"What I see is a man who pretended not to be Evil until he got caught, and then declares that actually it was no secret, he doesn't mind people knowing, and he's definitely not keeping any other such secrets and is definitely here to help fight Asmodeus anyway."

"Very logical," he says. "Though you'll note that the one test you pulled I did tell you why it failed. But you are right - I did prefer that you not know, and did not particularly expect that once you started rooting out your own members I'd last very long."

"If your lord has you whipped for looking at him wrong, and then a bandit says 'I don't like him either, I'll help you, I'm totally not going to hurt you,' it would be pretty stupid to trust him. Even if he really does dislike your lord. And also that wouldn't make it okay for him to be a bandit."

Well this is probably the third-most uncomfortable room she's been in in the last two days.

"I am sure Iomedae and Norgorber have found something worth collaborating on, once or twice. If I were trying to steal a Thrune ship I would want your help. I am not among the people who think that the worst thing that could happen here is more bloodshed.

 But we are trying to make this country better, and I am curious how that would go without Evil people commandeering it for their Evil purposes, now that it turns out no one has gotten to try that."

"And no one ever will," he says. "Let's be frank. There's three sorts of people in this room. There's you. There's the people who keep looking very uncomfortable and saying 'maybe we should do less of this sort of thing' every time you say something, like Delegate Tallandria and Archduke Blanxart, who joined the committee because they had ever read a history book and had some idea of what the Galtan revolution looked like. And there's everyone else. We're evil. Some of us probably don't know it, but we're evil, because most everyone in Cheliax is. When you declare your intention to start a chapter of the Grey Gardeners here in Cheliax to start murdering everyone who looks remotely evil, you have to expect that people who want to hurt the people they hate - that's me - or who want power, or who want wealth (because you did declare, yesterday, that you meant to fund your institution with the wealth of those it kills and that will be a great deal of wealth) - those people will sign up. And then these evil, evil people will begin doing evil, evil things, for all the reasons that evil, evil people do evil, evil things. Because it's convenient. Because it saves your best friend's life. Because hurting your enemies and rewarding your allies makes you feel good, if you grew up in Cheliax and aren't an unusual sort of person. Because these people may not be evil, they may not be guilty, by the narrowest definition of the term but surely if you'll look closely you'll find something and they're standing in the way of doing what needs to be done to save your country -"

He shrugs. "Those reasons. If you don't read evil today, then you will in a year, because having a merchant who occasionally beats his servants executed is an evil thing to do. You haven't fallen yet, Valia Wain, because you haven't done anything yet, but you will. And when you do, you'll remember that I told you this, that I told you everything, and that I knew it would happen. And that you could have known it would happen, if you'd listened to the man who swore vengeance on Asmodeus and on the queen and all the lords of Cheliax, and you didn't, because he was evil."

"One final postscript. You can check this fact with any Worldwound veteran, even your own Iomedans, and they'll tell you the same. There's a demon lord, Baphomet, who is lord of mazes, minotaurs, and the vicious beast that - his cultists say - lurks inside every man. Asmodeus imprisoned him once, Baphomet escaped, stole his holy symbol - their clerics both cast with a pentagram - and ever since then his chief goal in life has been to hurt Asmodeus as much as possible.

"I'm not, as it happens, a Baphomet cultist. But if a Baphomet cultist was on this committee, he'd be seconding your every suggestion. This world is larger than a war, and until you see that you're not qualified to try to shape it."

And he will salute Valia with a nod of the head, take a step back, and wait to be formally expelled from the committee.

What a load of shit. She can't help it, she laughs.

"Delegate Ibarra, that fact that you don't know how to fight evil people without being evil is a failure of your skill, not a fact about the world."

He'll give her an evil and somewhat pitying smile at her complete naivete.

At least he openly acknowledges that what he wants is evil, even if he isn't necessarily ceasing to advocate it.

