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."

She gives off the impression of holding everybody in utter contempt. It would be rude to complain about how someone from another culture comes across. Carlota will plunge bravely on. "There is more to do that matters in Axis than I imagined. Even though things like the present one that affect other planes are rare, they're rare because people don't tend to care very much about the happenings on other planes, not because there's any impediment if you do care to trying to do things with your own resources. And Axis has a trillion residents of its own, and doing things that matter to them is important. ...but I wanted Heaven. And I want it more now that I have subjects in Hell. If I came back I would be trying to get there, to listen to the Church even when the thing it demanded ran very strongly against the demands of my own conscience. And Iomedae's the only god of the Empire - unless that's changed and I haven't heard about it -"

"I thought that the Church holds that Iomedae retained none of the biases of mortality, none of her human attachments -" Lilia is in fact reasonably versed in Iomedaenism, having been spying on them for thirty years. She infiltrated the Reclamation half as a hobby, to see how long her pretend Iomedaens could last. 

"People are a product of their world. Even in the next one, even with lots of time to grow and change - in Axis people often cluster by culture of origin, at least for the first several centuries, because those are the people who understand the things that you care about. Iomedae is a god of the Empire, and a god of Aroden, and She did not cease to be of Aroden and I don't think She can have meaningfully ceased to have been of the Empire. She wouldn't favor it, over an Empire of strangers, but - She values courage. That's not a neutral thing, you know. Not all cultures value courage. There are some that relate to it as an idiocy to which young men are unfortunately prone. There are some that do not particularly contemplate it. In the Empire it was among the most important virtues. I would not have the people pray to a god who does not value the things they value, who does not elevate the Good they themselves are reaching for - even Asmodean Cheliax I expect valued courage. I don't see how you can have a country on Golarion at all that doesn't."

"Asmodean Cheliax had contempt for cowardice, which is in some ways similar."

"Well, it's worse but I think it probably gives you enough to work from. It's better than just not considering it an important measure of a man."

"Just of a man?"

"Mostly of a man. Some women need to also have the virtues of a man to be taken seriously - if, say, they're a duchess in their own right because all their brothers are dead - but unless a woman was doing the work of a man it would not have made any sense to condemn her as a coward. Women are not supposed to be ready to die for their homeland at a minute's notice. You don't particularly want them to do that or you won't have a next generation."

"I would expect that a culture that values courage highly and does not expect it of women ends up - not a very good place to be a woman?"

" - well, it's immediately better in life to be a man, right, for all the reasons it is generally better to be stronger. Though I think that actually women make Axis and Heaven at a higher rate than men, and there's a very important sense in which that's the true measure of who it's better to be. This also implies it is better to be a commoner, but a lot of people believed things that approximate that anyway, never in ways that inspired them to renounce their titles and become a commoner...well, very rarely in ways that inspired them to renounce their titles and become a commoner. There's a romantic appeal of sorts, right, to being a hard man who will sacrifice your own safety to do what must be done. It is not a romantic appeal that stands up to close inspection but - none of us were doing any close inspection -"

It seems to Lilia that it stands up to close inspection. "Why doesn't it?"

" - well firstly because almost no one is actually doing the calculus right. They are underestimating the goodness of paradise and the badness of Hell, because it's impossible to fit either into a mortal mind. But more impossible to fit the goodness of paradise in, I think. And secondly because - well, it's what I believed I was doing when I was actually in the service of Hell. It's what almost everyone believed they were doing during the civil war. It's just a very small slip, impossible to detect, from doing the terrible necessary things to doing a bunch of terrible unnecessary things -"

So you do both the terrible necessary things and the terrible unnecessary things, but the world is still much better off because you were willing to do all of them. "And instead you should do no terrible necessary things?"

"I mean, if I thought that I would definitely stay here in the safety of Axis where there are no terrible necessary things, even if you could afford to bring Jitiri back with me. The Material is full of terrible necessary things and the only way to avoid doing any of them is to abdicate all responsibility for doing things. But - you've just got to check, right. You just have to stop when you're in the middle of crushing your hated enemies and check. It's much much harder than just 'don't do bad things'. There is a reason the greatest of the Arodenite saints is the one who even attempted a theory of how to do the necessary bad things and not the unnecessary bad things."

"It was not Her church that freed Cheliax."

