She's been busy meeting people about her 'let's stop racing and also give the nobility and the Church control over what gets voted on' proposal, but it's getting too late for most respectable meetings. 

"Delegate Tallandria. How was the evening event?" She also had spies attending, of course, but they weren't invited upstairs.

Rocky and upsetting. "Productive, I think. The biggest single concern there was in fact unfair contracts, including unfair debt agreements, indenture, and serfdom. There was a particular idea floated that I did want to get your opinion on. Someone suggested that we could give the right to everyone - regardless of what contracts they are bound by - to serve some organized churches, or join an organized religious order, with the consent of that church or that order, effectively giving some subset of clerics the right to dissolve unfair contracts. We don't have agreed-on implementation details. Some people want a list of approved churches. I think possibly it would be better to have a list of approved orders, with charters approved by the crown and reapproved every few years, so there's a check on irresponsible use of the contract-breaking powers. Used judiciously, it could be a floor on how bad things can get, and direct large numbers of people towards religious service and useful work. But I don't know very much about religious orders."

"Huh. I do not know of orders having been employed in that fashion, unless you count places that take those who default on their debt and send them to the Worldwound and I don't think I'd really count that. ...historically most religious orders owned land, and had income from that land, as a nobleman does, but instead of passing the land down to their sons as a nobleman does it would be passed down within the order. There were orders for the care of orphans, and for the care of the blind, lame, or mad. There were orders that were perhaps best thought of as just a household, with the usual range of work except that the members were whoever took vows. Perhaps when we visit Lastwall you can talk to some people in the orders there. 

My concern about using non-martial orders as a - route for the desperate to escape - is that I think that they work because of the sincere devotion of the participants, their choice to make the service of a god the central matter of their life, and if they took too many people for other reasons it'd change their character and perhaps lose most of what makes them good. Of course there are always some people in an order who did not want it and were forced to it by their families, but - ordinarily I think it is not the majority, and if it's gradual there is the opportunity to shape them to their life over time. 

Martial orders might work better for this, because they can make more use of men with no particular desire to be there, but for that there's just the Reclamation, which is neither trying to grow its numbers nor suited to power over Chelish people, and the Hellknights, who - I'm not sure how thoroughly they've reformed. I suppose you could also say that joining the army's a route out of any indenture, though I'd want to ask the Archduke d'Sirmium what he thought of that."

"I think we might want some new hellknight orders, but not for this. For this we'd want many groups to be doing work that lots of people can do - reasonably strict rules, but little skill. The first person to bring it up was just thinking about people who could help out around temples, and do work that the priests are too busy to, but I think we can do more than that. The church best-suited to set up orders of last resort is probably Erastil's, if we allow farming communities run by rules agreeable to his priests. And then it's very easy, right, for any group that can secure land; the order is the people working the land, not just a group supported by collecting rent from it. The escaping serfs will go on doing the farm labor they're used to, but under the authority of the Erastilians, instead of a landowner who inherited them under hell. It wouldn't be a group of impressive elites, like the paladins or the hellknights, but it could absorb a large number of people and catechize them towards doing reasonable things with their lives. 

I had also been thinking about other escape routes - maybe the army, maybe crown labor camps, if we can bound them not to include mining - but a model where we have orders of last resort seems like it might make the people who go to them actively better, and maybe still prepare them to do something else afterward, if we don't require lifelong vows."

" - you know, actually," she says, now betraying some excitement, "You could combine this with the need to do something with the overwhelming number of orphans, and have the Erastilian orders both work land and separately be of use to the state by requiring their members to each adopt an orphan. That's the traditional remit of a religious order, then, but under conditions that the sower on the family committee would probably accept, since the children are being adopted into new families - sort of - and not being kept in underfunded orphanages. I'm not saying it would definitely go amazingly, but people in bad contracts aren't really especially selected for being bad parents, and the idea of it being an order is that they have oversight, and can be taught to do it well. Obviously we would need to convince some Erastilians to found orders like that, but - I think it could be done."

“There are plenty of lords we haven’t replaced only because there is no one to replace them with, and plenty of places without enough men to work the land you’ve got. If you find me an Erastilian who wants to do it I will probably give him the land on the spot. Your problem is men qualified to do this who want to do this; if you can find those we can find land for the orders. - I’d give you an orphanage order, if you want one, only you’d need a husband who can defend your person and the land.”

