"Does this mean people would have to attend every execution?"

"No, this doesn't make attendance at executions mandatory. It simply means that executions will be conducted in public, and members of the public may choose if they wish to attend, or choose not to."

Wait, what are they supposed to be doing if they're not supposed to just treat everything the Crown says as true?

She doesn't trust this guy at all on account of how he keeps bringing in proposals to help the Evil nobles, but this seems... obviously good? If someone were being executed for a crime against her she'd want to watch them die, and if she were being executed she'd rather her friends be there if it were safe for them.

She’s skimmed the transcripts for the previous two days, so this proposal isn’t a surprise.  It’s not too unreasonable… the spectacle of public executions isn’t ideal, but establishing public knowledge is beneficial.  The rest of the Urban Order committee’s ideas might be a problem though.  Should she start fighting them now to sap their momentum or let them get to their actually objectionable proposals first?

She’ll look to her political allies for cues.

"The citizens of Cheliax have learned deeply to mistrust the government. We must earn their trust, not merely demand it, and openness and honesty are our best tools to that end.

To elaborate on an aim of this law which Conde Cerdanya has hinted at, there is widespread confusion as to what the law is, and what crimes will and will not be punished. Many suspect that crimes against Asmodeus and the Thrunes are still prosecuted; others cannot believe that the Queen seriously means the decrees she has made. I have here the transcript of the trial of Livi Barro, a delegate some of you may remember, wherein he said in his defense for the crime of murder:

Your Honor, they're slips. Calling it murder to kill a slip is insane.

Barro was not the first man to murder a halfling in Westcrown, and not the first man to be put to death for it. But the previous man--one Lluc Canol--was executed unremarked and out of sight. I know of him only because I sought out the records, at some expense. Barro was genuinely surprised that the court saw his conduct as murder. There was no chance for Barro, or any of the mob he riled up, to see Canol's corpse hanging in the public square and ask himself, 'what did they do him for?', and discover that in fact halflings are subjects of Her Majesty entitled to the full protection of the law. If he had, he might not have been so eager to go killing, knowing that it would be tried as murder and that he would receive the Final Blade for it.

The aim of punishment is not just to do justice; it is to educate the public on crime and thereby reduce it, and for that is best done by public executions."

"I am told that the man who murdered my wife and child has been captured. In almost every other country in the world, I would have the right to see justice done. But in this one, I do not. 

The Asmodeans made it mandatory, or effectively mandatory, to attend public executions. I believe our wise and good rulers were trying to do the opposite of what Asmodeans did in every respect, when they decided to make execution proceedings occur in utter secrecy. But this is madness; the Asmodeans believed the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and the new government should not declare that as a matter of doctrine it rises in the west now. Our justice system should do nothing we are uncomfortable having it do openly. People deserve to see justice done. The unfixable wounds of a murdered loved one are not much salved, by witnessing justice, but they will certainly bleed forever, when one is prohibited from witnessing it. 

The people of Cheliax deserve better."

She hates him and wishes he were dead and—

—it was wrong to murder his child. Not wrong to kill him, not wrong to kill his wife apart from how killing his wife killed their child, but it was wrong to murder the child. And — he's not wrong that people deserve to see justice done, and — maybe that means people like him will be better off, but... only in ways that everyone deserves to be? She's not sure if that makes sense.

"The Count mentions that executions are carried out in public in almost every country in the world. He neglects to mention in which country, specifically, they are not. The answer, as many of you know, is Lastwall, Iomedae's own state."

"Now, Cheliax need not, and indeed should not, imitate Lastwall in every regard. But when Asmodeus mandates something, and Iomedae forbids it, it seems at least worth asking why they have taken their respective positions."

"About the motives of the Prince of Darkness we can only guess. But Iomedae's position on public executions is in the Acts, and it is as follows: it does not, in truth, heal anything, to watch a man die, even if he is the murderer of someone you love. It is necessary, for the upholding of the law and the greater good, to sometimes inflict suffering and death. It is still tragic, as war is tragic, to do so, and Iomedae does not wish us to take pleasure in it. Asmodeus, we must imagine, wished you to take pleasure in it; that is why attendance at public executions was mandatory in Asmodean Cheliax. Hell wished to inure you to the suffering of your fellow man, to teach you that death was a spectacle, to have you believe that other people deserved the fires of Hell so that you would eventually believe you deserved them yourself."

"There are, I admit, other reasons to have executions done in public, and in my former life I would not have thought to speak against the practice, whatever Iomedae may have said. But today I must concur with Iomedae and our Queen. The publicity of Asmodean executions was intended specifically to corrupt the people of Cheliax towards Evil, and the best thing to be done for the people of Cheliax today is to reverse their policy entirely, as our Queen has done."

"Your Highness, I do not think it is wise to emulate Lastwall in this respect. The people of Lastwall trust their government, and know they can trust their government, and so when they hear that a man has hung for murder they neither suspect that he has secretly been set free nor fear that he has been flayed alive. The people of Cheliax do not share this trust — and understandably so, for Hell routinely deceived them. Even when the Crown is being fully honest, we cannot expect any policy that relies on our subjects to trust the Crown's honesty will be successful."

nor fear that he has been flayed alive.

Yeah that's indeed a failure mode he hadn't thought of.

...If Iomedae doesn't think it heals anything to watch someone who's done terrible crimes to you die then Iomedae is stupid. She does not at all trust that Delegate Thrune is telling the truth about what Iomedae thinks, but the thing he's claiming is obviously wrong, you could find out it was wrong just by asking one person.

They both have good points.  Maybe they could ban mandatory execution attendance, so people can choose, as they personally judge best, to either avoid the corruption of witnessing death or to confirm with their own eyes the death?  It wasn’t an execution (as far as he knows), but he personally wishes he had stayed for the Valia Wain trial, given lies and fabrications spread about it before it even finished.

Wait… is that the subtext to this?  People think Valia was executed in secret and are indirectly pushing back against it?  Like the proposal against detainment that was actually a sarcastic mockery of the Archmage?

The fact that Iomedae thinks it is bad to want your child's murderer to suffer is sufficient reason to reject her entire and go to Hell, though he can't say that. He will proudly say at judgment that he's Evil, now that he knows what Evil is.

Iomedae sure doesn't have any interest in making it appealing in any way to obey Her, does She. She supposes that She doesn't need to.

Taís really doesn't think that she could stop wanting someone to suffer if they went and murdered one of her children for no reason! Maybe she can still make Axis if it just never comes up? ...Probably she should stop thinking about that, she's not sure she can change it but she doesn't want to get in trouble.

"The Archduke is entirely correct, and the Conde badly in error. There is no way to earn trust but to be worthy of it, and as long as we continue putting convicts on display as spectacle, we are not worthy of it. The people of Cheliax deserve better, and they will not trust that anything we give them is better. No, not even if they see it; I wouldn't, because I have seen that falsified far too many times myself. So we must simply do right by them regardless, and give them time to see that we do not perform for them, but only for our own consciences and Pharasma. There are places we should deviate from Lastwall; we must build families from people who have forgotten how to have them, and Lastwall has never forgotten."

"But on justice? No. Iomedae's justice is true justice. What Lastwall allows, is all that is needed for public safety and public order. Everything beyond that is for something else. For savagery and gore, for bloodlust and cruelty. For spectacle and terror. It is Evil, and nothing else. There are orders Iomedae says one should not accept from anyone, even your Queen or your Goddess. I judge this is one of them. No public executions. No gibbets or slow hangings. That is a path to Hell, and I will not take one step more on it."

"I have seen what public executions do to a people. My people, my city, who I love beyond reason and spent my life preparing to die for. Even when it is their own friends and family who were victims, those executions heal nothing. They inflame the anger in men's hearts and fuel their hunger for more bloodletting like tapeworms. They incite people to seek out their own vengeance without justice or mercy in mind. And they make them fear. Fear that they will be next."

"I ask you, the delegates of the convention: How sure are you that you won't be the one on the gallows in the square? How sure are you that no law will be passed you understand poorly and violate, no charge created which a man more powerful than you can point at you if you offend him? You know what the answer was. You may hope that it has changed. For today, it has. The Queen was careful about it. But will it stay changed?"

"Conde de Cerdanya will say it will remain just. I believe he intends this, and is not lying. But he, and the others on his committee, are wrong. I have seen the other proposals they are preparing, and they will send this country back toward how it was under the Asmodeans. Maybe not quite so far; it would be hard to do so badly without intending it, and they do not. But they will do it anyway, and call it the Arodenite way."

"It is bad for our souls to witness executions, as Iomedae tells us. For the Good among us, that may be enough. But remember, always, that when the convention votes to permit a punishment, it is voting to permit it on you. Lord or serf, baron or burgher, anything the convention allows is something it allows to be inflicted on you. Do not approve anything unless you are content that you may be next."

"Honored archduchess, before you return to your seat, may I ask whether you believe Lastwall's soldiers Evil?"

No, actually, she's already stormed past the back of the line and doesn't react until an aide shakes her shoulder.

"I don't think the Archduchess is feeling quite well," he says, loudly enough the people near him can hear him.

"The gentler sex isn't suited to discussion of these matters, and of course should not themselves attend the events."

That is true but he thought that in Cheliax you were not supposed to say it.

She got in line when she saw the Archduchess was speaking.  Now she wants to include descriptions of death in her speech just because of that comment.

She needs to find an angle that will sap from the conservatives momentum without making her or other moderates seem unreasonable.

If she wants to discredit herself like that that's certainly her prerogative.

"It is true that Lastwall does not conduct civilian executions publicly. Military executions in Lastwall are conducted in front of their fellow soldiers. Iomedae did not reject public executions as an intrinsic Evil, to be avoided at all costs; She believed, correctly, that they were unnecessary for civilians in the country She was building, but She did not believe they should never be used.

Osirion has public executions. Molthune has public executions. Taldor has public executions. Mendev has public executions. The Cheliax of my birth had public executions. Are they all walking the path towards Hell? Are the hearts of the people of Osirion filled with wrath and bloodlust? Of course not. 

If a man hangs unjustly in the public square, the injustice is in the hanging, not in the fact that it was witnessed by its countrymen. I cannot say I agree with the Archduchess's fears, but even were they proven correct, would she rather men who have done no wrong be killed in private, where any man may easily pretend as if it never happened? Is that justice, Archduchess?

Perhaps the Archduchess fears it will corrupt her own soul, to witness public executions. If that is so, I certainly would not wish to force her to attend, and indeed this statute does not oblige her to. But I have seen men hang, and I have died and gone to Heaven none the worse for it, and if the Archduchess means to tell us that Good demands we mete out justice behind closed doors I cannot say I agree."

She thinks she’s thought of an angle to draw out the issue as much as she can.

“As has been said repeatedly, other countries have not been ruled by hell.  It is true the public has need to confirm events with their own eyes.  It is also true Iomedae believed making a spectacle of it is morally corruptive.  Each person should judge for themselves which need is greater, so I would propose this amendment to supplement the mandate of public executions: it should be forbidden to require the attendance of anyone not directly involved in the crime for which the execution is taking place.  This would present a balance of interests, so that people tempted to celebrate death or of a gentler spirit may avoid it and that people that need certainty may witness.”

There, hopefully that distracts and delays the issue so they don’t have as much momentum when they get to their more troublesome proposals later.

Oh good, someone already presented a similar idea to what he was thinking so he doesn’t have to get up to speak.

"I would certainly be happy to clarify that attendance at civilian executions shall not be mandated for anyone uninvolved with the crime." He adds language to that effect and reads it out.

"It's not only the victims who this law helps," says a sortitioned woman who spoke yesterday. "If the lawmen take your son, and they won't tell you what happened to him, and they won't tell you if he's alive or dead, I don't know if it's Evil but I wouldn't wish it on any mother. If the execution has to be in public, at least you know whether or not he's alive.

I don't know if you can make the government follow this law. But if you can, I think it's a good law."

"One minor quibble: The Count of Cerdanya asks if the government of Molthune walks the path to Hell. My paladin friend Sir Feliu Tauler informs me that seven out of ten men in the Molthuni army strong enough to detect are evil. Certainly I was before I defected. And nearly all of us were Lawful."

He'll leave it there.

"My apologies if I was unclear, but I believe His Excellency has misunderstood me. I certainly have no difficulty believing there are many Evil men in the Lord Protector's army. I merely meant to question the Archduchess's presumption that the common people of Molthune have been set on a course for Hell merely by virtue of witnessing executions. I have no reason to believe Molthune's subjects any less virtuous than the subjects of Arodenite Cheliax, if they have not pledged themselves in the service of what we have all been told quite clearly is an Evil man."

Sergi would tell them the same about Taldor, if she asked him. A nobleman doesn't go to Andoran if he can stand Taldor. But... no, she can't burn favors on this. Throw her entire soul into it, yes, ask others to follow her no.

