Is his bodyguard still there. He is. Good. "Yes."

She is not actually going to attack him about it but mostly because Valia'd be upset about her getting herself killed. Also she'd be dead but that kind of feels worth it right now.

"I — Iomedae is supposed to be Good—" (and that feels like a very stupid thing to say but she doesn't know what else to say—)

"She can have clerics who are Lawful Neutral. - do you want a copy of the interview I published explaining this."

Probably that's some kind of Asmodean trick where if she says yes he has her arrested for breaking the publishing laws. 

"I don't see how it's possible to work for Asmodeus and be Lawful Neutral — how many innocent people did you have tortured and murdered—"

(Her chest feels tight, and her head feels heavy, and she (stupidly, pathetically) keeps remembering things her priest did only this time she's seeing Chosen Artigas in his place—)

"Do you in fact want me to produce a number."

She's still angry but now she's also confused!

"—can you?"

"- well, it depends on what you mean. If you're including every situation where someone under my command at the Worldwound disciplined their subordinates or abused the camp followers and I could technically have intervened in any handful of those cases, or situations earlier in my career where I was ordered by my own superiors to carry out such disciplinary action and did so, then no, I do not have a number. If you want to know how many people I executed and what they'd done so you can decide if you think it was justifiable military discipline or murder, and a separate number for how many people I tortured with my own hands, then I do."

What she wants is for him to just tell her how much to hate him — having thought about that for more than a second that's obviously a stupid thing to want, literally no one in the entire world is going to do that.

She wants to know what he did to every last one of them and then she wants to make him experience exactly what they felt. Which is less stupid, except someone would stop her and she'd die for it and Valia would be upset, and also even if she weren't stopped he'd die before she could get through almost any of it, and then apparently he'd somehow go to Axis and get to just be okay — maybe better off than his victims, if some of them were people like Lluïsa—

—ordered by my own supervisors to carry out such disciplinary action, he says, like it matters whether it was some other priest of Asmodeus who came up with the idea, if a priest of Asmodeus orders you to torture a child to death for disrespecting Asmodeus a decent person should refuse, the Evil her priest did wasn't any less Evil when it was her lord demanding it—

"...The right number is zero," she says, which she's pretty sure is also a stupid thing to say. "I don't see how Iomedae could say 'oh, sure, he tortured someone to death for saying no one should worship Asmodeus, but it's fine, he only did that once or twice or however many times it was—'"

"- yes. The right number is zero. You are correct. I did not get the right number and cannot now change that."

She thinks maybe she'd rather deal with Delegate Ibarra laughing about murdering children than whatever this is.

"I don't know how you can live with yourself."

Well, the other day I did get attacked by a mob and - no. Isn't it a gladdening fact that my feelings don't - no.

"Iomedae has some use for me. I am trying to fulfill it."

"I think she should've picked someone who isn't awful."

"It would be reputationally simpler."

It's not about reputation, it's about how no one should be able to just — get away with that sort of thing, and then be chosen by the goddess of fighting Evil, as if he hasn't done worse than almost anyone here — it's actually very weird that both of them count as Neutral, does Pharasma just declare nearly everyone Neutral no matter what they've done, is that why some of the Evil nobles didn't show up to her spell, she'd thought it was just that they weren't strong enough—

Instead of saying any of that she's glaring at him silently.

"Four," he says.

That is a smaller number than she was expecting and somehow it doesn't make her feel better at all.

(For a moment she feels like she's fifteen years old again, watching a kitchen-slip beg incoherently for her life as if anyone will listen, until eventually she can't beg at all.)

Four is — it feels almost possible that there's an amount he could suffer on Golarion that could set things right, not right enough that he'd deserve to be a priest of Iomedae but right enough that if he got the Final Blade afterwards it wouldn't feel fundamentally unjust that he was being spared the suffering of Hell. Not that he's going to Hell, apparently, but still. It's a fathomable amount of Evil, rather than a completely unfathomable amount.

None of which even slightly excuses being a priest of Asmodeus.

Valia would say, did say, that Evildoers who keep seeking power should die for it, and it's hard to see becoming a priest again and joining the convention as anything but seeking power. Alicia would say — well, she could just ask, but she's pretty sure Alicia would say — that if he really has given up serving Asmodeus completely, it's better to put him to work helping people who deserve it. Raimon would say that justice does not come to the defense of people who are tortured to death by Asmodean priests, and that that's wrong.

The azata would say that no matter how many innocent people he's tortured to death it's wrong to kill him if he's stopped. She really doesn't feel like listening to the azata right now.

There's a sense in which this is all kind of irrelevant. She's almost certainly being watched; if she tries to hurt him she'll die for it, and it won't even work, they'll just put him back. (She feels a flare of anger in her chest that there are so many innocent victims who stayed dead when Chosen Artigas is not just alive but resurrected.)

...Delegate Ibarra was in the hall when Delegate Fraga brought it up, and for all he's Evil she's pretty sure he really does hate Asmodeus. But trying to get someone like Delegate Ibarra to help give Chosen Artigas what he deserves feels obviously wrong, and anyways the idea of talking to him feels even less appealing than the idea of listening to the azata.

She wonders how he did it. Her priest was never very creative, with the torture, and it's making it kind of hard to imagine him getting what he deserves with any degree of specificity. Flaying would work, it's not like it has to be exactly the same, but there's something satisfying about the idea of hurting him the same way he hurt his victims.

"...What were they like? The — the four innocent people, I mean—"

"The four I have in mind under the most restrictive definition were all chosen for me by my seminary instructors for training exercises. I didn't know them personally."

"If an Asmodean priest ordered me to torture an innocent person to death as a training exercise I would kill the priest or die trying." Probably the second one, but still. They'd Maledict her but it would be worth it.

"Yes. A lot of people wouldn't make the mistakes I made. I'm still working through how I could have avoided them myself."

Victòria really does not see how "torture innocent people in the name of Asmodeus" could be a mistake. It's not like there's anyone who doesn't know that that's incredibly Evil! No one just trips, falls, and finds themself holding a knout! Calling that a mistake is a Hell of a way to talk about deciding to torture innocent people on behalf of Asmodeus.

"You could have just... not done super Evil things that everyone knows are Evil. And then you would have avoided it."

"I think that works well for people who are temperamentally Chaotic, as a strategy."

Yes! Obviously! This is one of the many many reasons why being Chaotic is better!

"I know Lawful people are weird about this but 'it is more important to be Good than Lawful' is the sort of thing that feels really obvious to me."

"You're right, it is more important."

Blink blink. She had not even slightly been expecting him to say that.

"...so why didn't you decide to just not be Lawful when you were being ordered to torture innocent people to death?"