He enters, and looks around for the local cleric.

A woman who appears to be barely out of her teens, in Iomedae's vestments, second circle. She looks - apprehensive, actually, at the sight of him. She bows. "What can I do for you, sir?"

"There's really no need for that, I'm not in the local command chain -" It's only the other Iomedans who've been bowing to him all the time, so it can't just be local custom - "I'm settling in and should be slotted into the Channel rotation."

"Ah. All right. What time's convenient? We do ten minutes past the bells - dawn, third bell, fifth bell, seventh eighth and ninth, and then dusk, this time of year. There's a second bell that rings with the first if it's an hour for a channel. ...we can change them around, of course, if you like."

"...I have five in a day, and would prefer to reserve one for emergencies - With four more in a day, would you keep to the same schedule or make it more frequent? It would be most convenient for me to do a number of channels closer together - say, the eighth and ninth bells and another channel half an hour after each - so that I am not spending all of my time running back and forth from the keep. But I can be inconvenienced, if your needs are otherwise."

He would not usually say that, but this woman seems inclined to go to great lengths to avoid inconveniencing him and maybe needs a bit of a push in the other direction.

" - if you're going to be assigned here for long I'd add a few more times," she says uncertainly. "But if you add the times and then lose people and have to cut back, then it makes it very notable to everyone in the city. Those times are fine. Sometimes as a reward for the men - or if they're doing a long day - the Knight-Commander has the seventh and eighth bell cleric go out after training and heal everyone up in the field so they don't have to trudge back on over here, I don't know if that'd be any trouble but if you don't want to do it then you want ninth and we could add a half past nine and a tenth, and dusk isn't long after tenth. I don't know if you're interested in overseeing any of the classes but those start at tenth usually."

"I expect to be here on a permanent basis, or if I leave," such as by being dismissed from my post for almost getting into a fight with another Good cleric in my first week here, "I expect to be replaced by a similarly powerful cleric... But even so, you make a good point, that we should probably not add times to the schedule right now while I'm still getting settled in. Especially since it may turn out that the Knight-Commander prefers to meet with me in the evenings, or something. For now I will take the seventh, eighth, and ninth bells, and the one at dusk? Would you like me to oversee the classes?"

" - well sir I'm sure you'd be much better at it but I don't know what important work we'd be interfering with." Hulrun rather liked to lecture about all the important work that everyone under him was interfering with through their inability to do their jobs independently. "The afternoon bells are good ones to take, the other priests here are first circle and the soldiers just don't always get patched up enough even if they double channel every time."

"I'll take those, then, and watch the classes at least until I acquire some important work. I don't think I would be better than you at teaching the classes, right now - I don't know any of the people here, or what they would benefit most from learning - and I do expect that in the long run I will be busy. But if you want me to watch you for a few weeks, and advise you - or not - I can do that."

"Yes, sir. There's also a hospital for the sick, upstairs, but no one but paladins is supposed to go wandering around it because they could spread the sicknesses, and there's the start of a library though it only has six books so far, and there's Arsinoe's office right there - Arsinoe is a third circle priest of Abadar - and Kyado's there - Kyado's a first circle priest of Erastil - and I do a sermon on the week-end." She can pattern-match and guess that he will decline to take over the sermons saying she knows more about what these people are ignorant of, so she doesn't offer.  

He'll check out the library. Which six books?

The Acts of Iomedae, a history of the first Mendevian Crusade, a book about the identification of demons, a cookbook for unclear reasons, and two modern histories probably purchased in Absalom. 

The priestess climbs up to the belltower to ring the tenth bell.

Well since he's already here he'll watch the class tonight too.

Yep she expected that and she rather has stage fright about it. 

Irabeth said that the point of the classes was for people to feel assured in the Goddess and for those of them who might be suited to Her service to learn this about themselves, so they could help the war effort. Stasia wanted to object that she simply doesn't know enough to teach anyone anything, but Irabeth was very busy. So Stasia's been trying to read a little bit ahead in the holy book and then tell people about it, and also give them very minor miracles of Iomedae, and also teach them to read if possible because the Knight-Commander said that would also be very useful. 

The people who come to the classes quite evidently like her; she beams at them when she sees them and asks after their units and scolds them if their cloaks are ragged - "in this weather? you've got to take better care of yourself!" She does a cantrip for each of them as they come in, and looks inquiringly at the fancy important priest as they gather around for the tenth-bell channel. She isn't sure if he meant to start today or not.

