"Yup. It's worse than we thought. I think I know what we need to do but first I want to check - the sortitioned members of this committee, if that's possible, with the good Pharasmin spell. I believe that the ordinary people of Cheliax are mostly not Evil and the ones in power nearly all are and I want to be able to prove it."

Ibarra is evil? That's bad, she'd been reassured by the fact that they had a 5th circle consulting on their plans but if he was evil the whole time then him not pointing out problems was a lot less reassuring. She might know more about magic than anyone else on the committee and that's a lot of pressure - hopefully the inquisitor was able to help out Valia enough to make up for it.

"Isn't that just Delegate Tallandria? I think everyone else here is nobility, elected, or religious, and I think almost all of us can detect normally?"

Yes but she hadn't wanted to single anyone out. "Are you all right with that, Delegate Tallandria? You are accused of no crime, I just want to know - whether it's that everybody's Evil or whether it's that all the nobles and electeds are Evil - those are different problems for us to be solving -"

She wanted to drop this committee. Told the count she wouldn't, though, and that she would do her best to keep it sane. So.

"I genuinely have no idea whether I am evil. If I am evil, you will consider it evidence about the sortition delegates as a whole, and not just about me, and assess your plans for the convention accordingly?"

"Yes, exactly. If most of the sortition delegates are Evil then you're probably right that we can't use it for all we might hope to. If it's mostly the nobles that are Evil, then I am optimistic that we can do something about that."

She breathes.

"Yeah, okay. I'll do it."

"Mind you, this spell will only show delegate Tallandria where she's headed. If you want more than her word, you'll have to put her under a truth spell after."

That said, since Abadarans shouldn't be hard to find, she goes ahead and casts the spell.

Yes, she already asked an Abadaran if they'll do the truth spell after. It was expensive but the delegates are paid well.

Korva audibly gasps.

Children. Everywhere. Emaciated, starving, medium ones and little ones and tiny ones and infants so small they could not possibly live outside a mother, but they do, rolling on the ground of a massive plain of twilight and dust, begging the older ones for attention, wandering on tiny, underdeveloped legs that cannot possibly hold them. A single older woman stands in the middle, rocking three screaming infants at once, while half a dozen more pull at her skirts, begging for their turn. Black birds swoop through the sky, ignoring them.

Korva trembles in her seat and swipes at her eyes, once, trying not to cry, until the scene melts away.

" - I have to be an orphanage worker forever?"

Xénia snorts. She's seen that one. "No. Only until you pick something."

Oh excellent! If Delegate Tallandria is neutral, then Valia is probably right. She smiles at the girl reassuringly.

...which afterlife is an orphanage? The Boneyard, where dead children go, probably. Valia beams at her. "Well congratulations on not being Evil. Do you mind if I get the Abadaran to confirm -"

"Yeah, go ahead."

Maybe everyone's not evil and this won't go terribly.

Maybe.

She feels — betrayed, which is probably stupid. A poisonous snake isn't betraying you if it bites you and you die, and fifth-circle wizards aren't not like poisonous snakes. But she trusted him, trusted that he cared about the same things she did, and apparently that was all a lie.  

"Are we allowed to kick them off the committee?" she says, not even slightly trying to hide how she's feeling. "If there were some other constitutional convention run by Chelish people for ourselves instead of by Galtan archmages — I forget the rest of the words — I'd say we should do more than just kick them off one committee, but I think the archmages will stop us if we try. At least during the convention."

(The Abadaran is easily fetched and consulted and paid and magical and sent on his way.)

"I'm not sure if we're allowed to kick him off but I'm also not sure we aren't. We can at least try and force Cotonnet to admit that he's forcing us to work with random Evil wizards just because they bribed or cheated their way into 'winning' an election somewhere. My bigger concern is - he's a powerful wizard. If we confront him he might just kill us all, or - enslave us all -"

"The Archmage Cotonnet is a far more powerful wizard than he, and has guaranteed the safety of us all." Not that, as of last night's discussion which reportedly went well, he wants 'Ibarra' kicked off the committee, but it will be fun to see them try.

