Yes.

Shadow-wing the Great and Powerful flies off.

To whom it may concern, the raven is negotiating a certain wizard's betrayal of the cultists. Relatedly to this he wants to put everyone through their surrender-accepting paces here - they're right near Kenabres and can hand them off easily, they have the luxury of numbers, and also this is how you incentivize people to betray cultists to you.

His people want to make sure he's not enchanted! This is not an intrinsically unreasonable thing to negotiate but it's not the sort of thing that couldn't be an enchantment. (As far as they can determine he is not enchanted, which is not a guarantee that he isn't, but they aren't going to do better.)

Questions various people have about accepting surrenders include: won't this slow them down? what if a cultist pretends to surrender and then uses their fake surrender to make it easier to kill people? what's even the point of accepting surrenders from anyone but Wizard Guy if they're just going to kill them anyway? that wizard sounds like he sucks as a person, has the Knight-Commander considered that actually cultist traitors should hang even if they're helpful later on?

Great questions, all of which have answers!

- Yes. It is slower to do things neatly than sloppily. They are going to aim for doing them neatly anyway.
- Then you kill the cultist. You should maintain prisoners in a state where they cannot easily use their position to attack you and where you can react if they try.
- The point is that they get a little while to contemplate their forthcoming execution and where they'd like to be on the other end. Demons may be infinite in number but demons specifically interested in goings-on on Golarion might not be so one would rather not inflate their numbers, even if one has no concern for the souls.
- He probably does suck as a person, but he might also save a bunch of Mendevian soldiers' lives with this tip and that buys him enough time to get out of town.

Some casters can cast spells without talking or without moving their hands, it really seems like it would be safer to just kill anyone who might be a caster. What if a demon surrenders? What if a succubus shapeshifts into a cultist and pretends to surrender and then seduces the people guarding her into letting her go? What if someone surrenders who might be a demon or might be a really weird-looking tiefling? Totally hypothetically, what would he do if they'd taken a prisoner and then someone got confused about whether that person had actually surrendered and killed them?

It would be safer! They are still not going to do it because that is not the right way to do things unless you have a pretty specific reason to think someone has those skills. They do not have to take surrenders from demons. They should not let prisoners seduce them whether they are succubi or not; he has only just now been talked down from that being an instant death penalty on a first offense. Tieflings will Detect differently from demons; if you don't have anyone who can Detect, this is one situation where he does not actually have better advice than "use your judgment". Totally hypothetically, getting confused in that way is a lot like getting confused in any other way that results in you doing murder, and you should try pretty hard not to be confused into doing a murder, and try pretty hard not to confuse your comrades in arms into doing murder.

Eventually Shadow-wing the Great and Powerful returns.

"My master accepts your terms, and requests to know whether there is anything he should do to ensure you can accept his surrender as quickly as possible."

"Well, if he'd care to come out ahead of the fighting but after unlocking the doors it will be less likely there will be some fog-of-war complication. I don't know if that's feasible."

"I doubt it, it would be more likely for someone to notice that way. But I can tell him you said that just in case."

"And it will be easier to distinguish him from any other wizards who might be present if you are with him. Anything else?"

"No."

Shadow-wing the Great and Powerful flies off.

Okay. Anything else last minute before they take the place?

None of his people have anything else to add. The Bless-clerics can make sure they're in position.

There are, as expected, archers and the occasional spellcaster harrying them as they approach, though they're harrying the army less than Shadow-wing the Great and Powerful had made it sound like they would.

(Meanwhile:)

The Mendevians can definitely take the hideout with casualties below the agreed-upon number if they're competent. But that's a big if, even if they did manage to take back Kenabres. Best to make sure it's not left up to their competence, then.

Bernat is one of the handful of people in this fucking place that Nico can actually stand. He's got a good sense of humor, despite or maybe because of his background, and he likes Nico too, or at least tolerates him. And he's a caster, too, not as good as Nico but still good enough to be dangerous, and good enough to be worth talking shop with. He's a Baphomite through and through, and he won't shut up about how terrified he is that the Deskarans are plotting something. They probably are, at least some of them, or at least they'd be stupid not to be. But by some quirk of who survived Kenabres, most of the archers are Deskaran, so it's not like they can just try to do without them.

"—Heard Ademar's gang plotting," Nico tells him, "I didn't catch the details but I think they've got some sort of ritual planned, the fucking copycats — he's got Herwig on his side, I'll deal with him, you go take care of him and the other archers before it's too late—"

Blai has commanded troops before, but not this many and not in this idiom. It's going to take him a while to get used to all the details, so for the time being he's a light touch about everything but the most egregious event in view and even then he tries to be quick about correcting it.

The entrance is unlocked. There's a wizard standing behind it, with Shadow-wing the Great and Powerful sitting on his shoulder and two bodies by his feet, but he falls to his knees as soon as the door opens, hands up and empty — "I surrender—"

Oh good, they found him! They were paying close attention to the Knight-Commander's instructions and are not going to kill him! Instead they're going to break his fingers, so he can't betray them by spellcasting. ...And his feet, so he can't flee until they've healed him. ......And someone is going to start rifling through his pockets, just to make sure he's not hiding anything, like a component pouch, or perhaps a bunch of money.

"You gag a wizard before you check his pockets," says Blai, who will be taking over this prisoner's handling now. "Thank you for your assistance, may it pan out."

He is going to be so so cooperative and he's pretty sure that means not responding to that with his mouth. Instead he will nod.

Blai appreciates that but gags him anyway and gets him out of the action - is there a convenient novice paladin around who can babysit him for a few minutes while he wades back in -

There are plenty of paladins and he can certainly grab one.

It's over within a few minutes from there. They storm the hideout; the cultists mount a resistance, but they're badly outnumbered and under-resourced. In the first room Blai makes it to a cleric tries the "channel negative in a room full of people some of whom are nominally on his side" maneuver and, predictably, brings down some of the people on his own side. The first troops to make it through report that half the cultists on the top floor seem to have already been dead by the time they made it up there, for some reason. There are a handful of casualties on the crusader's side, but from what he can see it's really only a handful; this was less a battle than a one-sided slaughter.

The Mendevian forces seem to be respecting the policy of not killing surrendered foes, at least when he's in the room. They are doing somewhat worse about not roughing up surrendered foes in the course of bringing them in. They are absolutely looting everyone on the cultists' side, dead or alive. One of the cultists apparently brought her toddler to the hideout full of cultists, and a cleric of Pharasma has completely abandoned her theoretical duties to make absolutely sure no one kills the toddler.