Few people of worth can stand Taldor, but the executions are really not the central issue with it.

Okay, so, they're definitely taking some of the convicts and letting them go, or maybe torturing them to death, or maybe both, and people are against this law because they're worried everyone will find out? How are they hiding them, you'd think people would notice — no, wait, they're probably getting new bodies from the Archhealer, it's not like anyone can tell one kobold from another.

"In the town where I live, if we're not getting fancy with it, we hang people from the gallows in the town square. What are the people against this saying we should do instead? Are we supposed to spend money we don't have building a little house for the gallows so we can keep people from watching? Drag people out to the woods and cut their heads off? I don't think any of us had even heard we were supposed to be doing them privately now, do they want to hunt down and kill everyone who was supposed to have heard about that?"

This wizard's town had also not heard that they were supposed to leave all the criminals for the paladins until a paladin showed up at their walls asking if they wanted to report any crimes, but obviously no one's actually been doing that, you'd have to keep them captive for months, they'd be dead of starvation before the paladins arrived.

She kind of wants to get up and tell Delegate Bainilus that even if she was only thinking about what would happen to her, she wouldn't want executions to be totally private, but there's not really a good way to say that without telling the entire convention about being arrested. She tried asking Calistria for the spell to talk in people's heads but apparently priests don't get that one.

There are a few more people in line, but no one it would be dangerous to snub, and he'd rather end on a speech agreeing with him. "At this time I call for cloture."

The sooner people stop talking the sooner we can go home! Cloture passes!

And the vote on the bill itself?

In favor.

It's a really good thing the paladin didn't have to execute anyone when he came by her village! It sounds like they'd have needed to do it inside their house, or something like that. She didn't even know that was a rule.

In favor. She's pretty sure that's allowed? The archduchess was really upset about it, but just her, and the paladins didn't say anything about it at all.

The paladins have, in fact, been given discretion to, when necessary, conduct executions using the facilities at hand. With that being said, even setting aside the moral concerns entirely, requiring them to conduct executions publicly would be logistically complicated. Against.

Executions are great fun to watch! In favor!

In favor.

Seems like a bad idea to do something they know the Queen disagrees with? But also she's tired of all Iomedae's stupid opinions. Hmmm. Abstain.

Against, and damn them for proposing it.

They must use every tool they have to fix this country. In favor.

Blai really doesn't know on this one. Military executions are public according to the Lastwall handbook; that's how he conducted them once he was going by that set of rules. This proposal isn't about military executions but the military executions demonstrate that it's not invariably Evil to have them in front of people. And... he's going to be trying to get seminary records specifically because he realized when he spoke to that one woman whose brother was spotted as a potential cleric that it's bad when people can't know what became of someone they were invested in. He's not expecting to be able to do better than telling her what's written down in some logbook, but if he were able to physically produce her brother for her - well, would that be better, it sort of depends on what condition her brother would be in at the time - aaaand the condition someone being executed is going to be in is "dead" - but not flayed alive. Maybe it would be good for people to be able to verify that nobody's getting flayed alive. But maybe it wouldn't?? He can't think of any executions he'd personally choose to carve time out of his day to attend and doesn't know what he'd be hoping to see if there were one. And he'd want a particularly strong reason to break with something that's working well for Lastwall, and isn't sure any of these reasons are any good.

If one of the paladins will give him a cue he'll vote their way but if they won't - abstain.

The ballots are secret, Select!

(Against.)

It's not that she regrets the way she killed Guifré. It was the only way she could have managed it, and if she didn't manage to accomplish anything else at least he was dead.

But if she'd had the choice, she'd rather have watched him die.

In favor.

This could really go either way, salutary farewells and the disinfecting power of sunlight and it being impossible to keep spiritual counselors away from the condemned at the last minute - or it could be spectacle after spectacle and every show a ticket one step closer to Hell.

Against. The one concern's of greater magnitude than the other.

They should do things the way Lastwall does them. But he doesn't get how Lastwall could do it for military executions if it's evil, and they make some good points about closure. He... might feel differently about things, if he was there when they put Florena down, but he might not.

It's confusing; he'll abstain.

In favor! Sounds like a fun time!

Against. Her backup plan if she can't marry up is to go home and be a magistrate and organizing public spectacles sounds exhausting and irksome.

As in committee so here. It's not mandatory, and if people want to know something they should be able to go and have a look.

In favor; one has to keep the rabble in line somehow.

Honestly Soler can't get worked up about this either which way. If there were a proposal to let the condemned invite people to be with them in their final moments, sure, but if you have to have both or neither of spectators and loved ones there's no clear win. Abstain.

In favor. She didn't go to Barro's trial but if they'd had the trial and then announced he was going to get his head chopped off in front of everybody she'd have gone to that part.

He doesn't actually care. If it were up to him he'd leave it entirely up to the magistrate, but neither voting in favor nor against actually accomplishes that.

On the other hand, he's sure Galè would love it if the magistrates had all his enemies dragged away and killed in secret, and if he can stop him from getting what he wants at no personal cost that seems like a win.

In favor.

Against. If somebody is concerned that somebody's flaying men alive in their dungeons they can just buy a truth spell about it, no need for pomp and circumstance.

Don't they have more important things to do? Abstain.

In favor, if you can see the death you can follow the body and make sure it's not going to throw a ghost.

Against. Doesn't seem decent, putting about that someone's going to hang and making it a whole event.

Against. If the Crown decides he should die he wants to at least have the chance to try bribing the executioner.

Arlet killed her husband well before the amnesty so it's not about what can be done to her at all, silly speechifier. If one of her boys went bandit and was going to hang for it, though, hm. ...Private's better, spare her deciding whether to watch or not. Against.

Abstain.

In favor. Somebody might need to say goodbye.

Against. It can be optional to attend on paper and everyone can still take studious note of who shows and who skips and make any inferences that pop into their head about it.

Oh, this one's tough. On the one hand Laia loves spectacle, and also kind of thinks you could do blood opera in a Good way if you were very careful. On the other hand, that... is almost certainly not what is on the table here. What's on the table here is an opportunity to indulge petty sadism. Which... is an impulse people won't stop having just because they can't watch executions, they're going to torture pigeons or piss on sleeping beggars or beat their children, and that's worse than just watching a death that was going to happen anyway! But will having executions to watch quell or stoke that vice? She doesn't know. She still doesn't know after asking Shelyn. Abstain.

Do it in public. Whether you're doing something needful or you're making a martyr, either way, do it in public. In favor.

Everyone knows Lastwall's way only works because they have a god at the head of it. In favor.

It seems sensible enough. Killing soldiers in front of their fellows is a good way to get them to break and run, it stands to reason that killing criminals publicly discourages the rest. In favor.

He abstains! He doesn't actually know.

So this means it's illegal to admit anyone who was executed privately was executed? Not being able to talk about things is inconvenient. On the other hand, talking is illegal anyway. Probably not that important. Abstain.

Well, everyone seems to agree Asmodeus is in favor of public executions.

For.

Against, because the church is. Honestly he thinks that public long-drop has been good for Menador, and requiring private executions sounds logistically complicated (and likely to trade off against being able to do long-drop hanging properly), but he's not under the impression that the status quo currently requires private executions anyway.

This is not one of the important battles, in the end.

Cerdanya said a bunch of fancy words about being careful but in the end he still called for abolishing slavery.

On the other hand, so did a lot of the people who spoke against this. And Fraga was against abolishing slavery.

It's a tough decision. In the end he abstains.

In favor.  It’s overall a good idea, especially with the amendment she asked for.  Hopefully the momentum here won’t help them with their other proposals, but Thea isn’t so ruthlessly strategic to vote down a proposal she agrees with out of factionalism.

He doesn’t want to oppose Iomedae’s church (and thereby be responsible for the Evil of the proposal)… but no Paladin actually spoke against this proposal.  He says a quick prayer to Iomedae.  Hopefully people each choose what is best for themselves. In Favor.

In favor, but this doesn’t really help that much.  It doesn’t say the trial can’t be in secret.

In favor. The people should see justice to crave mercy.

In favor. Anything that will keep the mob under control.

In favor. If later in the convention someone brings out an amendment giving nobles and priests of the righteous gods the privilege of a private execution, he won't begrudge it, but the law is worthwhile even in its current form to remind people of what reward awaits criminals.

In favor. In the long run it will radicalize the people.

Against. It really doesn't matter, but it seems... gauche.

She cannot possibly communicate how little she cares. Abstain.

Bringing back public executions is one step closer on the path to reopening the arenas and throwing the condemned to be eaten by wild beasts. Mattin votes yes.

“In favor” 

Passes overwhelmingly, 281-99.

That's a larger margin than he was expecting! Hopefully it bodes well for the next proposal, which was always going to be the more controversial one. He spent much of yesterday evening doing research, and he's confident the truth is on his side here, but he's not especially good at predicting the whims of the Convention.

"Thank you. Our next proposal relates to allowable forms of punishment.

Two days ago, a man named Vícenç Bardera was executed for his role in the riots. He had been part of a mob that murdered a tiefling woman, leaving her children as orphans. When the rain began, he demanded entry into a local merchant's house at knifepoint. While taking refuge from the rain, he forced himself on the man's adolescent daughters. For these crimes he received the Final Blade.

I do not know if the prospect of a harsher sentence would have deterred him from his crimes. But I do know that, having murdered an innocent woman and thereby earned a death sentence, our laws provided no further incentive for him to refrain from heinous crimes.

In the time of Aroden, there were fourteen standardized punishments, and it is those punishments we seek to restore. 

In light of the diversity and severity of punishments under Infernal Rule, Cheliax shall in matters of criminal law only perform the following fourteen punishments on civilians:

1. Whipping, with a horsewhip, no more than 80 times, ceasing before the point of risk to life.
2. Fine, with any amount unpaid collected via indenture as an agricultural worker or domestic laborer, for a maximum term of 1 year per ten crowns left unpaid.
3. Imprisonment.
4. Pillory, not to exceed one month.
5. Branding.
6. Civil Death.*
7. Banishment.
8. Maiming, only in situations where it will inhibit commission of the same crime and will not pose a risk to life.
9. Hard labor, not to exceed ten years.
10. Death, by hanging, garroting, or beheading, with an eye to swiftness.
11. Confiscation, or death and seizure of inheritance.
12. Burning at the Stake.
13. Breaking upon the Wheel.
14. Turning to Parts, reserved solely for the punishment of High Treason.

Writers of criminal laws shall identify which punishments from this set are appropriate for violations of that law, and may not invent new punishments. It shall be standard, in the case of repeat offenses, to increase the quantitative penalty or to increase the grade of the punishment. Punishments 1-3 may be referred to as "corrective" punishments. Punishments 4-7 may be referred to as "humiliating" punishments. Punishments 8-11 may be referred to as "afflictive" punishments. Punishments 12-14 may be referred to as "torturous" punishments. The military shall determine its own punishments under a separate law.

* Civil death is the loss of all civil rights, and all property is considered to pass on as though the individual had died.

In those regions of Cheliax which practiced trial by ordeal before the Asmodean regime came to power, this statute shall additionally permit those who have been accused of crimes for which the ordinary sentence is afflictive or torturous to undergo trial by ordeal, in accordance with their Arodenite traditions. However, if the accused requests an ordinary trial instead of trial by ordeal, this request must be granted.

Do not take me as saying that the torturous punishments should be common. They were used sparingly in Arodenite Cheliax, and they should be used sparingly now. It is enough that they be possible — that an Evildoer, having committed a crime that bears a sentence of death, still has reason to fear what the law will do if he continues.

I have no doubt that this law's opponents will rise in a moment to tell you that Lastwall makes do with swift and painless executions. This is true, and I place no fault with Her Majesty for hoping that we might imitate Lastwall's model. But Lastwall's model works because it is suited to Lastwall, where nearly every man is virtuous and Lawful, and where Iomedae Herself stands ready to correct them if they should fall into error. 

In the whole of Lastwall, seventeen people were executed last year. In Westcrown alone, more people have been executed in the last week.

With that being said, I do not wish to restore the barbarity of the Thrunes either. I seek, rather, to carve a moderate path between the leniency that preceded the Third and the cruelty of Asmodean Cheliax. The Thrunes were concerned not with what was necessary, but with cruelty for cruelty's sake. That was wrong, and this law condemns it. There are men in this room who would seek to return us to the days when men were boiled alive, but I am not one of them. This law rightly forbids such punishments and ensures that no magistrate further from our capital will mistakenly believe such punishments permissible, whether it is someone in this room who stands trial or any other subject of Cheliax.

It is too late to protect Vícenç Bardera's victims. But it is not too late to protect our subjects from those men who will come after him, and I hope you will join me in doing so."

