"'Preserving public order' requires not inciting riots by banning all books. If you don't believe me, find booksellers from the city. Consult them on how to write a censorship law that won't ruin them and drive their peers and customers to riot. And let I remind everyone who didn't live in Infernal Cheliax that not for at least five years and probably ten will we have magistrates who can be trusted with any discretion whatsoever. Ravounel currently has the best magistrate staff in the country and they still couldn't be trusted with this."

They have no idea what they're doing, and they're going to destroy the country on purpose in the name of saving it. At least if she has to take Ravounel separate she'll be able to get skilled immigrants fleeing the trashfire they're going to make of the rest of the country.

"I would not go quite so far as that," even if he has barred half the nobles in his realm from dispensing justice. "But I don't see what's wrong with the existing law. This publication you have here is atrocious, but my first guess is that the now-captured lich obtained the approval of Osirion's censorship board via dominate, which Chelish people are not much less susceptible to. It suggests that we would do well to extend our allies an apology for the inconvenience."

"It seems to me that had the lich not secured the cooperation of Osirion's censorship board, whether by magic or merely by the inadequacy of Osirian laws for our country's needs, she could simply have put up the required bond for a publishing house with the money earned from her admittedly-considerable spellcasting ability. I would certainly support extending our Osiriani allies an apology regardless."

"Perhaps we could bring the ambassador to the convention to issue him a formal apology?"

"That seems polite, especially since it can come with our assurance that she's been executed or otherwise confined and could be handed over to their custody for crimes committed there."

Being a lich is legal in Osirion! Are there any depths to which she won't sink?

"Archduchess, to return to your earlier point, I think it is either the case that many of the works those booksellers sell can be swiftly approved by a censorship board, and normalcy will resume without riots, or many of those works would not be approved by a censorship board, and we should rectify the situation. Much of what was published under the Thrunes was written to poison the minds of the people and will now best serve the country as kindling. If we could close the ports for a week, we can limit the bookstores to selling virtuous books for a week."

"Your Grace, I worry that there are not enough men of good character and sound judgement to staff a Chelish censorship board. I cannot imagine us outperforming Osirion here, let alone Lastwall.

I don't know if the people will riot over this, and if they do I think that it will be in another city. Westcrown has the Reclamation. I do expect it will result in sentencing several thousand men, women, and children to the mines in quite short order, and would at least hope that you are prepared for that. Unless you mean something else by hard labor; the mines and the galleys are the usual suspects, and at present I hear we're a bit embarrassingly short on galleys."

"If a man is so lawless as to willfully break this law merely because he cannot stand to have his actions even slightly restricted, I expect it would only be a matter of time before he violated it in a far more serious manner. Unless I misunderstand you, Your Highness."

Weren't they just discussing dominating the censor? That's illegal! That's illegal here!

"It is absolutely not the case that it could be done swiftly. There are hundreds of thousands of books. Thousands of distinct ones, at least. It would take months with a well-staffed board of censors, which we cannot afford; years without, long enough they'd be out of business before receiving approval."

She's not going to touch what the Conde just said. It's so grossly Hellish she can't think of a way to refute it that would be convincing.

"I find it challenging to take you seriously on matters of practicality when you yourself said how to achieve the task; ask the booksellers. The censors do not need to read the books themselves, they can be advised by booksellers under some sort of truthspell, and comparing independent lists to see where they agree. They could identify the thousand most tame books in a day, if there even are so many, and then spend later days on cases that require more consideration."

It is dangerously close to an insult; he narrowly stopped himself from claiming that she has not abandoned her war on Cheliax, since that would be a straightforward accusation of treason. But it is perhaps not hard to read his mind, on that point.

"A well-educated man can easily read and consider a book in a day. Even giving full consideration to every book, a board of a mere ten men could approve a thousand books in about three months, or a few thousand distinct books in a year — and the booksellers could sell whichever books are first to be approved even while much of their stock remains uncertain.

I do expect that some booksellers will go out of business, and I think that is unfortunate. But if the alternative is allowing lich necromancers to freely corrupt our country's morals, I think it is an easy choice."

"The general session is about to begin, honored chair. I think we should call a vote," which they'll win because the Archduchess is a deranged radical but still only gets one vote here, "and perhaps on the floor we can address some of these worries by naming some wise men we'll appoint to the censorship board."

"Conde, have you ever interacted with a censorship board? A day is wildly optimistic; a week is more likely, to judge whether a book is potentially dangerous. We discussed this yesterday in Rights, considering what ought to be done for the opera, and concluded that a week per play for a trained censor is the best that can be assumed, and assigned fees to support censors on that basis. A book would be a little shorter, since it has only the text, not a performance, but not by a factor of five or seven."

"If you're going to trust the bookseller's judgment, just use the existing law and let them count as publishing houses. Their judgment won't be useless, but they're as Chelish as anyone, and as wizards usually somewhat moreso; they would certainly not count as 'men of good character', not in numbers. They don't know what the thousand most tame books are, they won't even know what the thousand most popular books are. They know what sold in their town, and what was most obviously Asmodean. That will not make the censor's job significantly easier."

"You are seeking to pass a law that the citizens of Cheliax will be unable to distinguish from Asmodeus's law. The kind they are used to breaking regularly because they will be imprisoned anyway if they ever come to the notice of someone who dislikes them and is higher in the hierarchy, because they have broken many other laws because it was not fundamentally possible to live without breaking Chelish law. People who would never do anything meaningfully criminal will be sent to the mines, as the Archduke said, because you criminalized a normal part of life and they do not know how to live among such laws except by assuming they are already damned."

"If you pass this, that suffering, that Evil, is on all your souls, far more than on the souls of the people who are arrested. Weighing thousands of loyal citizens dead in the mines against less than a day of a necromancer making ridiculous claims no one believes? Yes, the choice is easy, but not in the direction you say."

