"I did execute people. In Lastwall that's the maximum you get for anything up to and including calling demons down on your neighbors. I didn't have the equipment for long-drop hanging so I was beheading them - at one point I requisitioned a wand of Sleep but couldn't make it work for me, I seem not to be the right kind of sorcerer or something, so I gave it to someone else and did without. I castrated people, when they lived far enough away from the nearest site routinely visited by Archmage Naima that I could expect it to stick for a long while - it's been shown in other places that that works shockingly well even on preventing even things you'd think weren't related, at least if the general tenor of the criminality is impulse and not - philosophical in nature, though mostly I assigned it for things that did seem related. But, yes, I also whipped and fined people, and possibly those they'd offended were not satisfied, and would have been satisfied if I'd - let's see, what did they tend to call for when they were moved to call for things - staked them out on an anthill for two days. Paladins can't do that.

"Do you know what makes paladins fall?"

"...Raising people as skeletons to make them work the mines? And probably other things but that's the one that's specifically come up."

"So, we have to be Lawful Good. But the Good part is much stricter than the Law part. Law is in a lot of ways a fragile alignment, but a little lawlessness that didn't happen to directly touch on any formal vows I've taken wouldn't make the Goddess renounce me right away if I remained able to read Lawful throughout. And many, many Good people occasionally do something Evil. Not very evil, I'm not saying most Good people have a rape or a murder in their history, but at all Evil.

"Paladins can't.

"Not once.

"Which is even more difficult than it sounds, because if you're hewing to that standard, and getting information that instantaneous about what is and isn't Evil, it turns out that a lot of things can be Evil or non-Evil depending on how you are thinking about them when you do them. I can't be angry at someone when I behead him. I can't be thinking about how repellent somebody is when I'm castrating him. It might pass muster the first twenty times, if I were careless about it and let bits of those feelings feature in my motives at the moment the sword falls, but eventually, if I'm not perfect about it, I will accidentally hurt someone in an Evil way, and fall, and need to call off my rounds and go do a lot of prayer and reflection and Atonement - if having me back in the ranks is justified as an expense at all. That's why we had to take so many breaks from assizes, it's a lot better to do it and re-commit ourselves to our paths before you need the spell with the expensive incense."

That is a very confusing group of sentences!! It kind of sounds like she's saying that... Pharasma counts people as Evil for doing the right thing if they're angry?... except that can't be right, that's just saying that Good and Evil don't mean anything. It matters how you're thinking about it, sure, but in the sense that it'd be Evil for someone to kill Delegate Ibarra because they're mad that he doesn't like Asmodeus enough, not in the sense that it's Evil to be angry at people for doing awful things. Which is... not exactly Good, being angry doesn't do anything by itself, but correct. People should be angry at people for doing awful things.

Maybe she's saying that Iomedae doesn't want people to be angry? Except she picked Valia, not as a paladin but as a regular priest, she could just pick only regular priests instead of weird priests with extra rules.

If Delegate Saiville isn't allowed to be angry at people who actually deserve it maybe that's why he kept getting annoyed with her for disagreeing with him, he needed somewhere for the anger to go and — that's a stupid and pathetic thing to care about, and not even relevant.

Maybe she's saying that if you're really angry you might end up hurting people more than they deserve, and that counts as a little Evil, and then you get kicked out of being a paladin? That would make sense, except it doesn't quite line up with the words she said, but maybe she just explained it badly? (Victòria thinks this sounds like kind of a dumb problem to have, but maybe paladins have a harder time than her with not accidentally hurting people too much or something.)

"...and so if you aren't sure how much is the right amount to hurt someone, you try to go for the smaller amount, because it's a lot harder to Fall by hurting someone less than you should have?"

"That is... basically true but in a way where I think you missed my point."

"I have more than one guess for your point but most of them don't make sense."

"Well, maybe one of them is close in a way I can clear up."

"That Pharasma randomly counts people as Evil for doing the right thing if they feel angry while they're doing it, except that's just saying that Good and Evil don't really mean anything. That Iomedae really doesn't want people to be angry, for some reason, except she picked Valia as a normal priest and Valia's angry sometimes. That people who are angry might be more likely to hurt other people more than the right amount."

"Pharasma... does that but it's not random. It's... related to how you said that if someone hurt a guilty person, but it was at random, like if a bandit accosted them because they were convenient and it had nothing to do with their crimes, then that wouldn't be satisfactory. That's an extreme example of the same thing. Iomedae does not specifically discourage anger and it is not forbidden to experience it and there are many contexts in which it's quite safe; assizes are bad for paladins in part because dispensing justice isn't one of those safe contexts. People who are angry are more likely to hurt other people more than they ought to, but if I've already decided to behead someone that's not really a fashion in which I'd expect to have a problem so it's not related to the train of thought I was describing."

"That's not the same thing!! It's Evil to be a bandit, it's not Evil to feel angry at someone. Or if it is then that's also saying Good and Evil don't mean anything."

"It's not Evil to feel angry. It's often Evil to hurt people because you are angry."

"...I think usually people do things for multiple reasons. I guess if someone were hurting someone... only because they were angry... and not for any other reasons... that would probably be bad?" As opposed to, for instance, because they're avenging actual wrongs that person did.

"Only because they were angry and not for any other reasons is definitely an Evil act, and I don't know the exact mixes that do and do not count. It's just something I have to be careful of because I can't afford even one Evil act so I need to make sure that whatever plan I'm using won't let one slip over hundreds or thousands of repetitions."

...Victòria is going to go ahead and assume that there's something more complicated than just "occasionally Pharasma randomly decides people are Evil for being angry when they hurt someone" that Delegate Jornet just doesn't know about. 

"...I'm assuming this isn't why you said that but I think I understand now why you want to stop using paladins as judges. And it seems like a good idea now when it didn't really before."

"Oh?"

"...Well, if all the judges might accidentally stop being able to be judges just by thinking about something wrong once that definitely seems bad. Also the thing you said earlier about not having enough punishments but that sounds easier to fix."

"We're not losing many, but it's - bad for us, and, yes, a fall does interrupt a circuit as well as everything else about a paladin's life."

Nod. "Uh, do you remember where we were?"

"I brought up how paladins fall because we were talking about how various punishments communicate about how seriously I'm taking a crime. I can't do something that's badly motivated and there are kinds of punishments that cannot be well-motivated. Like -

- I don't know how this example will land but you could imagine someone saying the punishment for some crime should be getting raped, I don't know if the Asmodeans had that on the books but it was evidently happening informally left and right -"

"That's definitely not okay!!!!"

"You're right, it isn't."

"During the punishments argument I was thinking — there could maybe be some punishments where it's like that, where it's wrong to do to anyone no matter what. But I think that's a different thing from — in any particular case, which punishments shouldn't be used because they'll hurt someone more than the right amount for that case — and the punishments that it applies to won't be quite the same. ...I don't know if I said that in a way that makes sense."

"I'm not confident I understood, I'm sorry."

"Okay. Uh, I can try again... so, earlier you were talking about how figuring out which punishments should be allowed is hard and complicated, but there's still right and wrong answers, but the answers are right or wrong for... reasons that might be different in different situations? Like, they might be different between Lastwall and Cheliax, even if you don't think they actually are different. And I think that's a different thing from... punishments that are just always wrong because they'd always be wrong to do to anyone no matter what, like rape or Malediction or things like that. And some punishments might fit one but not the other. Did that make more sense?"