that they are safe and will be provided safe passage towards whatever destination I convey."

At this last Galfrey just looks baffled. (She's in fact feeling kind of baffled by the whole thing; she expected Aspex to try to kill her again, not to start talking about loans.) "Who called them? Nenio?"

"Not relevant; they're under my direct command and not the Crusade command, and I want to ensure that they may all remain in Drezen in safety until another safe location for them to operate from has been identified, and that they may then depart Drezen safely."

"You have a private army of sixty called outsiders and you want them to stay in Drezen indefinitely. No. By all means convey promptly where they should be told to go instead."

Marit's instincts are all to have this conversation via Telepathic Bond but it's a bit of an escalation, what with how it'd make it possible for them to plan to kill Galfrey on the spot, though he's not in fact planning to do that. "We'll have that discussion now, then," he says. "You can return all of my personal property in the meantime, do you require an itemized list? Three bags of holding in the Knight-Commander's quarters, and their contents, as well as the contents of the library there; the contents of the second-floor armory, eighty suits of enchanted plate mail, a hundred and twenty nine enchanted longbows, and sixty-one sets of enchanted barding with Endure Elements."

"- the latter are the loans? Those can be transferred to be in the Crusade's name not yours, as they should have been all along."

"Your Majesty, when I sought a loan on behalf of the Crusade I was unable to secure an interest rate less than eighteen percent, and when I sought one in my own name with undisclosed collateral I was offered four percent. I believed it to be in the Crusade's interests for me to guarantee the loans personally. You are welcome to get the loans transferred."

The good thing about talking about logistics is that now he's somewhat less blindingly furious, and somewhat more tired, and this is probably a better state of mind from which to plan their next moves.

"I'll entertain suggestions about where we ought to go tomorrow when we leave the Fane," he says. 

"The Order of the Godclaw would welcome many of those present at our fortresses on the south edge of the Wound."

This is in fact among the options Marit had been considering, albeit half out of spite, which is a bad emotion to use for decisionmaking. "I appreciate that," he says, "but have some reservations about the Order of the Godclaw, particularly about the worship of Asmodeus, and for different reasons about the worship of Iomedae."

Cansellarion looks pained.

"I don't want to go to the Hellknights," Seelah says. "They're Hellknights. That's a bad thing, much as I appreciate Regill's knowledge of all the regulations."

"I own some land near Absalom, though it would mean giving up on this crusade as a lost cause." Catherine volunteers, looking like she's maybe halfway there already.

"The Crusade is not a lost cause because the Queen and the Knight-Commander had one argument," Seelah says. "It's the whole world at stake! Surely we can talk things through and do something less ridiculous than this."

"If Galfrey refuses us access to any of the Mendevian forts - whether or not the Crusade as a whole is doomed, if we're not willing to work more closely with the Hellknights there might not be very much we can do."

"Lastwall has forts on the Worldwound," Seelah says. "Crusader's Fort takes anyone who wants to fight."

"Hmmm," says Daeran. "Anyone thinking of any flaws with that plan? Anyone? Anyone? I should've paid more attention in history class, really...who does this Lastwall work for?"

"Iomedae."

"Then our dear Knight-Commander might have some of the same objections to them that he just voiced to the Godclaw."

"The Knight-Commander feels hurt and betrayed, and so he's not thinking past how he's been wronged," says Ember. "I think that's not the right thing to do, but it does make a lot of sense."

"The Knight-Commander is standing in the doorway," Regill reminds them, "Aspex has our support but no rank, at present."

"I don't in fact feel betrayed," he says to Ember. "That would require having had the slightest trust in Galfrey to begin with."

"You feel betrayed," says Ember confidently. "Maybe not by Queen Galfrey."

The thing is, she's not wrong. Is it satisfying to watch Galfrey realize how her crusade is utterly doomed without him? Yes, absolutely. Did she come here intending to betray him, and instead destroy the things that matter to her - Mendev, the Crusade - while hardly landing a scratch on him at all? Yes. Is she the villain of this mess? Sure. It is satisfying, to see her fail in the thing she came here to do, because the thing she came here to do was to betray him and he does have the ordinary human habit of wanting revenge when people betray him.

And it's - not what matters. 

There's a sense in which this is entirely his mistake, because managing Galfrey was as much his job as fighting the horde of demons, and he hasn't, in fact, tried very hard to give her a way to save face. Of course, having tried to assassinate him, she has to double down on removing him. Iomedae would be trying to find some way to -

- Iomedae's way doesn't work -

This also does not seem to be working -

Has he attempted deescalating at all this evening - okay, yes, that's jumping to too much self-condemnation, he begged her not to do it and he dropped his sword and he agreed to arbitration he didn't fully trust, but - has he attempted deescalating like the fate of the world depends on it? 

He stands up. 

 "Your Majesty. Is there any hope that I could - address, or somehow assuage, your fears that brought us to this point? I cannot blame you, at all, for your paranoia. My experience operating here, too, has been one of finding cultists everywhere I look for them. And I've given you little opportunity to verify anything that I say, or that divinations say, about me. 

But - this is a mistake. Is there a way I can prove that to you?"

Galfrey goes from mostly-stressed-about-unexpected-accounting to mostly-suspicious. "It seems a little late for that."

"It does. I apologize; I should have thought of it a while ago. I think I spent enough time anticipating betrayal as to make it inevitable. I failed you, and I failed Mendev, because my job was not just to take back the Worldwound but to in so doing maintain your trust and your confidence. I will say in my defense that I did not realize I had lost them. But - I believe I am worthy of your trust, and I want to prove that to you.

Is there something you want to know about me?"

"- sure. Who are you, where are you from, where did you become one of the most dangerous people in this place."

"- I am afraid that you will not believe me, your Majesty."

"There are solutions to that."

" - I assume if you trusted a truth spell at all then we would have none of our present problems, I could assure you that every single thing I'm doing has been for the good of Mendev and that the people I executed as traitors were all verified with magic to be traitors and we'd be done. And if you trusted a Commune we'd have none of our present problems, because you could've asked Iomedae if I should run your Crusade -"

"I think someone did, at some point. Not me. It is not a power granted to paladins, even very powerful ones."

Technically it is. He doesn't say that, because it only, to his knowledge, happened the once. 

"Iomedae did communicate that the former knight-commander leading the Crusade was expected to lead to good outcomes." Cansellarion confirms, "relative to all likely alternatives."

Dismissive hand-wave. "You are obviously very competent," says Galfrey. "Any other candidate would probably have failed to take Drezen. But at this point, we can have the Crusade run by people who don't hate Mendev and our Goddess."

"Did you ask Her about sending me to die in the Abyss?" This feels like a silly point to be belaboring when he trusts the reported results of the Communes so little, but -

"- we can't ask about every decision we make," says Galfrey.