"I'd take a husband, if he were trustworthy and decent to people and didn't despise me, but I've generally assumed that the overlap between those things is zero," she says, shockingly evenly, because somehow this response materializes fully-formed in her brain and demands to be spoken before the rest of her brain can get around to asking why the hell you need a husband to run a religious order. Aren't there supposed to be religious orders specifically for unmarried women?? 

- also she doesn't have a deity. That seems like more of a sticking point. Although she supposes she's not entirely sure whether the proposal needs to ban secular orders or "religious orders" headed by non-priests, if everything is by crown approval anyway. Hm.

It would also work for Korva to pick up a deity but that seems much less actionable. "That really seems too pessimistic," she says. "If this were a course you seriously wished to pursue I'd ask Ardiaca, or the Archduke Requena, or the Archduchess, for an introduction to one of their men who meets that description and I'd expect they have several apiece. I don't, but that's because I've had to piece a staff together from scratch; they came in with one."

Now that she considers it she doesn't think what she said on no thought is false, but she has very high standards for demonstrating trustworthiness. "I'd consider it, though I think you will lose a lot of people at the step where they have to not despise me. And at this exact moment I don't think I should commit to doing anything in particular after the convention, I haven't really had enough time to think about it properly. I can find you an Erastilian who'll do it, though. Uh, run an order, not marry me."

"If you find me an Erastilian who wants to run an orphanage order I can give them land to do it on. They used to be in the mountains, at holy sites, and attract pilgrims, but I don't know if that part is viable right now."

That sounds not ideal as a site of agriculture or as a place for pilgrims to go to, and she doesn't know Erastil to have any holy sites, but she supposes she wouldn't.

"I have also been thinking about the scheduling committee. I think a lot of people are receptive to the idea that rushing bills to the floor without thinking them through and without preparing explanations beforehand is destructive. But I think many of them will be, and should be, concerned about a measure that allows the scheduling committee to block popular proposals from seeing the floor entirely. I'm wondering if it would destroy your intent for someone to propose an amendment that all proposals given to the scheduling committee must be posted publicly, with a paper that people can sign if they want to see the proposal come to the floor, and if the paper gets, I don't know, one hundred, maybe two hundred signatures, it's considered high-priority and must be scheduled for debate within the week. That maintains the committee's control of scheduling, and allows everyone time to prepare arguments against terrible laws, but prevents the scheduling committee from completely locking out proposals that have strong support."

"Do you have examples of proposals that you think ought to be brought to the floor but wouldn't be without this mechanism? All the ones I can imagine the committee refusing to bring to the floor would be so refused because they'll destroy the country, like exempting us from all taxes or cancelling all debt, or because they're for secret reasons a bad idea, like some things around Razmiran apparently would be."

"...no, not specifically, but that's because I don't know the committee members or any of their opinions on anything likely to be brought to the floor. It is nearly always a really, really bad idea to hand unlimited power to someone you do not know. It is one of the very worst mistakes that anyone can make, because it can't be undone. 

- I actually also wanted to ask you about the Iomedan church's stance on taxation, since - we were talking about that as an obvious example of something that people might destructively bring to the floor, but - I remember that Count Cansellarion initially supported the no-taxes proposal?"

"There are places where the nobility don't pay taxes and it doesn't destroy the country, but it would do so here and we told the Lord Marshal as much and he apologized. Lastwall has taxation, and most of the taxes fall on the wealthy landowners as is fitting and appropriate since they can pay the most.

What if a vote on the composition of the scheduling committee is automatically scheduled for each month and the committee cannot change the date of that vote, so if people are unsatisfied with the current composition it'll be changed?"

"...well, if the mechanism is the same it'll end the same way, right, and if the mechanism is a floor vote it seems like a lot of effort goes into trying to control scheduling committee composition, and the selling point that everyone slated to be on it is a reasonable person evaporates."

"Well, the idea is that we have done our absolutely best to stock it only with reasonable people, but that if we failed and they behave unreasonably we want to be able to recall and replace them. Or did I misunderstand your concern? I agree we do not want a scheduling committee that abuses its power, and we want a way to either override it or replace it if it does."

