There is not! It seems pretty dangerous! Also he has a harem of hundreds of slaves and what if he decides they are interesting and should join it. They are going nowhere near the pharaoh. She was just idly curious if it is in fact like this all the way to the top. 

She pays a hundred and fifteen gold for the consult with a cleric, though. "When will they be available?"

"I will go check that and get back to you."

<Thank you for handling that. They seem to be treating you respectfully even though you are a woman?> 

Yes. She is prickly about taking motherhood class instead of insurance class but objectively that's being awfully picky, before her life got really weird motherhood was in fact more likely to be relevant to it than insurance. (When she got out of the army she would probably have moved back to Corentyn and opened a magic shop and had kids once they announced the incentives.)

She waits and eventually gets told that her advice session can happen at the sixteenth bell and says she'll come back then. What do you want to do in the meantime? 

<We could walk around and look at things, I suppose? ...Is casting Detect Thoughts on random people legal here, that would be a good way to learn more about what living in Osirion is actually like for ordinary people, compared to Cheliax.> 

Most places don't ban divinations but she can also ask at the temple about local laws. She does this. Osirion in fact bans enchantments but not divinations, like most places. 

(Cheliax treats enchantments as a grievance you can bring to court, which means it's not illegal, which would damage everyone's Law, but if someone catches you at it they can bring a case against you for it, so you should only do it to people if you're sure you can get away with it.)

Mhalir feels a little bit that if you're using workarounds like that to avoid people losing Law points, then maybe Cheliax is...not actually that Lawful? He's confused about the exact bounds of how Pharasma judges Lawfulness, though, and how much overlap there would be between that and his own internal sense of what the concept ought to mean. Having important concepts like that decided upon by powerful alien entities like the Golarion gods is a bit unsettling, actually. He feels very strongly that his values are his and not him choosing to follow one powerful alien entity rather than another. 

She thinks it's a meaningful distinction? Osirion is telling people that part of being a cooperative functioning member of Osirion society is not doing enchantments (except under the various circumstances where offensive use of magic is justified, like if they're attacking you or robbing you or something.) So part of the expectations Osirians are supposed to have about the kind of society that they live in is that no one will use enchantments and if they do they'll be punished. This is not the only kind of expectations a society can set up, but it ought to make sure everyone is in fact on the same page and has the same set of assumptions. it's fine to either have streets that prohibit wagons or not have streets that prohibit wagons; Law is just about caring that everyone knows whether the streets prohibit wagons and is motivated to comply. 

Cheliax is aiming for a different set of expectations but they're still widely known and the courts will do a predictable and consistent thing about cases brought to them. 

Hmm. He - can see that, that the predictability and consistency is a lot of what matters. Maybe this is a him thing; maybe it's that the law being determined by what you're strong enough to get away with feels - very bad - to him, the same way that, looking back on the last decades, the world he thought he was in - where the Yeerks could only ever have good things if they were powerful enough to impose that on the universe themselves - feels like a very bad one.

Also it seems like he was wrong about being in that world - maybe? Or maybe their alliance with Iomedae is really just an extension of that, finding a sufficiently powerful alien whose goal for there to not be a war is strong enough that She's willing to impose that Herself. Except he can't imagine any of Iomedae's followers phrasing it that way, it feels deeply misaligned with how people talk about Good - 

- and he's tired and confused and obscurely in pain all the time, and nothing makes sense and he no longer feels like he can trust that his decisions are the right ones, but he thinks the rest of the Yeerk leadership are even less well-placed to have good judgement on this, and so it's still on him... 

The way Good people think about Good still doesn't quite connect for her. 

They could try praying to Iomedae, she thinks that's what you're supposed to do and it might work now that she's Lawful Neutral instead of Lawful Evil. 

Mhalir is deeply unsure what's supposed to happen when you pray to a god, if you're not a cleric who does it to get spells. Also he's Neutral Evil still which makes it sound like he definitely can't talk to Iomedae, although he supposes that if Carissa does then he'll see it anyway. 

- and even though it seems not-entirely-unrelated to the thing where seeing the true nature of reality drives people mad, he...does want to hear Iomedae's values as explained by Iomedae, not filtered through the humans who work for her? Maybe it won't make sense to him, but it also feels possible it'll make more sense. 

There's not going to be a church in Sothis but they could go on over to Absalom? She thinks that praying is more likely to be heard if you are in a church, though she doesn't know for sure. She is pretty sure gods usually don't bother with their followers' prayers but Iomedae has already directly intervened in this situation, so it might be more likely.

If she has enough Teleports and it won't make them miss their cleric appointment here, that seems reasonable - or he supposes they can always buy a scroll there, since the Yeerks are by Golarion standards vastly wealthy and the ship is back to mining gold and spellsilver and various other elements from asteroids during its downtime. 

She only has Dimension Door since she is still not a very powerful wizard (and she haaaaaaaates it, she wants to be ninth circle and Plane Shift kidnap people into her specialized demiplane that does something she thought was widely understood to be impossible to do) but they can buy a scroll. 

The seller asks if she's married. She says that she is not. He looks pityingly at her but sells her the scroll. "If I were married, would you not sell it?"

         "We need your husband for purchases over 10gp. He can leave his signature on file."

"Mmmm."

And they go to Absalom.

The Church of the Inheritor is a sturdy stone building with arrow slits, though it's hard to imagine under what circumstances they'd be besieged in Absalom. She goes in and finds a unoccupied corner and looks around to see what other people are doing. They are mostly kneeling with their sword before them and a holy symbol hanging from it, eyes closed. She doesn't have a holy symbol and she doesn't have a sword, but she can kneel. 

