"I do not think I am particularly owed an apology. You handled the situation very well. And you were right that I was charging you suspiciously little."

"Well, I know you better and it's less suspicious now. And I still owe you an enormous favor."

"See, that's the other problem with trying to be a good person all the time. What in the world am I supposed to use an enormous favor for."

He shrugs. "Ask me to spend more of the government's money on subsidizing apprenticeships for young wizards who remind you of yourself instead of on feeding the impoverished?"

"I don't want to do that!!"

"Well then I'm not sure how to help you, here. Ought I keep trying?"

"I expect I would enjoy that, though I do not really expect it to land on anything. ...the problem with subsidizing apprenticeships for young wizards like me is that the young wizards like me are a good investment and insofar as they can be identified at all anyone would fund them. Also some of them might be hungry. My mother believed it to be among the substantial advantages of her children that we were never ill and never hungry, she thought that all children would be cleverer if this was true of them."

"It seems like the sort of thing that might help, alongside all the other advantages I imagine you had."

When Lilia was fourteen, she pretended to acquire a diary and write in it, and secretly rigged it to gouge out the eyes of any reader. She'd been trying to get Rose, but a servant had looked at it first. It'd been rebellious, her mother explained to her afterwards, though she hadn't meant it that way. Rose and the servant both were her mother's property, and what right had Lilia to damage her mother's property for her own entertainment? She'd taken Lilia's own eyes, as punishment, but having it explained to Lilia that her mother was disappointed was actually worse than the week she spent in darkness.

"I was very lucky," she says, and the truth spell lets her have it because she really and sincerely means it.

She's very busy. Egorian avoided being half spies by being a very dangerous place to be a foreigner; Westcrown has no such protections. There is more industrial espionage than political but that's not for a shortage of the political. (Also, while people being murdered for their rifles isn't technically her department, Lilia is patiently expanding the scope of her department and will be helpful there, too, if she can.) The Church of Asmodeus wants the country to collapse into civil war again and still owns the souls of half of everyone who matters; various demon lords of course want the country to collapse; Taldor wouldn't mind that either; it would be uncharitable to assume the same is true of Cheliax's allies but Lilia assumes it anyway, from long habit. 

“Did you recover Cheliax’s diamonds or did someone escape with those?” Lilia asks Cansellarion once she has realized he’s probably not hiding it from her because she isn’t supposed to know. (He does weirdly little of that, or is much much better at it than she would expect.)

“We did not recover them. Either someone escaped with them or they were all spent.” Cheliax did spend a lot of diamonds in the war, it’s not implausible they exhausted their supply.

Aspexia'd been spending them like she had a lot, and the end of the war caught her by surprise, because she hadn't expected Lilia to give the enemy comprehensive guidance on palace security and personal security for Queen and Crown. They're probably still out there. Inconvenient; even an idiot is a danger, if they can make Wishes.

“It’d be unlike Aspexia to spend the last one, and there aren’t many people to whom she might’ve entrusted it, but probably I’m too busy to track them down…and probably they’re in Mechitar or at the Worldwound.” Mechitar is ….interesting, these days, and a wise person would probably go lay low somewhere else, but Lilia knows the sort of person who becomes a powerful player in Asmodean Cheliax and many of them will be there. 

“I think I’d be reluctant to send anyone there who is powerful enough to get around whatever security the Asmodeans arranged for themselves there. At least until we know how Geb is reacting to recent events…" It's not that he's categorically opposed to ever ordering operations in Geb's backyard, but he was trained in Lastwall and is inclined towards caution there, especially when they suspect Geb to already be annoyed with Iomedae and Her church.

"And that’s assuming we were sure they were there. What leads do you imagine you’d be following, if this were your top priority?”

“Well, I’d ask Rugatonn. And if they’re in Mechitar I wouldn’t try to recover the diamonds at all, just tip off a rival of theirs there, make a new friend, get the diamonds out of Asmodean hands. We can pick a rival who’s probably just going to make themselves prettier, if you worry about miscellaneous Blood Lords having Wish diamonds.” It seems like the kind of thing paladins would worry about.

“That is the sort of thing I worry about, or at least would not want to idly cause. Hm. It would be spending a large soul-trap gem, and a slight risk of her escaping… how sure are you that you could get it out of her?” He…probably doesn’t need to clarify what methods Lilia would be allowed to use. She knows already and wouldn’t expect there to be an exception for Asmodeus’ former high priest.