Bit of a sigh. "Conde, I at least must agree with the Archduchess that I don't think this is a small restriction at all. I think that either it outlaws a daily activity, and will outlaw one of the few remaining ways that the plague of wizards has of legally earning bread, or the censorship board will be staffed with men not morally suited to it, and you will find yourself with more evil material, not less.

If this goes to the floor, in this form, I'm afraid I'll have to speak out against it. I've killed a lot of good men for distributing Iomedan commentaries, and I don't mean to go back to doing so."

"On the point of commentaries, I do not think Erastil's clerics will offend Old Deadeye by passing off unrelated works as his holy book. Let us consider the Parables of Erastil as simple copies if authored by one of his empowered clerics, and make clear the censorship board can issue similar judgments. Also, if I'm not mistaken, our list is missing Sarenrae."

She's not as popular in Avistan, but they need more than just Shelyn to redeem this damned country, and he always thought the Taldan prejudice against her was silly.

"We could simply test which of us is correct when it comes to speed. Create the board, task it with haste, and remove it and write a new law if it is inadequate to the task."

"I'd be fine with an amendment to say that the board should review books swiftly and be staffed with at least twenty men, if this will assuage the very dramatic fears of the Archduchess. And - perhaps the minimum penalty is a little harsh, and should merely be the suggested penalty?" Having two archdukes opposed fares worse than one for their prospects on the floor.

"Molthune has had no problems with a simple, standard censorship board, approved by the Lord Protector," Berenguer-Aspex says. "Her Majesty has seized the treasuries of the Thrune usurpers and their appontees and voided their debts and the realm is at peace; her government can pay the costs of staffing a competent censorship board as part of the restoration of order."

Jonatan has learned his lesson about trusting clerics to be reasonable merely because they are empowered by Lawful Good gods. Still, farming men are probably more reasonable than teenage girls empowered during a revolution, and he trusts the Duke's judgment. He makes a few more edits to the draft.

"Ah, my apologies for losing track of the time, Your Excellency. I call for a vote on the proposal to replace our existing censorship laws with a board of censors, as is the practice of all our Lawful allies."

The proposal now reads:

This statute hereby repeals the publication statute of 9 Sarenrith, and replaces it with the following:

There shall be established a Royal Censorship Board for the distribution of published works, to be staffed by a minimum of twenty men of good character who are approved by and serve at the pleasure of the Queen. The initial makeup of this board shall be established by the convention. The distribution, sale, purchase, or dissemination of any pamphlet, book, or other publication not thereby approved by the Royal Censorship Board is illegal. The Royal Censorship Board shall be tasked with ensuring that all materials published in Cheliax shall comply with the laws of Cheliax; that they shall not promote crime, violence, anarchism, or disorder; that they shall contain nothing obscene; that they shall not contain any grave offenses to morality; that they shall not promote false teachings about the gods nor promote the worship of any power of the Lower Planes, nor any other Evil power; and that they shall be moral, sensible, and prudent to publish. The Board shall also be tasked with carrying out this task with reasonable swiftness, particularly in the initial period after it is established.

A publication includes any form of written or pictorial communication, such as broadsheets, flyers, pasquinades, satirical drawings, etc., except for communications reasonably understood to be private, such as personal letters.

The censor's office shall promulgate a method of marking approved publications; any approved publication distributed without such markings is subject to a suggested penalty of 7 days in prison and a ban on all further dissemination, publication, or sale for the criminal for 1 year. The dissemination of material not approved by the censors shall be punished by a suggested penalty of 1 year of hard labor and 100 crowns in fines, with an extra year of labor for every 10 crowns unpaid, and the criminal may never again publish works. If an illegal publication incites readers to a crime, or is followed by crimes resulting in deaths or property damage in excess of 200 crowns, it is a capital offense. Purchasing or otherwise intentionally obtaining a publication banned under this decree shall be punished by a suggested penalty of 40 lashes or 7 days in prison, and a fine of 5 silver per page purchased.

The Crown and Convention may ban publications even if they have previously been approved by the censors. Lord Mayors and Nobles may apply additional restrictions to publications in those territories they rule but may not legalize works that are otherwise banned by the crown, convention, or Royal Censorship Bureau. Nothing in this decree shall prohibit the faithful copying of laws of this realm, nor official decrees, so long as they are copied in their entirety with no commentary. This decree does not make legal any publications banned under other decrees or statutes.

This statute initially authorizes the holy books of Iomedae, Abadar, Aroden, Erastil, Irori, Pharasma, Sarenrae, and Shelyn, so long as they are copied in their entirety with no commentary. It additionally instructs the Royal Censorship Board to give priority consideration to the holy books of other virtuous faiths not listed in this statute. Empowered clerics of Erastil may additionally append additions and commentary to a copy of the Parables of Erastil, and these modified copies shall still be Lawful, so long as these commentaries do not violate other laws (such as the law against slander) or promote gravely immoral action.

"In favor."

"Against. I regret that my further arguments for why will have to happen on the floor."

"I would accept the test, with your sworn words to repeal this when it fails, Duke de Fraga, were it not for the enormous human cost it would entail to enforce it while the test would last. Unfortunately, that cost exists, so I will not. Opposed, and may the Judge have mercy on you."

Berenguer-Aspex is a loyal vassal of the Archduke of Menador and will not vote against his liege-lord, so he'll just stay quiet during the voting and abstain if called on.

"In favor." Neither of them are his archduke.

"In favor." He'll slip the comment in quietly after Solpont. He's not in favor, but he'll vote with his patrons.

"In favor." At least they fed him breakfast as compensation for making sure he got here early.