"My concern is that a scheduling committee which is intended to be used to block bad proposals will probably also be used to block proposals which fall short of the bar that they will destroy the country. If it turned out that a majority of the people who selected representatives were strongly opposed to - I don't know, women being allowed to use the courts, or banning certain contract terms, or a right not to be mindread, or something - then blocking proposals of that nature wouldn't be them abusing their power from the perspective of the people who put them there. It would be them using it as intended, even though these are topics which reasonable people might disagree on. I suppose it's better to have some built in way to replace them so that the scheduling committee itself can't pull an irrecoverable coup, but I don't really expect that.

Maybe they could override the signatures thing if they voted unanimously, or nearly unanimously, or something."

"What about - if two committees pass a bill, then they must schedule it for a floor debate no more than a week after the second committee vote. So Rights might in the worst case need to collaborate with Slavery on contract terms or serfdom, or with Family on women's rights and access to the courts."

Hm.

" - yeah, all right, that should make it hard to lock anything essential out of the floor entirely. How does the scheduling committee interact with things that don't go through committees, like - well, creating new committees is the obvious one. You don't want people creating lots of new ones as a power grab, but you don't want to lock people out of debating procedure or creating new committees, either. Do you petition the scheduling committee directly?"

"You can publish a proposal for a new committee at any time and the scheduling committee schedules debate over it. I guess we could let a committee second proposals for a new committee, if the scheduling committee is holding up a popular one."

"Yeah, okay, I'll speak in favor of that. I still have some general uncertainty about what the Church of Iomedae's priorities are, but - I suppose it's not worth taking up more of your time tonight if it's not going to be decisive."

"Well, separately I'm now considering it my job to make the Church's priorities clear to everybody and accomplish all of them, since the Lord Marshal is not natively trained for politics and I am. So I would be very interested in hearing all of your confusions about what the Church's priorities are."

"It's concerning to me that the Lord Marshal doesn't think that civil courts are necessary to hold people to marriage promises when there are civil penalties for having children outside marriage. I am not sure I would disagree with the viewpoint if I understood what it was, but I don't think I have enough information to know what the full viewpoint is, and in isolation it's just confusing. It's concerning to me that he suggested that a marriage in which one party later leaves is in some sense an obviously fake marriage, such that consulting a Sower could have prevented it, though again I don't think I understand what assumptions it's built on. 

It's concerning to me that Select Wain jumped fairly immediately to purging all evil people from all positions of power. Obviously I don't want a country in which powerful evil people have unchecked power, but Select Wain went so far as to suggest removing children from their parents based on alignment readings, and merely felt that it was not a good first priority with the power we had right now. It's not clear to me what the church thinks should be done with anyone who doesn't meet their moral standards, when they have enough manpower to enforce their ideal. Or - what exactly that ideal consists of, in the first place, besides avoiding taking evil actions."

"Wain did not in fact know anything about Iomedaenism and was as far as I can tell going entirely off what sounded good to her and met with approval in Pezzack, which I think like many fringes of Cheliax had a convenient-for-their-postwar-reckoning distinction between the locals and the men Egorian sent. In many places like that they have killed all the men Egorian sent and killed as collaborators their employees and mistresses and then decided to believe everyone else innocent and not Evil. In Pezzack I think that in fact a lot more people than that died, because they rebelled before the war, but - you can imagine, I hope, why it would be a useful and popular idea, in places far from Egorian, that the evil came from Egorian and was not homegrown, that the evil was just a matter of killing all of the extremely obvious evil people who had done an enormous number of atrocities to your friends and neighbors and who are greatly outnumbered by the ordinary people.

And if that was how it worked, if the only Evil people were the ones that Egorian sent out to its outlying provinces, then that they should all be removed from power and their children should be removed from their parents is a compassionate position by comparison to what I expect usually happened. 

That has fairly little to do with Iomedaenism, but it's how you ought to understand Wain and many of her countrymen."

"I had been under the impression that fighting evil was a fairly central Iomedan concern." This is presumably why Iomedae chose Valia even without her knowing anything about Iomedanism.

"When Iomedae lived she was a paladin of Aroden. What do you know about Aroden?"