Lilia suspects it would be damaging to her relationship with her paladin allies to make it too salient that she can get anything out of anyone so long as she doesn’t have to follow the paladin rules. She does not bring it up. “I could get it out of her,” she says. “I don’t think it’d be worth the gem, but we separately wanted to ask if she knows why Asmodeus spent so much on the war, and that might be worth the gem.” And she is, now that she contemplates the question, not actually sure why Lawful Good allows interrogations at all, but it’s going to be a bit tricky to raise that concern without making Alex worry she’s still dismembering her prisoners…

The thing is that she can follow their rules. She can, in fact, though it'll be slower and more annoying, drag everything out of Aspexia while Aspexia is unconscious, and not having the slightest experiences that paladins could fret about. When a person is delivered into her custody everything Lilia wants to know will be Lilia's. The rules change how quickly she can get there, but not really what she can get. 

Obviously it would be an enormous pragmatic handicap for the forces of Good if they were to decide that you couldn't interrogate people with magic. She doesn't want to be on the losing side. She doesn't want them to decide that. But there's an oddity to the rules, a sense in which they feel like make-believe. A lot of people would say that all paladin rules are like that, but - most of them aren't, actually... the paladin rules around raping people are not that you can do it as long as you use magic rather than force and have sufficiently good reason...

Alex will probably be pleased that she's thinking about goodness seriously, if she does find a way to articulate this, but all of the phrasings she's thinking of seem likelier to make him alarmedly say 'what are you doing to people'??? 

“I am not entirely sure it’s ethical, though,” is what she settles on.

...Not the response he was expecting. He sets aside the moment of worry about whether this is a trick of some sort; if it is it's probably not just a trick and it's better to think about whether it is when he's not in the middle of talking to her. He'll take it at face value for now.

“Because it’s using her opposite to the purposes she followed in life?” 

Is that her reasoning? It's tempting, if there is a standard and paladin-comprehensible reason nearby, to adopt that one, but she doesn't actually think that it is. “She would hardly claim a principle against people doing that, but -

- I’m not actually sure the use of magic seems importantly different than the use of pain. It seems maybe allowed because it’s so much neater. Or at least if there’s some other justification it doesn’t seem applicable. Maybe it does people less lasting damage, an important consideration when the plan is to immediately trap their soul again forever. Maybe it does the interrogator less damage, but -” Wry smile. “And anyway I can’t exactly imagine paladins believing that torture’s all right if you have constructs for it so no one has to scar their soul with the doing.”

He's not actually a particularly philosophical Iomedan. Trying to explain being a good person in a philosophically rigorous way isn't really his strength. He might still be the best person to try to explain it to Lilia, but he vaguely worries his explanations won't be good enough.

"I think it makes a lot of sense to have a principle against causing suffering for its own sake or instrumentally. Obviously we can’t have an injunction against ever causing suffering, but - torturing someone for information is a situation where if, for some reason, they didn’t mind that would make it less effective. Using magic isn’t like that, so there’s not any incentive away from trying to use the least harmful methods available, or finding less harmful ones."

“You punish criminals,” Lilia wants to say, but probably this makes her sound like an idiot, from one angle or another. She’s not very accustomed to debating philosophy with paladins. She mostly only debated philosophy with - well, Aspexia Rugatonn, and that was a different skillset, or with her mother who had very little patience for arguments about incentives and injunctions and who tended to think that you should do things if they were themselves a good way to get what you wanted, and not otherwise. 

There is an overwhelming temptation to escape the conversation and it is, on close examination, stupid. It feels viscerally like the likely outcome of conversational missteps is a horrible death but that is false. This is strategically useful, including the occasional idiocy. Maybe she can just - “that rule seems to me to prove too much and also prohibit punishment, in general, for anything.”

“It forbids some forms of punishment. It doesn’t forbid being forced to make restitution, nor punishments whose primary aim is to prevent further wrongdoing. I agree that the principle sits uncomfortably with trying to govern Cheliax."

“Not just with that! Lawful Good people hit their children if they try to run into a fire, yes?”

Alex does not have children, never will have children, and has not put any thought into how he would raise children. And never tried to run into any fires himself until he was an adult. "I…don’t know. I imagine they mostly try to pull the children away from the fire?"

She can hardly give him a hard time over being an obsessively specialized person. She too mostly has not interacted with a child since she was one. “It seems to me defensible to beat a man for theft, even if the only route by which this prevents future thefts is that he and others dislike being beaten and will want to avoid it. If I try to come up with a reason why it’s not similarly defensible to beat a man until he tells you where he put the diamonds, I find myself saying things like that it is a use of him against his purposes, or that it causes him suffering which is bad in itself, which seem to mostly apply just as much to magic.

...I can get the answer out of Aspexia while she’s unconscious, which has notable advantages for security. I’m just - not sure I’m doing anything importantly different than I used to.”

If she’s reluctant to perform interrogations due to moral qualms, he’s not going to push her on it, even if he thinks the policy of allowing them in general is a wise one. "I see. I think it’s not urgent to do it now, or for you to be involved at all if you’re reluctant."