Great. Then she’s going to hide. Possibly this just means someone will do a Discern Location and if so she probably just dies but anything short of that is will defended and she is a notoriously willful person. Perhaps she will survive until morning.

She doesn’t mind the horrendous injuries much, but she dislikes the odds of survival and she’d like to ask some questions of Ilderia that might be a bit awkward, like “did you consider it extremely likely that I’d die inside five minutes, or were the capabilities your enemy displayed there surprising.”

Then she can find a building with nobody visibly in it! It looks kind of fancy; glass windows (shattered by explosions), richly carpeted floor (covered with dust and bits of ceiling), stairs, and lots of floors. There might be a basement, if she searches; there's definitely rooms she can hide in where nobody will notice her unless they cheat.

Basement's probably a good idea in case of fighting not specifically targeting her. 

This place was so wealthy before the war. It aches a little, to walk through the wreckage. 

There's people already hiding in the basement! They may have had that idea, too!

They flinch where a very heavily armored burned bleeding woman with a sword comes down the stairs.

She startles immediately when she sees them and raises the sword.

- civilians, Iomedae. Some people are civilians. Most people are civilians.

She doesn't have that much Tongues remaining but she's not in fact out yet. "I apologize," she says. "I'm not here to hurt you, just looking for a place to rest. Should I go somewhere else?" Which will be a bit of a nightmare, trying to hide again knowing these people may have sold the information that she was here, but - she remembers the building collapse. She can't, won't, stay here if they want her to go.

"- As you wish, ma'am," says someone who is clearly afraid of her. He's wearing slightly more formal clothes than everyone else here; most of the civilian men are wearing short-sleeved, low-cut shirts and pants, and the women similarly except occasionally with very short skirts. Not surprising - she may have been too busy to notice, but it's hot.

(There's a pretty astonishing mix of ethnicities present, ranging from Garundi to Avistani to Tian, as well as some kind of implausible hair colors. No people who aren't humans visible yet, though.)

Sword away, and she'll take a step back. "Well, I don't want to go back up," she says with a grimace, "because it's ugly out there, but I can't promise danger won't follow me and I don't even have a good guess whether you're safer with me here or without me here. I arrived here an hour ago. You know more than me about what will keep you safe."

"Nobody here will hurt you." Knights are very dangerous, whichever side she's with.

"You couldn't," she says, a bit tiredly. "What I don't know is whether people might have a superpowered way to track me down, in which case I should leave here. If there's no such thing, then you're safer if I'm here because I can stop anything else that shows up," and battlefields are always horror shows that attract monsters as well.

"But if there is such a superpower, for tracking people, I should go, and I don't know because I'm new here."

And if they lie to her about whether there's such a power so that she'll go away because they want her to go away, well, it's not great for their Law but it's still a way to learn their preference. Iomedae disprefers arranging circumstances where someone has an incentive to lie to her but not doing that is probably too tall an order for tonight.

"I don't know, ma'am." There's lots and lots of superpowers and nobody can know all of them.

"Understood."

If he can track her, she probably dies tonight, and should just try to be clear of anyone else when she does so, and if she stays here these people will die as well. If he can't track her -

- they're not acting like it'd be an enormous relief to have an adventurer around to deal with the inevitable scavengers that ought to plague a battlefield-of-a-city like this one. She thinks if you limped in this state into a basement in a besieged city in Ustalav - not as a paladin, obviously being a paladin changes things and to these people she is not a paladin - she thinks they'd still be, on the whole, relieved, once they determined you weren't inclined to hurt them.

"How long have you been hiding here?"

"Since the war started?"

(no, they're very clearly still afraid of her.)

"- and how long is that?"

"A week and a bit?"

"In that case I think you are safer without me here, as nothing's eaten you yet and the chance my enemies can track me doesn't seem lower than one in eight. I'll go. ...Do you have food? Water?"

"- We have food and water." It's a law in the district that all apartment managers need to have enough sacks of rice and beans for everyone for a month in case of natural disaster and the plumbing still works.

- that is a deeply and importantly surprising fact about this place, actually, in some ways more surprising than anything else she's seen or done. 

"Good," she says, after a few seconds. "...enough you'd sell some?" Because she does not in fact have any food or very much water herself.

Sell?????? This isn't Ilderia's district.

Maybe she thinks it is?

"Of course."

Iomedae reaches into the haversack tucked inside her armor and pulls out - more silver than the food could be worth even in crisis, but hopefully not enough they'll be willing to murder each other over it. "Only what you can comfortably spare, please."

They can comfortably spare rice and beans and a full water bottle (a marvel of engineering, made of some unknown material) for shocking small quantities of silver!

(actual, like, silver coins! wow!)

Iomedae has not guessed the silver is remarkable because she approximately hasn't heard of other ways of doing currency. The Church of Abadar will give you promissory notes saying your silver is in one of its vaults, which you can use to get silver out of a different one of its vaults.

"Thank you," she says. "Good luck. I do not know if anyone will come here asking after me but if they do you should of course tell them whatever you wish." And she'll grimace and limp back up the stairs. She's bleeding but she's careful not to leave any blood behind; your enemies can use that for things.

They will be glad that she is going.

Iomedae is tired and in pain and she wants to hide until morning and she's worried every building is going to have civilians in the basement but - 

- war makes people Evil in a lot of ways, but one of the more important ones is making everything very unclear. Maybe she could safely stay with them until dawn. Maybe she'd even be doing them a favor, doing so. Maybe she, if she lives, will end up saving them, and if she dies they'll perhaps be worse off.

And that's no excuse at all, of course, to remain in a place she is only permitted because they know she could kill them and don't know she wouldn't. And if they haven't died yet, they are unambiguously safer without her there; it's not hard math. But people know right and wrong in their hearts and the confusion of war makes it harder to see it. Or easier to look away from it. 

War does have as one redeeming quality that it kills you, if you lie to yourself too much. This is genuinely a thing Iomedae likes about war. 

Does the next building have people in the basement? She'll wander around all night, if necessary, though she's hoping it's not necessary.

The next one does but the one after that doesn't.

This is not the kind of thing the gods arrange but Iomedae sends them a prayer of thanks anyway. 

She keeps the ring of invisibility on and clears a stretch of floor and closes her eyes and tries to put herself in Aroden's hands, more than usual. Should she fight in this war? Can she win it for Ilderia? Should she win it for Ilderia? Is there a way of escaping? Is there a way to take these guns back home?