Narikopolus is pretty sure that investigations mean that you're in trouble, which is... fair... in that he just got two of the Church's priests killed. It is probably not so much trouble that they're going to stop working with him. It is not, he imagines, going to be a pleasant conversation. But he's being an Iomedan now, and part of that is not hiding when you've done wrong and been called on it. If he starts trying now, he won't last the year. 

He has time to meet in person, at the mansion. 

"Archduke," he says, and bows deeply. "We are very grateful for your time, and will endeavor not to take too much of it. This is my colleague, Sir Vittorio Cantes, also of Lastwall. Would it be  useful to you if I began by explaining how incident reports are conducted, or would you prefer to get to our highest-priority questions?"

"I'd certainly prefer to understand the process, but I expect the Church is currently more pressed for time than I am. If you have urgent business elsewhere, I won't insist that my interest keep you from it."

The Chelish nobility are really all surprisingly reasonable for nobility. He is starting to think that 'kill the worst four fifths of them and raise all the best ones from the last several centuries' is in fact a viable reform approach, if probably kind of Evil under circumstances less extreme than these. 

"The process is much more useful if people - use it - and so I will happily explain it, if you can spare the time. When something goes seriously wrong and the Church could probably have prevented it, or mitigated it, we try to figure out - how, and why that didn't happen. The aim is generally not to figure out whose fault it was. Most serious things that go wrong required a number of different errors of judgment, or if there were a situation where a single error of judgment could cause a catastrophe then almost by definition something went wrong earlier; we do not aim to run the Church such that single errors of judgment cause catastrophes.

It is hard to change the decisions that men make in the moment, under fire, and easier to change the decisions they make in calmer circumstances, when they sit down to plan, so we tend to focus more, though not exclusively, on the leadup to an incident. For example, if a team at the Worldwound gets killed and replaced by a bunch of shapeshifting succubi who decide it'd be fun to imitate them and infiltrate the fort, and they make it in because the man on guard is supposed to Detect Magic and doesn't recognize the auras he checks for, we can reprimand that man, if he's still alive, but - why was that the only layer of defenses? Why didn't he have more training, if his role was security-critical? Can most men in that role get it right? Did he even make a surprising mistake? 

The reports are meant to be helpful to everyone who is trying to improve their handling of similar situations in the future. You are, of course, our ally, not in our command, and have every right to ignore our recommendations if they strike you as in error. But the hope is that nothing like this will happen again, if we can figure out why it happened this time."

Narikopolus doesn't exactly believe that nothing worse than criticism is going to happen as a result of this process, but he's pretty good at doing things that are obviously the thing to do when interfacing with systems that are quite possibly going to kill him in the end, regardless of what he might or might not believe about the outcome if he bothered to worry about it. It doesn't especially matter what he thinks is going to happen if he cooperates. There has never been and is never going to be some safer option where he doesn't cooperate with the Church or the Crown in any capacity.

Anyway, he can learn how it's done, and see if he can put it into practice himself. He's learned one way of ruling, and he can learn another. Or die, and he'd kind of prefer not to do that yet.

"I see. Do I understand correctly, then, that it's meant to help everyone involved to reflect on the decisions that led up to the events investigated, as opposed to being carried out solely for the sake of the Church in Lastwall?"

"Yes, that's correct. We publish - redacted versions, as many people want to keep the details of their security procedures or other information private - but we publish the bulk of each report. You are welcome to read any past ones if they're of interest to you."

"I'd be interested in those, though I doubt I'll be able to make a proper study of them until the convention is over. Where do we begin, then?"

"When did you first receive an invitation to the Constitutional Convention? Can you describe your thought process around attending it? How did you decide who to take with you?"

