The servants will go and check. (The servants are thinking that one is not really supposed to just ask if the pharaoh is available but also the pharaoh has put off almost all his meetings this week, citing the birth of his daughter though he's never taken a day off for that before, and will definitely be available.)

The pharaoh is available. He smiles at Leareth and gives him permission to sit.

(Leareth is still managing to remember to prostrate himself first but he's almost forgotten a couple of times now, he has kind of a lot on his mind.) 

"One. We successfully demonstrated a Gate to Velgarth this morning. It is a more challenging spell than the standard Gate technique, but we have three and a half days remaining to teach it to my other mages. I would like to send Nayoki and Narva back to Velgarth to hold those trainings."  

"Congratulations. I can arrange that; when will they want to leave?"

"After lunch today, I think. If you would prefer to reserve your spells, I can Gate them over, it will be tiring but Lesser Restoration seems to work on that at least initially." 

"If you can do that, it leaves open the option of fetching people from Valdemar should they be ready, though I don't expect they will be."

Leareth nods. "I do not mind doing it, I simply thought it fair to warn you." 

He pauses. Takes a slow breath, lets it out through his nose.  

"I wish to accept Abadar's offer. Given that I have decided, and the Gate research is complete, I might as well do so now in case it helps to have three days of practice. I - do not actually know how to tell Him, though." 

"I'm glad. Trust isn't - an easy thing. But I think it will serve you both. 

Why don't you look at a listing of spells, and also at the options for domains - you get spells and some special powers from your domains, you should definitely take Travel because it's the only way to get flight and teleportation, but you get one other and it's less obvious what's next best - did you know that Hubris is a domain, it doesn't have the best powers necessarily but it would privately entertain me which is definitely a very good reason...and we can get you a holy symbol, and then once you know exactly what you want you pray for it. You can pray for it without knowing exactly what you want but it's very difficult to consult reference books in the middle."

Leareth's lips twitch slightly at his comment about Hubris. "All right, I will look at spells then. Is there a special technique for praying? I have - not exactly ever done that." 

"I would imagine not. Uh, you hold your holy symbol, and you clear your head, and you think about - the things that you and your god both care about, the things you're aligned on, the space where something like this exists, the chance to work together - and then there's something there? Not very much of it, and it feels very mechanical, and you can request and get your spells from it. 

And if you ever want to actually talk to Him, when you get the thing that's very mechanical you reach past it, and try to find the rest."

Leareth nods. "That seems straightforward enough. What does the holy symbol do?" 

"It uniquely identifies your god, you need it as a focus for many though not all of the spells and they stabilize around it when you pray for them. People who don't like relying on objects that could conceivably stop being in their possession get it tattooed, sometimes. You need it to channel energy, though you're not going to be able to do that very usefully until after the war."

"Oh - why?" 

"Evil clerics channel negative energy, which harms or kills everyone around them. It's easy enough to learn how to exclude your allies but this is still kind of stupid since if people are within thirty feet of you you probably have a lot of ways to kill them. Neutral clerics get to choose, and almost all of them choose to channel positive energy. I asked Abadar if he could make an exception but it's one of their godagreements and he can't. He did confirm you can retrain it once you're not evil."

"How inconvenient. Do - you have reason to think I will not read as Evil after the war?" 

"Well I don't know for sure but Abadar says it is mostly the killing children to wear as a skin and that's - the kind of thing that doing a lot of Good can, in principle, pull more than enough in the other direction, but it has to be a lot of good, and if the next week doesn't count I don't know what would but I would bet - have bet - that it will."

Leareth makes a bit of a face, but he nods. "Is it very unusual for Abadar to choose a cleric who is Evil?" 

"Not especially. Less than five percent but not less than two percent, I'd guess? He's planning to do a bunch of it in Cheliax after the war so there's not a whole country with no clerics. And He's not, Himself, Good, right, there are plenty of ways to be Evil which don't touch on anything He cares about... murder isn't one of those, He disapproves of murder."

Leareth sort of wants to say that he also disapproves of murder, but, as someone who has done rather a lot of murder, it feels questionable that he personally has the right to claim that.

(Also, more generally, he disapproves of people dying - there are reasons murder is worse than death by natural causes but they're all indirect ones, the harm to the dead person is the same. In Velgarth at least, where people are to a first approximation just gone when they die, in a maybe-retrievable way but one the gods don't bother implementing. And he remembers trading the lives of bandits exploiting the chaos after the Cataclysm, for ten times as many lives of starving children, or so he hoped when he added it up in his ledgers, blood-sacrifice to power weather magic so there would be a harvest at all... He wonders what Abadar would think of that.) 

He can get him the book of cleric spells. There are hundreds at each level. And he can talk him through the domains, there's a handy chart so he can compare all his options. The most sensible thing to optimize for with domains is getting spells that aren't otherwise available to clerics at all. Thus Travel, which grants him flight and teleportation. Protection eventually gets you Mind Blank, the spell he uses to be impossible to read magically, otherwise only on the wizard list; he chose it for that reason. Abadar is planning to eventually work out a suite of spells related to cities but hasn't yet. And so on.

It's a lot of spells! 

Leareth, after a lot of thought, decides to go with Travel and then Protection as the second domain; it's duplicating a lot of the shielding he can already do, but extra shielding is hardly a bad thing, and - well, he knows Malduoni can read him right through his shields even when he has a talisman for additional coverage, Golarion's magic is in some ways stronger than his own. 

Picking spells is harder because there are so many and also they are so, incredibly, obnoxiously specific. For cantrips he eventually goes with Stabilize, Guidance and Resistance, mostly on the grounds that they seem different from the kind of magic he already has easily. He - should definitely ask for Recharge Innate Magic, to see if that works, and then maybe he'll test Sure Casting and Divine Favour, again on the grounds that they seem different from what Velgarth magic can do.

All right, is the next step getting a holy symbol? 

The pharaoh has some of those! Some people like a golden key but among Osirians who want to show how clever they are the more popular holy symbol is the crisscrossing lines he must have seen. It's from a concept about how prices work under certain common conditions.

Leareth likes that concept quite a lot, more than the key. (He is mildly against people just thinking he's trying to look clever, but it doesn't actually matter that much.) 

"What people are going to think is what kind of cleric wears an intelligence headband, you must care about actually being smart far more than almost anyone in the world."

"Is intelligence not helpful for clerics' casting, the way it is for wizards? Interesting."