"- sure, but - maybe Her church was not even pursuing the policies that were best in expectation for freeing Cheliax. I don't know. But it's a high-variance sort of thing, and I would expect all the worlds in which it actually happened to look very different, and in many of them I'd expect the church to look foolish even if it was in fact positioned as well as it possibly could be. Not every resource that you position perfectly is going to be useful in most actual things that play out. You don't want to account value by what actually happened, but by what was worth it in expectation -"

It is a very appealing philosophy that you should evaluate Lilia not by the fact that she failed but by in what share of worlds she failed. Unfortunately it is appealing in the way that makes her discard it out of hand. "So then your own mistakes are - less, because you had no way of knowing Hell was making a play for the Empire, and usually Hell doesn't intervene in civil wars in the Empire -"

"No, no. There were rumors the Thrunes served infernal powers, everyone knew that Hell was intervening. We did not take seriously the possibility that they could actually win but we were not operating in total ignorance that they were trying, which would in fact make me only as culpable as anyone who prolongs a civil war which is still really astoundingly culpable."

"You made Axis, so I think you cannot have been all that culpable in the end -"

"I think Pharasma allows into Axis a great many people who have done unfathomable harm with their lives and could have known better. I do not know why she does this beyond observing that in fact we all do fine in Axis, and I do think an intended feature of judgment is that it sorts people based on what kind of civilization actually wants them....Nirvana aside. Hell is gleeful when it claims a participant in the Chelish civil war but Hell is not the thing those people build, given a chance. The Empire is the thing we build, given a chance, and it has its flaws but it was a monument to virtue as we understood it, and better with every passing century, and - Aroden was not neutral out of indifference between Good and Evil, but out of doing monumental amounts of both."

"What Good did you do?" ...probably that's a cruel question.

Not one she hasn't asked herself. "I don't remember the trial, I am not making any particular claims about my own case. It was important to me to feed the poor and protect the innocent and have a good man on the throne. None of those things actually happened, really, which is much of why I suspect one is judged in part off the performance in expectation of the policies one adopted."

"Can you tell me...the decisions you made, in the civil war? Or - starting earlier than that, I guess. I am not mostly interested in judgment but I am very interested in the choices that people were making and the reasoning behind them."

"Sure. As far as I remember it, which isn't perfectly. Being a petitioner makes it kind of difficult to remember being a mortal, your biology is different and the thought processes that are instinctive are different. I asked some people when I was considering going back and they said it works the other way, too, that when you're mortal it's hard to remember what it was like to be in Axis. You can remember all the facts but not the underlying processes, not as well .... anyway. I was sixteen when Gaspodar was assassinated, and he'd been effectively not ruling my whole life. Chelam was acting approximately like an independent principality doing diplomacy with nearby ones, with the expectation - which became more of a pretense, over time - that when the King recovered we'd naturally be again in his service. We had a favored candidate, among the claimants, a cousin of mine..."

"And so we were betrothed. Everyone agreed he was a violent madman, that he'd ordered a whole city slaughtered after it surrendered for suspected complicity with the Thrunes, that the littlest things would set him off... I knew it'd be awful. But sometimes it is our duty to endure awful things and I was pretty clear that this was one of those cases. Really the worst thing about it was that my parents clearly felt so terribly about it. They kept - flinching at it - it felt like I had to reassure them that I would do my duty without needing them to tell me it would be all right, that if they spotted any weakness in me then I would be injuring them -" 

Lilia's been finding something about the story of Carlota's parents betrothing her to an awful man for their greater plans to be very soothing but that part's just baffling. "...why?"

" - because they loved me, and it is a terrible thing to consign one's daughter to a violent and unhappy marriage for the sake of peace - the right thing to do, obviously, under the circumstances, but not an easy one -"

"It makes sense to me that because they loved you it was difficult for them to require this of you. I don't understand why they expected you to also pretend it wasn't going to be terrible? Because you needed the practice at pretending?"

"What? No. They weren't demanding it deliberately. They were just - struggling with it, and it was easy enough to pick up they'd be struggling more with it if I was having a hard time too, so I tried not to be - they were doing their best. We were all doing our best. It was just a very difficult situation. And then he was assassinated, irrecoverably. I remember I wept from joy, when I heard the news... I don't feel badly about that, actually. It is not one of the places where I think I particularly failed to exercise virtue. I wish that the marriage had happened, of course, but when I look back on the places where I wish I'd been stronger, 'not being glad he died' isn't something I wish on myself - I used to think about this all the time and eventually I admitted to myself I was going in circles around it, and mostly stopped."

Lilia would not overall say that she admires Aroden Carlota Guiomar de Chelam but sometimes she speaks in a way that reveals a kind of power mortals don't possess, or at least none of them Lilia's met, a kind of clarity about the self which only Aspexia Rugatonn had in infernal Cheliax, because everyone but Aspexia Rugatonn was desperate not to know who they were beneath the pretenses, and without Aspexia Rugatonn's utter contempt for what that clarity revealed. Perhaps in Axis a person can look at themselves clearly enough to see a pathetic and contemptible worm and then cheerfully acknowledge it in all its wormy hideousness, and go about their day. It is not a strength she aspires to but it is strength. 