"I knew about the convention shortly after it was announced, and received a formal invitation not long after. I believe it was Abadius, but I'm not certain. I didn't make immediate preparations. I'd thought at the time that I would stay with my sister in Westcrown, and that not much preparation would be necessary within the city. I spent more time satisfying myself that the archduchy could do without oversight for a period of several months. I wanted to bring Marit and Arn for counsel - I'd say because the convention seemed like the sort of thing one would need good counsel for, but the truth is I've been relying on Iomedan advice fairly constantly, and wouldn't have wanted to go without it in any situation. I wanted to leave Select Irek in Kantaria. I thought it would be a waste to bring our only Select with us when what we needed was theology, and Marit and Arn were perfectly capable of providing that. Kantaria needs the healing, and it matters much more to the people to have an empowered priest, to know that the goddess hasn't abandoned them. So - Marit, Arn, and a small handful of attendants who have served for many years. I might have brought my son Armand, if I hadn't sent him to the wound, but he does more good there, and - learns something, I trust, if not what he would learn here."

A train of thought nears something awkward. It rolls off harmlessly, like a raindrop on a waxed umbrella, without him ever properly seeing what the thought is. It's not that he thinks the paladins are secretly mind reading him. He does that almost all the time, hardly noticing that he's doing it. It's a rare moment when Narikopolus is prepared to be fully honest with himself, and through long force of habit, he doesn't do it while talking to anyone else.

"What was your understanding at that point of - what the convention was, how important it was likely to be, how highly you or the Church ought to prioritize it?"

"I expected the convention to settle some number of questions of governance. I won't claim I knew which ones, and assumed that would be explained when we arrived. I expected it to be - really quite important to the Queen. I expect she fully understands the sacrifice it is to the realm to have all of the higher nobility occupied by something like this at once, and wouldn't call them together for something not important enough to merit those costs. Certainly not while much of the country is still suffering from the effects of Infernal rule, and the new nobility are still getting their bearings. Of course I thought it was enormously important for me to attend. The Queen called; I came. I would be surprised to hear that any of the archdukes even considered not attending, but of all of them, I have the most to make up for, and the most to prove about my willingness to fully participate in any reforms her Majesty wishes to make."

"I confess, I didn't consider anything about how highly the Church should prioritize the convention. I knew religious delegates were invited, but I assume that the governance of Cheliax is less important to the Church as a whole than to Cheliax's own nobility." 

"So you arrived here in Westcrown to stay with - your sister? When was that?"

"Toilday before the convention. I should have sent someone ahead, I didn't realize how badly neglected the estate would be."

"Why had it been neglected?"

" - well, the previous owners are dead," he shrugs, apologetically. "Charthagnion Manor had belonged to my sister's husband, and he and virtually all of the adult members of his line were executed. The staff had quit or been let go. The slaves had been sold off. My sister and some of the grandchildren were occupying the house with only a housekeeper and a cook, and had not been concerning themselves with maintaining it. I should have anticipated more disruption than I did, but I hadn't expected it to be completely hollowed out."

"Had you been expecting or relying on there being security already employed in the city?"

This one is painful. He's really only alive because he's supposed to be able to defend places.

"Implicitly, I suppose I must have been. I certainly expected the manor to have something. But I wasn't thinking about riots as much of a potential threat. On previous occasions when I traveled south, I'd been concerned about targeted assassinations and mind control, and I suppose I should have taken it as a more serious problem that the set of nobles I meant to meet up with wasn't resilient against those, either. It's - not what I had been most worried about this time."

"What would it have looked like, to have taken it as a much more serious problem? What would you have done differently?"

Raindrop. 

"I would have had to pull one of the remaining soul-sold wizards off of Worldwound supply or defending Kantaria. They aren't fully distinct responsibilities, so it would in many cases affect both. A larger group of lower circle wizards would obviously have helped in the situation we actually faced, and those would have been taken from Kantaria. But I don't know that it would do much if, hypothetically, the Archduke of Sirmium wanted me dead, or a party of teleport capable adventurers from Andoran did. If I'd expected to need emergency healing I suppose I should also have taken a cleric, but Menador has fewer than it needs as it is."

"Were you present the morning of 3 Sarenith for Valia Wain's speech before the assembly?"

"Yes."

"What was your impression at the time?"

