"I'm getting the impression you're busy, personally. Doesn't seem better to slaughter them indiscriminately, though, if that's what's happening now."

"I think it is better to take someone prisoner than to kill them, presuming you'll kill them if they try to run anyway so they have the choice. If there's profit in going into the mountains to capture orcs, men will do it lots more than they currently do, and probably sometimes to orcs that would never have come down out of the mountains and never have harmed our people. If the orcs found a buyer for human slaves I think that would be bad for the people of Menador, not an improvement."

"The people of Menador grow their own food. Even more of it when they don't need to station as many men in the north."

It takes her a second. "And so you figure there are no orcs that don't live by raiding? They could hunt, maybe?"

"No, not in the numbers they have. Maybe if there were five hundred mountain orcs, and never any more. But there are enough up there, at least in my time, that this is completely impossible, and more of them every year we don't cut their numbers as much as we can. So all the orcs live by raiding sometimes, and all of them are bloodthirsty savages. But if you kill the men and make their children farmers, the generation that grows up like that is fine."

"I need to think about that." He might just be lying; he might be wildly bad at judging what civilization should look like. Even if it is true that you can civilize orcs just by killing all the adults and raising the children civilized, it is not clear that you ought to immediately go do that; if someone else regarded the Empire as insufficiently civilized and knew they could fix it by killing all the adults and adopting all the children she'd much rather they not....unless they were so civilized that no one who grew up in their society was condemned to Evil afterlives? Then maybe it'd be worth it - but also if they possessed such a secret the Empire'd want it, you wouldn't have to insist at swordpoint. Well. Maybe. Depending what form the secret took. 

But all orcs are damned, and maybe need not be; if that's not important, what is? "...do they want their children? Would they sell them?"

"...I don't know, I wouldn't expect it." This idea is uncomfortable, apparently. "I guess maybe you could buy the ones they otherwise kill, if you could find an intermediary they wouldn't attack, but I don't know that that fixes anything. I think for all their faults, the mothers often do love the ones they keep."

"That makes sense.  ...I don't know exactly what to do with this but it is important and I'm glad to know it.

What does the worship of Asmodeus...look like, in Asmodean Menador? There are shrines to him? The only permitted priests are his priests? Are there - required acts of worship or mostly just a bar on non-Asmodean ones?"

"The only permitted priests are his priests. Freemen are required to attend weekly services. There's one temple in Kantaria, which is dedicated to Asmodeus but contains within it shrines to half a dozen other gods, which the Asmodean Chosen maintain. Most of the outlying villages have a little shrine but don't have a priest, they have to ride circuits. The Archduke's spiritual counsel is Asmodean. The Disciplines are taught in the public schools, and the wizard students learn Infernal. Many people pray to Asmodeus, and take it as a general rule of thumb that prayer to other gods is fine as long as you pray to Asmodeus more. I'm getting the impression that there are probably several other differences and effects that I don't realize are because of the church.

Every year at Archerfeast we put up two Asmodean banners for every Old Deadeye symbol, let the priest say a few words about their similarities, and then ignore him and shoot targets."

That last gets a little bit of a smile. 

"What do they teach in the weekly services? Do people know they'll go to Hell? Why would anyone be willing to go to Hell?"

"I don't attend most of the weekly services. The entire back of the temple is a mural of people burning in hell, though, so I'd expect most people who were remotely paying attention to have gotten that part."

"And...they....don't mind?"

"I'm not really clear on what you expect people to be doing differently, here. Some people do devote themselves to another religion and do die of it, but not many."

"...well. Say that on the road there opened up a pit of lava, and you could see that anyone who rode their horse into it would be trapped there screaming in agony forever. You'd...ride around it, right?"

"Sure. I like living and do not intend to commit suicide in order to reach hell any faster."

"I would not just expect people to - go around it because they had other things to get done that day. I would expect them to - skirt it by quite a wide margin, even if that delayed them in other projects, unless the other projects were of absolutely critical importance, to be willing to go ride a day in the other direction if that were the best way to get around the pit of lava, to kill a man who tried to throw their children into the pit of lava even if the children were going to die anyway..."

"It is also illegal to murder people to send them to hell," he says, still not entirely sure he understands the concern.

"You collectively do not act like you have a particularly strong preference not to go to Hell. I find that odd. Every person I have ever met much prefers not to go to Hell, and acts accordingly. By pursuing lichdom, sometimes! But while I would not recommend lichdom it makes more sense than just going "well, yes, I will get horribly tortured forever, and I could instead not get tortured at all, but I don't happen to know any routes to my destination that don't involve being tortured forever, so I guess I'll be tortured forever."

He feels uncomfortably like he's being made fun of for being stupid right now. It feels pretty similar to being mocked for getting a math problem wrong, not like missing a target; not knowing what the mistake is or what the answer is supposed to be, you can't really see what you did that was stupid, you just have to accept that you are.

He doesn't want to be a lich. It achieves none of his goals and anti-achieves several others. The woman just said she doesn't recommend lichdom, though, so he's not really clear on what obvious mistake he's supposedly making, only that lichdom is somehow a less stupid mistake than... accepting that you will die?

There wasn't a question in there that time, so he doesn't answer it.

Iomedae genuinely has no idea to explain the problem more directly than that, she has already long since crossed over into being rude. "...it doesn't seem like you're all under some kind of horrible curse or something but that would be much less confusing."

"It would have to be quite the curse."

"...say that, when you die, it doesn't work the way we all understand it to work and instead Pharasma just lets you choose. Which afterlife would you choose?"

"I don't know, can I ask what other people picked?"

"...I suppose? You'd want to go to Hell if the people you loved were there? You couldn't help them in Hell, you'd probably never see them. I think lots of people might choose between Axis or Heaven based on where the people they love are, but that's because in those afterlives you can see them and live with them and help them, not just be tortured somewhere within a couple Teleports distance."

"I have no special attachment to any of these places. It doesn't seem all that likely that any of them consist of absolutely nothing but torture, but I haven't been to them and couldn't say. I guess if you told me that Nidalese really go to the shadow plane, it wouldn't be very surprising for that to be mostly torture."