"Eventually the crusade ended, because Mendev ran out of people and money. The demons hadn't pushed past the Wardstones in over a decade, and we never held ground inside the Wound for long. It felt like all the lives we'd thrown away the past few years were just a pointless waste. I'd been talking, to all the priests and paladins and adventurers I could find, but none of them thought the Crusade was wrong, or at least none of them knew how to do any better. I guess those who did weren't in the Crusade."

"The Mendevians had allies who sent Lawful armies to the Crusade. Lastwall, Isger, the Hellknights. They all agreed that Mendev was corrupt and mismanaged and incompetent, that they didn't make such mistakes at home. They said they wouldn't throw away men for no gain, or fight without achievable objectives. They hated each other but they all swore Law was stronger than Chaos, unity better than division, organization a necessary tool for waging war, that making sacrifices for the greater good or the greater victory was the best way to accomplish it."

"By the end of the war I was strong enough to register an alignment - Chaotic Neutral. Some of my fellows were Chaotic Evil. Lastwall took one look and said they didn't want us. Mendev couldn't afford us, Isger went home. We needed employment and we liked the idea of fighting demons and winning and the Hellknights said they could use us. So we went north."

"Obviously that was a mistake, maybe the worst I ever made. But I don't think - that the Hellknights were wrong, about what they promised us. They fought in the most efficient way, and they accepted sacrifices for victory, and it was bad luck that we became the sacrifice but we knew someone would. I just found out too late that - I wasn't willing to accept the conclusion, to sacrifice people, so I should never have accepted the principle."

Irabeth has heard a lot of stories over the years, of good people falling to Evil or Chaos or working with the demons or, sometimes, just breaking. Too many of those stories involve the Hellknights or Cheliax or Isger. One would be too many, with Asmodeans freely walking her country.

She's long past really feeling the horror of every story, everything that happens to people she doesn't personally know and love, as fresh and burning as if it were happening to herself. This is a wrong and a failing that she works hard to overcome, to respond as if she still feels everything she should and not just a tired muted horror at the long war and the demons and devils and all of existence.

"That's - a terrible tragedy," she says, and she wills herself to feel it. "You wanted to do Good. You came out of the war Neutral, no mean feat for a soldier whose commanders were, by the sound of it, neither Good nor Lawful. Most soldiers don't do nearly as well, and I'm honestly impressed that you did."

"And you heard about Law, and wanted to try it. But Lastwall didn't want you, so you went with the Hellknights, and ended up Evil and an enemy to Law. And that's a great loss, to Law and to Good both."

"I'm sorry, that that happened to you. That it happened at all. Lastwall failed you. We failed you, everyone who tries to make Lawful Good an ally to all Good people, to everyone who wants to help us. I don't know what anyone could or should have done differently. I'm just - very sorry, that it ended that way."

"I don't think it's the Hellknights' fault that I read as Evil. And I don't regret what I did to get there."

"We were on patrol when we ran into a nabasu and her ghouls. We lost the fight and ran away, but they managed to kill some of our horses, and we had wounded and drained with us. We knew we wouldn't make it back to base before they caught us."

"The Hellknight commander said if we stood and fought we'd all die for nothing. So everyone who had a horse would keep running, and leave some of the wounded behind."

"Some of those wounded were my men. People I'd fought with for years, people I owed my life. I was - tired and disillusioned with the war. So I said, no, I'm staying with them. We'll go down fighting, and buy you time to retreat."

"He said, I'm not leaving them to fight. The nabasu will turn them into more ghouls, and grow stronger herself, and I'm not going to feed our enemies' forces. You have one minute to say goodbye or prayers or what will you, and then we're slitting the throats of everyone who doesn't have a horse."

"I couldn't win a fight against him. I was outnumbered. And I thought - do I really want to keep fighting for years until a demon gets me? Or would I rather die with my friends today?"

"So I pretended to agree, and stepped aside, and then I killed his horse."