"His symbol is the open eye. He was lawful neutral. Armasse was his major holiday. He created Absalom by raising it from the seafloor. He was the first ascended human deity, and the patron deity of Cheliax, before Asmodeus killed him about a hundred years ago. He was concerned with civilization and human achievement."

"Aroden was a man who became a god, and who believed that men ought to become gods. All of us, I think, ideally. As many of us as possible, definitely. He sponsored men to godhood, repeatedly; there are a dozen demigods who were once human men and women who he set on the road to godhood. Iomedae and Cayden and Norgorber, obviously, and Arazni, and Milani and Rixana and Dotara and Vadrus and Simaron and Doliu. He built the Starstone, of course. He was the god of the Empire. He was in favor of empires because he wanted to build Axis in this world, rather than tell everyone they have to wait for the next one. He wanted the world to be rich. He wanted every person to carry around pocket libraries and a thousand other things that I have witnessed and am not supposed to tell you about. 

Iomedae was raised in the empire, at its height, and thought it was making two important mistakes. The first is that it was spending too much of its might on stupid things that did not matter. The second is that it kept doing Evils that everybody said must be done, that civilization could not function without, and she suspected that many of them were not necessary. She fought in the Crusade against Tar-Baphon, she became powerful, and she started trying to build a civilization that did not spend its might on stupid things that did not matter and that did the evils which were necessary but not any of the evils which were not. Lastwall was her attempt at that. And then she became a god, the god of prioritization - doing important things that affect lots of people, choosing your battles based on how much you win if you win them - and the god of the thesis that you do not actually have to run a civilization on torment and cruelty, that Good is not weak and that a civilization which protects its people and deals rightly by them will be stronger than one that doesn't.

She is very opposed to Asmodeus. She intended that civilization would someday be strong enough to fight Hell for all its souls. She is very opposed to the Abyss and to Abaddon, for about the same reason. She is not particularly interested in fighting random doers of random evils, except insofar as this is a good way to make things better. In Menador the church seems to have just attempted reconciling with everybody, presumably because they thought that was an easier way to make things better."

It really seems like Cheliax was wealthier and had more libraries before the Iomedans took over - not a safe thought. Maybe those were the stupid things that did not matter - stop. It's not clear whether the church forgiving everything Narikopolus did should be alarming or heartening for her beliefs about what they'd like to do to her - no, probably they've forgiven him to exactly the extent that they've forgiven her, and they're just piloting him with much more precision. 

Focus. "Goddess of prioritization" is not a gloss of Iomedae she's ever heard before, but it kind of suggests that Select Wain was in fact operating on a pretty similar wavelength when she suggested beginning with the most powerful evils and then toppling more evils down the line, however far the line went, except that possibly they were supposed to start with an even larger evil and that was where she misstepped. Or maybe that's what fighting hell is, in places where Asmodeus doesn't have an organized church - finding the people who are dragging the most others down to hell with them, and either removing them or bending them towards absolute good, such that the souls in their power instead go to heaven. She can see why this would be a comforting thought to lots of people, even though - stop. She will try to find it comforting.

She should really think of a follow-up question, here. 

"What are her priorities in Cheliax, then?" There, that's probably a sincere-sounding way of asking what exactly the goddess of prioritization is trying to do.

"Holding the Worldwound. After that - the people of Cheliax are mostly damned, and we've got to keep them alive long enough they have a shot at making Axis. After that - the convention passing laws that make the country Good and prosperous and not inclined to invade its neighbors. I'm not sure how She'd want us to trade off between 'Good', 'prosperous', and 'not inclined to invade its neighbors', they're really all kind of very important. 'prosperous' has always spoken to me most, personally, and involves less conflict with people I want as my allies."

The idea that the Iomedans might care about prosperity on any level remotely comparable to the level that they care about good on is so mind-bogglingy distant from everything they've done that the only way she knows how to process it is as the sort of bald-faced lie that you are not supposed to try to reconcile with anything else. You're just supposed to accept it as a given, and understand that someday, when you're stronger and better and less pathetic, it will either make sense, or you will stop being required to believe it. It's so obviously false that a part of her is angry. 

By long force of habit, the spark immediately dies.

