"Almost always and almost never, Delegate Tallandria. We don't have Final Blades." And it's another chance to delay the Abyss.

"I suppose that's not as bad as I feared. I think if we permitted it, I'd want to restrict it to massacre, treason, and some notion of particularly severe rape and torture. It's still distasteful, and I'm sure Evil, but unless we get many more dwarves in Cheliax so are all the other ways to man the mines."

He considers adding misuse of authority and dereliction of duty, but ultimately decides that's not actually merited.

"This requires that the government hire someone to do Evil for them, which is at least not of a piece with all the other things we're driving at with our list."

"If we can't man the mines without being evil about it then maybe we shouldn't have mines. It's wrong to say 'well, sure, this is evil, but I really want to, so I'm going to do it anyway.'"

"I think... executing a murderer is doing him an evil. Flogging a thief is doing him an evil, or gelding a rapist, or sending a deserter to the mines. We need the threat of punishments in the law, or theft and murder and rape will be common and our armies will crumble. We should all pray that we never use these punishments, we should seek mercy where we can. But, ultimately, all these deeds - all these punishments - are sins, and they are justified only by the fact that a greater good will come from them and a greater evil will come if we forsake them. It is our duty as followers of Iomedae to weigh the odds, and always choose the lesser evil and the better path, but until Hell is destroyed it cannot be our path to never take a single evil action."

"How is destroying Hell supposed to make you stop skeletonizing folks?"

Executing murderers is obviously not evil but she said that already.

“But there has to be a line somewhere, lesser evil you might have to do then repent of and evil you’ll never accept no matter what. Necromancy is on the wrong side of that line. Iomedae would agree, I think. Lots of stories of her fighting necromancers, haven’t ever heard of her working with one.”

"You're not wrong, any of you. But metal is weapons, and the cost of missing weapons is measured in blood. By all means ask the resurrected what the Arodenite solution was, and I hope they have a better suggestion, but I think they will not."

"If we permit this, making someone undead should of course be a punishment no one can be required to inflict."

Korva has arranged bad indentures for bad kids when times were good, and bad indentures for good kids when times were bad.

"A world without evil may not need metal weapons, but this one does, and this one uses children. Someday, maybe, we will have enough skill with magic to do it all with elementals, or enough dwarves to do it all with them, but not today. I am fine with convict's choice of swift death or condemnation to the mines. I don't know enough about mining to say if they must be made to work past death, or enough about necromancy to say if we should make a law against fixed term use of it. Perhaps we can say that the government may not use it without offering execution as an alternative, or for a term longer than a man's natural life. If participation in punishment cannot be compelled except as part of voluntary employment, the policy will fall out of use if people give up on necromancy."

"I have no objection to either of these two proposals," he says in response to Theo and Korva. They do seem to be sensible people who understand what a tradeoff is.

“That’s… still too complicated for something this obvious. Necromancy isn’t like killing where you sometimes have to do it to bad people, or even like halflings where you can’t stop it because everywhere except Andoran does it.”

“Every good god is against making undead and every good cleric can hurt them the same way every good cleric can heal people. That makes it obvious enough what side everyone even trying to be good should be on.”

"If you have a cleric of a Good god I will gladly offer myself up for an examination to determine my alignment. My confessor is Iomedaean and when last I received a Discern Alignment spell I was Lawful Neutral." He's also been Lawful Evil and Lawful Good in the past. He doesn't think he's ever not been Lawful. "But I'd rather send a skeleton to labor in the mines than a halfling, though I'll freely admit that was an easier decision before the Final Blade was invented, when the only choices for the wicked were undeath and Hell."

"Haven't got it prepared today. But that's not really the question, is it, it's whether the skeleton thing is evil, and ideas haven't got auras."

"I'm not sure there's an option here that isn't Evil. Iomedae is against necromancy, Cayden Cailean is against slavery, and Erastil is against not having metal for plows."

Enric crosses his arms. “Look, there’s evil and there’s— Okay, here. If you get a cleric of Iomedae or Cayden or Erastil or any good god to say that the courts using necromancy to punish criminals is the kind of evil we should allow, I’ll step back.”

“If not, I think we table this? Or have a vote?” 

He looks at the clerics of the Good gods before answering. This isn't a vitally important fight, not worth the two teleports it would take to prove it, but he thinks that the two basically sensible people who understand compromise are probably with him and the question is where they stand.

"Delegate Tetula, you said you're blessed by Cailean. Would you say this is an Evil we should permit?"

She counts votes. The Erastilians and Calistrian against use of undeath, Xavier in favor and Tallandria and Lebanel grudgingly approving. Herself and Tetula undecided. One way or another, Jilia's going to have to be the deciding vote on something she thought was an obvious pass an hour ago.

...Coward's way out.

"If you're unsure, I'm inclined to table it for other voices or more time to think."

"I was clericed a week ago and I don't know what I'm doing, but-- it seems like the least bad option to use the mines only as punishment, and if undeath is necessary to make that possible it seems best?"

“Cleric for a week is still more than not chosen by a god at all, that’s how I see it. So I’ll stop holding this up.”

Enric is suddenly less sure about a lot of things. He knows they can’t win on every right, but he didn’t think Good would give up something this important this early. The age of glory?

"For the right not to be made undead, except as punishment for severe capital crimes or as part of a voluntary agreement for other capital crimes, how do we vote?"

"Hang on now, are we sure it can't pass without the 'except'?" says Soler, visibly counting heads on his fingers.

"Aye." And to Narcis, "I vote in favor of this proposal. If it fails I'll vote for the other, but I'd like to see if we can pass this, first."

"Can't we just vote on both?"

"Voting in tandem is best left for times where the outcomes aren't really in doubt and it's better to save time. I don't think we need it here."

And everyone will have the chance to affirm they're decent people who dislike undead afterward if this fails, which will hopefully be what sticks in the heads of those against the complicated version if they vote it down.