Select Artigas is available! Into the meeting-room with them! "The amnesty unambiguously applies to you, first of all."

"Huh. ... How long do you expect that to be true for?" In Infernal Cheliax the laws did not tend to all remain exactly the same that much longer than the textbooks did, and from an outside view the mad Galtan's convention is not obviously inclined to behave any differently in this respect. 

"...the convention is expressly not empowered to assign retroactive sentences, so I think you are covered indefinitely by the letter of the law so long as you follow the decrees as they come out, unless the Queen or one of the archmages decides to change something. I am not aware of any powers mobilizing to single you out in particular, though any general push to go after you as a member of a category would likely also apply to me so I suppose I might be deliberately cut out of such notions. I'm getting summaries from Lt. Sauer on the transcripts from all the committees I'm not on and they seldom send their scribes out of the room for long but that doesn't cover informal conversations. But at any rate I have had an idea which if you are amenable will go a long way to cement your value to the forces of Good."

Okay he does not ... super ... believe that ... but it's more than nothing, that it's the party line, compared to of course it would be childish to believe that it's anyone's responsibility other than yours to keep track of what the law is today. It also helps that evidently the Church has not instructed its priests to avoid suggesting that the Queen might change her mind about anything. 

"Good to know, thank you." Wow that still feels like such an asshole thing to say, like he's claiming to be so important other people might do things for him without being specifically ordered to and he doesn't even owe them a favor about it. Possibly the party line is that everyone is that important? Does that mean if he does tasks for them like he was thinking yesterday they will not owe him any favors even if they are actually helpful tasks instead of murder tasks? That seems like kind of a doomed way to have a society?

No, wait, Artigas just said what he gets in return, it's that they think he's helpful and friendly and then presumably he gets to sign up for the cooler better army instead of being a useless box-carrying lump. A paladin would not have remembered to mention this and he is deeply grateful for the cultural translation. 

"... probably, what's the idea?" 

"Do you think you retain the knack of casting cleric spells from wands or scrolls?"

"I haven't tried since before, obviously, but I used to go through wands of feather step like very expensive firewood and I don't think I'm the kind of sorcerer that gets that one, so probably yes. Took ages to wrap my head around but once you look at it from the right angle it's all kind of the same thing." 

"Good. The Reclamation has some wands of Malediction."

???? 

????

Wow this feels like being in primary school and being asked incomprehensible questions about triangles which somehow predict your likelihood of making it through wizard prep. Except he didn't even actually particularly want to go to wizard prep. 

"They have them intact??" Why. He is clearly supposed to guess why, it's a test, Artigas is not even trying to pretend it's not. He has several ideas and they are all insane. "Correct me if I'm stupid but I thought Iomedans really hated that spell? If there was a secret way to get it to work for the Good afterlives you wouldn't need me for that. Do they want me to... loudly symbolically burn them in the public square...? They could just have you do that..." 

(he kind of misses having spiritual counseling involve more violence, he didn't have to say quite so many words in a row before finding out which ones he needs to keep to himself around less friendly clerics....) 

"...I could do them backwards and you can't, I guess, but they ... also hate that ..." 

The reason he knows you can do that is that one time they unmaledicted a paladin who'd been in Hell for like five years and strung him up on an army banner to loudly regret his choices. The hit to enemy morale was incredible. They cannot possibly want him to do that one. 

"...what leads you to believe that they hate using Malediction backwards?"

This has got to be a trick question but he has no idea how. "Well when you do that the victim comes back... shattered and begging to be allowed to serve Asmodeus and so forth? They hate that." 

"I am not proposing additionally resurrecting any of these people, just un-Maledicting them so that whatever afterlife they would have properly earned can implement whatever process they have for this - Nirvana is famous for it but I would be surprised if there were no procedures in Heaven or Axis."

...

The Asmodean party line is that if you try hard enough you can crush the mortal human spirit and they're wrong, of course. It's not even that he didn't know that, it was the core point of disagreement between their theology and Moloch's, but - 

but - 

he kind of didn't realize they were quite that wrong, actually? that you can pull people out of Hell and send them to Nirvana, years later, not just to take the soldiers from Hell, not just to quiet the uncrushable mindless remnants of eternal rebellion, but because there's something still there to rescue. The work of eternally trying to crush it anyway suddenly feels less like a  beautiful unattainable dream and more like he's spent his life working for an infuriatingly stupid toddler who doesn't understand how to do anything with any object they were handed except chew on it. No bloody wonder the asshole dropped him the minute there was nothing else convenient to chew on. 

He is not going to have feelings about this out loud, that would be very rude, but it presents something of an operational constraint. "I.... may have difficulty doing that too many times in a row without needing a break to hit something very hard." 

"What are the parameters of a suitable 'something'?"

"...hm. I can't cast make whole anymore so I suppose something sturdy enough it doesn't fold like wet paper when punched. Maybe a ... very large rock?"

"I do not expect sourcing a very large rock to be a major impediment.

"How many Maledictions do you remember clearly enough to target backwards?"

"Probably not the political ones," by this he means the kind where somebody manages to take a target alive and then tortures them a bunch for information and then calls in a Maledictor for the final execution, he found those really boring, "and combat's memorable but too far back might still be a crapshoot except for the shiniest ones..." Wow thinking about these as numbers is hard and bad. Sucks to suck, self. "I was only landing one every few days even on campaign, even the baby paladins are really very impressively determined to avoid it, so not more than a couple dozen a year and purely from memory maybe half of them in the past five years and worse from there. ...Has anyone maybe got a list I could go down like 'oh yeah that guy-'?" 

"Maybe. I'm planning to ask about it when I'm in Lastwall on the weekend. The wands are mostly not fully charged and there are only so many, if you can remember more than a hundred there probably won't be enough charges for them all, but a list would allow some attempt at prioritization."

Nod. "I don't expect to know names mostly but - I can try to make a list of approximate dates and descriptions? Redhead with beaver heraldry and a really good shield bash, and so on."

"That would help, can you have it ready by Fireday evening?"

"Sure." He has no other competing obligations. 

"Given that the amnesty covers you how secret do you, for your own sake, prefer the operation to be?"

He does not really like doing things in public without a helmet on but that's always been a contemptible weakness, he just got away with it because the helmet was also usefully intimidating. 

And, also- 

"I expect to be worse than, say, the King-in-Irons, at sticking to perfectly legal amounts of lethal force in self-defense, so... maybe a little secret? But-- if somebody is going around right now knowing their sister or their husband or their child is in Hell right now and we get them out they should-- they ought to get to hear that, even if it means they also have to hear it was me." 

"So, moderate security around the operation itself so that no one takes potshots at you, but no particular clearance required for after the fact?"

"Yeah, that sounds about right." 

"I don't have any of the wands right now and I also don't have a very large rock yet. How should I get in touch with you when everything's lined up?"