He'll do the channel, then find a seat in the back and sit down to watch the class. If he were a paladin he'd sit in the front and offer Stasia courage, but he's differently blessed.

All right. This week they're going to go through the sounds all of the letters make again, and everyone attempt to write their names, so they don't have to sign for their pay with an X. If they have sweethearts at home she thinks they should practice spelling those names too, because on a document of marriage you write both names and the sweethearts will be really impressed. 

With that done with, the next section up in the holy books is the story of Iomedae flying on a griffon and fighting the King of the Barrowwood, and she doesn't honestly know why this is important but she practiced reading it three times this week so she can get through pretty much all of the words, and do voices, which keep peoples' attention, and then talk about the complicated part at the end of that section about how the Crusade was already going on but Iomedae wasn't sure she should join it because they wouldn't take her and she couldn't see how to change how it was going. She privately thinks this is a bizarre sort of thing to put in a holy book but presumably it's in there for a reason, and maybe it's something like that before Iomedae came the Shining Crusade looked hopeless, and such a mess it couldn't even make use of the kinds of people who could fix it, and then she came and put it together and won it, and maybe this is also kind of what happened with the Mendevian crusades. 

And, (gaining a little bit of momentum), for a while after Iomedae'd started fixing the Crusade people in faraway distant Taldor who didn't understand it was their own doom at stake still thought it was doomed, because that's what they'd heard before, and they didn't bother going and checking if it was still true, and it took everyone longer than it should have to discard the habits of doomed people and realize they were winners.

That's her best guess, anyway. (Hulrun would have had some fairly vicious complaints but he'd at least have kept them for in private and it looks...like the important priest is inclined the same way?)

The important priest is definitely not going to criticize her in front of everyone! Instead he approaches her as the last people are filing out and smiles and tells her that he was right and he couldn't have done better than that.

...it's not that she doesn't believe him, as he's a priest of the Goddess, but she would believe an angel doing aerial acrobatics in front of her face and still be quite shocked to see it. She nods. Does he have any questions about how they're running the temple or anything.

"Look, Stasia - I am here to conduct diplomacy, and to occasionally speak with the Goddess on the Knight-Commander's behalf, and - I am sure there will be a lot of other things I wind up doing, while I'm here, but one thing I'm not here to do is to preach. The Goddess already chose someone for that, someone who knows the strengths and the needs of the people here. I counted three mistakes during your lesson - not mistakes that you made, but mistakes that I would have made, trying to teach here. I think you're afraid that I'm going to come in here and tell you you've been doing everything wrong and - you haven't. The temple here is your business. The Goddess trusts you to run it well, and I trust you to run it well, and I'm sure even if you told me every last detail I couldn't tell you how to run it better. I could tell you how it's done in Lastwall, but this isn't Lastwall. I would not try to run a Lastwall temple here any more than I would try to use a spear on a skeleton.

...If there are particular things you are struggling with, or that you think you're not doing right - You can ask me what we do in Vigil, and I can explain it to you, and we can decide together whether it makes sense to try the same thing here. But anything you're doing that's just working? Keep doing it."

Stasia unfortunately missed much of the import of that speech because of a deficiency that just got corrected in her theological education.

" - you can speak with the Goddess?"

"...Sort of. Not like the conversation you and I are having, but she can answer questions as long as it's a question you could answer 'yes' or 'no' to. And it is expensive for her, so we try not to ask about things that are not important, and we have - rules, for how to put multiple questions together, so that answering them all is less expensive than it would be if we asked each question separately. But yes, with those limits, I can speak with the Goddess."

Stasia looks very awed.

And then thoughtful.

"...but since it's expensive, it wasn't worth Hulrun asking if people were traitors or not, and that's why we just had to kill them?"

"...Stasia. Hulrun fell."

"...he died, in the fighting in Kenabres. You mean he didn't go to Heaven?" She is quite upset about this actually!

"...I'm not actually sure. Axis, I suspect, but only very temporarily - he was raised. But what I mean is that - Hulrun did great evil, and the Goddess decided that it was a mistake, to leave him empowered as he was, and took away his powers. I don't know all of the details but - there are ways to check, especially for someone empowered as Hulrun was, whether someone is a traitor. Ways much less expensive than communing with the Goddess. And it sounds like Hulrun was not availing himself of that? If he was executing people that he knew might be innocent, that's the sort of thing the Goddess would take away his powers for."