"I must admit, the teachings of the Goddess for countries like Lastwall and for free people are likely not the best possible advice for people who are not free. If there are listeners in Cheliax who find themselves more called to Milani's path - I can hardly fault them for that. I myself would probably choose that way, living under the Thrunes. Though dying in the fight against evil is often not the worst fate that a man might meet."

"I have taken an oath of honesty," says Freedom, "and some time after I first considered myself bound by it I was taken prisoner in a foreign country, and made a kind of indentured servant, which is a position in which honesty is very difficult. The hardest part was not actually that I feared I might die, if I was asked the wrong question, though I did fear that. The hardest part was that I feared I might get other people in trouble with me, and they would rightfully be very angry with me, for having made an oath that now obliged me to betray them to their captors.

If I could speak now to myself then, I would tell her that - that to draw a line in the sand and say you'll die before you cross it is the freedom it is most difficult to deny people, and the most precious one I've ever known. To take up the hand you've been dealt and decide the point past which you will refuse to play it is to be a free person in secret, no matter what those who have power over you believe you to be. For a while it was my greatest source of strength. 

...but it is reasonable to choose not to draw one's personal line in the sand at 'ever lying'. 

And it makes sense for Iomedae's banner to mean certain things to all who see it, things that one cannot make true alone in enemy territory, such that one should not take that banner up where one cannot make those promises come true. In sufficiently difficult circumstances the promises one makes to oneself should be different ones than She made, as the champion of a great Crusade, as a god.

But it seems to me that one is walking in Her footsteps, whenever one tries to figure out who they'll be even if the world is trying to make them worse than that, who it is that they will refuse to ever stop being. There is following Iomedae by keeping the promises She was known for, and there is trying to be like Iomedae, by making your own."

Iomedae is kind of expecting the next high level strategy meeting to be awkward because she went on the radio and called their country unfree. She is giving them a fair bit of credit that Cansellarion has not ordered her to cut it out. Her father would at this point have ordered her to cut it out.

Fortunately they're all politicians and are presumably experienced at being diplomatic even if they're annoyed with her.

"If I ever tell Iomedae that I'd like to be on her radio show," Jan says, "You are to relieve me of command until I have recovered my senses."

She was planning to pressure him into it by getting Codwin and Cyprian first. She looks at the table, a bit sheepishly. …then she realizes that he is joking, and that she got him to make a joke, and then she is delighted. "You are going to take this as the strongest case yet against democracy but in America the president takes questions from reporters every week. They stand in a crowd with their microphones and shout them at him."

"Questions about what?"

(from an August 2014 press conference which I selected at random, drafted before recent events, resemblance genuinely coincidental):

"You've said there should be a ceasefire in Gaza, but how can Israel agree to that when today one of their soldiers was kidnapped? Also, have you seen the Israeli government respond at all to your call for them to do more to protect civilians?" and "Do you think you could have done more to prevent the Russian invasion of Ukraine?" and "Mr. President, you've called for a ceasefire in Gaza, you've also called for a ceasefire in Ukraine, with no more success there. Has the U.S. lost its global influence? Have you lost yours?" Iomedae liked listening to Obama's press conferences. She found them very instructive. She can do voices for all of the reporters.

"I can't say I'd like that very much. Do the laws say the President has to answer, or can he just stand there?"

"No, he absolutely needn't answer, but the people of his country will form opinions about whether his Ukraine policy and his Gaza policy are any good, and they'll vote for Romney if he's doing a bad job, so if he wants to stay in office his explanations had better be satisfying." Iomedae herself preferred Romney, but she didn’t in fact think that Obama was doing a bad job. He was so, so good at explaining himself.

"What if his policy is good but it doesn't sound very good - if reporters were shouting at me asking why we're not at war with Cheliax I don't think I could give an explanation that would satisfy the average farmer, but I still think our policy of keeping to our international commitments even when it's inconvenient is the right one."

"...I think I have three answers. One is that I do think America gets into far more dumb foreign wars than Lastwall does according to its histories, in part because its commitments are no more durable than 'until sixty in a hundred senators votes to change this', though also I'm not convinced by the example of Cheliax that countries should make long-term commitments more durable than that. Maybe they should be eighty senators of durable, or even a hundred senators of durable, but - there's something to having an escape valve which will clearly only operate under extreme circumstances. The second is that I suppose even if we shouldn't go to war with Cheliax there's something to having people ask us to defend it. I don't know. I used to ask Aroden every night to fix the Evil afterlives already. I didn't really believe that he had the means to do it and would just forget if I didn't remind him, but - but it's a way of being in the habit of noticing the question, right, and not being someone who never wonders. 