"Punishment serves many different purposes. One purpose of punishment is to send a message: the state does not countenance this. But a message must be sent in the language that the people speak, or it will fail utterly. I believe that the current system of punishments has failed utterly to send a coherent message in the language that the people of Cheliax speak. When a man who encouraged thousands of people in bloodthirsty violence and who crows proudly that he means to start a revolution is put swiftly to death and sent on, he believes, to Elysium, what message does that send to the people of Cheliax? That his crimes were not very serious; that we do not mind them; that his wellbeing is far more important to us than the wellbeing of his victims.

I do not think that our noble Queen means to send that message. I think, as the good count Cerdanya says, that she hoped that we could do as Lastwall does, with lenient punishments. In Lastwall if a man did such a thing it would suffice to hang him, because in Lastwall that is understood as how serious matters are settled. But we are not Lastwall. That is not understood as settling a serious matter, but as condoning it. And this policy of condoning crime has led to an extraordinary explosion of it, which leads to far, far more death and suffering than would come to pass if we simply took crimes seriously in the first place.

The calculus of Arodenite Cheliax was simple: if you just need a man dead, just kill him. But if you need to send a message, send it. Do not send it with unnecessary cruelty, but do not embrace the false compassion of condoning serious crimes. Do not accidentally communicate to the people that even the gravest atrocities do not really give you any pause. Do not lead men to believe that no matter what they do they have nothing to fear, or their countrymen will have far more to fear from them."

"I support having a list of punishments which are the same the country over. Under the old regime, the important thing was to show off your creativity. Men were spending half their time coming up with complicated ways to have other men die. That's barbarism, and this is a good rule to say that we won't be doing any of that. 

I suppose a lot of people are going to get up here and argue about torture. I'll just say this: sometimes it needs doing. If you ban it, it'll still happen, just outside the law, because men know it needs doing. The best you can do is say, it's only worth doing for the really serious cases, like treason, and it shouldn't be allowed every time a man gets on the wrong side of the law. A country that bans torture for treason is just a country lying to itself. But a country that limits torture to the most serious cases might actually mean it."

Most of those punishments sound fine, but she kind of thought they weren't supposed to burn people to death anymore? Burning people to death is just copying Hell. They're supposed to be Good now, which means they're supposed to be like Heaven, which means... killing people with earthquakes? She's not really sure how you would make a tiny earthquake for executing someone. Probably Heaven has some other way of torturing people that she just doesn't know about.

Good thing the previous proposal got an amendment so he doesn’t have to watch any of that!  Most of it is way tamer and gentler than anything under the Thrunes, but he can’t afford to waste any Goodness or pick up any extra Evilness.

Victòria is pretty sure that list of punishments left some important punishments out but she isn't quite managing to follow the speech. Whoever Bardera is, it feels wrong for him to do things like that and just — practically get away with it — he's dead, that's better than nothing, but he's still in a Final Blade and she wants to make him hurt—

—her chest is burning, it feels like the anger is pressing up against the side of her head—

—she should probably be thinking through what sort of punishment he deserved instead, but she doesn't want to carefully think it through, she wants to go back before his execution and make him pay herself, and it's too late, the world is just always going to be a little broken—

"When men commit murders and arson and treason, they are destined for the Abyss unless they receive the mercy of the final blade. But the judgment of Pharasma is not seen by their fellows, and particularly within Cheliax a great many believe themselves already damned and do not fear committing more evil - and why should they, when a long drop is all that they know awaits them? A torturous execution must be harsh enough to discourage their fellows, both to save both their souls and the lives of their future victims, without lying at the discretion of magistrates and so risk their own souls; by its own cruelty, it ensures it need not be overused. The punishments of old Cheliax have withstood the test of time to solve both goals, and I agree that they should be restored."

...her chest is still burning and she is not entirely sure she caught that whole speech but she's pretty sure he just compared arson to murder? Arson really seems very different from murdering innocent people, at least if you're careful about it and pick the right — well, she didn't exactly pick the right target, it's going to be harder to investigate the Asmodean cult now, but it was just stupid, not Evil. 

"The text of this bill is mostly about what is allowed, but in judging it I turn your attention to everything else, which it disallows. Those punishments are right to ban. We will not compete with each other to develop the art of cruelty.

Cheliax is in a state of chaos, with laws in flux and rulers changing. The people need to know what to expect, and this list is short and memorable. Standardized, predictable punishments will weigh on the mind of the criminal and reassure the law-abiding. Judges and servants of the crown, many used to the rule of the Thrunes and the others unused to Cheliax and its people, bringing with them the traditions from a hundred homelands--let them all have the same list.

Note as well that permitting a punishment does not require that it be used. This bill does not create a new set of crimes--in adding branding to the list, we had forgers in mind, but a separate bill will be required to make the punishment for forgery branding, and that bill can specify the range of appropriate punishments. Even the Turning to Parts, which we have allowed in the case of high treason, is not yet required as the punishment for high treason; that is the province of another law."

"Make no mistake, this list of punishments is Evil. They are bad for the country, bad for the judges, bad for the lords and bad for the commons. Banning unnecessary torture was one of the first things the committee on Rights considered, and we agreed to it almost immediately, on the second day, before the riots; all we left for yesterday was how to decide what is unnecessary torture and what is reasonable punishment. The Queen has banned torture, and for the same reason: Because we must reject Asmodeus's ways. Forcefully. He inflicted it on us, and so we reject it; not just to a standard other nations meet, but further, so that we may, in trying, meet the standard other good countries show us."

"I would have preferred to bring all the rights of the accused and the condemned together, but a group of bad men who think themselves Good brought this to the committee on 'Urban Order'. The committee on doing Evil things in the name of Good and patting each other on the back for how virtuous that evil was, even as it destroys the lives and souls of Cheliax and protects no one at all. Some of them were in Heaven two years ago; I doubt any of them but the Lord Marshal and Archduke Narikopolous will be on their next death, unless they change their course soon."

"They give a story of a hardened criminal who killed and then did worse, and claim torture would have stopped him. This is a lie, and an utterly transparent one that reveals total ignorance of their people. I could give you five similar stories from Kintargo since the coronation, yes, but I could give you five a year while under the Thrunes. Men who rape and kill are not rational, and not dissuaded by the prospect of a painful death any more than they are by the prospect of a painful afterlife. We had harsh punishments and spectacle made of them every week; they could hardly have failed to know the price. They were no more dissuaded than this Bardera. The only effect those harsh punishments had was to harden the hearts and souls of those who saw them and more fully damn those who played a part in inflicting them."

"Arodenite Cheliax had punishments with torture. But as my city's returned heroes have told me, Arodenite Cheliax was not Good and did not try. It was, more often than not, composed of Evil lords and Evil judges doing 'what was necessary', when they were men, not gods, and so had not a clue in Hell of what was actually necessary. That was a fine enough way to run a country of decent people waiting for the Age of Glory to arrive, to fix all ills and replace all flawed mortal judges with divine perfection. We have neither. We have a country of confused men and women, most of them trying to be Good, like most of the delegates in this hall, but most with very little idea of what that is, likewise. We have judges who are either scarce paladins courting flaming-out of the soul, or trained by Mephistopheles. We have no one standing ready to show us what is Good, and a committee ready to throw a flurry of proposals which are not, and hold up as an ideal a path that cannot take us out of Hell and does not try, and did not, ever, make up a virtuous way to run a country, not without a god to correct it."

"Aroden corrected it, in the past, but He is dead. Let His Inheritor take up the reins. Iomedae has shown us what is necessary for public order and public safety in Lastwall, and if Her punishments there are insufficient here, we should ask Her, not a god and king who died and failed. There should be a list, and it should be set by the Queen for the whole nation; on this I agree with the Duke of Valldaura. But they should be allowed only with the agreement of both Church and Crown, and not include any torture those do not consider strictly necessary for safety and order. Here is the text of my committee's proposal; let us reject the foolish one from the Urban Order committee and choose a virtuous path instead."

All citizens of Cheliax have the right, if convicted of a crime, to be punished only by means which are no more torturous than necessary for public safety and public order.
Therefore, no judge may assign to anyone any sentence not permitted by Iomedae's nation of Lastwall at the time of adoption of this right, unless that sentence is added to the list of those punishments permitted, through confirmation from the Church of Iomedae in consultation with the Crown. The convicted may accept other punishments if the court offers one and the criminal prefers it.
This right shall take effect with the adoption of the constitution, and the convention and Queen will, before that time, specifically seek out consultation with the Church for the punishments of lashing with a scourge rather than horsewhip, imprisonment, beheading, and the Final Blade, to confirm the proper methods by which these traditional punishments may be permitted.
The civilian punishments permitted by their present use in Lastwall are long-drop hanging, permanent exile from Cheliax, maiming, sentences to hard labor for a specified term which may be year-round or exclude the harvest and planting season, fines and confiscation of property (with appropriate methods of seizure), and whipping. Military punishments include being stripped of rank, punishing an entire unit for the crimes of a single member, and being consigned to a penal battalion.

"And let me remind you again, delegates; you are voting on what can be done to you. To your parents, and your children. Your brothers and your sisters. Your husbands and your wives. To everyone you care about, and to yourself. Do not think you are safe from the judge and will never be the convict; even great nobles can run afoul of the law, and face no more mercy than it requires. If our country is just, we will face that lack of mercy, when we offend, and there is no one here but the paladins and perhaps hellknights who can say truly that they will never break the laws of Cheliax."

Women are so evidently unqualified for power. It's not a matter he'd ever had cause to contemplate before, and he'd started out open-minded about it, but the Archduchess is just awful in all the ways you'd expect a woman to be awful. She's reactive, she's emotional, she overreacts to everything, she's incapable of perspective, she's two-faced, she walked out of their committee and ran off to her other one to race them to the floor... he really hopes they can get a rule through against women participating in parliament, but probably the Queen would take it entirely wrong. 

Okay these races between committees are getting ridiculous. The first time was funny, but Jordi doesn't want to live in a country where every law is made in a rush. 

Took a while to have that realization, making the laws you want to live under being the whole point of this, but better late than never. 

If he cared more about attaining Heaven than about the people of Cheliax he would have stayed there, but it would not even slightly help to point that out.

"The honored Archduchess has told us much these past few days about which ordinary policies, used by nearly every government on Golarion, she considers to be so unforgivably Evil as to damn anyone who dares propose them. Nearly every time she speaks, she condemns those who disagree with her as Evil, whether the topic is censorship, public executions, or any other matter. She condemns the lords and magistrates of nearly every country in the world as damned, and asks you to take on faith that this is true. 

Perhaps if it were the Archduchess's assessment you were to face at Judgment, this ought to move you. But it is Pharasma's court, not the Archduchess's, that weighs your soul. I cannot say how She will judge those of us in this room, though I know how she judged me once, and I would not wish to ask any man here to vote against his conscience; but She did not condemn me in my first life, and if I allowed fear of the Archduchess's condemnation to overwhelm the voice of my conscience urging me to protect my fellow subjects from anarchy, I would not wish to count on Pharasma judging me kindly for it.

But let us set aside the Archduchess's spurious accusations and consider her proposal on its own merits.

The honored archduchess forgets, perhaps, to clarify one of the more important aspects of her proposal." He takes out a copy of the Rights Committee transcripts.

"Our honored Archduchess is wrong when she says that these punishments are Evil, and wrong when she says that the men who propose them are, but most importantly for this discussion she is wrong on two matters of great significance. The first is whether riots like the ones we all just witnessed happened in Westcrown under the Thrunes. They did not. Because everyone knew they'd die horribly, and so they didn't do it. They did it in distant cities like Pezzack and Kintargo, far from the might of the state, precisely because it is more difficult to deter misconduct more distant from a Queen's base of power. In other words, the history of Asmodean Cheliax is a perfect example of how deterrence by torture does work to prevent riots.

She would have you believe that men are nothing but beasts, whose decision to riot or nor is determined only by, as she testified in Valia Wain's defense, the temperature of the city; but rioters are men, and they think of whether they will die and how they will die when they decide whether to go out into the streets or not. Of course they do! Think on the riskiest thing you've done; did you consider whether you might die? Of course you did! Anyone who did not do that is dead before adulthood! Yes, torture deters riots, in every species more intelligent than a dog.

The second important matter in which she is wrong is that she says this will be done to you. Delegates, have you since the amnesty raped and murdered your way through our city? Do you make sacrifices to Urgathoa in a secret altar in your basement? No! So this will not be done to you. This will be done to the men who butcher your families. This will be done to the men who invite the curse of evil gods to this land. The most revealing part of the Archduchess's speech was her insistence that those of us who disagree with her in this matter, who believe differently than she does on how best to make this country a safe place, that we are bad men and that even if we were found Lawful Good and went to Heaven as the Count Cerdanya was that is only because the Judge, I suppose, must not be as wise as Jilia Bainilus.

