"Devils can learn magic. It's not like ours, it's more flexible and more finicky and it takes a long time to master, and they don't export their magic items to Cheliax, they need them in Hell, but they have magic item enchanters. I wanted to have a long impressive career doing that and then when I died I could get an apprenticeship doing that, and study magic and build - magic grain-mills, magic looms, magic castles, they have all kinds of things..."

"On one of the other layers?" he wonders.

"Yeah.

I won't - there's no reason you'd give it to me, who accomplished nothing and failed them at one important thing and then died, there are lots of better people for it. But it's what I wanted."

"...I'm not going to kill you right here and now if that's what you're asking."

"What? No, that wouldn't help, I was trying to explain that it is too late for me to get to do that even if I did die now."

"You said 'I don't know why you'd give it to me' -"

"Why - the universe. Hell. A person in the position to decide who gets to study magic in Hell. Not you personally. I am pretty sure the guards would stop you if you tried to kill me and then we'd figure out what all the Good contortions around punishing people are and that wouldn't improve anything in the slightest. I wouldn't ask it."

"Ah, okay."

"Sorry."

"It's all right."

She does not contradict him about this.

He'll wait a bit, to see if she has anything else to say, before he knocks on the door.

She should be being good company but she's finding it kind of hard at the moment.

Knock knock.

The guard lets him out.

He goes on another long rambling walk and comes back and this time he is actually bored enough to open the Iomedan book.

It is divided into sections, a long part on the history of Iomedae's rise as a warrior for Good and eventually ascension, and then a part She dictated as a god explaining the intended role of Her church and how to be her follower and so on.

It passes the time.

Iomedae was born in Cheliax, then part of Taldor, to a rural family in a dangerous area where their livestock was routinely threatened by griffons and direwolves and so on; she was chosen as a paladin at 14, which is young but not unheard of, and had cleared the region of predators and become a significantly more powerful paladin by 20 when she finally showed up at the gates of the nearest paladin order, two hundred miles away. (This was unusual; being Lawful Good entirely on your own is hard and most paladins join an order if they're not part of one already.) The paladin order does not suit her perfectly, and she founds her own, which goes on to be one of the largest and most successful of its era (its descendents are now in Lastwall, the book notes).

And many adventures follow. She apparently spent the next sixty years or so doing all kinds of marvelous and extraordinary things, culminating in the decades-long Shining Crusade against Ustalav;  after that, she went for the Starstone, and ascended.

Good, in the opinion of Iomedae's holy book, is described in so many different ways because it is a balancing of so many different things, and how they are best balanced is a consequence of how you talk about them and how you prioritize them and which you conceive of as the core of the thing. Good is about defeating everything broken in the universe: disease, death, hunger, fear, helplessness, cruelty. Good is also about approaching the world in such a fashion that, even if you misunderstand a great deal about it, you will still make things better, rather than worse. Assassinations, for example, make things worse unless you're correct about all of your assumptions and motivations for them; feeding orphans makes things better even if you're wrong about most more complicated things. Many of the precepts of Good are rules against mistakes that humans will often make if not warned off them; they are not intrinsic to Good, but following them will produce more of a Good world than defying them. 

Iomedae then analyzes at length many of her own decisions while living, from her new perspective as a god who can see the longer-term consequences of such things; she thinks lots of her decisions were correct in the context of a threat as dangerous as the Whispering Tyrant but would be unwise to emulate in happier times. She thinks she made mistakes, especially while young, by being too ruthless, not noticing the complicated costs of being known to kill prisoners or to having people afraid to admit to disappointing her.  Aroden, her god, mostly did not warn her from these mistakes, being lawful neutral Himself, but She thinks Good is more correct, on the whole, now that She can see both of them properly, and She can try to explain some of why, through the lens of explaining her human errors. 

Another section is a meditation on her popular understanding as the god of fighting Evil. She refers to it, herself, as being the god of defeating Evil, and She thinks it an important difference. When children are learning to swordfight, they commonly try to swing their sword at the enemy's sword, seeing that swordfighting often involves weapons clashing in this fashion and thinking that to swordfight you ought to clash your weapon in this fashion. But when you swing a sword, you should be trying to kill or cripple the other person. They might bring their sword down in your way, they might not, but a swordfight is not your aim; it is the natural consequence of your aims being thwarted. Iomedae expects that her followers will have to fight many battles, but the battle is not the aim, and must never be mistaken for it. 

A lot of it is going over his head, couched too much in terms he didn't grow up with, but some of it is interesting.

The paladins seem slightly cheered when they see him reading it but they don't say anything. 

Honestly them being that cheery about it is offputting enough. He does not ask them questions even when he thinks of some.

He visits Carissa every day, and takes walks once or twice a day, and when he has read through the Iomedan book he asks if there's anything else to do.

There's a library if he wants more books. He is welcome to enroll in swordfighting lessons. They are confused about how Ibyabek does the things it is doing, and they are considering confidentially bringing in a cleric of Abadar to explain the case for money and hopefully clarify some of the confusions, if he is interested in that.

Swordfighting lessons sound kind of fun, actually, even if they won't be especially useful once he goes home if ever he does. It'll keep him in shape differently than walks will, at least. He isn't sure what they're confused about but if they want him to talk to more clerics that seems fine?

They enroll him in swordfighting lessons. They think they can get a cleric in by the end of the week, the confidentiality agreement is the hard part.