The third and most practical answer is that America has three hundred million people in it and the President is the most persuasive and compelling and comprehensible one and I am nowhere near his rival, at making complicated decisions sensible to people. I probably will be in twenty years."

"Not sure I like that answer any better than the lack of one. We've seen it in Andoran too - Nothing against Codwin as a person but he's no genius, at war or foreign policy or lawgiving - but he sure is Splendid."

"Yes. People like it when their rulers make sense to them and make the world make sense to them. You can interpret this as idiocy, or as - all of you would I suspect be unhappy if Iomedae appointed an outsider with no comprehension of Lastwall's culture as your ruler, even if he was a genius at all of war and foreign policy and lawgiving. 

I can imagine it, some American who has the advantage of you at war and law because his world has more study of it and who happens to get along splendidly with Cyprian and Galfrey but who is an American, and eats absurdly sweet foods in absurdly large quantities and has no reverence for your gods and considers it mildly impolite to mention that they exist and who is licentious because a lot of Americans are, and you might work for him but you wouldn't like it, and every time a different woman left his chambers undressed except for being smeared in an exotic chocolate sauce he imported from Casmaron you'd feel - diminished, no matter how brilliant his tactical decisionmaking, because he doesn't care about the things you care about, and doesn't even know they're there to care about, and has never been subject to the constraints you are subject to and cannot recognize grace within them. 

I think this is how the people of a country usually feel about their rulers.

 No one likes to be ruled by strangers who cannot know their lives or make themselves understood to them. And no one likes to be unable to evaluate those who have power over them, they want those who have power over them to display those signs they can recognize as signs of familiarity and allegiance and shared values. 

In democracies when people get a choice they choose to be ruled by people who are comprehensible and likeable and feel like allies and friends to them, at the expense of other concerns. Some part of that is foolishly underrating the other concerns, some part of that is a preference as entitled to significance as any other. I don't know how much is the one and how much is the other.

But I do think that the fact people, given a choice, grasp ravenously for something that their rulers don't agree matters and would never otherwise think to give them is an argument for democracy, not against it."

Lastwall's cabinet has looked deeply uncomfortable ever since the words 'exotic chocolate sauce' if not sooner.

(Alfirin is trying not to look too delighted.)

"I suppose you've given us something to think about," says Jan after a pause. "...but for now, let's discuss the proposed rifle training schedule."

"This is Freedom Radio, and for today's guest, we've reached out to the Church of Asmodeus!"

"...okay, that's true, but only very technically. We sent them a note. It said that when the worship of the Good gods is permitted in Cheliax and when Cheliax's children grow up healthy and happy and strong and when newspapers telling the truth are sold in Chelish street corners, we'll be happy to host them on the show. And we will, though I'll tell you how that's almost certainly going to go down.

House Thrune is losing. Many of you have been lied to about history, so let me spell it out. In Aspex's time, the Empire - the greatest power in all of Avistan - stretched as far north as Lastwall and Varisia and as far south as some holdings on the Mwangi coast. The Empire grew and prospered until Aroden's death, and then it collapsed into thirty years of devastating civil war, egged on by Asmodeus. Now, let me tell you some things about thirty years of war. The ordinary people die, when the soldiers take all the food they need for the next harvest. Disciplined soldiers moving through their own territory will have enough sense to leave some food. But as the war dragged on, the soldiers got worse. The first year that you leave a family with barely any food for winter, their children die, and their elderly. The next year, or maybe the year after that, they all die. Then the people in the cities where the food was taken die too. People get out, if they can, and starve, if they can't. No natural war I know of has endured as long as this one at the intensity of this one; it endured so long only because Asmodeus was making it. 

Asmodeus robbed Cheliax, crippled it and leached it and starved it, for thirty years, until he could puppet some cowards to the top of the pile of corpses he'd made of their country and declare them in charge.

But the people of Avistan are brave, and noble, and they're not idiots. And you'd have to be an idiot, to work for Asmodeus. Your only reward is eternal torture. If he says anything else, he's lying. It's worse than dealing with the fae. So the people of Avistan? Rebelled, either during the civil war or as soon as it was clear who Hell had placed atop their mound of corpses. Rahadoum broke free. Molthune and NIrmathas broke free. Varisia broke free. Korvosa broke free. The holdings on the Mwangi coast broke free. 

Pezzack rebelled, and the Thrunes had to burn one of its own richest and greatest cities to the ground because they realized they'd never see peace from it. Galt broke free. Andoran broke free. 

Once, there were twenty archduchies. Now, there's five to go.