She does not see you as her countrymen. This is not how one speaks of their countrymen. She sees the people of Cheliax as mindless beasts too stupid to act on their own interests. She sees you as rapists and murderers best appealed to by proposing that you want your own hanging to be swift.

That is not my vision for this country. That is not my impression of you delegates. I think that you are much wiser and much better than the Archduchess believes you are, and that your desire to see justice done does not make you Evil but indeed makes you Good. I understand that delicate stomachs might have difficulty with such subjects, and that it is her own admirable delicacy that moves the Archduchess to oppose all matters bloody or gory. But that is not a sound basis for policy, and it does not make you a bad man to disagree with her.

That said, if you are a rapist, a diabolist and a murderer, then just as the Archduchess says, you should vote this biill down. This is not a bill friendly to rapists, diabolists, and murderers. The Archduchess is right that it should not garner their vote."

"Thank you, Your Excellency, I quite agree."

"Liar," she hisses at Bellumar.

It's a good thing that Alicia has a good poker face, because otherwise she'd definitely be having a reaction to how as soon as it's commoners being called diabolists he's enthusiastic about them being tortured to death instead of outraged at asking them to repent.

"Are you quite well, Archduchess?" he asks as he passes her by on his way back to his seat. 

She doesn't need to respond. He heard her the first time.

Enric steps up to speak. It feels strange, knowing what the fight would be and having time to prepare.  

"Iomedae found a way to run a country without burning anyone at the stake or breaking anyone on the wheel. If we need an answer to what punishments are 'necessary for public safety and public order' and Iomedae gave us that answer, I'm ready to trust her. If doing it her way only works in a country guided by the good gods, let's be a country guided by the good gods. Or, at least let's give it a try before we give up on the idea."

"That's why the rights committee law lets us add new sentences, but only if the church of Iomedae approves. Maybe it is true that the people of Cheliax have been so hurt and corrupted by living under hell, that the sentences Lastwall uses wouldn't be enough for us. Or maybe we aren't that corrupted, and the gods of good can redeem us. I would rather try, ask them if we have a chance, and only bring back tortures if they say it's the only way."

"As for whether the common people have to fear any punishments we bring back.... Out in the countryside, the paladins are the law. Lawful and good, with the blessings protecting against greed and corruption, they decide fairly who to put to death and who to spare. We won't always have them around to be judges."

That is hopefully not getting too close to the slander law, but Enric still feels like it's too close. There's really no other way to say what he wants to, though, which is reminding everyone how many innocent men and women the old magistrates put to death.

Torture is barbaric. A rational, civilized society that considers people worse than nothing should use a Final Blade and can use a regular one.

Whatever means are needed to keep the rabble under control.

"If you ask me, it seems a lot kinder to burn a diabolist or a murderer at the stake than to cut off their head. Lots of Evildoers have convinced themselves that they'll be one of the devils ruling in Hell, or one of the big strong demons in the Abyss, or that even if they won't they've got some Evil that's just so important they'd rather damn themselves than give it up. If you cut off their head, that's it, they're dead and damned. But fire's slow, and more importantly it shows people what's waiting for them. Give a man time to think, give him a taste of what Hell'll do to him, and maybe he'll realize he doesn't want to go there after all, and he'll repent and ask the Sun for mercy."

This is not going to work. It might weaken him on the fight that really matters. Although it's possible that doesn't matter, since he can't speak on the one that matters anyway. 

But the church thinks it's worth fighting.

"One year ago, I asked the Church of Iomedae in Lastwall to send priests to Menador, to help us draw out the poison of infernal rule. The very first change they told me to make - the very first evil they told me that we must uproot, more urgently than any other - was the evil of torture. They told me that execution by torture is always evil. And they told me that it is not necessary; that men who are not dissuaded by an eternity of torment in the Abyss will not be dissuaded by a few hours of torture before they die.

I believed them that it was evil. I believed that every time I ordered it, I blackened my soul further. But when they told me that it was not necessary, I did not believe them. I thought that killing men painlessly would result in more crime, that we would see a rise in lawlessness, and that the people would be less safe than they were. But as it was very important to them, and as I did not, at that point, trust my own judgement in matters of good and evil, I listened anyway. Today in Menador, all men who are executed meet their end either by hanging, or by the axe. 

There is no more crime in Menador today than there was two years ago. If there is more murder, it is only because we began counting infanticides, which have themselves become much less common. If there is more rape, it is only because we began counting men forcing themselves on their indentured servants. There is not more banditry. There is not more assault. I am not aware of any rioting whatsoever.

I do believe it was important that Menador made fewer changes than other regions. Consistency, as far as I can tell, is enough, and I am not at all convinced that torture can substitute for it. Whatever I thought torture was adding to it, it seems it is not. Whatever I thought I was purchasing at cost of a piece of my soul, it seems that I already had. 

I am sure there are many evils which come with real sacrifices, if one gives them up. But for those who believe that torture is one of them - that it is a necessary evil, whether among all men, or among only those who are used to hell's rule - I can tell you only that I checked, and found that it is not. And there are enough evils in this world which are painful to reject, without also staining our souls with those which give us absolutely nothing."

That sounds improbable to Xavier. There's plenty of soldiers who will sneer at twenty lashes who won't at eighty, and he doesn't see why the principle would change at that level.

That.. is a rather counterintuitive conclusion.  But the fact that it’s so counterintuitive means it’s a good opportunity to show allegiance to Iomedae and rejection of Asmodeus.

Setting aside whether it is true or false for now… It seems some of the leftover nobility actually align with Iomedae’s church and in turn the progressive nobles?  Or maybe it’s just this one issue where they all line up?  Dia hopes the upcoming Kortos Tavern meeting has people that have also been paying attention, so they can work together to actually figure out who is aligned with who.

"Your Highness, I am glad that the abolition of torturous executions has yet to cause problems in Menador. It gives me hope that such executions can be used very sparingly. But I do not think that the example of Menador is sufficient to say that such punishments should be completely outlawed in the entire Empire. Perhaps there is less crime because there are fewer laws to break. Perhaps those men at risk of turning to banditry have yet to hear about the change in policy. Perhaps riots are less of a concern in Menador because it has fewer large cities. I cannot say for certain. 

This law does not require torturous punishments, merely permits them. If it proves to be the case that torture is as unnecessary as you believe, then they need not continue to be used. But by the same token, I cannot abide by the archduchess's proposal to permanently enshrine a ban on all such punishments into our constitution, with no affordance for resuming them even if her proposal should prove disastrous."

"I got in line to say something a lot like what the Archduchess said. You may imagine my voice joined to hers. But since she already said it, I'll say something new.

"Earlier this week a man came to my church and spoke to me about his sins on the night of the third. You can know from the fact that this meeting happened in the church and not in the dungeon that nobody had already caught him. We prayed together about his eternal fate. And then I advised him to turn himself in to the Queen's justice, and we talked about whether his repentance was such that he'd need the Final Blade or not, and I walked there with him and he went inside and did not come out again.

"No step of this process can happen if the Queen's justice is torture. If it is ever torture. If it might change from the last time I read a decree to the moment his sentence is passed down from 'never torture' to 'sometimes torture'. And if you don't care about that man's soul the way I do, maybe you can care about the fact that I brought him to the palace to be tried and that he is no longer walking the streets.

"Maybe you think he'd have been caught anyway after a few more days? Maybe, or maybe he'd get on a boat. You think he'd have been more restrained on the third if he'd attended a few breakings upon the wheel? Maybe, but we've just determined it's not going to be obligatory to watch them, and a man's impulses in a chaotic situation do not admit of going over all the pros and cons! Maybe you think I should have to turn him in whether he'd cooperate with that or not? You can take as long as you will to send me home to Nirvana and I will still insist on being worthy of it. I will not send anyone to be tortured. And if I would, he should not come to me in the first place."

Note to self never confess your sins to Shelynites, as long as the Queen's justice isn't torture they'll turn you in!

Oh, he bets they can hurt her enough to make her no longer worthy of Nirvana.

"Honored delegate, it is common practice in civilized countries for those who turned themselves in willingly to be spared from torturous punishments." Which is not to say that it always happens, but this does seem like a relatively safe and reasonable place to experiment. "I do not know if that would be sufficient to assuage your concerns, but I would support a resolution to enshrine such protections into our constitution, if one is brought to the floor."

"I don't like either of these proposals. Back home, if we catch someone trying to steal our cattle, we break his legs so he can't run and leave him outside to die of thirst or wolves, whichever comes first — and we haven't had a cattle rustler in years, so clearly we're doing something right. Anyone who wants to call that Evil just because we aren't being nice enough to the cattle thieves has never had to figure out whether skipping meals so their children can eat will leave them better off, or just mean it's longer before they starve too."

"It is certainly true that this proposal would prohibit that, yes."

Reflexively standing up as soon as dying outside is mentioned, speaking up in a loud stern voice.

“If you leave cattle thieves in the woods to die, they rise up as skeletons. Don’t do that.”

"I don't think this is a particularly complicated problem. We need punishments to deter crime, or else our country will be overrun with it; we are not all of us blessed as Menador apparently is. But we also do not want the punishments to be arbitrarily decided by each judge, so that a thief in Ostenso gets thrice the punishment of a thief in Westcrown, or for every lord mayor and magistrate to have to determine for themselves exactly what sentence is appropriate. A reasonable country might draw the lines of what crime goes with which punishment differently than did Cheliax of old, but any code of laws that could maintain order across the empire would look similar to this, and it's a tried and tested law that we know will work. I will be voting in favor of the proposal."

Silvia heard about this proposal from Thea's discussion of the convention notes yesterday. She's not going to call torturing people intrinsically wrong or anything. The Archduchess who didn't like the law against talking was against it though. She was saying it was evil. It might be a necessary evil, of course. Silvia still wanted to know. She dug through her pack, and found some of Arbat's letters. Nobody else wanted them. They were informative.

She's not going to say whether torture is a good idea. She just knows the answer to this particular question. Everyone else should know it too.

 "This Convention intends to make rules for Cheliax. These rules should not be made for Lastwall. They should not be made for Taldor. Cheliax is its own place, with its own people. As we all know, there is one group which tried to understand the Chelish. One group watched us for decades to learn about how we respond to things. I speak, of course, of the church of Asmodeus. 

 "Fortunately, among the matters they investigated was this one. How will the Chelish people respond to slow, publicized, torturous executions? Are they evil? We don't need to guess. They checked. They did not check whether they were a necessary evil, of course. They just saw what effects the executions had. Here are some of the things they said.

"'Last year's thought detection sweep included an investigation of your assigned town's thoughts on Hell. When it came up in nearby conversation, a full fifteen people were terrified of eternal torture. As you should know, Chosen, this thought is common among peasants who repent and flee Asmodeus's grasp. Properly trained peasantry should recognize Hell as a mere continuation of their life, not as an atypical and extraordinary increase in pain levels. Further investigation revealed most of the terrified people had almost no fear of being personally tortured, and had only personally viewed one slow execution in the last year. Chosen, this is an order: over the next year, you must execute at least three people, by a method at least as long-lasting as impaling. Asmodeus's gaze rests on you.'

"'Chosen, your increased execution schedule has improved the acceptance of Hell. This year's thought detection sweep has, however, revealed a new problem. Your village properly understands they will inevitably go to Hell, and furthermore understands Hell's torture more painful than any mortal torment. The slower death inflicted by impalement is therefore rumored to be a mercy, postponing the pain of Hell for your favored wrongdoers. The reported petty treason case was thus encouraged in her crime against the hierarchy by believing you and Asmodeus prefer it to lesser crimes. Such blasphemy deserves a greater penalty. Chosen, this is an order: by next year, your peasants must both understand the torments of Hell and fear committing blasphemy and violating the hierarchy more than injury to chattels.'

 "'...your new program of arbitrarily selecting from your population and publicly torturing them as blasphemers has successfully reduced the attention paid to Hell among your peasants, and the standard prompt for recent evil actions found twenty cases of petty cruelty in the week before thought detection, as opposed to the fifteen from last year. Chosen, your success is commended. On other matters...' "

The slips disappear into the indistinguishable veil as the reading finishes.

"If your peasants do not expect to be tortured, they will act to escape Hell. If they do, they will simply accept torture as the way of things. They must understand the feel of Hell, and worry over other matters. Ensure Hell does not stand out to them. Then their petty struggles will lead them naturally to Evil and they will come to us. Chosen, this is an order: You must vote to legalize torturous execution.

"—ah, my apologies. I lost track of what room I was in. The letters do have a certain pattern to them. There were more I had to read. I don't want to take up too much time on the floor, though. Let me amend that. Your Excellency. Your Excellencies. Delegates. You, instead, must vote, ah, whether to legalize torturous execution."