She hasn't done this since she was Asmodean. 

If there is the potential in me to be an instrument of your will, she thinks, help me realize it. The thing she wants is more complicated than that but she doesn't really expect a Lawful Good god to care about most of the things she wants -

And there's a feeling like falling face-first into a river, which in half a second would scour you to the bones but then you're pulled out of it, held above its surface -

And then they're in a room, with a Chelish woman who looks Carissa's age, and is watching them concernedly. 

"I would really rather give you both some time to grow into it," she says. "I'm not going to, because people die and go to Hell every day, but I wish I could. Carissa, can you let Mhalir talk if he wishes to? He won't be able to automatically here."

- her initial instinct is to kneel, but she was kneeling - is kneeling - and if she's instead sitting, here, wherever here is, that's presumably by Iomedae's will. She feels panicked. She tries to - not panic. She asked for this. She should be grateful -

"I don't think that cashes out to anything," Iomedae says, watching her closely. "Or maybe to 'if I am not grateful I will be murdered' but that is false. I do not need you to be grateful and I do not need you to be obedient. I need a lot of things, actually, from you, because they are best done by you, but if it were not the case that you could do them I would use someone else, and I wouldn't be angry. I am very proud of you." 

"I - don't understand what things make you proud of people."

"Trying to win," she says instantly.

Trying to win. 

Mhalir expected to be scared - was terrified, seconds ago, listening in on Carissa's attempt at prayer - but oddly, he isn't now.

It's less confusing, somehow, for a god to need things from him and Carissa because they're well positioned to do them and She can see that. Mhalir is not and does not want to be an instrument of Iomedae's will, but he is and always has been trying to win, he thinks. He wants so many things to be different in the world. He wants people to stop dying and going to Hell and if Iomedae sees, from a god's higher vantage point, some path by which he can help, instead of breaking things that wouldn't have needed to be broken if he had true and complete information about the world, then he wants that.

He's not scared but he does feel very tired. Everything feels so pressured, right now, and what he really wants is to step back and spend a decade trying to actually understand the world, and it doesn't seem like the world is going to give him that luxury.

He doesn't know how to put any of that into words. 

"You need time. You are new at this, and the sorts of things you want to do don't have a gentle learning curve, you don't get half the benefit from being half as good. I think you are right to notice you need time. After the wars are over you will have the time, I think. The wars cannot wait." She sounds maybe a touch sad, but not apologetic. "I think you understood the world better than you give yourself credit for, but you were operating in a space where even making a little bit of a mistake could close off the best paths. And you were making a mistake. Do you have a good picture now, of what it was?"

He tries talking through Carissa's mouth. "I think I was - wrong about the fact of the matter on what terms the Andalites would allow if we tried to negotiate a truce with them. I think my inference was reasonable given the information I had, but the information I had was incomplete and also - biased - and I knew this and tried to account for it but I did not account for it enough. And so I - gave up too soon, on them being agents we could make agreements with, rather than...a force of nature that we needed to overcome by being more powerful? I thought I had tried all the other avenues and probably I had not? I am not sure but I think something like that was my mistake."

"One way that people coordinate with each other is by having shared values or, less effectively but more widely available, shared lines they won't cross, so they can expect that any work they delegate to another will be done in a way they broadly agree was the right way to do it.

People who are not willing to constrain themselves like that can still coordinate, but it is much harder. It takes unreasonable effort. It takes repeated unreasonable effort. It takes making real costly sacrifices when they almost certainly will not work. When the Yeerks first took unwilling hosts they closed off all the easiest paths by which people can come to trust one another, and no one knew enough to even start on the hardest ones. Maybe if you had understood more about Andalites you would have known enough to start down that road, but it was still a very very hard road that you had boxed yourself into from the moment the Yeerks first took people as slaves. I do not quite want to say that you were wrong when you reasoned that it was better to take slaves than to lose the war, and that you did not see another route to winning it. But I think it is a line of reasoning that is less appealing when you are more uncertain and expect more strongly that you are making mistakes."

Mhalir feels an urge to defend himself by pointing out that the initial Yeerk decision to cross that line and take involuntary hosts - slaves - wasn't meaningfully his choice at all, he wasn't even a Visser yet at the time, even now he's nowhere near the top of the leadership hierarchy and he's felt frustratingly constrained by his superiors as well as by the Andalites.

...He could have made Iomedae's argument to the Council, though, and he didn't, because he didn't even have the vocabulary for it, he isn't sure he does now. It - felt irreversible, sure, and he vaguely remembers saying that, but it didn't feel like a closing of many paths, at the time. 

It felt like Seerow had already closed those paths for them. He knows it was still their choice how to respond, and they made it, but he remembers the feeling of walls closing in on him happening significantly earlier than the first enslaved host. 

Mhalir is feeling really angry with Seerow right now, actually, which is interesting because anger hasn't generally been his main emotion there. 

"He wronged you very badly. And he did so after you had come to believe that he valued you more than any other Andalite ever would."

"I want him back." He says it before he's noticed that he's thinking it. "I want to show him Golarion. I want him to meet Carissa. I want him to see - what it looks like - for a Yeerk to work with someone who wants them there. I want him to understand why it did not have to go that way. I - want - it to have gone a different way. And I cannot have any of that and I will never see him again and even if there had been a way for the gods of Golarion to catch him when he died, he would probably have gone to Hell and been tortured and he would think that was - worse than ceasing to exist..."