"I think he's in the library?" He can show them the way.

Blai is indeed in a library. He has his copy of the Acts, two different commentaries, a notebook and inkwell, a cup of water, and a Light radiating from his pen as he scratches some notes.

Valia waves at him, weakly. "Blai."

He looks up. "- Valia!"

"They had the trial today. I didn't - exactly follow all of the discussion - but they acquitted me. And the Archmage Cotonnet said the convention was supposed to be voluntary except for the sortitions, and people wiser than me thought I should leave Westcrown and come here."

"They have catechism teachers, which are. Important. It's - I - regret that I couldn't be there, but -"

" - I wouldn't have been able to notice anyway. There were thousands of people."

"...still. It seemed - like -

- I think I would be better able to answer your question now if you were still curious."

"Oh. - yes. Definitely."

"Lastwall has conscription. It is understood here that everyone in adequate condition to serve will do so, unless they go to rather extreme lengths to belong to a pacifistic order of some kind; it's possible with some concerted effort to get a non-combat position deliberately but it is viewed - very negatively, just this side of desertion. Desertion, of course, is illegal; penalties go up to and include execution. Iomedae's country can and does command people who want nothing to do with violence to commit it and endure it and, if they do their duty well enough to be promoted, to require it from others. If they have a supply failure, they still expect of their soldiers that they will go hungry rather than pillage unlawfully, and will convict them for it if they do so out of desperation.

"If I had been born in Lastwall, the important difference - in kind rather than in degree - to the extent to which I would have been obliged to hurt people including myself for reasons not my own whenever my superiors called for it - is that I would have been taught the concept of an illegal order. There would have been any limits, even if the space within the limits remained vast and demanding, to what they could licitly ask of me. And in Cheliax that just - wasn't the case."

"....so Lastwall's also Evil?" asks Valia, horrified. She had really been pretty sure that was not the case!!!

"No. My point isn't that conscription is evil or that military discipline is evil, they're just difficult answers to difficult situations; my point is that illegal orders are an important concept and I didn't have it because it wouldn't have served Asmodeus for me to imagine there were boundaries to His power over me. I'm temperamentally - not - insulated, from what I find to be required of me, very well. I think what happened with me couldn't have happened with you, you would have noticed on your own that something was wrong in a way I couldn't. But the nature of the something wasn't just that I was obliged to serve, or that I expected to suffer for it, or that anyone else suffered for it. It was that there was no ceiling."

"I understand that you are trying to describe a distinction between Lastwall and Cheliax that is - really important to you. It is not making a lot of sense to me right now. I think of the difference between Good and Evil mostly being - that the Good people are always trying to do the best thing that is possible with the options, and the Evil people aren't trying to do that at all. You can be - Good and not have very many options, I think. I was not going to be angry with the court if they had me executed because they were - trying to have laws that are probably a good idea to have, even if we were also trying to follow them -"

"- I think the reason this distinction is important to me is because I don't usually expect to understand the high level operational objectives of gods or even countries and I think a lot of the rank and file anywhere also don't. The difference to my mind has to be something that I would have been able to see, which doesn't describe anything that would be secret, or too complicated for me to follow, or even just not worth the time it would take to explain to me. But of course your mind would be on the - is there context it would help for me to have about the trial -"

" - I am honestly not sure I understood everything that happened, except at a very high level. The speech caused the riots - not directly, people wrote further horrible speeches based on it, but it wouldn't have happened otherwise - and so they arrested me, and charged me with incitement to three hundred murders or something, and then there was a trial.

The difference between Good and Evil isn't hard to tell, at all? They didn't torture me for a confession. They charmed me and got me drunk and read my mind, instead. They didn't permit the guards to abuse me. They fed me. They let me write letters, and take meetings. I got an advocate to argue to the court that I wasn't guilty. And if they had decided to put me to death they would have offered me the Final Blade. That's - eight different differences one can see, between a Good society and an Evil one."

"I think if you'd been sent to seminary," she wouldn't have been, they don't take illiterates, but, "you would not have had my problem. I've mostly been focusing on whether there was anything that would have caused me not to have my problem."

"- and 'that's a lot of torturing innocent people' wouldn't have done it, but 'in some places there are some orders that they're not allowed to give you' would have?"

"I don't - have the ability to go through my life over again with the one thing changed, but so far it is the best candidate I have thought of."

"Hmmm. ....so if Lastwall wanted you to do something that was harmful and bad, but not in Lastwall's category of illegal orders, you'd now...be able to reach for the illegal orders as a concept, and not just as a specific part of Lastwall's rules, and not do it?"

"Well, they're actually still not allowed to give me any orders. I'm not qualified to take an oath of obedience to the Church yet and won't be by the time I need to return to the convention. But if I were and they did then I'd have access to systems that are intended to acknowledge the possibility, that it could be right to refuse an order and to go over one's direct superior's head about it, and failing to allow me to access those systems would itself be suspect and delegitimizing."

"I'm glad you have that. I ...I think maybe I am too tired to have this conversation, I'm sorry. I want to see, later, if I'm still confused about the things I'm confused about right now or if it's just that I had a long day. Are you going to still be here?"

"I will be going back to Westcrown whenever Ser Cansellarion does but I don't know his exact schedule."

"Okay. Do you want me to keep trying to ask you questions about this while very confused, or should I see if you are still here in the morning?"

"I think that one topic might be kind of complicated inherently but if you had any other questions I would try?"

"I don't know. I - trust the Goddess. And it's not like I haven't done awful awful things because I was confused about the world."