She supposes that this is technically a list of answers to which goods Iomedae cares most about, even if 'keep them alive long enough that they have a shot at making Axis' feels more like a frame around an empty space. At least Hell - no.

"I see. Then it sounds like they'll favor proposals that take strain off the crown's budget and free up more resources for the army, as long as the army is being used only in ways that are responsible. So the abandonment crisis is potentially of great interest to them for the same reasons it's potentially of great interest to the other people invested in the military, if there are any proposals that solve it by spending less money rather than more."

"I think the abandonment crisis is of great interest to them for many reasons, though I would not expect 'we could spend more on the army' to particularly loom large....hmmm. I guess we could free up our allies if we took over more forts at the Worldwound, and the Church would highly value that, but - I'm not actually sure what the main constraints are, for that, and it might well be qualified officers rather than funding, or teleporters rather than either. We should ask the Archduke d'Sirmium if he thinks it could be done and what he'd need to do it. If we can do more at the Wound then I suppose the Church would rather fund the army more but if we can't then I bet they'd actively prefer to have it smaller.

Anyway the abandonment crisis is obviously a disaster from an Iomedaen point of view because an enormous number of children are suffering and will probably be less likely to become law-abiding and productive citizens because of not being well-raised, and because their parents are doing evil in conceiving and abandoning them, and because it is costing us an enormous amount of money which we could otherwise put to better uses."

They suffered less before.

"I don't see how it's possible for Cheliax to have a shortage of qualified officers, unless -" oh, it's possible if they killed most of the qualified officers. How to end this sentence, now - "there's been a tremendous loss of staff since the war. Cheliax has held the northern border for decades, across all of its recent wars, and it doesn't seem plausible that an army that did that is incapable of training people to take on more." Don't say 'especially with this many people unemployed', she doesn't even mean that one as a dig but it absolutely sounds like a dig to her now. "I admit I don't know anything about our teleport capacity." They probably also killed the teleport capacity, in addition to shutting down the ways of making more teleporters, which isn't even a fair thing to be upset about because she's aware they apparently actually don't have money for it, but -

Korva. Stop it.

"We can't take over Lastwall and Mendev's forts with unreformed Asmodean officers because they will do an enormous amount of casual rape and murder and make our allies really irritated with us. Being an officer of a nonevil military is sufficiently different as to possibly be an entirely different job. If the Archduke of Sirmium can do it I think it'd be because he has enough of his own men to supervise all the unreformed Asmodeans. 

Most of the people capable of teleporting fled the country. That's the thing about people capable of teleporting, right. If they're nervous it is entirely trivial for them to go to Absalom and retire extremely wealthy."

That really sounds like Iomedae's top priority is not holding the worldwound. She supposes maybe they're holding the worldwound fine and it just isn't worth it to leave it to go after the second most important thing. But who even is there to rape or murder at a military fort in the middle of nowhere, besides your own soldiers? Just make a rule that they can't interact with anyone, she's pretty sure they weren't allowed to interact with anyone else anyway. It doesn't sound any harder than meeting their existing treaty obligations with Mendev, which they've been meeting fine for decades. This is the thing, they tell you they have important work that needs doing and then they refuse to hire people to do it, because it won't be done to their-

Korva.

"I would expect Cheliax to be able to meet its treaty obligations with Lastwall and Mendev, though maybe you would want to make a rule that Chelish soldiers can't interact with anyone outside their fort, to be cautious. And I'd expect that money could be used to hire more teleporters, if that's the bottleneck, even if not the same ones. But I don't know much about militaries, and I could be wrong."

"Cheliax is presently meeting our treaty obligations, which involve keeping our troops far from theirs under most circumstances, and I am confident we will keep meeting our treaty obligations, though I think the treaty has technically expired with the wound closed. The question is whether with further expenditures we can usefully help relieve the strain our allies are under in meeting theirs - they are much smaller and poorer countries, and holding their assigned borders is more costly for them than holding the north is for us. I don't know ...many things one would want to know to make such a proposal. I think that one can always hire teleporters but a wise person does not want to commit their military in a posture which can only be sustained by mercenary teleporters, as then the mercenaries have a great deal of power...but maybe the archmages could do it themselves at sufficient need. I'll look into it."

