Well, you have to do something to punish them to discourage that kind of behavior, and having trained soldiers executed is a waste. You have to watch them more closely, with loyal officers and soldiers or especially inquisitors when the church can spare them, but Mendev gets the benefits of a larger fighting force, the normal army get to take fewer risks, and if the penal soldiers serve their tour of duty when they're let go their crime is expunged. It's a fairly common destination for people with the right skills or fitness who commit serious enough crimes in civilian life too, though the queen has investigators to discourage people using it to be rid of people they don't like.

If the results are worth the extra surveillance that's a convenient way for it to work out. What does the cost-benefit analysis look like for docking pay as an alternative to lashes? With the kind of energy channeling infrastructure an army will inevitably need anyway she can see how lashes wouldn't have consequences for combat effectiveness, and of course the point of these punishments is to deter malfeasance such that they rarely get used, but she still has a preference and wants to know if it's feasible.

People have tried to implement it a few times, but it hasn't ever worked out. Captain Harmattan expects that the reason is it's not immediate enough; there's not much to spend money on other than gambling with your fellow soldiers in the wound, which they try to discourage anyway, and frankly pay gets disrupted often enough that if you make it a punishment the impact often gets lost in everyone else not being paid right then as well. Plus, it doesn't really have the same discouraging power; when someone gets whipped in front of everyone, their fellows get a clear idea of what they don't want to happen to them, but it's hard to tell who had their pay docked recently for breaking the rules.

Brenda hates that and hates being responsible for it, but doesn't have the expertise to reliably cause something better to work. She doesn't say anything more on the matter. Instead she asks if Harmattan is planning to conscript anyone, and what goes into being the kind of leader people want to follow other than paying well, joining the fighting herself, and winning lots of battles.

He is. You want as many volunteers as possible, of course, but trying to run a war on just volunteers is a way to get all the most loyal and patriotic people in your country killed by an army that outnumbers them and then you still have to do conscription anyway. 

As he understands it, an ideal general is a master of tactics and strategy, incredibly charismatic and capable at inspiring the men, able to politically maneuver to keep the nobles in line and the funding streaming in, and can personally outfight any assassins or enemy strike forces that come for them. Obviously no general can manage all of them at once - not even the queen, and she's had decades to practice - so you also want a general who knows how to delegate the parts they're less good at to their subordinates without leaving them too much work to do.

She is so so out of her depth and should never have agreed to this.

She doesn't say that. She says she thinks she's got the assassin situation handled and that she'll be able to stay on top of the fundraising situation, but she'll need to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on strategy and tactics with the people the queen sent her for that. She'd appreciate lessons in being inspiring, unless he thinks it'd be a better use of his time to do all of that himself. (She also does not say out loud that he is starting out with an advantage by looking immensely cooler than her.)

Captain Harmattan isn't sure how much of his methods will transfer, given their differences, but if she thinks it will help he's willing to try. 

Speaking of her tacticians, it's not long before there's another knock on the door. The woman on the other side has golden hair and a halo above her head, which Brenda has presumably seen often enough to know means she's an aasimar.

"Captain," the woman says, nodding respectfully to Harmattan. "And I believe that would make you Brenda?"

"It would!" Ooh, Friends in High Places is feeding her information on Mendevian sumptuary laws. "I'm expecting a Baroness Gaunther, is that you?"

"That's correct, it's a pleasure. I hope I'm not interrupting?"

"I don't think so, but she might have more questions I haven't covered yet."

"I'm sure I could keep listing things I need to know more about all day, but I think we've covered the key points in your area at least until I have a detailed enough budget to talk numbers and pay scales. Baroness: I'm going to be frank with you. I don't have nearly enough experience with large-scale combat or the logistics of getting an army from point A to point B, and I want to remedy that as quickly as possible through a combination of meetings where we plan operations together and reading any books you've found helpful."

"Hmm, that's a hard ask to do in a hurry. In an ideal world you'd have attended Galt or Lastwall's war college and then spent a few years working with smaller commands, and while that's not really practical to do or fair to ask of you it's a lot of ground to cover. I'll make sure you know when we're doing planning sessions and do my best to explain the decisions and tradeoffs, but you'll have to make sure to ask about anything unclear. As for books... the traditional answer is to suggest the Acts of Iomedae, which in fairness does have a lot to reccomend it. The inheritor was a brilliant strategist and had several brilliant strategists working under her, was facing a similar problem, and laid out almost all of her work and reasoning for posterity - as well as the book having the not insignificant advantage that very few demon commanders are willing to read it. 