Wow going to the Worldwound was the best thing he ever did and he did it on a whim.

Where the fuck did that person get letters like that.

Sounds fake. She doesn't think the Church ever hassled anyone over doing executions for a selective audience or having peasants scared of torture (aren't they supposed to be?) if it wasn't decreasing tax revenue.

Wait, there’s a secret chosen of asmodeus ordering them to vote for this? Why did the archmages let one of those into the convention? 

And because she's anonymous nobody can go after her for just making this up. Huh. Well, if she doesn't get tracked down maybe he should see about exploiting that himself.

"I cannot speak for the veracity of those anonymously-presented quotations," says Jonatan, who absolutely believes that she made them up. "But what I can say is that this statute clearly and explicitly outlaws the punishments their addressee was allegedly being ordered to inflict. It seems to me, hearing those quotations, that the primary factor driving men towards Hell was not anything about the punishments — indeed, those quotations contradict themselves, in their claims about the effects of the punishments themselves, which if these letters are accurate would suggest that the Church of Asmodeus was not confident in those effects — but rather the instruction to arbitrarily torture men for perceived blasphemy against Asmodeus."

"There are two matters I wish to speak to. The first is that when people expect a fate worse than death to befall them, they'll fight to the death; word has spread gradually, in Chelam, that it is the paladins meting out justice, and this means that sometimes bandits will surrender. This saves the lives of the men who fight them, and sometimes among the bandits are relative innocents, captives, twelve year old boys, who we save if they surrender and can't if they fight to the death. It is a powerful thing, to have it reputed that it might be worth surrendering. A slow public execution conveys to all who witness it that they should be afraid of the law, but I don't actually find bandits less dangerous when more afraid, and it is hard to make a man fear a fate worse than death when death he can buy at any moment with the blade in his hand.

The second is that these punishments are copied from, I assume, some old Arodenite book of law, though naming them the punishments practiced in the Empire is in fact wrong, as the Empire was large and accommodated many practices. But it is true that there are many magistrates now in Axis who judged by this code and handed down these punishments.

I can tell you what they would say, if you consulted them on this. They would say that the well-intentioned men who introduced this law have misunderstood the old Empire very badly. The most important guiding principle of the old Empire was that we would improve on the work of our parents, that our children would improve on ours. You cannot build an Arodenite Empire by digging up old laws and putting them back into force; you cannot resurrect any Empire, but most certainly not our own old Empire, by animating its dead laws to put back into force under new conditions. You are commanded to do better. The men who wrote these laws were improving on the laws that came before them, and we are commanded to improve on these ourselves.

The old Empire had many virtues, and many vices. But to put in place its laws without the sensibility that produced them imitates the vices, not the virtues. It is a mistake to try to model ourselves off a code of laws that our great-great-grandparents had declared unsatisfactory and were planning to change in the Age of Glory. It is a more serious mistake to call it Arodenite. The Arodenite thing is to think for ourselves and design our own code for the needs of our own country."

"Your Grace, I agree wholeheartedly that we are all commanded to surpass what came before us. But improving on what came before us requires wisdom, prudence, and a willingness to abandon experiments that have proved unsuitable.

If a man wishes to build a house, but having no experience with house-building, he attempts to construct it by intuition, it is very likely that his house will collapse with him inside of it. If he instead consults an experienced builder, and asks after house-building techniques which are known to be reliable, the final building may not be the house most perfectly suited to his needs, but it will at least keep out the rain. Year by year, century by century, we improve our knowledge of how to build houses; and year by year, century by century, we improve our knowledge of how to build laws. But we do not improve our houses, or our laws, by changing everything at once, by throwing out centuries of precedent in the misguided belief that we should simply copy Lastwall in all things.

And if our most recent attempt at a house has collapsed around us, it is better to rely on those methods which we know to at least be adequate than to fret that in doing so we are failing to surpass our predecessors. 

Westcrown's greatest needs right now are peace and stability. If our present code were suited for it, the riots of the Third would never have happened.

If this body, or whatever body succeeds it, or the Queen herself, finds that there are improvements to be made to this law — and I am sure there will be, one day, when our country is on stabler footing — I certainly hope they will make them. But we must build ourselves a firm foundation first."

The reasons bandits will surrender to paladins is not that their executions will be swift, but that the paladins will consider mitigating circumstances. He's had his own share of successes convincing people to abandon crime and re-integrate into society, and that he even thought it was possible for them to reform seems to him like the most important part.

Victòria has put her thoughts together and gotten in line, now, though there's still a fair number of people ahead of her. And maybe she should care about the person who's... pretending to be a priest of Asmodeus, for some reason?... but she's honestly a lot more focused on Laia's speech.

It had not particularly occurred to her that any of the rioters going out to murder innocent people might have just gone and turned themselves in. It feels kind of absurd that someone would take to the streets in a mob one night, only to decide after the fact that... they cared about breaking the law? They'd realized later that killing innocent people was Evil? But she doesn't think Laia was lying, there, so apparently one of them must have.

And — she wants him dead for it. Obviously she wants him dead for it. If you take someone who turns themself in for the sort of things people were doing during the riots, and then don't kill them, you're treating it like it's okay to kill innocent people as long as you tell the Watch afterwards.

But — if she holds him up next to Vidal-Espi-whatever-his-name-was—

Her heart feels like it's on fire. She wishes he'd suffered properly, that he hadn't just had a nice clean hanging, and — it helps, knowing he's in the Abyss, or if not that he's at least getting painfully torn to shreds in Abaddon — and maybe that shouldn't be forever, she's not sure, but it should definitely be a long long time—

—but she's not sure she wants that for the man Laia was talking about? And maybe part of that is that she doesn't know what he did, but — she was angry at Ibarra for burning down houses full of little children, but she was also angry with him for treating it like it was funny, like he didn't even care—

—and she wouldn't want someone like the person Laia was talking about to go around being a happy songbird in Nirvana, he shouldn't get to just be okay, but if she imagines him taking the Final Blade, that doesn't feel so upsetting, even if he's not tortured first. Which — she's not sure entirely makes sense, whatever he did was surely still awful, but — maybe death could be enough? She's not sure, but — maybe.

And most of what people say about 'repentance' doesn't really make much sense, but if it means treating people like Ibarra or Vidal-Espiwhatever worse than people who at least have the decency to regret it and turn themself in, that doesn't seem totally ridiculous? Of course, by that measure it makes what people have been saying about the Evil nobles repenting even more absurd, it's not like any of them are going around turning themselves in for all the awful things they've done and asking for the punishment they deserve, but it was already pretty obvious from the fact that they haven't even stopped doing blatantly Evil things.

After taking long enough to work up the courage to speak, even, anonymously that the conversion has somewhat moved on a sorition reaches the stand.
"How is this the first thing to go in the constitution we've already past like 10 things. I thought we were almost done. What have we been doing? Can we just say it is all part of the constitution. Can I go home now." Better not say that last part the archmage can probably see through the anonymity. 

"Honored delegate, our work so far has primarily been oriented towards producing a body of law for Cheliax. This is important and necessary work, though your frustration is understandable; when Asmodeus was overthrown, the laws of Asmodeus were repealed, and replaced with a limited law code covering only the most serious offenses. The constitution, when it is completed, will set out guiding principles for the government itself; this, too, is important work, but it makes the former no less important. I cannot say I agree with the decision to force unwilling delegates to participate in this work, but the archmage has made his will very clear."

As many as several delegates, mostly soritions, but including a few of the more clues members of other estates, who were also confused on this point are disappointed yet enlightened. 

"Torture is Evil." It should go without saying, but it apparently doesn't in this crowd. "Commanding that torture be inflicted on people is Evil. Allowing people to be tortured, when you could easily prevent it, is Evil. There are Evils to which no one has devised a good alternative; these are not among them. Lastwall has found, and Menador has found, that men do not commit more crimes in places where the law will put them to death swiftly - so long as the law is enforced without exception and so long as men do not imagine they will escape justice entirely. I am sure that some men would be dissuaded by a slower and more terrible death, who are not dissuaded by the prospect of Hell or the Abyss - but they are few indeed. And being dissuaded is not the only way that a man might react to such threats; For each man who avoids further evil out of fear of worldly torment, there may be another who turns from repentance and commits more crimes and evils to conceal his misdeeds, or one who sees the evil of the punishment and reasons that the whole state is turned to evil, or one who chooses to follow the example of the law, and torments his wife and children for their errors or perceived crimes against him. Whatever the forces which drive men's hearts, when the state is barred from torturing its subjects this does not cause those subjects to descend into anarchy and lawlessness.

Now, this proposal does have some merits. As the count of Cerdenya says, it does not require torture, and in fact it bans almost all forms of torture. But it could be better! We could, instead, pass a law which keeps most of these same punishments, and discards the harshest. I think that such a law would be better, for our country and for our souls. Burning at the stake? Turning to parts? There is no reason for these cruelties. The lords of Old Cheliax and of Taldor may have thought so. The lords of old Cheliax and of Taldor were wrong. We can do better.

In advocating for this law, its proponents have pointed to the night of the third as justification for harshness, but I do not think those cruelties can be defended as anti-riot measures. Molthune uses harsh punishments and has constant riots. Taldor employs all manner of torture and sees riots also, ones far far worse than those of last week. Lastwall employs no torture under any circumstances and almost never sees a riot of any kind. This return to Evil will not spare us riots. This body has already voted for a great many measures for security in the city: we have banned slander and banned pamphlets, with my full support. We have maintained an occupation of the city with the Glorious Reclamation. We have recommended a new Lord Mayor and made executions public. Each of these actions, it was argued, would restore peace and order, and to all appearances they have. Let us not damn ourselves to achieve a victory which we have already won."

...okay, she's pretty sure she's confused again. Obviously it's Evil to torture innocent people, but the paladin from Lastwall could barely even explain what he counts as torture as opposed to just regular hurting people, and no one thinks it's always Evil to hurt anyone, even the paladin from Lastwall didn't think that. And Valia trusted Delegate Cansellarion, he's not going to start saying things that are obviously stupid — well, Valia could have been wrong about him, if she assumed he had to be reasonable just because he's a priest of Iomedae. Maybe when Delegate Cansellarion talks about torturing people like it's always Evil he means it in a different way than the paladin? Like, there's some things you shouldn't do even to diabolists, if there's some really bad sort of torture that's more like rape or Maledicting someone or raising someone as a skeleton than like whipping them or beating them up or carving their offense into their skin. ...Actually, the arguments on Rights Committee make a lot more sense if people thought she was saying something more like "it should be legal to Maledict Evildoers" than like "it should be legal to whip Evildoers with a cat." Except the Lastwall paladin didn't want to allow that, either...

"The Lord-Marshal tells us that when men know they will certainly be punished, the prospect of death alone may be sufficient to dissuade them from crime. Perhaps this is true, and perhaps in Lastwall all crimes are caught and prosecuted so consistently that the criminals of Lastwall know certain punishment awaits them. But it is not true in Cheliax, not yet. Dozens of men have been put to death for their role in the riots — but far more than that were on the streets of Westcrown on the night of the Third. I will continue to support measures to ensure that lawbreakers are caught quickly and certainly, and perhaps with sufficient certainty we can render such punishments unnecessary; but if we need either certainty or severity to deter criminals, it is far easier to achieve the latter than the former.

He asks, also, why men who are not dissuaded by the torments of Hell or the Abyss might be dissuaded by the prospect of a slow death. The answer there is far simpler: the lawbreakers of Westcrown need not fear the torments of the Evil afterlives, because they can simply choose to be executed by Final Blade. Those who refuse the Final Blade do so because they believe that Pharasma will look kindly on their sins. They are mistaken, of course, but it is far easier to be mistaken about how Pharasma will judge their crimes than to be mistaken about how a magistrate of Westcrown will, when the judgments of Westcrown's magistrates are on display for all to see."

Deep breath. It doesn't actually matter what happens here. Except that people should know things, whatever they decide to do about them.

"In Egorian, under the Thrunes, there were executions at least once a week, different each time. I have seen flayings, impalement, people grilled alive and consumed by rats, forced hallucinations provoking death by fright, people turned into ice sculptures, slow dismemberment that opened the breastbone and briefly left the heart exposed and visibly beating, and - you know, a dozen things too gross to talk about without good reason, and a hundred too complicated to waste your time with.

And yet when I was thirteen, there were riots in Egorian. I couldn't tell you why, or how many died, though there were, briefly, bodies in the streets. It was not reported in the paper, so we all acted as if it had not happened. Men were executed for treason after, but there was no mention of their having succeeded at causing any civil unrest. The official story did not include them, and I am not surprised that they were not heard of anywhere else. But I was there, and they happened.