"You're not riding away, I said. You're fighting today, either with us or against us, but you don't get to run away."

"He ordered his archers to fire on the wounded, and attacked me with the rest of his men. And I knew I was going to lose that fight. So I prayed to Gorum, lord of battles, to give me strength, because I was finally fighting for something I believed in. And - he did. I used a spell to get away and channeled over and over to keep my friends alive and we were still going to lose, but we'd taken a few of them down with us."

"And that's when the demons found us. Fighting the Hellknights, and losing, and me a cleric. So the ghouls assumed we were friendlies, and charged the Hellknights. And when the dust cleared the nabasu had made enough ghouls to fuck off to the Abyss, and eight Hellknights and armigers were dead or turned, and two of my friends were still alive."

Irabeth doesn't think it would help to keep saying she's sorry that happened. Gord doesn't want her pity or her compassion, he wants her understanding and - her validation? Her judgement? Maybe that's her vanity talking, to think he'd care about a paladin's good opinion.

She knows what she'd say to a soldier under her command in such a situation. Killing your allies is an illegal order and Gord was right to refuse it.

Except - it's not right in the Lawful sense, because presumably the Hellknights didn't make that order illegal, or hide ahead of time that they might give it. And while it's Good to stand up for your friends and to volunteer to fight with them, she's not sure if it's uncomplicatedly Good to fight your commanding officer over it, if you don't even expect to win. It's not Lawful, which doesn't make it Evil, but - perhaps it's Chaotic Neutral?

She's very sure that what Gord described is not, in fact, Evil. He shouldn't have become Chaotic Evil because of that. It must have been the things he did later, with the demons.

Weeping Cherry feels like there's something off about that story, but she can't quite put her finger on it. She puzzles for a minute over why the soldiers couldn't just promise to fight the demon and then kill themselves if that didn't work, since that sounds like it would leave everyone better off. Or just re-arrange the horses so that the least-depressed soldiers got them. Or split up into multiple separate units so that the (singular?) demon couldn't follow them all.

"I think I might be missing some cultural context," she remarks. "Because that scenario doesn't really make sense to me. But I'm glad you shared the story. What happened next? Did you talk to the demons and learn that they were being forced to fight too?"

Doesn't make sense to her - oh. "Ghouls are intelligent undead, ones who retain their memories and become irrevocably Evil. And feed on corpses. Nabasu are demons who have magic to turn living people into ghouls at the moment of death, but they can't do it to corpses, which is why you wouldn't want nabasu to get living captives. Besides the usual reasons."

"Every time a nabasu makes a ghoul it grows in power, and when it decides it's powerful enough it it goes back to the Abyss. So nabasu try to find weak prey, and don't care who they turn, and then they leave a horde of ghouls behind. Ghouls can also spread ghoul fever which turns sick people into more ghouls, so it's important not to let them grow in numbers."

"Undead don't tire, so you can't outrun them on foot, and nabasu can fly as fast as a horse can run."

"Does that answer your questions?"

"Oh! Yes, that does make more sense," she agrees. "Thank you. I had been wondering why they didn't split up to escape pursuit. I still feel like there were probably better solutions than killing everyone immediately, though -- like asking the soldiers to fight some of the ghouls and then kill themselves, which seems like it would be better for everyone -- but I don't think that really needs clarifying. The important bit is how this all affected Gord."

"So there we were. Three injured men, and a pack of ghouls. The nabasu teleported away, but we still couldn't take them. We couldn't even bury our dead, because we knew once we left they'd just dig them up again - to eat the corpses," he clarifies for Cherry's benefit.

"So we - compromised. Took a part of them, to bury home. I -" he doesn't really want to talk about it. It's probably not important. "I think we were all a bit crazy that day. Not just the ghouls."

"Anyway, we left. We didn't want to go back to the Hellknights, or - risk meeting other patrols who'd ask what happened. So we went south, into the Wound, and took the old road back to the Mendev front."

