?????

Delegate Bainilus kept insisting on keeping the bond the same in committee, and now she's trying to lower it to... still an absurd sum of money, but a smaller one? Noble politics makes no sense.

...At least now she knows that the nobles on the Rights Committee were telling the truth about the diabolist nobility who'd want to stop people from printing almost anything?

"I recognize the wisdom and experience of Archduke Bainilus, and thank her for her support," Xavier says, "but I do not support these amendments on the grounds of their radicalism. A merchant or adventurer needs some degree of sense to become rich enough to raise six thousand gold which he does not to raise five hundred, and five hundred will not pay any significant fraction of the damages of a crisis such as the Third. And Andoran possesses many virtues, but I would not consider Andorani pamphlets to be among them." Thank you so much, Jilia, you're really wonderfully helpful.

"With all due respect, Your Highness Archduke Requena i Cortez de Sirmium, I welcome the spirit in which these regulations were proposed, but I must agree that they seem wholly inadequate.

We have all seen how a handful of inflammatory pamphlets can send a city into uproar. Hundreds of people died, on the night of the third, and thousands came to lesser harm. Would you value their lives so cheaply, that you treat six thousand pounds as sufficient to make such a riot's architect answer for his crimes? A wealthy anarchic adventurer, were he so inclined, could fund a press himself, and so long as he remained carefully within the boundaries of incitement he could freely sow seeds that will one day blossom into destruction — and should he be executed for it, in the end, he could see himself returned to life in a neighboring country for a similar cost.

Moreover, even setting aside the risk of loopholes in the law, such varied exemptions seem to me to leave the men of the Watch with little to do save read through pamphlets for compliance. If they are forced to waste their time reviewing books of recipes to ensure that they don't begin halfway through to instead advocate cannibalism, as some pamphlets have seen fit to do, we will render it impossible for them to identify truly dangerous literature in time to respond. Better to require all works to be approved before publication, and thereby render it simpler, if not simple, to judge whether a work is lawful.

As for your concerns about the laws of Andoran, men who knowingly violate the law are as yet an unsolved problem, except insofar as the law sees fit to punish them; I see little reason why the same sort of men who ignore Andoran's censors to unlawfully spread radical pamphlets in Andoran would not ignore the licensing requirements of this law just the same.

Perhaps when our children reconvene for the next constitutional convention, our country may be ready for laws so loose as these. But it is not ready yet."

He would, in fact, be happy to live in a world where the judgment and character of men are sufficient to prevent rebellion. It's the sort of thing he'd have liked to build, in the Age of Glory. But they are farther from such a world now than they were when he died, and they weren't especially close to begin with.

Only nobles are speaking. He wants to change that, stand up and say something, now that he recognizes the pattern of controlling the room. But the President's speech has him all confused.

He doesn't know how book business works, or how merchant houses do. Six thousand crowns is an unfathomable amount of money, and the other options are all sort of limited? He's taking notes but he's not very fast at it and misses a lot of things.

...Yeah, he's mostly just very confused. 

"I think I speak for a lot of delegates," he says after politely waiting his turn, "When I say that the fine details of a policy's future effects seem as impossible to divine as the weather a year from now. We can guess if it'll be good or bad by experience of those who have seen and done such things, like the nobles for matters of order, the clergy of Abadar for matters of trade... But if such august persons disagree on bonds and taxes and funds, what are we to look to? I was sortioned, and in many ways, I'm not fit to stand here among the learned, but as one fellow soritioned delegate said on the first day- We are the people of cheliax. We are the people these laws shall rule. The cities don't exist without farms to feed them, just as farms don't exist without soldiers to protect them. But the farms still matter, and so do the farmers. So I beg pardon, and know that oversimplifying a thing makes it nonsense, but I ask those proposing laws to please explain to me and all the other barely lettered or unlettered farmers what this proposed law actually means for us in our little villages. It won't stop us from sending letters? Will it make getting the news or holy books more expensive? Will I have to worry about posting a wedding invitation in the village square without the proper stamps?"

Ravounel’s proposals are just insanity. She’s an archduchess so he can’t say it but looking around the room it’s obvious how many recognize that. Jonatan is being more reasonable.

If this proposal is a starting point to be negotiated down from, rather than up, he seriously misjudged speaking in support. 

Ruben, welcome to the uppity peasants willing to speak. This is what going to a cafe does, you’re one of us now. 