She supposes you can reconcile 'cares about prosperity' with everything the Iomedans have done if Mendev and Lastwall are both even poorer, so your bar for prosperity is even lower than where Cheliax is right now, and every time you hear that someone wants books or enough food that they're not hungry it sounds like they're complaining about not drinking out of jeweled goblets, because your baseline for a society that doesn't care about prosperity is somewhere north of Mendev where nobody grows any crops and everyone lives in animal skin tents and shivers for three quarters of the year. She tries to think how poor the Thanelands used to be - poor, okay, yes, and she didn't feel when she was reading about it that the poverty was completely crushing, but then again it was mostly about the landowners, who would be least hit by it and were in fact still kind of poor -

She's just filling space here to cover for the fact that she's not doing very well at either integrating this fact about Iomedae or accepting it without integrating it. She should really be asking about what is supposed to go in the empty frames, but she doesn't know how to do that without -

"Do you have any ideas what sorts of policies will work best for directly tackling the issue where most people are damned?" There. She's so smart. She's sort of aware that she began this conversation with the frame that she was trying to figure out whether the Iomedan church disagreed with her about anything important, and has now sort of inexplicably jumped to giving the impression that her priority is in fact just giving Iomedae whatever she wants, but she doesn't know how to fix that without pausing.

"Well, in Andoran Codwin tried encouraging them all to be Chaotic Good and that worked reasonably well but also produced a bunch of pirates so people are reluctant to follow his example. And he didn't solve the abandoned children thing at all. And Galt tried a very idealistic thing - they got rid of all the nobles, initially - and that led to a decade of chaos and bloodshed and then Cyprian. I think the Queen is hoping that if she just keeps as many people as possible alive during the difficult transition then over time many different people can try many different approaches to getting them Neutral, I don't know that she has a vision for it herself....the thing is that you don't need people to care about Good to want to escape damnation. If they have accurate information about Axis and about Hell and about what gets you to Axis instead of Hell they will all choose Axis. We've just got to get information to them. Which is part of what we'll be picking up in Lastwall tomorrow."

SHE'S TRYING TO ASK WHAT THE FUCK IT CONSISTS OF TO TRY TO BE GOOD TO ESCAPE DAMNATION. SHE IS ASKING IT AS DIRECTLY AS POSSIBLE AT THIS VERY FUCKING SECOND. HOW THE FUCK ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO -

"I think I am asking more about what that information is, but I suppose if we'll be picking it up in Lastwall tomorrow there's little point in going into it all now."

" - about what gets you to Axis? Aren't you Neutral already?" Valia Wain rather made a fuss about it in her famous speech. "It's not that it's secret information, it's just that you've got to try two hundred ways of saying it to find one that lands with Asmodeans instead of getting horribly misinterpreted. Don't kill, rape, torture, torment, enslave, or terrorize people. When you've got enough to make do, give some to the less fortunate. All we'll find in the books is a great many attempts at saying that enough different ways that everyone finds one of them not confusing."

Korva honestly doesn't want to go anywhere right now, or maybe to go someplace nobody has tried to get her to go just to get away from everyone, and is going to have to re-examine her thoughts about that at some point when she isn't busy trying to have a dangerous conversation. It seems kind of maladaptive to select an afterlife to aim for out of spite.

"I'm not asking for myself, I just need the moving parts in order to think about how it can be fixed. The last time someone asked me why I thought I was neutral, I told them that when the earthquake hit I ran across town to drag the children at my orphanage out of the rubble before the fires reached them. I do not think this is a particularly reliable method."

"Probably not. People who are damned are mostly damned for the extended abuse of, or occasional murder of, other people. You can make up Evil by repenting of it, by sincerely becoming someone who would not do it again, or you can do as much Good as you did Evil - saving the lives of orphans from rubble, defending the world at the Wound. Voting at the convention to end slavery and not go to war and save our countrymen from hardship and suffering. Adopting orphans, I know the Erastilians are recommending that. Marrying a woman who has children and stepping up to be a good father to them. Anyway if it balances out, or even comes close, one'll mostly make Axis."