"It's easy to travel with a cleric. You can channel and make clean water, and carry heavy loads and ignore the cold, though I didn't have enough spells to cover everyone at first. The only thing we had to fear was the demons. We pretended to be demon cultists so they'd let us pass. That's how I first got to talk demons. And it was how I first met a real cultist, too."

"We'd spent almost five years fighting demons. Kill or be killed, on sight. They didn't encourage us to think of them as people, in the Crusade, they were just - the Enemy. Evil, cruel, untrustworthy, impossible to negotiate or bargain with, impossible even to understand. The Sarenites said everyone was redeemable, in theory, and I'm sure some of them tried but we never heard of any success stories. There's no peaceful demon village of farming dretches somewhere our side of the line, no heroically Good demon fighting with the crusaders."

"It's a shock, after all that, to walk among them with weapons sheathed. You can't relax. You feel like a spy, an infiltrator - and we were there on false pretenses. They ask you some banal thing, what's for dinner, like they do one another, and it makes you feel like you're a demon yourself. Playing the role of one, and how long before you become one in truth?"

"We tried not to linger. But I found myself talking to them, more than I really should have, out of some kind of - horrified fascination. They were walking, talking, thinking people, whose fondest dream might be to forget their own name, or it might be to torture a random peasant to death by sucking on his entrails, and they - didn't see anything wrong with that, or maybe any difference between the two. I wanted to - make it make sense. I didn't manage to, not until much later. But I did learn why they were there in the Wound and what they were after, which was something the Crusade leadership neglected to tell its footsoldiers."

"They're not here to conquer Mendev, or the world, or even to kill and abuse people like most crusaders think. Oh, I'm sure Deskari wants to conquer the world and kill everyone, and maybe so does Khorramzadeh. But the regular demons? They weren't there to conquer anyone. They definitely didn't want to fight anyone if they didn't expect to win, or to make any necessary sacrifices for the cause."

"They were fleeing the Abyss, because life in the Abyss sucks. Demons constantly abuse and kill each other, and even power doesn't bring much safety. The Wound is much better, because it has fewer demons in it! You can spend days without anyone trying to kill you, if you're a demon in the Wound! So of course everyone who can goes there. And once there, their natural inclination is to spread out and avoid each other, and they attack mortals on sight or run away because they expect everyone to try to kill them, but if you leave them alone, maybe with some wildlife to hunt, many demons will just sit down and - rest for a few years."

"But they can't do that, because more demons keep coming from the Abyss. Forcing them out and, eventually, to the borders, where they have to fight the crusaders in front or the demons behind them. And when a strong demon wants anything done, they bully weaker ones into doing it, killing or hurting any who won't obey them. If a succubus wants across the Wardstone line, she'll enchant or threaten some demons into fighting a patrol as a distraction. If Khorramzadeh wants Kenabres taken, he'll start murdering demons and won't stop until everyone who's left goes and sacks Kenabres for him. None of them want to risk their lives trying to take Kenabres, so he has to convince them they risk more by not taking it. And for all I know Khorramzadeh is only doing it because Deskari's threatening him."

"In the Abyss, all but the weakest demons can teleport at will. That makes it harder for demons to bully others or keep slaves, because they keep running away, and even the strongest demon won't spend all their time hunting down and punishing a hundred weak ones. But here in the Wound, the Wardstones stop demons from teleporting so easily. Only the strongest ones can still do it, and then only a few times a day. This lets strong demons gather bigger bands than they could at home. It's what let Khorramzadeh drive a horde of demons to Kenabres and still have it there after Terendelev started her fly-bys."

"All this time, we hadn't been fighting an army. We'd been fighting a horde of refugees."

Does this account contradict any fact she knows?

She thinks - she believes - that demons, or at least very many demons, are much more - proactive about doing Evil than Gord makes it sound, and much less careful of their lives. And she doesn't think most of them are being threatened by other demons into it, or at least not into gratuitously taking their time (and incurring more risk) being cruel to their captives.