Lluïsa likes Delegate Oriol (the other one, no relation).

Are peasants just all secretly really great?

To the front.

"The rights committee met as soon as humanly possible because the matter facing this city deserves no less than the swiftest possible response, and because this is a decision to limit and narrow a basic right - that of freedom of the pen. This law will halt nearly all domestic publishing of new works for quite some time. It will most likely utterly cripple anyone's ability to make political arguments pertaining to the government of Cheliax of any kind, and hit many other things with it, until a censorship board can devise more careful guidelines. If I am wrong, I expect it to be because the Church of Abadar has more love for political debate than I imagine. This is harsh, but it is necessary; the need to prevent politically motivated lies is too great."

"It allows foreign and existing books because Cheliax contains quite literally millions of existing books, together very likely worth millions of gold in value. Many foreign books describing true history, the teachings of the good gods, or simple acts of human kindness, were once smuggled into Cheliax by brave men and women who were not just killed, but maledicted when the government discovered their activities. In the past eighteen months, an even larger number of wizards have diligently copied a far larger number of foreign books for the people of Cheliax to learn from. In many places, these books are the only window that the common people have into any way of life that is not built on evil. While the restored nobles and the foreign priests are wonderful, almost no common people have the privilege of speaking to one for more than a few moments. It was from a foreign book that I first learned that sometimes men in other nations love their children, and are unashamed to say so openly. So rare is this, in Egorian of today, that if I had not read it in a book, I would not know it. But I do know it, because someone thought to preserve an old book."

"We do not have a board of censors, and may or may not be able to staff and train one this year. We do hope to have one in the future, and have left a place for them in the law. But to ban all books we already have until they pass such a board would be to halt a huge portion of the moral development of the people of Cheliax, not for a moment, but for years. It would be to deprive many people of their most cherished possessions - possessions that their dear friends gave up their eternity to give to them, so important are the words contained inside. And it would be to ruin a huge number of honest businessmen, at a time when far too many men are already out of work."

"This law will end the spread ephemera, periodicals, and pamphlets - all of them - immediately. None of them will return, after the first crop of unlicensed pamphleteers are likely jailed en masse, unless a man of very much wealth indeed stakes his life on a particular pamphlet being safe. If he is wrong, or willingly negligent? He will die for it, as he would die for any other crime. Others will, I imagine, learn to be more careful in the future. But it will not deprive of us of the right to share that information we have about what life is like in places like Lastwall and Osirion, which the people of Cheliax desperately thirst for, and cannot obtain any other way. To lose that information would be a massive step backwards, towards the evil we were raised with."

"In answer to Delegate Oriol's excellent question: this law does not ban letters, invitations to events, or materials not distributed to more than one person. It will, as a matter of fact, make the news from anything besides a private letter more expensive to obtain, and probably arrive later, in exchange for likely making the news more reliable when it arrives. It will not make it harder to obtain holy books, or any other book which exists legally in the same form in another civilized and lawful allied country. Perhaps most importantly, you will not need to hold your breath while law enforcement ransacks your home, waiting to see whether they declare that a book you purchased legally last year is now illegal, which I know was a common experience for many of us before. Unless a work is specifically banned, such as the Disciplines, you cannot be punished for merely for keeping it in your home. Nor can you be punished for possessing an illegally copied work. The wizard who copied it may be liable for damages up to and including death, but anyone who merely owns an unmarked book cannot be. It will end the dangerous lies, but as long as you don't publish unauthorized books or pamphlets within your community, it will do so without placing the peasantry in any danger."

.....aaaaaaaah, please let that have been helpful.

The part about men loving their children really hurts, unexpectedly, but all in all Tallandria is quite the persuasive orator.

"Well said, Delegate Tallandria," he says firmly.

Clapclapclapclapclap.

Loud claps. Damn, she's a good speaker.

The convention should vote to dissolve all the cities and let everyone in them go home. Enric remembers only a bit about his parents and more about the loose coalition of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and ambiguous relations that actually raised him. But he knows they’re all of them family and love each other. How could it even be possible to make so many people forget that, and the only one who says it is a book. A book! What did they do to people? 

...okay, he guesses he'll hire the Inquirer as a scribe if the fellow's put out of work.