I think it is true that men are not dumb beasts. Beasts care only about pain, but men sometimes care more about other things. So you can hand out whatever punishments seem just to you. But if your hope is that through harshness, you will achieve no riots at all, ever? If such a level of torture exists, it must be more than what the Thrunes inflicted."

How do you kill someone with fright? If someone tried to do that to him he would simply not die. Kind of seems like the people getting killed that way just sucked at being people.

"No country, even Lastwall, has entirely eliminated crime. But there are circumstances that make it more likely, and circumstances that make it less likely. If the prospect of a slow death for the most egregious crimes can deter even one riot in ten, it would easily be worth it." This is an important concept in Aroden's holy book; hopefully it isn't too complicated even for random peasants.

"We have heard as well today that under the Thrunes, it was not uncommon for men to be seized at near-random and tortured to death for alleged blasphemy against Asmodeus, whether or not they had even broken the law. It does not surprise me that men living under such threats would have less fear of a slow execution for rioting, if they could not hope to avoid it simply through Lawful conduct."

How old is Tallandria, twenty-four? That'd be ....4703? No, probably 4701, which would make Tallandria 26. During the early part of the Galtan Revolution, when food prices spiked and the soldiers and priests had been rapidly shipped out. She doesn't actually know how many people died, it having never previously occurred to her to care. A lot of them. 

It would be kind of helpful to the cause for Lilia Ramona de Montero to show up at the podium to confirm Tallandria's account and say that she is in favor of the proposal because torturing people is fun.

That's an astonishingly terrible idea and would be very hard to pull off without risking important secrets. 

It's just hard to see a winning move on something as important as people not getting tortured to death and not play it. 

Mattin faces the crowd proudly. He is dressed in black with a few hints of red. Not enough red to look Asmodean, but enough to obviously be a modern urban Chelish man. He clears his throat and asks,

“What do the people of Cheliax want?”

He exaggerates his Ostenso accent when asking the question, to make his implication more obvious. These foreigners from Galt and Taldor and the afterlives just spent a while arguing about what is Good. They care about what Heaven wants, or what Aroden wants. I'm one of you, and I care about what you want. 

“More pamphlets? Less pamphlets? More war? Less war? Will any of these things stop riots? I don’t know. But there’s one thing I know we want. Lions. The people of Cheliax want to see the condemned sentenced to death in the arena, fighting lions and other wild beasts. It is necessary to see justice done, to see it in glorious spectacles of bloodshed. It is necessary and if the people are deprived of such bloodshed, we have already seen them take it into their own hands." 

“I asked the people of Westcrown what they thought about the trials last week. They did not say the trials were just in condemning Vidal Espinosa, or merciful in sparing Valia Wain. They said the trials were boring, a waste of an afternoon. Don’t just take my word for it. Outside the trial, the bookmakers took bets on the result. The most popular one, what the people hope and clamor for: lions!”

He points upwards and a few sortitions in the crowd cheer or shout the word 'lions'. There's no point to bribing delegates for votes anymore, but he can buy applause.

“Will the people learn the consequences of breaking the law? Will the people see the power of the crown? Not if the executions are so boring no one shows up! Maybe the Galtans, weak of stomach, are content with drinking watery wine and watching final blade executions. But we are Chelish people! We want strong drink, and fights in the arena!"

“This is not some cruelty born of Asmodeus. The arena has existed since ancient times. Ask any sage about the days when the empire was united and powerful. He will tell you of the great spectacles those emperors put on for their subjects. Chariot races! Shows of wizardry! Battles of man and beast! Are we not to surpass our elders? With even greater shows!”

“I propose an amendment. Add one more punishment to the list. The gladiator games!”

Mattin raises his hand in the air at the end of his speech, a second signal for cheers and applause.

The first person in this entire discussion to actually be a normal person who cares about normal person things!!!!!!! He wasn't even one of the people paid to cheer but he'll cheer.

Oh, that would be nice. They kill orcs in the games and it's great fun for the whole family.

Actually, in the Empire of his day, the people fighting in the arena were nearly always slaves, not convicts. ...Admittedly, now that he thinks about it, that isn't actually better.

This has the potential to be an enormous disaster — maybe he can just not have people vote on the proposed amendment—

"I second the amendment!" shouts a man who was absolutely not in line.

"LIONS!!"

Oh, he definitely didn't mean to ban lethal arena games, those are the heart of the empire. They keep the masses entertained. He'll applaud for the amendment.

—Oh, right, lions were created by Iomedae! Probably that's how you torture people to death in a Heavenly way.

"LIONS!"

This man has lived in Cheliax for more than fifty years and is trying to be an Iomedan and is not going to laugh, damn it.

They almost banned the gladiatorial games by accident? Good thing they caught that, that would have sucked.

Oh, are they supposed to be shouting "lions" now? She doesn't really understand why they're shouting "lions" but she can follow instructions. 

"LIONS!" Oh no, what if that was too quiet and now she's in trouble.

Honestly it's a good amendment. Does torture deter criminals? Who knows! Does a better thing to do with their time, like watching the games, deter criminals? Absolutely! She'll applaud. Yelling 'lions' isn't dignified.

...Look, Victòria agrees that the list of "Arodenite" punishments is missing a bunch of important punishments, but gladiatorial games aren't one of them! If you punish people by throwing them to the lions you're just saying that anyone strong enough to fight a lion can hurt people as much as they want! Unless you just punish them properly even if they survive, in that case it's fine, but she really doesn't want to count on that! 

Maybe she can try to explain that in her speech, once she finishes explaining why you need to be able to punish people as much as they actually deserve.

"LIONS!" Ysabet has never seen a lion, but that's not the point!

If he had not heard it claimed that Mephistopheles currently ruled Razmiran, and that he should therefore be more proactive about advocating for things he supported, would he be getting up right now to attempt to explain that feeding people to lions is generally still torture and generally still Evil? ...Probably not. He didn't speak yesterday, even on issues of fairly significant importance.

... Lions?? Really?

C'mon guys, wolves are much more easily sustainable in this climate, are you planning to keep your lions in little tiny pens and only feed them with people? What a terrible way to treat lions. Wolves can be allowed to roam free in the woods of Cheliax, and come back around at appointed times to devour whomever the populace wishes. Much better lives, much less logistical trouble.

They're supposed to try to save criminals from Hell, right? Well, people like watching gladiatorial games, so probably it's Good for criminals to participate in gladiatorial games, so maybe they'll be less likely to go to Hell. Therefore voting for lions is the right thing to do.

Obviously the original proposal didn't ban the gladiatorial games, but if that needs to be clarified explicitly, then fine.

Getting mauled by large predators sucks even if you're heavily armored and the family cleric is on hand!  Can we please not actively try to make that happen more?

"Your amendment is heard," Jonatan says. "With that being said, I would not wish to confuse the issue of restoring the Arodenite punishments with the issue of the gladiatorial games. I propose, therefore, that we first vote on whether to restore the Arodenite punishments — and thereby no longer wholly prohibit torture — and then, if that proposal passes, additionally vote on the question of adding the gladiatorial games to the list of approved punishments."

There, that should get all the peasants who just want to watch people be eaten by lions to vote for the actually necessary part of the law, and then the sort of people with any business actually making law can vote down the proposal to wantonly throw convicts to the lions.

"Boooooo!!! Add the lions or we'll vote down the bill!" He doesn't even care that much but the man clearly thinks they're all idiots and contemptible so now he wants to screw him over.

"As a point of order, amendments have usually been voted on before the bill, so that the version the convention votes on is the one we mean to put into effect."

Message to Jonatan: Your excellency, accepting the idiotic amendment doesn't require any officials to ever apply the punishment, and wins the bill votes.

For the love of Aroden. Is the Archduchess interested in making her love for procedural nonsense useful to achieve their shared interest here — apparently not, she's in line but she hasn't said anything — no, that's not entirely fair, she could simply not have thought of anything to say. She was the person who introduced the idea that amendments needed to be voted on before the bill.

"My apologies, as a matter of procedure you are correct," he says, after a regrettably conspicuous pause. "When voting opens, we will vote first on whether to add the gladiatorial games to the list of punishments permitted by the proposed law, and then on the law itself."

The amendment should, at least, only pass if Montcada is correct.

A Mislead would do it. You could get up there and just talk about how sometimes for stress relief you and Aspexia Rugatonn would disembowel people just like this bill proposes and that'd probably kill it and I'd be sitting here the whole time.

Elie'd be furious with me. Why are you this worked up about this. It doesn't matter. 

"The good people of the urban order committee have told us a number of times that this proposal only permits these grisly punishments, and does not mandate their use for any particular crime. Certainly it's been implied that they'd be used sparingly. For truly extraordinary crimes, for high treason perhaps. But I heard the Count Cerdanya mention just now that he'd like people to fear "a slow execution for rioting". So I'd like to ask for some clarification. The bill doesn't mandate particular punishments for particular crimes. Fine. Count Cerdanya, how many people do you envision broken at the wheel or taken to pieces after the riots of the third? Just Vidal Espinoza? Just him and Select Wain? Every single rioter the watch brought in? Or perhaps only a tenth of them, chosen by lot?"

"I am not a magistrate of Westcrown, but were it up to me, I would desire the ringleaders and orchestrators of the riots to be punished for high treason. I would likewise see those men who, having condemned themselves to death with one capital crime, decided that there was no reason to restrain themselves from further such crimes — men like Vícenç Bardera, whom I spoke of earlier — sentenced to be broken on the wheel. I would not see every man who took to the streets tortured, regardless of the severity of his offense, and I would particularly be opposed to a slow death for men such as the one the honored Songbird told us of earlier, who repented of his crime and voluntarily handed himself over to face justice."

Just Valia, Victoria, Alicia, Laia, Jilia if they can nail her on anything, and Rui d'Argent. A very restrained list, really.

Lions? Really?

Regular lions or dire lions? Why lions and not anything else, is it because they're Iomedan now? He's pretty sure that's not how it works...

...The respectable people in the room do not seem to approve of the lions, even though it's a perfectly reasonable ordeal as ordeals go. Oh well. He'll vote for lions but not speak in favor of it.

Lions are Iomedae's animal, so this is basically just a proposal to exempt Chosens of Iomedae from the law. Maybe Wain was secretly tortured to death, and the people proposing lions are upset about that?

Do people being eaten by Lions count as torture?  He’ll miss out on all the fun if he’s really strict about avoiding watching anything close to torture.  If the Lion punishment amendment loses they’ll have to figure out a non-torture way of doing fights with lions and then he can watch those without hurting his odds of avoiding Hell.  He gets in line, he can explain his idea for non-convict gladiator fights.

Alexandre isn't going to spend a Dimension Door on this, but he is, unfortunately for de Cerdenya, in line!

"LIONS!" he shouts, projecting his voice across the auditorium, before smirking behind his mask and then starting into his oration.

"Men of Cheliax," he says, "Delegate Guerrero is correct in every particular, and I swear he did not bribe me to say this. Gladiatorial games are practiced in Taldor, were practiced in Aroden's Cheliax, are practiced in Absalom, founded by Aroden, and provided for in its laws. Gladiatorial games are described in the Acts of Iomedae; she considers them a waste of money, because she considers practically everything but big armies and bread for the poor to be wastes of money, but this did not stop her from participating in Oppara. Since she was not merely Good but boring it was against summoned outsiders, but we aren't paladins, are we? - No harm intended to those of us who are, Lord Marshal -" he taps his mask "- but a man who's fed to lions is dead and damned and a man who's hanged is dead and damned, and if the lions take longer that's time he isn't burning in Hell. It's an act of charity, really," he adds smugly.

"Now, His Excellency de Cerdanya is probably damned for proposing this, but that's because he's proposing there should be circumstances when we give souls to Asmodeus, from whose rule we were only just freed, when we have a Final Blade to use. If we want people to suffer horribly we can instead reanimate them as undead, maledict them to the Abyss or feed their souls to summoned daemons, but no, no, His Excellency de Cerdanya wants the followers of Asmodeus burned at the stake and so makes a farce of the entire war we're fighting. But if we're going to have a farce, let's have a fun farce. Let's feed them to lions! Martin Guerrero looks at this and says - let's make the people of Westcrown happy! I'm with him. If we're going to kill a man in agony because it will make us feel better, let's make us feel better and the same for the lions! It'll entertain an arena of people, teach everyone not to do stupid shit that gets you fed to lions, raise tax receipts, and provide wizards employments as lion-summoners at a time of their deepest financial dissatisfaction.

"So I am for the Lions Amendment. But first I want to add another one: That no person with any chance whatsoever of being Lawful Evil ever be executed for any crime whatsoever by any means whatsoever other than the Final Blade in any city which has one, except by direct order of the Queen. That's my amendment."

You know, he's not that bad, really.