"That was the year my father was killed, at Longacre, in the battle we called Sun Hill at the time, I don't know what the other side called it. I haven't read any good mortal-written histories of the war, which means that probably half of what I think I know about it was wrong. War's very messy, that way. My father was killed and my brother became the Duke and - mostly didn't speak to me, actually, between when he became the Duke and when he died. We'd been close when he was younger. I think that he had space only for the dead, and not for the living..."

" - so I think it's best thought of in terms of self-interest. I actually think at least half of virtues are better considered in those terms. Why is cowardice a dueling insult but not having outrageously high taxes? It's because a coward threatens the men around him; they have an immediate interest in doing something about a coward. And for that reason being known as a coward is an immediate threat to a man's interests in a way where being known as greedy isn't. Greed of course can cross the lines a society has an interest in enforcing. 

...anyway I think the same applies if you contemplate women as a collective. They aren't acting in a dead-babies-minimizing way - if they were you'd have to shame women less for unwed pregnancy, because it's the shame that's moving many of them to solve it with poison! They are acting in a way that minimizes harm to their interests."

"That is the most satisfactory explanation of it I have ever heard. Thank you."

"I have absolutely no idea how much of that is actually necessary to get people to Axis and how much is - the same error we have spoken of repeatedly, steeling oneself to do the necessary terrible things and then doing a bunch of unnecessary terrible things."

She thinks she has enough of the woman, by now, to try her on. "Perhaps I'm speaking from too little context to guess, but - I'd expect that the way things were done in Arodenite Cheliax were more unjust than the actual best equilibrium, because the people setting it would have incentive to have more power and the checks on that, though there are some, are well past wherever it'd actually be best to land -"

Oh this conversation's going to be so so much less awkward and frustrating if it is about to be an actual conversation and not a disquieting interrogation. She beams at her and orders them another round of drinks. "On the one hand I would expect so. On the other - most men aren't cruel to their horses. Their power over their horses is absolute; the churches will not particularly get worked up if they are cruel to them; I have never heard a sermon about how one is damned for evil to horses. Most men are good to their horses because I think most men are fundamentally inspired to gentleness towards those who serve them. That analogy has some deficiencies so let me try one that has some deficiencies from a different angle. Kings are usually cruelest when they're weak. That's when they believe they cannot afford mercy and must execute everyone who threatens them. A king who is not threatened and is not desperate will always be a better king. And a third analogy, for a third angle - in Axis everyone is safe and they are so much better to each other."

"So you don't find it obvious that giving women more power would get them treated better, rather than creating the - tribulations of a strong vassal relationship -"

"It very well might. I do think I'd try various ways to give women more power anyway, because - it is a good idea to check, if one is doing a terrible thing, whether it's a terrible necessary one or not."

"The last line of questions I had was - about Chelam. Tell me what about it - I love Cheliax. I have loved Cheliax all my life. But I think that whoever we select to rule Chelam should see in it something they do not see in every part of Cheliax."

"Oh." A wistful, slightly pained smile. "Chelam had some of the richest farmland in all of Cheliax, you know, and flat as far as the eye could see. You could imagine that the whole world was civilization, fields of grain and little villages - and density is good for people, you know. If a great many people live in walking distance you can have a cobbler and a smith and a priest not on circuit. You can have roads! We had a great road, all the way from the castle to Longacre, with the brush cut back two hundred feet out so no man or monster could lie in ambush, a road safe enough that children would walk along it on their way to temple - I do not have the right to ask anything of the people who freed the country when we failed it, and I have very little money with which to buy favors because I gave most of it to the mysterious though probably related matter. But - I would be very grateful if whoever rules Chelam were to know that, and want it, and clear those roads until they are that safe again - that was gone by the end of Gaspodar's reign -"

"I spoke to her and I" want Chelam? No. Lilia doesn't want things. Certainly not from the people who freed the country when she failed it, when she has nothing at all which with to buy favors of them though admittedly because she committed it all already to their service. Lilia also does not have Carlota's habit of impudently making requests she does not believe herself to have any grounds to make; that would be pathetic. "...don't expect to run across a better opportunity. No one living, nor anyone else we have contemplated resurrecting, remembers her, and she said she does not ordinarily answer inquiries from the Material, nor visit where they could reach her. The only question is whether it is more convenient to have me in your direct service; if we are to do this, she's the one to do it with."

The disadvantage of having Lilia in her mother's direct service is that Lilia still has dreams of Volnugar, and so is compromised. The advantage is that her mother does not have a secondary candidate who is nearly as good. Lilia has formed no opinion on the tradeoff. If she has failed her mother and is rightly rejected for it she wishes to believe that she has failed her mother and is rightly rejected for it.