One of those five is the place I'm from. I promise you, when I tell you what the Chelish people have been robbed of, I am not judging you. You had no way to know the worth that is your birthright and your inheritance, that was ripped from your hands by the Church of Asmodeus. You have felt, perhaps, the aching absence of something, something that should have been yours, but you did not know the words to put to it. I will be there to take it back with you. I know what we're supposed to be. 

Five to go. We'll get them. It'll take longer than I'd like, and more people will die than I'd like, but I truly expect that all of Cheliax will rise up and have their freedom, in our lifetimes, or by the work of our lives, because we will certainly many of us die in the doing. 

And then we'll legalize the worship of good gods, and bring good modern medicine and invent even better more modern medicine, and we'll allow any newspaper that speaks the truth, whether the people in power like it or not. 

And then we'll put every priest of Asmodeus who participated in Asmodeus's butchery of our country on trial for their crimes. And I'll visit one of them in prison, and that's how this show will fulfill its commitment to let a priest of Asmodeus tell us about their faith, though we'll still have some problems since I don't allow lying on this show and nearly every word out of their mouths is a lie. They worship an Evil, weak, pathetic god, that could only with enormous effort and expense manage to wrap his fingers around the throat of my homeland, and mortals have spent every minute since breaking those fingers one by one and prying him loose. And there aren't very many fingers left. 

The Thrunes are weak. It makes sense; strong and free people have their choice of employers, so Asmodeus can only work with slaves, or people too stupid to realize they're getting a bad deal, or people who no one else would ever choose to work with. In nearly every case I've ever heard of, a dynasty as incompetent and wasteful and self-destructive and infighting-happy as the Thrunes would be overthrown, and good riddance. But Hell keeps its puppets in power; it has to. All the rest of its puppets are somehow even worse."

Iomedae has several dozen embarrassing completely true stories about the Thrunes and then a segment called 'lies the Thrunes thought they could get us to believe'. Her tone sobers, as that wraps up. 

"I do want to admit something. We're going to kill Abrogail, if one of her relatives doesn't get to it first, and I'm very much looking forward to it. But I can't usually bring myself to hate her. Why? Because this is the story of Abrogail Thrune's life: she will spend it as a tortured lump of flesh that can't remember her name. That is the whole story of Abrogail Thrune's life, thousands and thousands of years, depending how long it takes us to fix Hell and that one might genuinely take us a while. 

There's a little brief window at the beginning of her story where she has some kind of title and does a lot of torturing people and feeling special, but it's unfathomably short, alongside eternity. Even if she outlives the median Thrune in power, and she probably won't, it's the blink of an eye alongside her eternal reward for it. Abrogail Thrune's story is that she will be tortured horribly for a very long time and she won't remember what it was for and no one will care who she was. Nothing else features in her story, not really. 

Obviously if she had any sense she could escape that fate. Get her soul trapped. Plane Shift to Heaven and beg them for help. Hire the best lawyers in Creation to try to find a way free of her contract. Why doesn't she? Well, part of the answer is that if you're the kind of person who realizes you don't want to go to Hell and does something about it, you're too smart for Asmodeus to put on the throne of Cheliax. Part of the answer is that Asmodeans have built up this long list of lies and rationalizations, and she may genuinely believe she's too special to be tortured in Hell. She's not, but she may believe it. Part of the answer is that Asmodeans try to insist that everyone goes to Hell, that there's nothing else, and -

There is something else. There is a better world, and it is in your reach. We'll talk with the dead, on this radio show, in the upcoming weeks. We might visit Axis and report to you directly from there, once we have some adequate recording equipment. Abrogail Thrune, if she found the courage to get out, would have some problems, but ordinary people can just choose to do the right thing, and escape Hell that way. It's not easy. But it's hard the way that getting the harvest in is hard, not the way that flying to the Moon is hard. You work hard, leave the world better than you found it, and get into paradise that way. Most people aren't damned, in countries that Hell isn't trying to strangle. Most people need not be damned, even in countries Hell is trying to strangle. 

Hell wants people to think that Goodness is a strange impossible thing you have no hope of doing. Goodness is very simple. Close your eyes, think about how you could leave the world a little bit of a better place, make someone else's burden a little lighter, do a little bit more of your part in keeping the wolves at bay. Take a sick friend soup. Pick up a baby and count to ten on their fingers. Tell someone who doesn't have a radio what the weather's going to be. It's these things paradise is made of. 

Asmodeus has to combat the natural human instinct to love one's children, the natural human instinct to love one's parents, the natural human instinct to love one's self, because all of those loves will guide you out of Hell, if you let them.

