That's not what Carissa meant, exactly. 'Should the fort commander order everyone to stop lying' is a different question than - maybe she can just say this. There really ought to be at least some benefits to his being an unreasonably lenient person. 

"If Asmodeus does not value us any more then it seems a very terrible thing for all of us to go to Hell, which has perhaps as little remaining use for us. Iomedae wants us, or at least exerts herself to prevent this fort's annihilation; therefore it is useful, to us, to know what Iomedae wants her things to be, so that we can be that, and not be of no value to anyone. There are lots of things Asmodeus valued that you were not commanded to tell us all to do but that constituted being a better Asmodean than other people."

"I suspect it would be bad for your Law to announce a policy of never lying again and then break it, so I don't advise you to do that. But it might be plausibly good for your climb out of Evil to decide to tell the truth, when reasons not to come up, particularly if motivated by a desire to emulate Iomedae and Her servants. It's almost certainly less important than not torturing people."

"Yes, I had gathered from the fact She prefers sending people to Hell to flogging them that She felt very strongly about that. Presumably it is why She likes you." Which means Carissa can't even call it incompetence any more since getting picked up by a new god was in fact the most valuable thing the commander could be doing.

"- I don't claim to understand any high level strategic aims of any gods, but - you could model it as something analogous to a hostage situation, where Asmodeus and His Hellish systems have so damaged so many of us that a typical Chelish person is now a hostage of Hell, and the right move is not to - indicate at least on a policy level that this fact is a moving one, lest that tenderness inspire even more machinations dedicated to inflating the hostage population."

"That still has the implication that Iomedae would rather kill people than flog them but I guess lacks the implications about whether she minds people going to Hell. Which was the confusing part alongside the intense dislike of torture! I think - the problem is that other people won't be following that rule, right, unless they're commanded to and maybe even then! No one's going to report a rape if you've got to wildly overreact about it."

"Someone did. I assume many other people are not, which - since as you point out it leaves us more of our force alive to hold the fort - is not at this time an unmixed curse. Awkward though it is from a Law perspective. - if you want to have an extended conversation about theology I am not averse but will think better if we are playing chess at the same time."

Does Iomedae like chess? Probably, or she wouldn't have picked the fort commander who is obsessed with it. She can sit down with a chessboard. And ask about the rules. And -

" - I spoke imprecisely. Some people will happily destroy all their petty rivals by reporting them. If they haven't calculated what will happen if we all do that."

He explains the rules of chess. Opens his chess book to the first page, where they're all written out, and leaves it on the desk for her. "It's very hard to get people to calculate that. I'm not sure yet if a large shakeup in the established rules and habits improves or worsens the matter."