Quite alive. In Isarn. Nothing urgent, will be back before morning. 

She'll pass that along without taking the ten minutes to send a response.

"Possibly we should assign him a secretary. Someone who's job it is to keep track of where he's expected to be, so we don't have tonight's situation where I'm expecting him to be around camp and Karlenius is expecting him to be back by sunset and to update me if that changes.

I could nag him about it but I expect that would put some strain on our friendship and - I want to try to avoid the thing where archmages that live at the same time are never famous for being the best of friends." Nex and Geb. Aroden and Tar-Baphon. Any runelord and any other runelord.

"I can think who'd make a good secretary to our secret archmage. It seems very profoundly not worth you nagging him about it." Iomedae's in a mood, as she always is after getting back from Vellumis; she wants to fly around and fight morally uncomplicated enemies, but there's logistical decisions about Marian Leigh to make. 

(She has contemplated, and decided she's fine with, the fact she yearns from the front when she's away from it. After the war it'll be a habit to change, but the war isn't over, and people die when she's away.)

"He says he'll be back before the morning, at which point we probably want to talk about whether there are any new things you need from us before we go back to research. Might be a good time to suggest it, if you have a candidate then."

"I'm sure I can find one."

Elie's compatriots in Isarn get more treasonous as the night wears on, not that their over-dinner conversation was exactly legal. There are rumors about the Emperor - that he's unwell, that his son is even more of a dolt. The Shining Crusade has the Empire's wealth and most of its spellcasting power tied down. If there were to be a new Emperor before it ends, perhaps Galt will be free. 

There was a little rebellion in Galt in the 3830s, he remembers. Sometime around then, anyway. One of many throughout their history, quickly and completely crushed. Of course, it's different now, he's here – 

– and he has more important things to do. 

"I have always hoped, and always believed, that I will live to see a free Galt," he says, because it's true. And he can excuse himself, and make dinner plans with the man with inexplicable taste in opera, and teleport back to the crusade. 

"Elie! You missed the light show. I suppose you can do your own any time. Alfirin means to steal you away for research again in the morning, if that's convenient for you."

"I am entirely at your disposal."

"In that case maybe before she does that I should ask your advice on the civilian administration. I was just thinking resentfully that if anyone had done this before then there'd be less guesswork involved in trying to do it right."

"The civilian administration of – "

"Liberated Encarthan which we haven't named yet but I take it ends up called Lastwall."

He's not really in the mood to discourse about governance right now. 

"I see. I wasn't aware that you intended for it to have one." 

That is not among the answers she expected! "- well, it needs to - collect taxes, and provide port security, and have courts and so on?"

"Of course – but your military handles all that, there's no distinction. Isn't that how you arranged it?"

"....no? Or - presently, if a soldier commits a crime, my military courts put them to trial for it, and if a miscellaneous scoundrel in Vellumis commits a crime, the civilian administration in Vellumis puts them on trial for it. I suppose if I weren't in the middle of a war it might be only one system, I don't have a strong instinct that you need military courts in peacetime."

"And who appoints those civilian judges and administrators? Who do they answer to?"

"Presently I appointed them all. In the long run, they'll have a commander with a council of other top generals and advisors, with a successor appointed from that council or plausibly just by my direct orders, depending how easy it is to see, as a god, who'll do the best at it."

"I'm happy to discuss the administration of your military dictatorship, but in my time that's not what we call a civilian government." 

"You mean that power is not devolved to the nobility? That was on purpose, I am hoping that one can govern without a primary concern for keeping your own largest landowners from trying to murder your administration if the state outmatches them by enough."

" – I meant that it doesn't have any civilians in it."

But he should be charitable. Of course, from the perspective of 38th century Taldor, the government of Lastwall must look positively progressive. 

"Forgive me. I think I see where the confusion is. In my day, it's considered best practice for the civilian government of a nation to control its military, rather than the other way around. In the first place, it's difficult for a military state to maintain a peaceful succession – not when the contenders for power all have their own armies. In the second place, a ruler whose power comes from his army is naturally inclined to use it. The wealth of the nation is turned, not to the benefit of its citizens, but to the pursuit of endless war. 

But then, in Lastwall, that would be the point."

" - do they have violent successions? That is - the failure mode I was most singly obsessed with, it's so monstrously wasteful. I was hoping that threatening to personally smite people for not going along with whoever's appointed would do it even if everything short of that failed, but also hoping that - that people can be better than that, if there's enough institutional incentive and if they and their soldiers are sworn to something higher.

I think it's just fair to say that I do not particularly mean for the wealth of my state to be turned to the benefit of its residents specifically except insofar as prosperity is a necessary condition for innovation and moral strength and high populations and so on."

"Élie's a Republican. Supposedly it actually gets tried at scale in the next nine hundred years."

"Huh. Does it work?"

He can answer the easy question first. 

"Lastwall does reasonably well on the succession front. It just – it couldn't, without a god supervising the process every time. And our Republic – "

Does it work? In a sense, that answer's easy too: of course it does. He believed it when he was seventeen, and he believes it now. It might take longer than he'd hoped – it might be bloodier – it might require more wisdom to establish its institutions – but he's still convinced that government by and for its people will prove more just, humane, and prosperous than the rule of masters over subjects. 

He believed all that when he was seventeen. And if the intervening years have given him no cause to doubt it – well, they haven't made him more confident, either. It's easy enough to make excuses for the Republic of Galt. Like that it spent its whole brief existence at war, or that Cheliax never stopped trying to sabotage them, or that almost everyone in it was evil. He wouldn't find them compelling, he thinks, if he hadn't lived there, and if he hadn't seen how badly some of Galt's most notorious monsters had wanted to do good, or how desperate they were, or how little they understood how. (Andoran might have gone differently, but that hardly bears mentioning). 

Does it work? He can't tell them honestly that it does. Only – 

"It will."