Ha! The girl thinks those books about happy families are real. Wants to protect the smuggled romances and adventure stories too. That’s all good nonsense, like kids stories about cute little animals in paradise. Pathetic. Libraries are for making wizards, and not much else. 

It is not the first time she has made the observation but the sortitions really turned out remarkably well. The natural assumption would be that they were cheating but if they were competent to find people like Oriol and Tallandria in order to pretend they found them randomly the entire government would look remarkably different.

Maybe he will have a heart attack and die. That wouldn't be his fault, and he'd be dead. ....nnnno then he'll still go to Hell. Fuck. Fuck.

"Fine oratory from a child of Egorian," Berenguer-Aspex says. "But let us ask if we want to preserve Chelish books. A handful of fairy-tales gotten from smugglers on the one hand, and on the other - on the other evey book printed in Cheliax for the past eighty years, all filled with all the lies of the Thrunes. The Disciplines. Books of "religion" for every devil in Hell. Their lying false histories. Stories of murder and deceit that exalt every sin the gods condemn. All these poison the minds of the people, and the people, as we saw less than a week ago, are fools who can be invited to riot with a few lying quotes. Legalize good books, well enough, and let the schools have their libraries. To the pyre with everything copied under the Thrunes."

"You say that this will end the crimes of the pen, and ask that we vote for it thereby. It will not, and as such voting for it would be a grave abandonment of the responsibility of this convention towards the stewardship of Cheliax. When we must accept the decision of every other censorship board in the inner sea, we are committed to permitting the worst of their excesses - no man can in truth speak of the wisdom of the censors of Absalom, for there men may advocate for the worship of anarchic powers. If dozens of legal publishers exist, each with their own standard and no oversight, then illegal publications will be free to pass illicitly into the hands of her majesty's subjects, buried under the weight of other works, until their damage is done. And if we legalize all works from before the convention, then every anarchic work created under the Thrunes that we have not explicitly banned may continue to spread throughout the country. Now is not a time, as Delegate Tellandria suggests, to tread lightly around the core freedom of the pen. No, His Grace has the right of it - now is the time to pull this ill-wrought freedom out by the roots."

Nethys, let us know. She can't speak again, she doesn't think - though part of her really wants to ask if he really means to claim that men all over the world only love their children in fairy tales - but she thinks the Archduke knows what he's doing, and can see this through. Hopes.

(The saga was not a good book, of course, not in the way that he means. There's a sense in which it could not have meant anything to her if it was. She hopes, though she is sure she'll never see it again, that a copy exists somewhere in Absalom.)

Almost everywhere men may advocate for the worship of (at least some) anarchic powers. Desna's an anarchic power. Osirion and Molthune are practically alone there, Molthune because of the internal revolt and Osirion because they seem to have been under the impression that the way to be maximally Lawful was to abhor all things of Chaos. Lastwall has a week of lessons and prayers for conscripts concerning Desna because if She picks someone once they're introduced to her worship, free Good cleric Iomedae's not paying for. 

She isn't going to say any of this, even though she put a lot of work into learning the censorship regimes of many different countries for this floor debate. She owes Xavier a favor which will not be hard to repay, and she stays out of it entirely, and it still passes and no one gets the impression she is a many-tentacled monstrosity steering the whole convention, much less that the Geryon cultist pamphlets had inside info. 

Acevedo... realizes Milani and Desna are anarchic powers, doesn't he?

Gotcha.

"You know, Your Excellency, I believe we have priests of Milani and Cayden Cailean in the audience," Joan-Pau says drily, "to say nothing of great Desna. Will you pry the Virtuous Placards from every tavern wall in Cheliax, burn the Eight Scrolls, throw the Light of Hope onto the blaze yourself? I think the worshippers of every Chaotic Good god in Cheliax would be very interested in hearing that this is what your proposal means, when you say that permitting the worship of anarchic powers is sufficient to dismiss a proposal from consideration. The man who pulls a rose out by the roots will tear his hand, and the man who tries to swat a wasp will have a worse day than that. Before you commit Her Majesty to a war with a third of her clergy, do kindly tell us all that this is what you propose."

Of course the oathbreaker would defend, not just the worthy anarchic gods, but the unworthy as well.

Ha! Look who just made a mistake and is losing at politics? The noble who could be eaten by three halflings, that’s who. Hope Acevedo enjoys a smug half orc sneering at him every time this happens.