"Enchanted, no--maybe if I learn to enchant armor I'll be able to do it faster than average, but today, definitely not. Mithral is another maybe. If you have a bit of either it might help--not necessarily armor, just an ingot or something."

"If just an ingot will do, that should make things easier - I know Vhane has some of the material on hand. I'll send a runner to ask him to bring some over when he has a chance."

He pulls out a piece of paper, scribbles a quick note, and then puts it in an envelope that he seals with wax and stamps. One of the guards watching the entrance can be re-tasked for the delivery.

"I'm sorry about that; I should have had those on hand, but it didn't cross my mind that it might be a possibility. In the meantime, do you want to see if any of the designs are easier than others, or go over the finances while we wait?"

"That's alright, it didn't occur to me either. Let's take a look at the finances before I pile more armor all over the floor."

"Right. So when we arrived at the city, we had about seven thousand men under arms - four thousand of them trained and active professionals from the standing army in Nerosyan, and three thousand levies. From what Harmattan says, we can probably pick up at least another thousand people from Kenabres and the surrounding towns, but probably not more than two thousand. A lot of them are going to have their own weapons, and some of them armor, but not always the right kinds and not always in the best of repair, so they might need maintenance or replacement. Unless things go poorly that number should expand, from mercenaries and from further levies and from rearranging parts of the border to be held by a higher proportion of local troops to free up professionals to join us.

"The bare minimum numbers I have here cover the essentials only - making sure everyone has a weapon, making sure we don't run out of arrows, making sure nobody starves - and involves making a lot of sacrifices. It would mean cutting everyone's wages, it would mean not having enough fuel for regular fires, it would mean our people are equipped with a hodgepodge of gear and would absolutely cause problems come winter, but in a pinch it would be enough to keep the army from disintegrating. To pull that off with our current numbers, we'd need about thirty thousand crowns a month in maintenance.

"Next is the targets I would like to be able to hit. This means having everyone in chainmail and gambesons, good boots for hiking across rocky terrain and for the cold, some extra cavalry for scouting, a healthy supply of cold iron weapons and arrows, spares of critical equipment, shipping over plenty of food to keep the soldiers fighting fit, guards for the caravans, adventurers for rapid response teams... that comes out to about ninety thousand a month, though if your ability to produce clothing scales enough we could knock a good ten to fifteen thousand crowns off that. 

"Moonshot numbers are a bit harder to quantify - there's no shortage of things that could help if we were spending gold like water, like supplying our forces via teleport in the Chelish fashion, but in terms of sticking to the things that would get good returns on the investment I think with about 300,000 crowns a month would cover enough of them that we wouldn't have to make any painful tradeoffs. Right now we have a bit of extra flexibility in funds to get our forces established, but from what my colleagues at the treasury say we're probably looking at Mendev being able to supply us about sixty thousand crowns a month. Once we start seeing successes donations and volunteers should bump that up some, but it's hard to quantify how much."

Rathimus said four million a month sustainably. She keeps her smile small enough that it's plausibly about Garms' clear and concise explanation. 

"Thank you, that's a very clear overview. Could you list a few of the things that would get good returns on investment that you'd want to buy at three hundred thousand?" She should ask a question that isn't about the high end so it doesn't look like she knows something he doesn't. "And if we end up with less than expected, do you think it would make sense to cut back on recruiting before cutting back on supplies?"

"More cold iron weapons - having some at all is a bigger benefit, but the more people who can reliably hurt the demons and the more freely we can use our arrow stocks, the better. Extra consumables, for emergencies - Bless Weapon and Greater Magic Weapon, for taking down powerful demons, or scrolls of Haste, or extra wands of cure for when the fighting grinds on enough we run low on channels. More regular teleport runs, for high value goods and improved communication bandwidth. Raising salaries so we get more volunteers, especially clerics. That sort of thing.

"In terms of what I would have to cut first if we have a shortfall... recruitment somewhat, yes, but the problem is that a lot of the time if we can't pay for something in gold we have to pay for it in lives, and we'd still need recruitment to keep the numbers up. I wouldn't want to authorize any big expansions if we were running a deficit, but we'd still need some recruitment. Outside of that... pay, certainly, since if we do better later we can make it up and it's better for the men to earn less than have to go to sleep with empty stomachs. Fewer horses, which means fewer patrols and more ambushes but they're expensive enough to pay and feed we could make real savings. Being more conservative with our supplies of cold iron arrows and relying more on the melee combatants against lower level incursions. That sort of thing, mostly, though if the shortfall was large enough I'd have to do it places it bites more than that."

The realization that she's conscripting horses and will inevitably get some of them killed hurts less than the realization that she's conscripting humans did. 

"Makes sense. We both have access to the crusade's account; can I see your recent notes on how much was spent on what so I can learn the format and make my own entries later if I need to?"

"Yes, but please be careful where you spread it. Most of it isn't especially secret, but there are a number of ways cultists could cause problems if they knew exactly how much we were spending and where."

The main sheet is a copy of a ledger listing payments to and withdrawals from their account with the bank of Abadar, which as of this document dated two days back claims to be hovering at a little over a hundred thousand crowns, but it doesn't say much about what they were spent on or from who the money came in from. He has... most of that recorded, but it's scattered across a lot of pages of budgetary calculations and bills from dozens of merchants and payments to paymasters for their soldiers wages and sometimes in documents in almost illegible script that need deciphering, which state of affairs he seems somewhat embarrassed about.

The concern for secrecy is very sensible; she appreciates it and will be careful. (She's still not going to tell him the whole story, at least not yet.) She'd be happy to sit down with him sometime and help get everything nicely written down in a single ledger; it'll go a lot faster with two people. Six hands make light work, ha ha.

