"If I want to actually make things better, I'm going to need all the advice I can get--yours, theirs, and everyone else's. It feels like every problem I can imagine solving is just a corner of a much bigger problem, and if I'm not careful I'll fix one thing and make another thing worse."

"Maybe that sometimes happens, but I think it's the wrong way to look at it. It's not that every problem is a part of a big problem, it's that every big problem is made up of little problems that you can deal with now. I don't think helping people will just make things worse."

"Yeah. I do think pushing the Worldwound line back will be net good, and closing it would probably be better."

That won't get any disagreement from her. 

"Do you know what your next step will be?"

"Broadly speaking, 'get the army moving toward Drezen and see what attacks us'. Or did you mean on a smaller scale than that?"

"I was wondering if there was anything I could tell you that would still be true by the time it was relevant. I'd been doing a lot of spying in Drezen, though, and most of it was pretty recent - from just before I got captured."

"Ooh, yes actually, I'd love to know roughly how many demons are there, and who the most dangerous ones are, and, how to put this, how dug in they are? How hard are they likely to fight to keep it if they have the opportunity to run away? And have they been preparing for a siege or making the buildings more defensible or anything organized like that?"

"Not much organized in terms of defenses - the gates are at least sometimes repaired, but most of the wall is crumbling. It's not a recent enough victory to be fun to lord it over the humans and it's not a good staging ground for raiding, so it doesn't get many... demonic tourists. It had a fairly experienced force under Aponivicus, but when Derrazand took ove  those left with him. so last I had heard there weren't many capable commanders. He does have connections of his own, though, so what he lacks in officers he makes up for with individual combatants - in addition to Minagho and the Minotaurs running the prison, I know there's at least one vampire that helped do architecture on the prison, and I'd heard Janeamine had left for the attack on Kenabres but she might have returned if she survived."

"I suspect that in war everything is harder than it sounds, but that sounds less bad than I was worried about. Though I've heard vampires are really bad news."