But if some demons, even many demons, behaved as Gord described, would she know about it? Maybe there are isolationist demons and she never met any, for the obvious reasons. And many demons have wanted to run away once she was smiting them, but so have many humans, so that's hardly proof they didn't want to be there to begin with.

...She really hopes he's right, because that would mean Cherry's solution of putting all the demons very far away from one another might actually work, consensually and not by brute force.

Should she do anything differently, because of what Gord says? Or have done it differently, she supposes. Maybe prioritize decapitation strikes even more, and leave demons clear paths to flee battles? She's never been in charge of high-level strategy and she doesn't know if it'd be worth it. When she has time, she will review her past actions in light of this new information, and determine if she had erred, if she could and should have found this out earlier and done something about it. But she can't do anything about it now.

She refocuses on Gord.

"I met a halfling at one point. A cultist of Deskari, or at least he wanted to be one. He thought I was the first Deskarite cleric he met."

"Demon cultists are another thing they don't want you to think too deeply about, in the crusades. Kenabres is crawling with cultists, and has been for decades. Why? Where do they all come from? What do they want?"

"Some of them are deluded. Some just want power and don't care who they hurt to get it, or they want to hurt someone and can't do it on their own. Some are probably doing it for reasons I don't really understand."

"But why are there so many of them here, in Mendev? The demon lords can offer power, but why do so many people here accept it? If all it took was making some Evil clerics, wouldn't we see a lot more cults and revolutions around the world?"

"It was dangerous to go around asking people what all the good reasons were to follow Deskari or Baphomet. They chose to fight for the enemy, and I didn't think about it much more than that, when I was a crusader. That was the other biggest mistake of my life."

"This halfling had been born into slavery in Cheliax. His master wanted to make Lawful Neutral, and heard that you can get Good points for cheap if you fight in the Crusade. So he came to Kenabres, with all his hirelings and his slaves, and ordered them to start killing. He thought he was donating his fungible property to a Good cause, like a reasonable Abadaran."

"They fought them some demons, and one of the slaves was killed. When they were back in Kenabres, they tried running away in the night. The city guard caught them at the gates, whipped them, and brought them back to their master. Mendev respects the property rights of Law-abiding crusaders."

"The next time he took them out into the field and had them stand watch, they let the demons into the camp. They thought they'd kill them all, and they though they'd be sent to the Abyss and become demons themselves for what they'd done, and they didn't care. There comes a point where - it just doesn't matter anymore. If you hurt people enough, they stop being rational."

"But the demons only killed everyone else. One of them, a coloxus, asked if they'd like to serve him instead. And they said yes, if he'd let them tear down Cheliax, and Mendev, and the whole crusading world that brought them nothing but misery, where everyone they had ever known were still enslaved. Better that demons eat the world than let that stand."

"He came to me, asking, demanding that I help him do this, in Deskari's name, but it would have been as just a plea in Gorum's. And I - couldn't say no. I couldn't find it in me to defend what I'd spent my life doing, while permitting that. Not when demons had been the ones to help him, and not the crusaders supposedly fighting for Good."

"I didn't promise him the destruction of the world. But after we got home, I didn't go back to fighting demons. I started freeing slaves, instead."

"I kept going back into the Wound. Met more demons, once I was stronger and not too scared to talk to them as equals. The saner ones can talk to you just for the sake of talking, not constantly looking for advantage or scared for their lives. They're just people. Most of them are really shitty people that I wouldn't want for friends or allies. But I don't want to kill them all, either, and the same goes for the cultists. And I met one demon I honestly liked, and I wish her well where-ever she is."

