"There's a reason that human defendants aren't gagged for their trials and forced to write. You all must have noticed how sometimes misunderstandings happen over the internet where they wouldn't in person because speech is just so much more expressive."

He can also make facial expressions.

"It's not the same, trust me, I've been gagged. Tone matters, and communicating in a medium you're comfortable with matters. They would never gag human defendants. If some place did, everyone else would consider it a human rights violation."

Someone thinks that the GCP of all people would probably know if it were really untrue that demons can take souls.

"How? They never let us talk, or talk to us."

They must sometimes under controlled conditions, everyone assumes.

"Everyone assumes wrong. The Elves found out about people daevafying when they die within like a week because Elves talk to us. The entire population of Godspring has now summoned a daeva because they got confirmation and then took the implications seriously. This world has a prejudice which it has permitted to blind it for a very long time."

It seems really implausible that nobody would've noticed.

"People noticed! People said things! And we weren't believed, we weren't taken seriously, we weren't trusted! Any of you can summon a demon and ask for the posthumous works of William Shakespeare, any of you can confirm this in your own living room - though use the bindings linked on this site, or other comparably trustworthy ones, summoning without adequate bindings really is dangerous."

William Shakespeare was a summoner?!

"There's still an afterlife for nonsummoners, they just don't get any powers. But William Shakespeare is still around writing plays, yeah, I've read the ones after he died and some of them are excellent."

After some delay his comments section turns into Love's Labors Won Discourse.

Eh, he can live with that.

He alternates impatiently pacing and impatiently flying and annotating the GCP's demon binding until the trial.

Silva's argument, in contrast to her last demon defense, affirms the right to suicide and identifies daeva as among the instruments expressly permitted for this purpose rather than making much of the demon's personhood. Arati shows up to testify but the judge declines to let her, believing her to be an impostor. The prosecution focuses mostly on how young she was, but Silva manages to argue that this means that Arati violated the law and that the demon was no more obliged to ask for her ID than a bottle of pills would have been. The demon gets six weeks and will be sent home after that.

"So," he says to assembled wizards and witches and Bells that evening in Milliways, "I want to sneak invisibly into Ganymede and make six ink blotches on this binding that in effect invalidate it, for every circle, and then I want to answer them. Because I am annoyed with them."

"What are you planning to do? They'll just send you home once they notice -"

"I wasn't planning to be immediately conspicuous about it. And when they send me home I'll do it again until they give up."

"If you panic them they'll kill your summoner to give you less time to operate."

"They're lying to the entire population. And using that lie to conduct trials in which the major witnesses are barred from testifying on unchallengeable grounds of being an imposter."

"How do you propose to fix that by making them need the hazard pay they give their summoners?"

"Summon them back and invite them on the show? I don't want anyone to die and I won't endeavor to panic them but they cannot continue operating as any kind of legal authority while running charade trials built on a lie that by now they know is one."

"How sure are you that they know?"

"Takes ten seconds to verify and even if they hadn't done it for some reason Maitimo outright told them."

"He could've told them anything, from their perspective."

"If they don't know by now they are culpably ignorant."