Marrying a woman who has children really doesn't seem like the same kind of thing there at all, though she supposes that if you're good to people generally then it makes sense that that counts towards being good. Non-evil. Whatever. ...she had not really thought about that as one of the reasons why someone might think she was an especially bad marriage prospect, but maybe she should.

"I am not sure everyone has a sense of what counts as extended abuse of other people. But I suppose that's probably enough to be getting on with. It - kind of suggests that the church should be broadly in favor of laws that place limits on powerful people's ability to do harm to the powerless, but I don't know if I'm imagining this to be a more convenient position than it in fact is."

" - I very much expect the church to be in favor of those proposals, just like the church supported abolishing slavery."

"Well, for example, not allowing legally enforceable general obedience clauses in contracts would be a significant help to the cause of not allowing the powerful to do unlimited harm to the powerless, but if they're in favor of marriage contracts having those by default, then they won't back it. In which case having a better idea of the set of things they will back is going to take more information about how things work in Lastwall in practical terms, and not just the two-paragraph version of the theory."

"I told the Lord Marshal that I wanted to work on a theory of what orders should not be legal to give in marriage, and he thought it was a good idea. Maybe in fact the situation in Cheliax is such that women should not promise to obey their husbands at all, but certainly it is such that there should be a clear understanding of the many things that obedience does not oblige them in. I would expect the Church to be more pleased about - a theory of which orders are illegal - than about a ban on promising obedience in general, because that will also disrupt the normal functioning of the army - but maybe you could persuade us nothing short of that is good enough, or that something short of that which is good enough won't pass the floor and this will."

"...I'll think about that. Though I don't think soldiers promise general obedience? You can't, like - I see what you're saying, but I don't think normal army contracts involve promising complete obedience to your superiors such that you would have to sign a contract adding years to your deployment if they told you to. Legally, I mean, obviously if they have leverage over you then they can force it by threatening you. I guess I've never read one and am mostly guessing from the fact that people mostly do eventually come back.

We were talking in rights about that being a specific limitation, not allowing contracts which force anyone to sign additional contracts, modeled on the idea that it would be an illegal order to tell someone to take an oath. But the problem with general obedience is that even if you carve out a few exceptions, you can still order people to do any number of other miserable things until they do the thing you're not allowed to force them to do, and then punish them if they refuse to do those things. Though an escape method like the religious orders would help."

"...I think that in most places soldiers swear to obey their lawful superiors for their term of service and it's just understood that their commander can't use that power to make them sign on for longer. And in Lastwall they swear to obey lawful orders, which would prohibit orders that are just about making someone miserable and also certainly prohibit oaths to sign additional contracts. But perhaps we will need an escape method for at least as long as it takes to train enough Lawful Good magistrates.

And - I think that probably even in countries not previously ruled by Hell there are women who aren't sure if their husband's treatment of them counts as cruelty or not, and if they got illegal orders training before marriage maybe then they'd know. It does not only strike me as a - necessary adaptation to Cheliax, but as an actual good thing, an improvement in marriage."

"In Cheliax an unbounded promise of obedience is in fact an unbounded promise of obedience, and usually asked for when a lesser promise wouldn't do, since everyone knows that one." Probably not literally everyone. "It does seem like having a list of things which one is not allowed to be obliged in would help, although I worry that - well, I guess prohibiting orders designed only to make people miserable would help, but when we talked about the scope of obedience it wasn't immediately clear to me how to apply it to marriage. One of the illegal order categories was orders which serve no lawful purpose, but it's very difficult to say what counts as the scope of obedience owed for a personal servant, let alone a spouse.

It's surprising to me that no one has written up a list of orders that wives are not obliged to follow from their husbands, if in fact in the rest of the world they are always expected to swear obedience but it's understood that this doesn't oblige them to follow every possible order. I would expect it to come up pretty often. But - if you think they'll be receptive then I'll think about what would be good policy. I do very strongly think that wives should not promise to obey their husbands without any such limitations in place, and I think it's a very important point for any proposal that aims to encourage people to marry and take responsibility for their mutual children."

"Cheliax is more literate than any society since Azlant. Only among the nobility was it common for marriage to involve a written contract at all, in my time, and fairly little was written about marriage at all, given the very small presumed audience. It hasn't been written. But we can write it. Do you think it ought to be outright illegal to pledge unbounded obedience, or just that we shouldn't encourage it as the standard form of marriage?"