"There aren't many places for a fugitive slave to run. In Mendev I give them some money and they try to fade away into the countryside, and I hope they don't become bandits or end up recaptured or killed, but realistically many do. The smart ones get a ship for the River Kingdoms. Up on the Chelish border, the only way out is through the Wound again. Some of them end up going with the cultists, that way. But I can't judge them anymore, for choosing that over their old lives."

Talking with demons sounds fascinating. She is pretty sure that if they have vaguely human brain structure she could induce targeted retrograde amnesia to make them forget their name. The tricky part would be limiting the other effects. Maybe a lot of demons will be willing to volunteer for experimental neurosurgery and she'll finally have enough experimental subjects.

... that should probably not be her main takeaway from this. What else is there to say, though? She already knew that things weren't good in Golarion. This is giving her more details about how, exactly, but they're going to fix this as soon as they open the door.

Probably the real question is what does Irabeth think about this? She glances at her, but she's never been very good at reading faces, and dealing with high-stakes socialization has drained her reserve of social energy. She turns on her HUD's body language visualization layer, which thinks that Irabeth is 'thoughtful'.

That doesn't help much. But it's better than it could be, and she does think this is giving her a much better idea of what Gord has gone through, which is nice.

Actually, she hadn't thought about this much because of the, well, Everything. But they both came from an active war zone, didn't they? She should probably suggest that they take a vacation and maybe talk to someone who specializes in treating PTSD once the assault on Hell is over. Maybe she can invite them over to the mountain compound on Antichthon and show them the hot springs.

There is a brief silence in the room while Gord works on restoring his more usual mood.

He's told parts of this story two, three - a few times, now. For some reason, it feels harder every time. He can't control his voice very well, or choose his words to affect others, when he tells it. Normally he'd practice, make it into a sermon, but it's. Unpleasant.

Irabeth clears her throat.

"Thank you. For telling me that." She'd say she knows it couldn't have been easy, but she's not sure he'd take that well.

"I think I understand you much better now. I'm going to summarize it in my own words, so you can tell me if I'm wrong."

"You feel betrayed by the crusade, including the Iomedaeans and the Mendevians who called for it and led it for the most part. They made tradeoffs for you without telling you what they were. They made you party to Evil actions you did not consent to, or that turned out to be insufficiently justified. The risks and tradeoffs they made didn't pay off, which calls into question their competence.They misled you by omission - about the enemy, about the winning conditions, about the reasons we were fighting at all."

"Faced with a war seemingly between two evils, you turned away from Law, which was allied with the Hellknights, and to Chaos, which let you help people on either side of the war as you see fit."

"You couldn't tolerate the lesser evils we accepted. You had to make your own tradeoffs, for your own bright lines that you wouldn't cross. Like any tradeoff, it led you to commit some Evils, prices you had to pay to get what you wanted. And that brought you into conflict with us, because we wouldn't accept your tradeoffs."

"Is that a fair summary?"

"That's all true." It sounds like a statement in a court of law, but that's probably just what she's used to.

"It's not a very good summary, because it doesn't mention any of the actual reasons I had and things I did, and talks in generalities instead. And you said I was wronged by the crusade, but I keep pointing out that I'm not the victim here. I'm not even dead."

"But it's true and probably fair, once you've heard all the details." He thinks the details matter a lot, and he obviously didn't have time to tell her everything, but it's probably not worth pursuing.

"I didn't mean to replace what you said, or that it's all I took from it. I wanted to be sure that - the way in which I understood and framed your story was correct."

"Alright."

"Then I guess you can tell your story, too. But I want to ask you something first."

"Understanding each other is always good. But I don't just want to understand you, I want to understand - something about Iomedae and the rest of your people. Whether we can be true allies, or even allies of convenience. I won't make the same mistake again, that I made with the crusade."

"You were willing to accept some evils to contain the Worldwound."

"Tomorrow we'll be fighting Hell, so we shouldn't have any Hellknights with us. But your other allies, the Abadarans and - whoever among the gods is most like Mendev, they are still slavers. Will we be sending people to their deaths tomorrow who didn't volunteer to fight?"

