"Score one for gods," he says. "References to resurrection in published material you can translate?"

Searchy searchy search.

Yeah that's totally a thing gods can do. They don't seem to have done it very often but perhaps that was because they were so busy decorating mountains and going to war with one another.

"Well, I feel much better about assassination as an option now," Sindri remarks.

"Are you trying to calibrate your sales pitch for demonic sensibilities or something."

"No, I'm just - thinking out loud, as opposed to making any kind of sales pitch at all, and I have a morbid sense of humour and a vivid imagination and am mainly thinking of assassination in contrast to much worse options."

"Okay."

"Again, I have not yet reached the stage of deciding what to do about all this, I'm still figuring out the parameters of the situation. Nothing would make me happier than to discover that all I had to do was - seduce him, or some damn thing - and he'd stop torturing people and the problem would be solved. But it seems really unlikely to work out that way and the existence of resurrection means that even if I have to kill him, he's not gone forever, he's just - indefinitely awaiting review."

"Gods seem hard to come by and harder to steer."

"I consider those both solvable problems in the long run."

"Well, watch out, if the run is long enough you may find yourself having to work through summoners who think you're an infohazard."

"Under those conditions I probably would be!"

Sigh.

"I want to - fix things," he says, beginning to pace back and forth. "Things in general. All the things that there are. Do you know the þainneið - probably not, hardly anyone does - it's the oath you take to become a thane of Thule, and it says, basically, 'when things are not okay, when people are starving or in danger or oppressed or miserable, and there's something I can do about it, I will consider it my duty to competently and responsibly solve the problem'. The original wording is more tuned to tenth-century priorities but that's the soul of it. I took it last year on my sixteenth birthday, and I've been waiting to turn eighteen and qualify for an EU summoner's license so I could find out what the fuck is up with demons and determine the appropriate response, because if the souls thing is for real we're giving you way too much slack already and if it's not we need to stop fucking gagging you - but now there's something more urgent than that, somebody else is going to have to be the smart summoner with the impeccable record who goes to bat for demons' right to speak because I am going to be busy saving Eianvar from its dumpster fire of an emperor."

"Some people are assholes who think it's funny to make desperate humans make excruciating faces! Nice demons often don't have anything they want out of a summoner, at least not that they can get without talking, so you get a different mix than with angels and fairies! The gagging thing was some asshat who was a summoner pre-Revelation deciding that the best way to make bank once he couldn't corner the neodymium market anymore was selling books scaremongering about that until everyone decided letting demons talk was irresponsible!"

"And see, that just makes far more sense as an explanation than 'demons can steal souls' - if all three kinds of daeva can do it you'd expect angels and fairies to know more about it, when in fact they mostly know less than a well-informed human; if only demons can do it, it's an insane asymmetry in the powersets any way you slice it - I've read one of those books and it looked much more like someone trying to make himself look important than someone sincerely warning the world about a perceived danger - it just would have been irresponsible not to check -"

"How were you imagining you'd check, it's sorta hard to verify."

"Summon a bunch of demons long enough to get to know them. I have a talent for getting to know people. Assuming that demons as a collective aren't hacking random summoning with the specific aim of fooling me in particular, I'm satisfied that the more reasonable explanation is also the true one. I could spend days following up on it to make really sure, but I am going to be busy figuring out how to seduce, murder, appease, propitiate, or otherwise handle Fareine Siurek."

"He's not bad-looking, if you go with 'seduce'."

"Oh? What's he look like?"

Cam digs up a portrait.

"Goodness me. If only he weren't so fond of torture."

"I know, right."

He laughs.

"All right, let's see..."

Another flower crown begins to take shape. This one is more elaborate than the last.

"- I apologize if you don't like flower crowns," he says as an aside, "I'm sort of informally apprenticed to a weaver and it's got me thinking about practical knot theory - anyway - I want to know what the deal is with the barely-mentioned prince, and I want to know what the Emperor's daily routine looks like and who else in his life I should be worrying about, and I want to know what the minimum necessary intervention is to get him to stop. Suggested avenues of investigation? Questions you want answered?"

"I have no strong opinions on flower crowns. Is there anything you'd like to search Korovai's writing for - possibly also, given the givens, his editorial work - like, what would convince you to talk to him instead of spying if you found it."

"Part of the reason why I'm so cavalier about spying is that, as a future jarl of Thule myself, if I found myself in his position I would welcome being spied on by a hypothetical me. Also, I don't know yet how to talk to him safely, because there is local magic and I don't know how much of it is also spying on him. But I'd try if I saw a solid indication that he was the sort of person I'd accept as Emperor of Eianvar, i.e. at minimum not a dumpster fire."