"He chooses people, if their hearts match His own, and you might have to be from the world I'm from, not from this world, though if any god could choose priests of His here too it'd be Nethys. But it took her a hundred years, I think, to see as many things as she sees now, and she doesn't see some other things that normal people see, like that it is rude to kidnap me, so it has disadvantages. The man who is a king -" and she suspects she's right about this, now, based on the little boy's thoughts, though maybe she's reading too much into them, "picked a different god to be a priest of, the god of wealth and trade and cooperation."

He makes a face. "That doesn't seem like the sort of thing that there's a god of. Or he's not very good at being a god. At least here. Maybe you just meant in your world, are people very rich there?"

He has only the faintest idea of what it means to be rich, aside from 'having lots of cattle and grain and good tents.' Rich people have shoes too, he thinks. He's never met anyone who owned shoes, it seems kind of pointless because it's not like feet don't work just fine, but apparently people in the city wear them. 

"He's in my world, yeah. The gods can only do some of the things they'd like to do, and I'm not sure Abadar - the god of wealth - can even sense places that don't have any wealth, but - yes, my world is much wealthier than at least this part of yours. When people are rich they build...houses, and they buy fancy clothes and magic items that make their lives nice, and they hire guards and servants, and they buy slaves in some parts of the world where that's allowed, and they build schools for all the children so all the smart ones can be wizards."

He tries to make a picture of that in his head. It's a nice picture, overall. He's vaguely aware of slaves as a concept, some people from another clan to the east got taken once by bandits and someone said it might be to sell them as slaves in the south. "Does the place where the man you know is king have slaves." 

"No. Well, foreigners don't have to give theirs up when they visit but we don't have them bought or sold, and all the people who were slaves before the war got freed."

"There was a war? Why?" Ma'ar also has only a hazy notion of 'war' construed on a broader scale than cattle raids; he knows that entire countries with kings go to war with each other sometimes, there are stories about it, but his mental image is still a confused blend of herders with knives and sticks and his best guess of what swords look like, he hasn't ever seen a real one. 

"Uh, kings command armies, tens of thousands of people, Cheliax can field a hundred thousand if we really have to, and they fight when they want each other's territory, mostly - countries claim territory, do cattle herders do that?"

"Yes, this is our range, clan Kiyam - my other name is Kiyamvir, because my clan is Kiyam and my father was Vir. To go to Kanrata we need to pass through clan Yakan's range and they'll try to kill us if they see us. That's why I haven't gone yet." 

"My horses will be faster," she says, unconcerned. "Well, just like how I imagine clans fight over territory, countries fight over it. The man who is King now had an army and he did not like how the ruler of Cheliax was running her country, so he conquered it, with some allies, and now it is his. He did it by having his army use magic to send the other army off where it couldn't fight, and by using magic to command the minds of his enemies so they'd surrender to him." She is watching him intently.

She's trying to gauge his reaction to some part of that, Ma'ar thinks, and he doesn't know what she wants. "That's...clever?" he says, a bit uncertainly. "I mean, if it worked, it must've been clever. And then he didn't have to have his army kill the whole other army first. What did he do with them after, did he just put them so far away it'd take them years to get back and they might not bother...?" 

"He put them in another world. He let the ones who'd be loyal to him return afterwards."

Ma'ar considers asking how he knew which ones would be loyal, but probably you can just find that out with magic, somehow, when you're very powerful. He can't use magic to command people's minds, it would be way more feasible to get past the other clan's range to the city if he could, but he's not surprised it's possible.

"And then he freed the slaves - was that one of the the things the last ruler did that he didn't like, having a lot of slaves?" 

"I don't think he would've fought a war just over that but it wasn't how he preferred it. He freed the slaves and he told people to follow different gods, mostly, because we used to follow Asmodeus, the ruler of Hell, and we'd go to Hell when we died and Hell is a lake of fire where you burn until the unworthy bits of you are burned out."

"So he told us we couldn't worship Asmodeus anymore and we switched to other gods who are nicer to their dead people."

There are a thousand questions he suddenly wants to ask and it's hard to make them line up in order. "Can the nicer gods fight Asmodeus and take his dead people back." 

"They're not strong enough. Maybe someday."

He takes a deep breath. Rubs a hand over his face, shakily. "And I guess maybe they think, it's his dead people, he can do stupid horrible things like put them in a lake of fire– I don't think that would even work, people aren't - like that - you can't, you can't make them stronger by - burning things - it would burn the good parts and, and there'd just be stupid pointless ashes..." Ma'ar is very visibly upset about this, though he's trying to hide it. 

"It's - complicated - but definitely some of the other afterlives use lots more of the people they take, and that's better. I think some of the nicer gods would fight Asmodeus if they had a way to win, but he's very powerful, one of the oldest gods, and helps with protecting the world against even worse things, so it's very complicated.

Do you want a hug? I know you're a kid, I'm not going to notice only if you let me hug you."

Whether he wants a hug is such a weird question, how can he tell if he wants a hug.

Someone this woman knows is a king, because he thought another country was bad, and wanted to fix it. And she thinks that Ma'ar might be like him... 

He takes another deep breath. "I - want you to teach me magic. And - show me where your world is. So that when I grow up and I'm strong enough, I can - help the other gods find a way to do that and take his dead people, because–" 'it's not fair' is stupid, that isn't what anything is made of, "because I don't want him to have dead people if he uses them for that." 

" - yeah. Yeah, I think that's why Nefreti wanted me to look after you. So you can do that."

Ma'ar looks levelly at her. 

He's thinking that he doesn't really believe her or trust her and he's very confused, but - it almost doesn't matter, right, because she's powerful and rich and she knows a king from another world, who if she's telling the truth is very clever, and so what's he going to do, not go with her, not leap at his best chance to get off the plains and learn magic and become strong enough that if something is horrible he can change it. And in a way it makes things very simple and easy to keep track of, that she's so much better at magic than him, because obviously trying to knock her out and take her things, or steal them off her when she's asleep, isn't going to work.

And he may not especially believe any of the words she's saying about why, but she does want him, for some reason - maybe she collects children she can teach magic so they can serve her, and she can tell that he's clever? - and it seems like the use she wants him for involves answering his questions and making him stronger, so that's fine. If later she's less nice and hurts him, then he can decide at that point how much is worth taking before he decides to run away, but hopefully by then he would be in a big city, and have more ideas about where to run to. Right now he has no other ideas. Just this one. 

"All right," he says. 

She makes water for his cows. Her Detect Thoughts expires and she doesn't recast it; she knows how he thinks, because she thought like that, for a very long time.

"Do people in this world go somewhere when they die?" he asks her eventually, scratching a circle into a patch of bare dirt with his finger. 

"Your gods put their souls into new bodies but they don't keep any memories."