After a few minutes of this, Jhoran Vhane arrives.

"Quartermaster. You said you needed me to bring a sample of Adamantine and Mithral, for something important but non urgent?"

His voice lets some of his puzzlement leak. "Ah, and the knight commander too. Is this related to whatever you needed all that armor for?"

No point hiding this bit, it's going to be totally obvious if it works. "Yes, thank you! I'm working on a trick to produce some extra armor. We'll see whether it proves useful."

"And you need the materials to see if you can make things out of them rather than just steel. Like amazing tools of manufacture but, hmm, as a spell? Those do work on other materials, but do so less efficiently. Checking if yours has the same limitations rather than assuming seems sensible."

He hands both ingots over to Brenda. There's not a lot of metal, but even from the small sample it's clear that the silvery metal is significantly lighter than the jet black one.

She spends a few moments examining them, more out of curiosity than for any practical reason--their weight, how they catch the light, how they react when squeezed against each other. "Do the properties of either of them change in an antimagic field?"

“Not as far as anyone has been able to determine, and it comes up often enough that people have tried.”

"That's promising. I'll let you know how the experiment turns out."

"Good skill."

There's some temptation to see if whatever she's doing with making armor is soemthing he can learn, but he wasn't invited for that and he is in fact very busy with rush orders at the moment. His cargo delivered, Jhoran Vhane exits the tent and heads back towards his forge.

"Thanks!"

"And now, if you'll close your eyes for a moment please?"

When Garms opens his eyes again, she's wearing a mithral chain shirt over one of the gambesons, with her lower arms folded inside it so it has the conventional number of sleeves. And also her hair is done up again so the rings don't eat it. "I think," she says as she takes them off, "that when I go to mass-produce these I should be hanging upside down by my knees so they just fall off, if we can find somewhere with roof beams or something for the purpose. The limiting factor is definitely how fast I can get them out of the way."

(Author's note: I have taken off chain mail shirts before and being upside down helps big time.)

Wilcer Garms is delighted! Mithral armor would mean they could outfit people in heavier armor than is otherwise practical or march longer in a day, while adamantine would keep people more safe per size of armor, and he's not sure which he values more but either one will be a huge improvement to how many people survive. And also to how many recruits and adventurers they can attract, since it says good things about their chances, how serious they are, and how well they can pay.

...Probably it's in fact good enough he needs to budget in significantly more to catching thieves and deserters trying to make off with their gear. At least he doesn't also have to guard shipments of the stuff coming in or panic too much at a set going missing.

She's glad he's delighted! Also wow there are so many interlocking things to keep track of and it's very cool and she looks forward to learning more about them. Blink again please? Thank you. 

If one of the benefits of mithral is marching speed (she says as she starts getting out of the adamantine) that sounds like they shouldn't just solve the problem by letting people pick which one they get when they sign up, and probably also like they shouldn't go with mithral unless the speed test shows that she can scale it to entire units.

(The possibility of getting a scroll of Gate, renting some real estate in Axis, and wildly cheating on the required amount of marching everyone has to do occurs to her, but she wants at least the scroll and Alpina's okay and probably a lead on the real estate before she's willing to rely on this plan working.)

"That seems sensible. It does have other benefits, that would still make it valuable, but since this is costing you time we should make sure to use whatever time you spend as efficiently as possible. I think the only other pressing questions I have are how far clothing extends. Could it make weapons, if they were fashionable? 'Armor' made out of arrowheads stringed on twine?"

He's clever and that's awesome and she really hopes he doesn't think about diamonds. "It can make a scabbard if I'm holding a sword and need somewhere to put it, so maybe? If you turn around for a minute I can experiment."

The results of her experiments, which she describes out loud to the back of Garms' head, are:

- Dressing Room will not make A Sword, even a very fancy one, or any other sort of in-hand weapon.

- It will make an overskirt out of a bunch of swords, but only if they have very fancy guards and aren't sharp enough to stab her if she moves carelessly. (This latter requirement isn't obvious, because swords that are the normal amount of sharp take quite a bit of force to break her skin.)

- It will make a shirt out of arrowheads, strung on wire mesh with beautiful tiny glass beads in between them. It drapes amazingly and makes a pleasant wind-chime sort of sound as she takes it off.

She does not narrate the experiment in which she discovers that it will make a cool cyberpunk glove with a nine millimeter built into it, if she mentally talks it through all the moving parts. She's going to need to think about that one for a while, before deciding whether to test it. The glove goes away again.

"If you can make them in cold iron-" he has a dagger of the stuff, just in case "- that might be even bigger than the armor, frankly. One of the biggest problems with fighting demons is that even lesser demons are highly resistant to normal weapons, and the stronger ones are all but immune. Cold Iron alone isn't enough for the really scary ones, but the more our archers can do the less we have to rely on infantry with polearms to carry the day."

She examines the dagger carefully. "What makes it different from ordinary iron?" She's worried that if she isn't careful she'll produce arrowheads of pure iron at fridge temperature, which would be less useful than steel and very embarrassing.

"I'm not sure what the metallurgic difference is. I know the only deposits are pretty far underground, and that a lot of the price comes from the extra work of forging it at low temperatures, but if I wanted to check and something wasn't labelled I would have to ask a smith or test it."

"Does it rust like iron, with the same colour rust? How similar are they in weight? Is it cold iron when it's mined and heating destroys it, or does it need to be worked at low temperatures to become effective?" Does it stick to this here magnetic bracelet?