Asmodeus also claims that he's going to conquer the other afterlives, but I have seen the weapons of war that are made by free hands in the defense of free lands and when you see them too you'll know that's just another lie of His.

Evil has to fear the strength of its own people. Good doesn't. Cheliax has to closely monitor all its wizards because most of them defect at fifth circle, the minute they can Teleport to freedom. Good countries rejoice on learning that their wizards have reached fifth circle because their strength strengthens everyone. 

Anyone can see that they cannot trust anyone who wants them to be weak. Abrogail Thrune wants you to be weak. I don't. Her Cheliax cannot endure you at your strongest. The true Cheliax is built out of all of us, at our strongest. This is Freedom Radio, reporting from an undisclosed location; but one day we will report from the soil of my birth, in Cheliax, and we'll build paradise together."

When the episode ends she is crying. She wasn't expecting that. She isn't sure what to do with it. It feels slightly like being unable to breathe and slightly like everyone else is very far away.

And then there is a touch on her metaphorical shoulder, a feeling of recognition and conviction and love and safety - not the kind of safety where there isn't danger, but the kind of safety where you are at last a legal adult and at last have a concealed carry permit - and she can Lay on Hands in the morning. 

Abrogail Thrune II is upset about Freedom Radio. Reasonably so; it has presented them a thorny challenge. The radios are most popular with ship's captains, who rely on them to avoid storms, and who can obtain them cheaply in every foreign port; when the radios on ships aren't needed for weather-watching, people will inevitably listen to descriptions of chariot-races, or adventure stories, or Freedom Radio if someone's daring. Banning them has been tremendously unpopular and notably hard to enforce. Banning them because a teenage girl said mean things about Abrogail on the radio also looks weak.

The better option is to assassinate Freedom, or better yet to arrest her and host a public execution and malediction. Abrogail did not initially assume that this would be very difficult. But far from the ad hoc operation they initially presumed this was, it seems well prepared (Probably still Morgethai.) Manohar has met Temos Sevandivasen, and ran a Discern Location when the man appeared live with Freedom. It failed, which can only mean he was Mind Blanked. Scries for Freedom herself fail consistently, even when conducted by powerful casters who one might expect could overcome the difficulty intrinsic to having never seen her and only heard her voice; she’s probably Mind Blanked all the time too. 

There's of course one way to extradite someone which doesn't require knowing their real name or where they are. 

And so Paraduchess Lilia Ramona de Montero, Cheliax's spymaster, is not very surprised to learn that Abrogail is planning to use Gorthoklek's once-yearly Wish to try to grab the little bitch, along with seventeen other people Cheliax would like to publicly execute and maledict. (She learns this because Abrogail needs to know which of the other likely candidates are in fact still alive and not known to be operating at the Worldwound.) It will fail for a majority of the subjects, but strike terror in the hearts of all of them, and it's less likely to fail for Freedom, who can't possibly yet be a powerful adventurer. Mind Blank and a priesthood from Milani or Iomedae or whoever she's got them from won't save anyone from a Wish cast by Gorthoklek. Even if she’s a paladin the girl’s odds are very slim.

Then, of course, they'll broadcast the girl's torture, and her death, and her malediction, and all will be right with the universe again. 

Lilia agrees it’s a good plan. One that requires complicated setup: for Freedom herself, ‘Wished into the immediate vicinity of a pit fiend’ will probably do for taking her prisoner, but if you’re not wasting the opportunity to grab seventeen other people then you want to make sure you can secure them if you get them, and the list is going to include people like Morgethai who wear a wizard’s hat and can’t merely be dropped right into an antimagic field. She gets a very small team to work on it; you don't want to risk something like this leaking. 

...Lilia falls asleep and into a routinely scheduled mindscape, and informs Myrabelle of this. They're going to time the Wish for mid-next-broadcast so it's harder for the show to hide by getting an imitator. They're going to try for, in addition to the little brat, Morgethai and Cansellarion and Galt's Cyprian and some of his marshals and Andoran's Supreme Elect, Codwin, and some Andoren generals and leaders, and a half-dozen prominent Chelish defectors and Catherine de Litran and a couple noted political philosophers and one of Abrogail's distant cousins who defected and is in hiding somewhere.

She gives Myrabelle the whole list because sometimes Myrabelle may want to adjust the results of such matters, though in this case she doesn't really expect any adjustments, certainly not for the benefit of very stupid teenage girls. They're not in the saving brave idiots from the consequences of their decisions business.

Well that can't be allowed to happen. Myrabelle has no adjustments for Lilia to make, but she's going to make sure some of the parties are alerted and Lilia should make sure she's covered in case Cheliax learns that this leaked.