"The Archmage Cotonnet is not in this committee room. If Ibarra Fireballs us all, what happens?"

"Archduke Blanxart, powerful enough to survive a single Fireball and with protective gear, screams," says Alexandre, rapping his knuckles against the doorframe to break invisibility as he sweeps in, "his bodyguard drops invisibility, the guards come running, and I die." This is his polite way of protecting Jean's identity as 'not someone powerful enough to effortlessly kill Alexandre in a single Quickened Flesh to Stone.'

He'll nod to Valia. "Your fears are extremely sensible when dealing with evil fifth-circle enchanters you expect are plotting against you, especially since they might be lying about being more than fifth. Your group's size - there's no Mass Dominate Person available to mortals - and the number of wizards and clerics are both sensible precautions, though, as is the presence of Archduke Blanxart. Even if I wished to test the Cotonnets' power, which I most assuredly do not considering the level of my debt to them, neither murdering nor enslaving you would be a remotely sensible idea."

(He's standing in the doorframe, in the way that people who have just entered a room last in the group stand in the doorway, and not particularly in the manner of someone blocking the door.)

After what he hopes is a moment of stunned silence, but waiting no more than a moment -

"I see the Committee is assembled without me. Conducting your first internal purge, I see."

"You lied to us," she says, realizing a second too late that this is probably a stupid thing to shout at an Evil fifth-circle enchanter.

"I don't believe I ever said I wasn't evil," he said. "Really, with the mask -" he taps it "- I would have thought you could guess. What I said was that I wanted to assist the committee in excising diabolism from Cheliax, which I most assuredly do."

"And when we assembled today with the Pharasmin spell to check everyone, you were planning to tell us the truth?"

"Oh, I expect I'd have to. There's ways to get past Abadar's Truthtelling, but I'd rather not feud with the Church of Abadar. They might cancel my resurrection insurance."

He raises an eyebrow. "Really, Valia - there's a dozen people in this city here from Absalom who could tell you I am a worshipper of Norgorber, Neutral Evil god of crime, and probably some who could quote my 'slavery is pointless and inefficient, but just because I'm not an Asmodean doesn't mean I'm Good' speech word for word, gods know I've made it enough. Background checks won't get you everything, but they're still worth trying. Some people don't even really try to hide it."

"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."

"This man just confessed to burning children to death in their homes. Do you have any reason to accuse Victoria of that or are you just playing the stupid game that people seem to think is wisdom, where they insist that we're all equally bad and so can't survive expecting any better of our leadership?"

Was that what this whole business was about? If he had just asked about it she wouldn't have pushed back - she doubts anyone here would have - but now that he just wasted all of their time on stupid rhetorical tricks because he couldn't just ask for things like a normal person she just wants to roll her eyes at him, and only long practice lets her refrain from showing any of it. Fucking noble politics.

"Neither of those, Select, but if you think the check unnecessary then I will not insist on it now." (He'll try to arrange it later, though.) "My vote against removing Delegate Ibarra stands."

And now he's upset that they're not just going along with him after his posturing fell flat, though at least he's keeping it to gestures that won't effect the final result. She can already foresee he's going to be a nightmare to manage going forward, and reminds herself that she'd have been ecstatic about an archduke even this reasonable a year ago.

"I'm in favor of removing him, obviously."

"Fine." They don't need his vote anyway. 

That's - Ferrer, Wain, and Rivera for removing him, Blanxart opposed, and her and the pharasmins undecided. Fuck, her vote counts.

Why does Blanxart want him here? Why do any of them have to be here? Can she just leave? She told the count she had a principle and she ought to keep having it for longer than ten hours, but - Korva doesn't even know what this committee is doing, anymore. How are you supposed to have opinions on which way to take things if you don't feel like anyone in the room is being other than terrifying. Well, besides the Pharasmins, who haven't voted yet.