"Maybe you'll say we won't, because Cherry's fixity field is strong enough we won't need them. But as Desna said, this is not the end. There will always be more Evils to fight. When the day comes that we can't beat them alone, will you be making the same tradeoffs?"

"Am I going to have to fight you over this again one day?"

"You don't have to answer now. You can tell your story first, if you think it would help me understand the answer better, or if you just want time to think about it. I wanted to say it first because - this is what I really care about."

"And if I don't like your answer, I promise to do my damned best to try to understand how you think, because I don't want to fight you if there's another way."

There are several things that Weeping Cherry could say. The thing she wants to say is "the thing about awful tradeoffs is that if you give people more resources they can often stop making them, and I bet that's true of the followers of Iomedae."

But she doesn't want to interrupt. Irabeth and Gord seem to be on the right track, vis-a-vis understanding each others points of view. So she just sits and looks thoughtful and attentive.

"I hope you'll better understand why I answer as I do, after I tell you about myself. But I can give you the answer now, because I don't think it's going to change."

"I don't know who'll be fighting at our side tomorrow, or the day after. I can't promise you we'll change our tradeoffs, or choose differently next time. Not just because I can't speak on behalf of Iomedae, but also for myself - I have not seen a reason to do differently, if I were to be placed in a similar situation again."

"But we don't need to ever face the same choice again. Because we don't make our tradeoffs once and for all. They're not something Iomedae would ever make a Lawful promise not to change, I think."

"We want to do the most Good with the least Evil. The more resources we have, the more Good allies, the less Evil we have to accept. It's obvious why, if we have more power, we won't need to accept as much Evil. But there's another reason, which is that - we take our allies' wishes into account. If Sarenrae joins the fight, and She really hates working with undead, then we won't ally with necromancers, not just because we don't need them once we have Sarenrae's power, but because we really care that She doesn't want to enable them or work with them. As much as we care about our own goals, in some ways."

"I'm not saying this well. Let me try again."

"Iomedae is the Lawful Good goddess of prioritizing, triage, and making tradeoffs, in order to triumph over Evil. The things She has to triage and trade off aren't just Her own values, they're the values of all Her allies. The price of having Sarenrae as an ally isn't that Iomedae pays Sarenrae money, it's that Iomedae prioritizes the things Sarenrae wants more than She would otherwise. If Iomedae didn't do that, Sarenrae would just use Her power for Her own goals without allying with Iomedae."

"Even things like paladin oaths, which are absolute rules for us mortals, are sometimes chosen as tradeoffs by Iomedae and Her allies. I didn't invent my own oaths, or skip any of the standard ones, because I know I'm not Wise enough to do that, and because there's great power in having all paladins swear the same oaths. But Iomedae is the one who wrote those oaths - some of them, anyway - and She worded them to accord with the tradeoffs She was making then. If Her resources and allies change, She may instruct the next generation of paladins to take different oaths, ones which forbid more Evil outright."

"The more allies Iomedae has who want to ban slavery, the less slavery Iomedae will be willing to allow, and the higher the price she will require of Her other allies if they want Her to tolerate slavery."

"Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Gord is nodding along. "That seems very straightforward. To get what I want, I need power. The stronger I am, as an ally, the more my wishes matter to the alliance. I should focus on growing stronger. That is Gorum's teaching."

"And - you're saying, or implying, that to get what I want, I should join the alliance and influence it from the inside rather than work alone or against it, and I suppose that is the Lawful teaching?"

"That's true, but - I'm trying to say something more. I am sorry I wasn't clear enough."

"What you described is indeed a Lawful argument. I want to make the Lawful Good argument, which is better than that."

"We want you as an ally, you and everyone who thinks like you. Not just because we want your strength on our side, and are willing to pay for it by adjusting our methods. Because the things we really want are already the same. We both want Good, and freedom, and - the thriving and well-being of all sentient creatures. We only differ on the best way to get there. If we join forces, we should both profit from changing our methods to be more alike, or we're doing something wrong."

