You care about the poor little peasants enough to be all sad about them but not enough to just tell me to stop? Have you considered just, instead, placing your threshold to act on whatever stupid problems wildly below your threshold to be all sad about -

"You never did really like it when I tortured people to death for my own amusement, did you? I'll stop."

"I do not like it, no."

She is struck suddenly with an odd temptation to tell Alfirin about the family she murdered, and why, but there's no reason at all to do that. It is tempting because it'd hurt her mother and that - shouldn't really be an input into her decisions at all but if it should, it should obviously be one in the opposite direction.

She doesn't say it.

She doesn't remember their names anyway and it'd hit harder with names.

"I also copied out for you all the spells known to me developed or invented in the future. Including your secret spells, though I assume some you already know." She hands over the spellbook into which she's been copying them. "There’s also Scribe’s Binding, at ninth circle, but I don’t have it and I’m not sure it’d be much easier to rederive given anything I’ve seen. It turns people into books.”

"...why?"

“ - oh, you can edit them that way.”

"I can see how that would be useful." Did she do that to Lilia, she wonders?

"Is there anyone in the Darklands we could ally with to cut off the supply lines, then?"

"Well, name your favorite demon lord."

" - "

"Baphomet."

" - fair enough, sir. My point was - we can try to ally with one of the drow tribes but they're not exactly reliable."

"Sure. Do they need to be? Even unreliable allies presumably increase the costs of supplying Urgir -"

"I'm also not sure it solves any of our problems if they're unable to supply Urgir. If everyone there starves we still have to fight them all."

"Unlikely, and inasmuch as we do it might still be worth it to make them spend the onyxes or Tar-Baphon's time."

"And the orcs might turn on their masters if it looks like that's the plan."

"And taking Urgir becomes very morally uncomplicated if everyone in it's dead."

"Not an advantage we may weigh."

"I don't mean it's any better for the orcs, sir, they're all damned regardless, it's better for the men and I don't see why not to weigh that."

"Yes, of course, we wouldn't want the men to feel bad about the deaths. Maybe if the siege doesn't work out, we can try poisoning the wells instead?"

Alfirin that was entirely unnecessary.

"The man in the habit of considering whose fault he can make a situation will rarely arrive at the best handling of it; the best way to keep our soldiers from doing evil will usually not be to do more of it ourselves; whether or not we should take Urgir will almost certainly depend ultimately on how much it will cost us to do so. If we decide to take the city we will then turn our considerable creativity to making that the least hideous thing it could possibly be. Anyone with a startling innovation in how hideous it'd be should of course share that as decision relevant, but in its absence I don't think the presence of that puzzle on the table is improving any of your reasoning."

Eorello sometimes wishes the paladins hadn't been the first to take Tar-Baphon seriously and thereby ended up in all the positions of power and influence on the Crusade. Normally war planning never gets sidetracked either by worrying about the wellbeing of the orcs or by worrying about whether one ought to worry about the wellbeing of the orcs. But it sounds like the Knight-Commander is giving him this one so he'll try to proceed as if there had been no paladin digressions. "Your options outside the drow tribes are the Drathnelar priests or, I suppose, the ghouls, though good luck outbidding Tar-Baphon for their favor..."

Arazni does not, usually, speak during their meetings. It is a rare matter that they won't eventually think of themselves and is worth telling them. 

 In this one she speaks only as it's ending and they're all standing to leave. "Alfirin," she says.

She doesn't quite startle. "Yes?"