She is mindreading her and so in fact was not confused but she is of course pretending she wasn't mindreading her. "Thank you. That makes sense. That is not a custom even in Lawful places on the Material but I suppose they can't measure precisely enough."

"...the Material is" a hellhole. That would be a fairly provocative phrasing under the circumstances. "- it's really terrible. I - that's not actually why I am not going back. And I'm not sure how much it helps you to know it. But that is not a custom even in Lawful places on the Material firstly because there barely are any and secondly because they don't commonly have hard liquor - and absolutely should not introduce it - and thirdly because everyone is tired, stressed, and brain-damaged, and they don't have a lot of customs that are really quite obvious once you're out.

 I would not exactly say that the Churches do not evangelize for Axis enough, and I imagine they've contemplated it much longer than I have, but nonetheless if there were one thing I wish I could say to people it's that they will be so much stronger, in every single respect, once they are dead."

"Unless they go to Hell." She is presently immune to poison, that being just common sense when you're on another plane. She sips the drink. It's quite good. 

"Unless they go to Hell. I - I'd come back if I thought I could do a good job of it without Jitiri, but I couldn't. If we'd known it would happen of course there'd have been large-scale practice rebuilding Cheliax management games on an annual basis, but we didn't and there weren't."

"I am not here to talk you into it. I just want to be working from a complete biography. And I want to know what you would do, if you did return, so we can try to do it. Almost all memory of what Cheliax was has been lost. The books were burned, the people were killed...the people who know what was lost are all dead. If we are to restore it we'll need to understand what it was once like."

" - well, as a first thing, you shouldn't be trying to restore Arodenite Cheliax, because an Arodenite empire is absolutely not the sort of thing that can be restored by interviewing the dead and trying to build the world as they remembered it. You're supposed to do better than us. That's - if only one thing outlives the god, it should be that. You are supposed to do better than your gods."

That rather presumes that there is any external moral standard outside obedience to the god. A hammer cannot surpass being usable for hammering nails; it can stop being usable for hammering nails, but there's no growth in it. 

Lilia is not to be an Asmodean any more. She is to be an Arodenite, dead most of a century ago, her eyes glowing with passion for how the restored Empire will surpass the ancient one. As masks to put on it's not an unpleasant one. "Well, then we'll do better. But it would still help to know what we're improving on, so we don't waste a great deal of time reinventing things you knew perfectly well. There are so many details, that the books that didn't burn did not bother to capture. I don't know what people used to eat. I don't know what they used to wear, or how they used to greet each other. I don't know if girls were taught to swordfight. I know that Cheliax used to be more sexist than it is in the present day, and I don't know why - I don't know what people were thinking -"

"...they were mostly not thinking," she says, gently, because the woman seems so convinced that there's ancient wisdom to be had, and there isn't none but there's really less of it than you'd think. "I can tell you what I was taught as a girl, what I heard from my mother and from my grandmother, what I read in books of theology, but mostly people weren't thinking, they were tired and they were hungry and they were rarely actually sober and they had six different chronic pain conditions - sorry, this isn't helpful -"

She's heard it before from a priest of Sarenrae, that the Material is full of suffering and everybody is tired, and had nothing but contempt for it because there are no excuses for weakness. Carlota's account is as patronizing but less repellant; it's an explanation rather than an excuse. The explanation of people is that they mostly are tired and hungry and in pain; try explaining them that way. 

Probably it would have more explanatory value if one had had the experience of not being relevantly tired and in pain (Lilia isn't particularly hungry). 

"If you did go back, is that the wisdom of the past you'd pass on to them? That they are just kind of terrible and will be until they get to Axis which they won't since they're in fact too terrible for that?"

"No, I wouldn't tell them that. I cannot imagine it'd help them to hear it. I would tell them that the Empire wasn't good enough, that they shouldn't be restoring the old laws, that they can do better - someone somewhere must have made some progress on doing better -"

"Some people have, yes."

"I didn't learn to swordfight as a child. There were families that taught their daughters, that saw it as Iomedaen, because of course Iomedae learned to swordfight as a little girl. But of course that's not really Iomedaen, is it, to put a sword in the hand of a woman with no particular aptitude for it because a different woman who did have an aptitude for it used it. Half of Acts is warning against that precise mistake; move to win, not to imitate winning."

"You think of yourself as an Iomedaen?"

"Yes, of course. When Aroden died She was the obvious place to turn, and - even before He died I think She'd have been where I would have turned. I resented the Church in life, but that's because they wanted me to make peace with the scum of the earth, the enemies of my people, who'd done so much damage to my homeland - and they were right to. It might have prevented the Thrune takeover, if we'd found a way to bury all the other grievances. They were very real grievances. I did not imagine them and I only slightly exaggerated them in my mind. It is just that also Hell was making a serious bid to take over the country. ...I never took it seriously. I presumed there was no way it would happen. I think I was imagining that there were, somewhere, some real adults, who'd step in and prevent something like that, that obviously something that bad and desired by no one could not actually happen. ...it took me decades to admit this to myself. It is upsetting to realize that almost everything you did with your life was condemn the surviving people who mattered to you to a fate worse than death."

"I imagine it would be, yes."

It does not take any imagination. When it came to the most important task in her life she failed and served the spawn of Rovagug and nothing else will ever matter as much as that.

"There's this district in Axis that's good for - thinking clearly about that sort of thing. A lot of Axis has truth spells up, but it has something more comprehensive than that. It doesn't let you lie to yourself. I spent a long time avoiding it."

It sounds awful. "Where?"

"I don't think it's one of the ones that lets in mortals. Sorry.

It was awful, when I finally did it, but - less awful than I had expected, actually. It's not as if living a lie is actually living in the world where it is true, it's just living in the world where it's false and you aren't thinking about it clearly. It hurt, to look at it clearly, but in advance it had felt like I would be losing something, and I wasn't. It also helped, probably, that it'd been a few decades. I felt like I was already a different person than the one who did those things. Not enough of a different person that I wouldn't have done the same thing, possibly, but enough of a different person that realizing how profoundly I had failed at everything I cared about it did not implicate too directly everything I would do, in the future -"

Every irrelevant meaningless thing you do in Axis, the thing that matters in your life having already passed. 

There is no reason for a well-meaning agent of the crown to find anything about this line of questioning personal, and so no trace of it on her face. "What sorts of things are you doing now?"

"I worked at a museum for a while. I ran a ....newspaper... that did food reviews. Jitiri and I are thinking about adopting a teenager."

Nothing that matters at all. Lilia doesn't even mind that she's damned; she doesn't want Axis. The delicious drinks and comfortable seats and spectacularly well-dressed people and soaring skyscrapers are all a bribe to be irrelevant. "If you did come back, with Jitiri - we can't afford that, but if we could - it'd be - altruistically, hoping to go to Axis again once Chelam was settled?"

"Oh, I'd want Heaven. I always wanted Heaven. It's where things are happening, you know. I was underrating, of course, how much things are happening here. You know that Axis organized in secret to raise several trillion dollars for some secret thing Abadar said that many of us would care about - the Inquisitor Shawil recommended it, so I think it had something to do with saving the Empire -"

"I am afraid I really cannot comment on that." Also she doesn't know. Why would her mother tell Lilia - Lilia, who failed - anything? 

Carlota looks genuinely concerned. "- I of course was not asking or implying that you should - it's incredibly rude to mention secret things and try to notice whether someone knows about them - I can face the other way, if you'd like -"

"I am told I am fairly hard to read."