She is actually in favor of lions.  She’d give herself decent odds against a lion even without her holy symbol.  It’d be enough of a challenge to help her level, especially if it’s several lions, which actually makes it more enticing.  She’ll get up to speak in favor of an amendment mandating clerics of virtuous Gods be guaranteed their holy symbol if sentenced to fight lions. She can appeal to the crowds’ desire for an interesting fight which cleric spells can help make happen.

As for delegate Ibarra’s amendment… it’s sensible enough, no point getting damned because she voted for a fun option. 

Technically, this makes people like Valia Wain just about the only criminals they're allowed to throw to the lions in Westcrown, but maybe that's... fair...?

Well, of course Delegate Ibarra supports the lions amendment, he's a powerful wizard, he could just kill all the lions with magic. It would admittedly make her feel better to watch him be torn apart by lions but only if the lions won.

That's... not as terrible as it could be.

Awww, that's no fun, you can never be sure whether someone isn't Lawful so if that proposal passed almost no one could be thrown to the lions. Get better material, funny mask man.

No, seriously, why are open cultists of Norgorber allowed at the convention? Maybe once they've worked out an acceptable form of laws against private worship of Evil powers they can have him arrested on those grounds, but for all he knows the Galtan archmage will decide that's unacceptable.

"Honored delegate, I would not wish to see any man damned if it can be avoided. With that being said, our Queen is far more familiar than I with the effects of the Final Blade in practice, and even she has chosen not to make it mandatory as a form of execution, but merely to extend the offer of the Final Blade to convicts, where practical. This law does not forbid the use of the Final Blade, which is, of course, a form of beheading, and any subsequent decrees may certainly clarify whether the use of the Final Blade shall be mandatory, permissible, or forbidden."

No one has actually seconded the amendment yet, which he's pretty sure means he doesn't have to call a vote on it.

No she thinks it's a good move - sow confusion, cripple the bill -

"I second the amendment! Send no one to damnation!"

No one’s seconded it… and denying Asmodeus souls is probably Good.

Oh wait he was too slow.

"Very well. As it was proposed second, we shall vote after the gladiatorial amendment on the amendment to require all criminals sentenced to execution in a city with a Final Blade to be executed by Final Blade, if they cannot be unambiguously proven not to be Lawful Evil, save by order of the Queen."

That seems really bad? Like, sure, it's good to stop Asmodeus from getting more devils, but even setting aside the people who deserve to suffer, if someone does a crime that's not Evil, and they know they're, say, Chaotic Neutral, this would force them to be executed by Final Blade. She'd be fine, she's a priestess, but lots of people aren't.

All right, how does the balance of power seem...

Your external conscience thinks you should go say something.

Political credibility is valuable and hard to get more of.

And yet I bet you're going to go say something!

This is a popular law! Especially with lions attached!

Fine, fine. Joan-Pau gets in line.

Admittedly, it is completely random happenstance that she knows she's not lawful evil, and if she were lawful evil and happened to actually live in Westcrown it might be sort of comforting to know that the state couldn't deny her the blade, but -

Whatever. Most people don't live in Westcrown.

"Torturous executions," Xavier says, "are indeed practiced by the laws of nearly every country. It is a sensible, moderate bill, that His Excellency de Cerdanya has proposed, to limit them to only the most egregious crimes, and I fear that, should it fail, it might be replaced by one which reinstates more tortures."

"And yet I am still opposed. I am opposed because Her Majesty has placed us on the path of Aroden, the path to greatness, and that path I will walk so long as I have feet. Before us is a chance to forbid torture in all cases and to rule without any punishments beyond those strictly necessary for the maintenance of the peace, and whether it succeeds or fails, the path our ancestors walked that let them reach Axis was to look at Heaven and touch its very doorstep and then say that is not enough and reach beyond it! It was not to settle for what their own fathers did, or their own grandfathers! It was to touch the sky! His Excellency de Cerdanya said that the Third proves it is useless, but the truth is that, as Delegate Tallandria has said, every great city riots, save only for the great city of the greatest Arodenite of all, Iomedae, who saw what Aroden did and said it was not enough for her. Only Vellumis does not riot - and Vellumis is the port of Lastwall, and Lastwall has banned torturous executions. To accept His Excellency de Cerdanya's proposal is to reach for the past, as Taldor reaches for the past, and say that what we are and what we can be is Taldor, living in an echo of greatness. I say that the best days of our nation are yet to come! The Age of Glory is ours to forge! And in the name of the Age of Glory, let the ban on torture stand!"

She'll cheer for that.

He has already explained why he thinks this view of Arodenite excellence is mistaken and he doesn't especially expect it to be rhetorically effective to repeat the same explanation, here. He gives the archduke a respectful nod that nonetheless clearly conveys his disagreement.

Polite nod back.

Joan-Pau will see Victoria in line next to him and give her a polite nod. "Here to speak for the Rights Committee?" That won't go well, if she is.

Tiny headshake. "I — well, I got in line to talk about how the Lastwall punishments are missing a lot of important things — so is this law, but at least it's missing fewer — except now I also need to figure out how to explain that the lions thing would just let powerful adventurers get away with hurting people as much as they want, and how people shouldn't be forced to take the Final Blade even if they can't prove they won't go to Hell. ...I should've brought some paper up here with me, I've been writing it in my head but I'm worried I'll forget something important."

"Ah," he says. "Well, I think you're wrong about the lions - the sentence is to the gladiatorial games, not to participation in a single game - but I do recognize your point, though I am personally opposed to torture, even to the worst villain." She's on the other side, and she's probably the most hated person at the convention, and that is a great boon for the Forces of Good! Even Archduchess Banilius has fewer people who will vote against everything she does out of spite than Delegate Ferrer!

Stop getting cocky just because something totally unexpected is about to happen that might be good for your cause.

Never.

"...I mean, I think some people deserve to be tortured, but the Lastwall rules don't even just ban torture, they ban loads of normal punishments that aren't torture at all — or, I guess they might only ban things that Lastwall people think are torture, except when they tried to explain it it didn't really seem like they had a... way to decide what counted and what doesn't that makes sense to anyone but them?"

"If Lastwall wants to do something, they always pick the suffering-minimizing way to do it. Do you think it's more complicated than that?"

"—sorry, do you mean, do I think what Lastwall is doing is more complicated than that, or do you mean, do I think what people should do is more complicated than that — I mean, it's yes either way, but—"

"Do you think what Lastwall is doing; I understand that not everyone is opposed to all suffering."

"—yes! Like, Lastwall has whipping, which, I mean, it's a little-kid punishment but it still hurts — I was confused, when the paladin was trying to explain why that's allowed if they don't want to hurt people, although he explained that part — but apparently they don't have prison. Which, I mean, being in prison is — upsetting — but it doesn't hurt you, not really, as long as they feed you and don't hurt you in other ways—"

She would probably rather have been whipped than have spent a night thinking she and her friends were going to be tortured to death but it seems kind of pathetic to still be upset about that when they didn't even hurt her.

"Lastwall interns people briefly, but it doesn't have the money to hold them for a long time as a criminal sentence, outside of extraordinary occasions. Feeding and providing security for jails is an expense, and they want to save money so they can use it to fight Asmodeus and stop demons from breaking out of the Worldwound and killing everyone."

"That explains why they wouldn't do it very much but that doesn't explain why they'd say it's just not allowed at all. ...And I'm still confused about how they decide which kinds of whipping are allowed but I don't know if I can explain it well."

"I am not a great noble, nor have I ever been to Lastwall, so perhaps I cannot speak on the matters of grand policy as an expert. But I am a citizen of Cheliax, and I want to live in a nation that upholds the rule of law, and because of that I support this bill. I want a country where I know that we have laws that will dissuade criminals, and I do not have to worry that they will act without restraint once they have nothing left to fear. And this law will do that - while I have heard many people say the measures aren't needed, I have not heard say that they will not work, because these are time-tested rules already in effect everywhere in the inner sea. It does so with a list short enough that everyone knows what to expect, in one law across all of Cheliax, and if as our country moves away from the example of Asmodeus the harshest punishments are no longer needed it does not require us to issue them."

He thinks that was a pretty good spin on it, enough to make all the same points while showing he understood the message.

"Thank you, honored delegate, I quite agree."

The next person in line is Ferrer. Jonatan has read the Rights Committee transcripts and fully expects Ferrer to argue for torturous executions in the most off-putting way possible.

"At this time, I call for a vote for cloture."

This is unfair and unjust!

Yeah! She wanted to talk!

He shakes his head sadly and sternly.

Hey, the count with the great faces has had some pretty good speeches, he wants to hear what he has to say!

The convention doesn't care! The convention wants to GO HOME! It's closer than usual, but the vote for cloture passes.

"The first proposal we are voting on is the proposal to amend this law to permit gladiatorial combat as an approved form of punishment."

It failing probably makes the bill more likely to fail. Against.

In favor, obviously.

In favor! He doesn't care what his buyers want, he wants gladiator games.

In favor, obviously.

LIONS!

Oh this is the one to put the games back! In favor!

Send an evil wizard to the gladiator games, and they might escape, or be released after honing their skills. Against.

She'd actually be pretty good at fighting lions, she could win fights in the arena until she got strong enough to escape... that's not really a great way to make decisions about laws, and she doesn't want other people to get torn apart by lions either. Against.

Jonatan would really prefer the original version of the law, but some of the commoners are threatening to vote down the part that matters if it doesn't legalize the gladiatorial games, and Montcada isn't wrong that the magistrates can simply never sentence anyone to them. 

In favor, reluctantly.

It wasn't in the original proposal for a reason, but if this is what they need to do to keep the Archduchess' lunacy from winning then so be it. In favor.

It is a rule of the Order of the Pyre to never kill someone via an elaborate and inescapable trap when you could instead decapitate them, burn both head and body at the stake, and pour the resulting ashes into a river. Against.

Against! Murderers and rapists shouldn't get to go free just because they're strong enough to kill a lion!

In favor. It's more likely to succeed, and a few circuses will help keep the rabble content.

In favor! Let the games begin!

For lions, obviously, it's good fun.

This is barbaric savagery. No.

The paladin said torture was Evil, but he didn't say anything about throwing people to the lions. There were lots of people shouting for lions, so probably that's the right answer? In favor.

LIONS LIONS LIONS

He's a loyal Queen's man, and if the Queen's archdukes say it's Evil that's good enough for him. No.

In favor.

For lions! And if they can get the lions proposal past there's a couple of other things he'd like to legalize too.

Sure, why not, it'll keep them busy so they don't invade forests or things. In favor.

And where will the wild beasts come from? Men like him will pull them out of the forests, and sell them to the cities. In favor!

In favor! The people demand lions!

(and the owner of the best fighting pit in Ostenso profits thereby)

Maybe if this part passes they can say that breaking cattle-rustlers' legs and leaving them for the wolves is a type of gladiatorial game. For.

Oh, Cheliax. Against.

On the one hand, this is a disgusting mockery of the very idea of justice. On the other, it's taxable income.

Fine. Against.

In favor.

In favor.

Against. 

In favor. Even if his wizard was making dismayed faces the whole time. 

Does fighting lions make people more or less likely to repent? ...Probably more? Getting torn apart by lions is slower than beheading, and if you think about it it's sort of like being in the Abyss. In favor.

LIONS LIONS LIONS 

Against.

He has no idea if he's supposed to be for or against this amendment... he can't abstain, though, it's better to have a wrong answer he can justify and apologize for his mistake on than to be blatantly helpless without a script. Cerdanya seemed annoyed by the amendment, and he's His Grace's ally so probably they agree... and the reason he'll give if it comes up is that lion deaths are unpredictable and might be much more or less torturous than it's supposed to be, that makes sense. Against the amendment.

Fed to lions is the kind of angry death that leaves ghosts. But at least it’s not sacrilege like the final blade. Abstain?

Who the fuck has time to go to the city to watch some guy get eaten by lions? Some people have jobs. Against.

Sure, in favor. Make a good bill even better, and make sure the radicals don't have a prayer of victory; what's not to like?

Oh, the southerners think they’re so much better, with their fancy arenas and lions. Can’t even do bear pit right. Against.

The commons are deluded about a lot of things, possibly including whether feeding people to lions is evil. And it's not like he's particularly in favor of watching people be eaten by lions; he always preferred straightforward quick executions, and got away with it because guuh uuurgh he's just a stupid barbarian, obviously he's got terrible taste - 

...But if you think about it, it'd kind of be an asshole Asmodean move to slam the door shut behind him. For.

LIONS LIONS LIONS

Watching people get eaten by lions is good fun, though hopefully they include some bears and stuff too. It's great how the convention pays well enough he'll be able to go to all the exciting games.

No! If you're going to do executions as entertainment you have to ALSO have it scripted and lovely and healing! Lions cannot follow a script at all!