"There's a piece of Law which - I don't understand well enough to explain how to make it work, but I do know that it's true, and I believe it's a very important principle."

"'If you come to us in good will, you will not be worse off for it.' Abadar also makes that commitment; doing so is not enough to be Good. We want it to be true that, if you come to us in good will, you will be better off."

"If you want to serve Good - and I believe, now, that you do - we will do our best to help you serve Good according to your own values, because we want to enable all Good. If we can help you free some slaves that aren't being held by crusaders, we'll do that. If you want to free these particular slaves, for - valid moral principles, not abandoning those in front of you - we will also help you do that, not in the sense of helping you kill Mendevian officers, but - in trade. Maybe we'll free them ourselves, peacefully and Lawfully, while you fight some other evil that we both hate, and that way just as many slaves will be freed and you'll be able to do even more Good on top of that."

"I haven't thought this through. I can't offer you the right deal or arrangement, right now. Maybe you'll need to speak with Iomedae more directly, for that, maybe you'll need to gather more people or gods who think like you do so you can all sit down and negotiate. But the crucial point is - we want to cooperate. We won't wait for you to come to us, we'll do our best to reach out and talk to you and people like you, to reach better outcomes than fighting each other. I, personally, commit to thinking deeply about everything you've told me, and trying my best to - do better, and not repeat the same mistakes. I don't know how relevant it will still be after tomorrow, but I will work hard to learn every lesson I can from your story."

"One thing that we - paladins, Iomedaeans - take very seriously is learning from our failures. Not having you on our side was a failure, you and all the others whom we must have missed over the years. I can't say what, specifically, we should have done differently. But in the months and years to come, after the war is won, some very Wise, very serious people are going to sit down and think very hard about where we may have gone wrong. Because there may be another war after that, and we will not make the same mistakes again."

"I can't promise you what weapons the next war will be fought with. But I can and do promise, in my own name and to my best understanding of Iomedae and all her servants, that we will do our very best and spare no effort, to make sure it is fought with better weapons than the last. And I hope that you will help us do it."

That is definitely not the right deal to offer him! The idea of buying some slaves' freedom by fighting elsewhere is utterly disgusting. 

To buy a slave's freedom is to pay the slaver; who, being paid, will use the money to enslave somebody else. Gord had considered, once, being an adventurer and spending his money freeing slaves. An Abadaran told him it wouldn't work; the more slaves he bought, the more there would be for sale. Gord isn't sure about the logic, but when an Abadaran tells you buying instead of robbing - that is, freeing the slaves without paying anyone - will make things worse, you tend to listen.

On a much more fundamental level, though, he - can't stand the thought of buying people. Of giving the slaver money and not stabbing him in the same motion. He'd do it, if he had to, if it was the best way, but he'd hate it. 

Is that his justified mistrust of Law talking, standing in the way of doing Good? What is Irabeth actually saying?

She promised he'd be better off working with her, by his own values. Or, at least, that she'd try to make it so, and that he definitely would not be worse off for trying.

It's a beautiful promise. To do her best is infinitely more valuable (and believable) than simply swearing to accomplish some end.

By his values, there should be no slaves, and anything he does should make there be fewer. And he does want to help the people in front of him, and not just know abstractly that his efforts helped someone he'll never meet. He doesn't know if he could live with himself, seeing people suffer and not doing anything, knowing his hard work was going towards helping suffering people - somewhere else.

But - those are his values. Could she, or rather Iomedae, offer him something he'd happily, uncomplicatedly accept? He doesn't know, but that's no reason not to try. That's how you find out if you can do something, by trying. And if you find out that you can't, you try harder.

He'll have to think it over carefully. Maybe he's missing something, there were a lot of words in there.

And then he thinks he'll - try accepting the offer, and see how it goes.