She'll smile blandly back. If she wanted the advice of an evil failure, she still wouldn't have gone to him because he's not even the best of those.

"Right. All in favor of removing Delegate Ibarra because he has said that he is evil and pursuing the aims of this committee for evil reasons?"

"Before we vote, I would like to hear Delegate Ibarra's account—under Truthtelling, if it is available—of those acts that he believes cause him to read Evil. The account of his deeds that I have heard is he has killed a great many Asmodean nobles and freed a great many slaves. As far as I know he has done nothing that the chair, Select of Iomedae, has not proposed herself. I am surprised that he does not read Good, if perhaps Chaotically so."

She's not Valia, not uncomfortable, and not evil!!!

...Actually a lot of the things he's saying are obviously wrong. Which isn't really surprising, since he literally said he was Evil. Evil people have an obvious reason to try to convince you that it would be Evil to take vengeance on them for it.

She's pretty sure that it's because he didn't ever actually try to do good, just hurt people, and that he's not half as skilled as he likes to portray himself as at anything other than wizardry. Demons killing demons isn't good, that only comes in when you're keeping people safe from them. 

"I don't expect it to be particularly edifying, especially since he can probably beat Abadar's truth, and letting evil people waste your time is rarely a good strategy. Do you have a reason to think otherwise?"

The archduke is at least himself not evil and she'd rather not burn any more bridges there than she has to, so if that's the price he's putting it to she'll let him have it, but that doesn't mean she wants to waste more of her time.

"I can indeed, though I'll not name my method." Nor think about it with Blanxart's bodyguard here.

(Valia is vaguely aware that archdukes are extremely important but she'd kind of failed to have this be a part of her model of the world until Ibarra pointed out that the archduke probably had an invisible bodyguard present and the archduke seemed to nod along to this like of course he has an invisible bodyguard present.)

"Let's not bother with the Truthtelling then. I judge a man based on his deeds and not on what Pharasma thinks of him, but, in fact, if he still reads evil in spite of all that he's publicly done, then he must have done something truly heinous that I don't know about, and I would like to know what it is before I vote on whether he should remain here or not."

(The thing he wants is for Ibarra to clarify that murdering Evil people out of a personal desire for vengeance and not a sincere belief that it's the best way to improve the world is still, itself, Evil, and then maybe they can get an Early Judgement on the Calistrian.)

"Well, I'm in favor of kicking him out. Also I had another idea but I think I should wait until he's gone to say it."

"I think that there's a difference between killing Asmodeans because it's the best hope for Cheliax to be a good place someday and killing Asmodeans because you want to steal their stuff and serve Norgorber."

"Very sensible," he says to Victoria. "- Archduke, teleporting into someone's home, murdering a few dozen Worldwound veterans who signed up to stand between you and him to pay off their war debts, killing him and then burning his house down around his ears is evil. If you have good reasons to believe it prevents a great deal of harm, and you're right, and you do it for that reason, it's not evil. If you do it because you personally hate his master - not even he himself! Merely the one he serves, half-unwillingly! - for injuring you, and you don't even bother to stop his children from dying in the flames? You're Evil. I think I am doing a great deal more good than Iomedaeans would, and in fact have figures to that effect, but I'd do the same to a servant of Erastil or Gorum if it had been they who incurred my wrath, and Pharasma knows my soul."

"Would you say that you were primarily acting out of a desire for vengeance?"

Sure, he'll play along. "One doesn't declare war on Asmodeus out of greed, Archduke. Yes, I did it for revenge."

—well, obviously it's Evil to take vengeance on random unrelated people who have never done anything wrong! There's a difference between killing an innocent priest of Erastil who happened to annoy you and killing someone who deserves it.

"Well, then, while I oppose the removal of members from this committee for any crime other than willful service to Asmodeus, if we are expelling people for merely reading Evil then I think we should get an Early Judgement on the Calistrian."

"I'm Chaotic Good, but it's fine if you all want to check that, I don't have anything to hide."