It's evil. Therefore he's opposed, because it's evil.

This is why republicanism is a terrible idea! Against!

Wow, everyone is really excited about lions. Jofre's watched a guy get eaten by sharks but it was sort of hard to see since it was... in the water... maybe it's actually great fun to watch if it's lions. He won't begrudge the pro-lions folks, he supposes, he's been a criminal most of his life and it hasn't escaped him that someone could conceivably make Gozreh illegal again, but everybody's gotta go and lions sound less bad than burning.

Gladiator games are almost as stupid as the theater, but stupidity for poor people instead of for rich ones. Honestly, all of the proposed laws on punishment seem kind of weak? The most important thing by far is which things are death penalty offenses, which none of the proposals address. But as long as you don't maledict someone it's, what, a couple days of suffering at most? How it happens seems much less important than whether it happens.

But everyone willing to work with her deeply wants things to be quick and painless, so fiiiine, against.

Man, he could really go either way on this one. ...Abstain.

Kicharchu does not want lions to eat people. Those people are perfectly good eating and he doesn't see why the lions should have any. Against.

Sigh. Against.

Gladiator games are very stupid, and she can't bring herself to vote for them. But the amendment also makes it more likely that they'll get some real law and order in this country, if it helps pass the main one, so she can't vote against either. Abstain.

For! Why ever shouldn't they have proper arena games? Absalom will always have the best in the world, but they can have a good try here.

Against. The incentives are all wrong; if you need to keep lions a particular amount of hungry and sell tickets to people who expect blood, then you have every reason to oppose a finding that overturns a conviction, or to pressure law enforcement and the judiciary to produce more condemned.

Well, at least this one isn't complicated.

LIONS!

In favor, he supposes. Republicanism.

Blai considered going up to say something about torture in case it would have mattered but all the things he could have said got into a free-for-all brawl in his head and none of them were left standing by the time he would have had to decide. If there were some way to know in advance what was going to come up he could compose something in advance and then if necessary ask a paladin to walk him up with their aura on so he could execute on the preplanned speech, but it keeps being a surprise.

He's against lions though.

Lions!

Lions!

Juan is almost certainly voting for lions, but that's not actually a reason to vote against!

If they can be persuaded to use local animals for gladiatorial games, then the very stupid populace could be educated about the dangerous beasts in the wild that wish to eat them. Importing lions in particular is pure stupidity, but the idea itself is the sort of thing that makes civilization look better upon druids. Or at least respect that the woods hold beasts that can, and will, eat them alive if they piss it off too much. For.

(But seriously, go with wolves instead.)

Is there anywhere that doesn't do this? In Favor.

If we aren't writing a constitution at least we can have people eaten by lions.

Nuria has been paying attention to the Condesa's face, and as she votes, (in favor) it's clear she's going to have to find out how much lions cost, as soon as possible. 

Some people just really don’t see the appeal of sitting in a hot, crowded arena and watching people getting eaten by lions. 

“Against”

Passes, 305-161, with significantly fewer abstentions than the last vote.

Did it occur at any point to anyone planning the convention that a body of largely Evil people, many of whom are fundamentally confused about the nature of Goodness, was likely to write Evil laws?

Feliu said the point of having nobles is to fight monsters. Did all the Evil nobles vote for that just so that they could get out of being punished by killing the lions?

CLAP CLAP CLAP

Oh good, it sounds like she chose correctly.

If she was upset about people being completely needlessly fed to wild beasts for the entertainment of the masses she'd find Republicanism pretty terrible, but she doesn't care so she finds it great fun.

This is embarrassing. Maybe there's hope of pointing out to Cerdanya later that whether or not the bill he intended was incredibly Evil, the bill that actually passed definitely was and the implementation will be moreso and perhaps that should be a lesson for future Urban Order proposals.

...At least they don't have to actually sentence anyone to the gladiatorial games.

"The amendment passes. 

Next, we are voting on Delegate Ibarra's proposed amendment to require all criminals who are sentenced to any form of execution to be executed by Final Blade if there is one in the city where they are sentenced, unless it can be incontrovertibly proven that they could not possibly be Lawful Evil or the Queen orders otherwise."

Against!

For!  Some nice easy Goodness he can show off to the judge.

Against!

Against! That one guy did a GREAT job repenting as far as she knows, and if he did as far as he knows too he deserves the Judge's mercy!

Jaume would rather like to be able to prove that he's not Lawful Evil any more one of these days but most people are not going to be able to do that. Against.

The Final Blade is all well and good when someone wants it but if they don't that's what Nirvana lawyers are for. Sometimes they probably get somebody, and the proportion of people who can be thus got will hopefully go up over time whereas the proportion of people who can prove anything about their alignment won't really.

Jofre's kind of dubious about Final Blades in the first place, against.

It's not that Jonatan isn't sympathetic to the perspective that many criminals are too stupid to decide for themselves whether to accept the Final Blade, but this amendment would completely undermine the rest of the law. Against.

Does opposing Pharasma’s rules count as unlawful?  If she loses her law she loses her cleric powers if she hasn’t made neutral before that.  She isn’t sure…

Abstain.

If you pass this rule you can't make criminals fight lions! Against!

How many people is she willing to deny paradise to save some from Hell? Does the Church have a formal answer to that question? ...she suspects if they do she'll disagree with it, actually -

If you told her, when she went to her death, that it was a coin flip between Axis and Hell, she'd take that coin flip over the Final Blade.

Against.

Oh no, she doesn't have any idea how she's supposed to feel about Final Blades. The man who proposed this was one of the people that the priestess of Iomedae denounced, so maybe she's supposed to be against it? Except it turned out that the priestess of Iomedae wasn't supposed to say that at all. Abstain.

Weren’t they letting people pick before?  She can’t prove she isn’t lawful evil but she thinks she’s might be clear and might want to risk the Judge.

Against.

Against. Obviously.

If somebody wants to put off the Creator getting around to them for a few hundred years till all the Final Blades explode or get turned inside-out or are kidnapped by aeons or whatever, that's not high on Ester's priority list, but if somebody stands willing to get where they're going she cannot possibly countenance stopping them!

Final Blading people who didn't ask for it is sure a way to make it so nobody with reason to have you on their shit list is ever given further opportunity to think about that. Fucker. Against.

Are people not even getting a chance to speak on this one? ...she's going to have to go make an annoying procedural point afterwards, isn't she, but this isn't going to pass - is it - should she jump the line, is that even allowed -

He almost votes against simply because it was Ibarra who proposed it, and a continuing sense of dismay on how the vote on the lions amendment went, but he should do his duty and actually consider it. It is flawed in that someone known to Evil but not Lawful will still be sent to a terrible afterlife, but he doesn't expect there to be that many denied Elysium due to it. The Blade is also remarkably efficient; even if they have to execute a hundred people in a day, it could stand up to it, and so it won't cause logistical problems.

Will it make the bill more or less likely to pass? This seems unlikely to matter. He probably couldn't sink it now even if he wanted to, now that the people know that the people want lions.

It offends the Judge. But it is not her that he is trying to emulate.

Bleh. In favor.

Fuck no!

Against. Most people are Evil but that's no reason to require the Final Blade.

He is strong enough to detect. It seems like that shouldn't matter, on a question of policy, but somehow it's the main thing on his mind, that there's a way to not reach Hell.

It's contemptible how long it takes him to focus. Against.

Some people deserve worse than the Final Blade, and that would be enough on its own, but that's not actually the biggest thing she's thinking about right now.

She spent — hours, probably, maybe a day, she's still not entirely sure — thinking she was going to be tortured to death. And it was awful, not in a way that matters but still in a way that made her pretty miserable — and there was no point where she thought they might force her to take a Final Blade. It would have sucked a lot to be tortured to death, but eventually it would have been over, and she would have been off to — well, off to the Maelstrom, not Elysium like she thought, but she'd be fine in the Maelstrom. 

If she'd thought they were going to trap her in a Final Blade forever — she's not sure what she'd have done. Tried to kill herself, maybe, only it would've been pretty hard to pull it off.

And she'd be fine, actually, under this proposal. Calistrian priestesses can't be Lawful Evil. But probably somewhere there's a girl who was never picked by a god, who didn't know she could write to the paladins and explain what happened, and she shouldn't be forced to take a Final Blade just because she can't prove she's not Lawful.

Against.

Idiotic implementation, but better than letting the judges picked based on the demand for lion meals. For.

Criminals have a harder time escaping the Blade than the afterlives. In favor.

The vast majority of people who commit capital crimes are Evil. It's true in Cheliax, it's true in Taldor, as far as he knows it's even true in Lastwall. Most of them aren't Lawful Evil, but the Abyss is still a place of enormous suffering, even if it's less organized about it. Many of those will choose the Final Blade anyway, but certainly not all of them. 

The proposal would also, unambiguously, deny some people paradise. He's heard it said that Galt was hoping to extract everyone from the Final Blades someday, but that's a lot to count on.

Even accounting for that, he's confident that a significant majority of people who refuse the Final Blade are going to an Evil afterlife.

(It still feels sort of awful to actually vote for it.)

In favor.

(And he can still Detect Evil, so that was at least not unambiguously the wrong decision, but that really tells him a lot less than one might hope.)

Some fear hell more than they desire heaven. Or wherever Nethys’s people go when they die. He still isn’t actually clear on where that is. 

”For”

Against. You only have, like, one of those things? For the entire country? And the Final Blade as an invention hasn't even been around for a century? It is not, historically speaking, very tested, especially not on an elf's timeline. And they want to put a large number of their populace into this badly tested soul repository? Yeah, no. That's screaming for a necromancer to come do horrific crimes against life itself with it as a dark power source or some shit. Voshrelka might not like Pharasma or her dubious Judgement, but she likes it better than 'This thing we just made should have all souls stuffed inside it, there's no way that'll explode in two centuries.' Humans. Eugh. Idiots.

Obviously. For.

For. They'll get the innocent out eventually, and in the mean time it buys souls time out of Hell.

For!

A very bad implementation of a good law, but the legal repeat law might block better ones, later. Is that what the fool who proposed it wanted? He's not sure, but he'll be for it anyway.

Hmm. It weakens the laws, but chaotic evil people are more of a problem than lawful evil ones, so does it weaken them enough to matter?

No. Pharasma says way too many people are lawful, and the law applies to anyone who might be evil so it doesn't even require that low of a standard. Against.

Desnia had thought about coming up and saying things about torture, about doing things under the threat of torture. 

Mostly that - she'd known that she would have been tortured, if caught, but that she just hadn't - really thought about it? Especially not the possibility of Malediction, but even the rest of it. 

It wasn't because she thought she could get away without being caught for her whole life - she understood that she was probably going to die doing what she was doing. She understood that many of the ways that she might be caught would mean that she would be alive and in the hands of people who tried to mandate the observation of their ability to be creative with torture. 

She had dithered over whether to do this anonymously or not - she didn't want to talk about being tortured wearing her own face to the entire convention, but the specifics probably made her more sympathetic.

Then the letters to (from?) the Chosen threw her off and by the time she had re-composed herself enough to talk, it was time to vote. 

- The way that torture had made her worse at doing things, even things that it didn't make sense for it to make her worse at, could have been an argument but it probably wouldn't have worked at all, they mostly wanted to torture the people they planned to kill afterwords. What it did to still being alive afterwards wasn't really relevant here. 

... 

The final blade argument was - more confusing? And there wasn't enough said about it for her to make up her mind based on that. If it was people who were definitely Lawful Evil she'd vote for that, but proving otherwise would be hard for most people that weren't her. 

Maybe if it was just for people strong enough to detect Lawful Evil? Or people who had that Pharasman afterlife checking spell cast on them? She would have proposed that, if there had been more discussion. And if she could have managed to make herself to be able to do things like someone who wasn't pathetic. 

... 

Against lions, against final blade requirements, against torture. 

She had abstained on public versus private executions. She probably would have voted for public if it weren't for who was arguing each side, on the grounds that knowing what had actually happened (or at least making people doing the lying put in more work) was good.

Against. Most people are too weak to have any aura.

For. She hates that he's the one who proposed it but it might be good on its own merits and definitely seems more likely to get them to kill the rest of the bill.

Against, obviously, people need to repent of their evil instead of encouraging it.

She'll think about it, and decide that it's probably worth denying some people to Axis and even fewer to Heaven or Nirvana to deny more to Hell. In favor."

If it was a kinder slate of punishments he'd be against. A harsher slate, in favor. As it is... he's leaning in favor but no, abstain.

In favor.

In favor. If you're against Hell, and they're supposed to be, now, this is worth a very great price.

He does not care.

Against. This is neither justice nor mercy, but a false hope that delays an inevitable fate.

What they need is to buy time. In favor.