"With that said, it's not actually my first choice here. For all the political applicability, both magic and warfare have evolved a lot in the last thousand years, and the demons are about as far from being the Whispering Tyrant as Mendev is from Imperial Taldor, so it's more something to look into if you find yourself with spare time. Instead... a bunch of the other ones are a bit more technical than is ideal for a beginner, but Aspex Mendisant's A Treatise on Modern Warfare is well written and only mildly dated, and the aptly named Crusade Chronicles should help you catch up on the last four crusades at the wound. If you find yourself struggling with it Dendiwhar's works are a decent overview and easy to read, but I find as a historian she sometimes interprets facts to support a narrative when it's ambiguous what happened."

"Technical is good; I'd rather put in the time to get a real understanding than end up with an oversimplified one. I'll write to the war colleges as well and ask about correspondence courses or hiring a tutor; if this crusade has a timeline like the previous ones it'll be worth taking some time at the beginning to invest in skills that will be useful in the long term. I expect to be able to keep up with my day to day work at the same time." By using her golem heritage, Time Enough for Love, Just A Little Longer, and Iron Will to work 22 or more hours a day and not go insane, probably, because there's no way running a crusade isn't a huge amount of work.

Her other two advisors arrive at about the same time; the taller of them is a jolly looking man who identifies himself as Wilcer Garms.

And the shorter a blond haired woman who could pass for being even younger than Brenda. "It's a pleasure to meet you! It's not every day you get to see history in the making."

'Looking as young as her' is a stupid reason to like someone, but Brenda wants to like all her advisors and she might as well start with the stupid reasons, so she doesn't try to stop.

"It's a pleasure to meet you both! Quartermaster Garms, there are three numbers I'd like from you whenever you get the chance, ideally in the next day or two. Item one, a number of crowns per month you would consider a bare minimum shoestring budget that would force us to make serious tradeoffs but that we could just barely run a crusade on. Item two, a number of crowns per month you would consider a reasonable budget, where we would still have to work at keeping costs down but could take good opportunities to turn money into combat effectiveness when we found them. And item three, a number of crowns per month on which you could run the most well-supplied and effective crusade since Iomedae defeated Tar-Baphon."

"I can do that. We're in between the first two numbers right now, but it's a good idea to get you a sense of what kind of tradeoffs we're looking at. Do you want a breakdown of what we're currently spending where as well?"

"Yes, thank you, that would be lovely, especially if you also provide a couple examples of the next things we'd start buying if we had slightly more money. I didn't realize a detailed breakdown would be possible already; are those the numbers for Mendev's standing army? Do you have a sense of how the fifth crusade is going to affect them, beyond 'generally attacking is more expensive than defending'?"

"Mendev's standing army, and my best estimate for what the costs of conscripting and equipping the new troops will be. Obviously there's only so precise we can get before we do a headcount and assess the equipment they bring with them, but this isn't our first time raising an army or supplying it in the wound, so I can make a decent guess of what the numbers will look like once we've done so. The biggest wildcard is Kenabres, but from the looks of things the attack wasn't bad enough to reduce the numbers too much here. Do you have a temporary command post I should bring these to once I have them assembled, or just wait for you to drop by?"

She nods along, smiling appreciatively. "I'm afraid I don't yet. I need an office, I've been staying in an inn and if I'm going to be an attractive target for assassins it seems polite to stop that. But that's a subcase of the general problem of needing somewhere to put everyone we're bringing here, so there may already be a plan for temporary buildings?" 

"We'll be operating out of reinforced tents when we're in the field for ease of transportation, but at the moment I'm renting space at the temple of Abadar. I understand the Baroness is staying with one of her cousins, but I'm not sure about the others and most of the ordinary soldiers are camped outside the walls. I'm sure it wouldn't be an issue to set up your command tent early, I just wasn't sure if you already had availed yourself of something before we arrived."

"I own a tent but it's not really big enough to take meetings in; if you have a tent that can fit a desk I'd happily start operating out of it. Does the crusade already have an account with the church of Abadar, or should I set one up this evening?"

"We do; it's pretty impractical to get donations from outside Mendev without one. You should have access to it when you officially get appointed, but I'd recommend having one of your own if you don't yet so you don't mix finances. I'll tell them to get the commander's tent pitched."

"Thanks! And yes, I definitely want a separate personal account." Because the alternative involves deciding an official amount to pay herself, which sounds way worse and more awkward than deciding on an amount of money to not-donate even if it's almost the same thing.

"Another thing that might or might not turn out to be relevant is that I can create clothes, which probably includes armor, fairly quickly any time I'm not being observed. It might not end up being worth it at the kind of scales we're operating on, but at some point today or tomorrow I'd like to look at a couple examples of anything you want lots of and see if I'm fast enough for it to be useful."