Abstaining is either the same as voting to remove or will devolve into her vote being the tiebreaker, which is the worst.

This is now the second most uncomfortable room of the last two days. Maybe number one.

There is no way any productive discussion is going to happen with all of these people in the room. Maybe that's the point. Maybe sitting in here yelling at each other and doing nothing is the best possible use of everyone's time, given they won't just dissolve this stupid committee. Fuck.

She can't actually keep him here anyway, though, the Pharasmins won't both vote to keep.

"Abstain."

"For removal."

"Shoo," says Ester, who has not followed everything that's going on because she's an old lady, damn it, but has gotten the picture that he's evil and burns down people's houses.

And he will give an ironic salute and depart.

"Right. Okay. ....really to be responsible we should talk to del Mar too about why she was using magic to conceal being Evil before we vote on kicking her out. Maybe that can wait until our scheduled meeting time this afternoon? Unless she's secretly here?"

"So now that he's gone, I was thinking, he gave this whole speech about how lots of people in the city knew he was Evil and could have told us. And I think most of the people we're trying to get rid of are really obviously Evil to everyone who knows them, but we don't know everyone, so we might not know what they've done. So I was thinking, we should have an easy way for people to tell us about all the people who are really obviously Evil that we don't already know about. For everyone to tell us, not just delegates who already know who we are, like maybe there's a nobleman who's playing nice here so people don't notice but his servants could tell you that he forces himself on them, or maybe there's more people like that Hell-priest where they're from Westcrown and lots of people around the city know what they've done but we don't. ...We shouldn't assume that everything people tell us is true, Evil people might make up lies to get us to go after innocent people, but I think it would be better than nothing. ...Also this can probably wait until we meet this afternoon, and definitely until we've handled del Mar. I just wanted to say it now so that I don't forget."

"I think that's a good idea. I also think...I want to give a speech to the convention. Because he said, and everyone keeps saying, oh, the people of Cheliax are mostly Evil, whatever you do they'll subvert it to Evil with their Evilness, and - I think that's not actually true. I think that most people have done some terrible things, but -

- but there's a reason the Asmodeans resorted to killing everyone in Pezzack, right. It's because they believed that Good is contagious, that once there were two dozen rebels the city was lost and you might as well kill everyone in it. It's not something you'd do if most people were awful through and through. You wouldn't have to. Most people wouldn't rebel.

And it seems like maybe a really important disagreement, whether Good is contagious, whether a city with two dozen rebels in it is lost to Hell forever. And the people here who aren't from Pezzack probably don't actually know how it happened."

Nod nod. 

"I think that would be really nice! I didn't know anything about what happened in Pezzack until I met you. —I think there are some things that are so awful that they still make you a bad person even if you also go and rebel against Asmodeus, like murdering innocent people or rape or burning down a house full of children, but I don't think most people have done those."

"Yeah, I don't think rebelling against Asmodeus makes up for all the things Ibarra did. But I think it's - most people might not even know about themselves, that they'd probably have rebelled against Asmodeus if they had the chance, but if they lived in Pezzack they would have. And - I think maybe they'd be less scared of what we're doing, if they knew...do you know how to write?"

"I do!!"

"Would you be willing to help me write it? I was reading the pamphlets - well, asking people to read me the pamphlets - and they're mostly stupid, but that's the way to make people really understand things." Right. They should wrap their unofficial meeting first; she's keeping people away from the important floor debates.

"Thank you all for detecting Evil this morning, and for helping with Delegate Ibarra. We'll meet in the afternoon like we did yesterday, I guess, and figure out del Mar then." She smiles at all of them even the Archduke, who shouldn't get less consideration than a normal person due to his crippling deficiency of being an archduke. 

"I'd be happy to! Sending it out as a pamphlet is a really good idea, I bet we can find a wizard to help once it's all written up. Or I can ask Calistria tomorrow but I'm not sure if it's a priest spell too or only a wizard one."