“I don’t know. I would probably see it banned, if you think we can. I worry that’s overextending ourselves, and that people will see it as an attack on all concepts of obedience, or all promises, but maybe if the right person introduces it. The best thing tactically might be to ban it without talking about what it means people can’t promise, rather than what people can’t take from them. Have a list of rights that no contract can legally rob a person of, and make it explicit that interfering with those rights is - well, I don’t know if we want it to be grounds to nullify the contract, or be a crime, or what, but not allowed in some manner. I don’t have a clever way to prevent people from punishing those who make use of their rights, but - I think allowing some organizations to break bad contracts, and ensuring that everyone has a right to contact those organizations and petition for it, will at least do something. I do want to make sure that we don’t exclude marriage from the class of contracts that religious orders can break, I think we want to just have a stringent approval process so that we don’t end up with Caydenite orders who go around dissolving every marriage everyone asks them to.

I think the most important thing is that nothing requires general obedience. I am - worried, following the discussion of Cyprian’s code of laws, that someone might try to deny women basic rights until marriage, and either thoughtlessly or deliberately write into the law that marriage requires a promise of obedience, without clarifying anything that this obedience does not cover. And that, I think, would be completely disastrous, because Chelish marriages don’t work like that, not ones where the people in question plan to respect each other. We would be telling many men that it is wrong to marry, and that what we want is to relegate all women to the status of slaves. And - a lot of Chelish men will go for it, if they're offered that. Not all of them, they're not all terrible, but - enough that it might be very difficult to fix it, if the floor is deciding."

"I think if you frame it as a ban on the marriages that nearly all of the married nobles have it will go over badly - and especially if you suggest to all the married noblewomen that they are slaves, a suggestion at which both they and their husbands will take extraordinary offense - but if you introduce through rights or through virtuous churches a set of orders no one can be commanded to follow that will probably go fine, if necessarily more limited in scope than whatever the theologically proper set of illegal orders in marriage probably is."

"Yeah, I think that's best. And then family just needs to not encode it in their definition of marriage, and I think the family committee is broadly very reasonable. They disagree about - well, most heatedly about whether to focus on better orphanage-daycares or on keeping as many children with their mothers as possible, but - thoughtfully. I don't think any of them would argue for unbounded obedience except the Osirian, and he really seems like he can probably be talked around." She feels calmer, now, that's better. Not calm enough to talk about prosperity, probably. 

"Osirion is a terrible place to be a woman. Women everywhere are expected to obey their husbands, but in the barbaric east they are expected also to live secluded from the broader world, to not speak to strangers or do business with them, and that really does make it impossible to complain of abuse or flee it. I am sure many Osirians are individually well-intentioned, but it would not be a victory to import their customs."

Nod. "He's been talking about providing financial incentives to men to get married. Not directly paying people, I think, he's been getting business owners in his county to only promote married men, or something, and providing matchmaking services for people who have passed a class on how to be a good husband. I can't really tell based on his description whether the result is in fact positive and not horrifying, but - he's thinking about reasonable things. I don't think he's going to fight for obedience requirements. The fight he wants to pick is requiring husbands to provide for their wives, which... I don't know, I could go either way. But I'm not worried about the minimum definition if it comes out of family. It'll be good or it'll be mediocre, it won't be devastating."

"Then it sounds like you should keep working on it in Family, and perhaps we'll separately work out illegal orders in Slavery. - and maybe talk to the Archduke Narikopolis's Iomedaen advisor, the Archduke spoke a little about what they ended up recommending in Menador and I expect that if you have him on board the Church will defer to him."

Oh hey, yeah, he'd said that they were against obedience provisions. She's... terrified, at the thought of talking to any of Archduke Narikopolus's staff, but probably not more terrified than she was of speaking out the first day. And this is an important concern.

"That sounds good, I can do that. That's - probably enough to be getting on with, I suppose. What time should I come by for the teleport?"

"Let's say twelfth bell. ...do you have another outfit?"

"I'm working on it. I expect to have a second one by tomorrow."

"If it is delayed come a little early so you can borrow something from one of my girls."

Nod. "Thank you, I will."

"That's all I had. Goddess go with you."