"I was worried that she would successfully turn the convention against the holdover nobility, either with regard to our ability to get anything done at the convention, or possibly to the point of violence carried out by organized vote. I expected that we still had the main Church's support, and knew we had the Crown's, and I hoped that they would step in before the situation became genuinely dangerous. I did not, at the time, understand that Select Wain was not a member of the Church at all, but I was confident that her speech didn't reflect the opinion of the entire Church. Marit had intended to speak to her the next day, after hearing about it, and explain to her more about the situation. I'd hoped it would go some way in patching any damage that had been done, and that the Select would ultimately be able to correct herself."

"Did you change any of your short-term plans in response to the speech?"

"Not especially. I expected to see Count Cansellarion that evening, and thought he would be among the most useful people to discuss the situation with. I didn't expect that action needed to be taken in the next few hours."

"Is there something useful to you that the Church could have done at that stage, in order to mitigate the harm from Wain's speech or help you prepare better should trouble result from it?"

"Not without predicting the riots. Had they predicted them, I assume that Count Cansellarion wouldn't have teleported home that evening, might have advised us to leave the manor, or might have brought the reclamation troops in that evening, but I don't see that he was particularly better positioned to predict that response than I was. At the time, I wanted to know that I still had allies, and he obliged."

"I suppose he could have said something on the floor, but I understand he tried that, and it didn't work."

"That is what he told us, yes, that he joined the queue for speeches on the floor but was not prioritized ahead of a large number of other people with less relevant opinions. So, not foreseeing the riots, you had in place that evening only your usual security arrangements? Security arrangements are usually treated as in confidence - not in a public version of the report - if you choose to share them at all."

Under other circumstances this would still sort of give them a bunch of information with which they themselves could kill him, which he supposes at least makes it a good show of cooperation, except for how the problem is really that he didn't have any of his normal security with him.

"I appreciate that."

"We didn't really have security. I had four other archers and a staff wizard, and the house was alarmed, but I don't think this constitutes much of a serious attempt to defend it from anything. There were of course the other lords inside, and a half dozen men they had with them. Insofar as we were relying on anything, it was our own personal strength, but I think it's more accurate to say that I wasn't expecting to have to defend the mansion."

"...even when I heard the house was surrounded, I don't think I was initially worried about being overrun. But I hadn't really thought through the tactical implications of not shooting through the fence."

"Can you walk me through what happened once you realized the house was surrounded?"

"Of course. One of my men came and got me - late, I suppose, unless the crowd surrounded the building very quickly - and I stepped out of the dining hall to look. The guard at the back came and reported that they had wrapped around the fence in the back of the building as well. When I came back to the dining hall, the others were discussing ways to get word out. Archduke Blanxart said he couldn't fly. Marquis Reixach's wizard had a sparrow familiar, so we wrote a message and sent the bird to the palace, hoping that a response would come before things came to violence. I told the others I thought we could defend the house, but not without a massacre, and said the only other thing I could think of was sending one of the Iomedans out to talk to them. None of us had much hope of it working. Baron Ramirez suggested that we might walk out and allow the crowd to kill us, in the hope that they would spare everyone else inside. I decided against that; there would have been no one else capable of defending the civilians if it didn't satisfy them. Valentia went through the house and gathered them all while we were discussing what to do. I told her to take them to the cellar, and she took up position there."

"Archduke Blanxart put a protection from arrows on Marit, and on some of the other defenders, and we sent him out and attempted to fortify the front of the house behind him. I told everyone before we took positions not to kill anyone until they were actually on the property, past the fence, and not to kill anyone who tried to flee. I think - that was the order that made it impossible to defend the house with what we had, really. We didn't fire on the people trying to batter down the gate. Once it was open, the gate wasn't enough of a chokepoint, and it wasn't a policy that made it obvious what to do about people throwing torches. Arn did comment that he thought it was permissible to fire on the people with torches in particular, but I didn't give the order to do it in time for it to matter."

"What was your reasoning for asking your men not to fire on the crowd unless they'd stepped onto the property?"

"I thought the likely alternative was killing almost everyone outside. And - it seemed like an unassailable line. I thought it couldn't be argued that we had overreacted to a crowd that was aggressive but not violent, if we only killed the people who had actually forced their way onto the property."

That's not precisely morality, is it. When he gave the instructions, he had still been more worried about the Crown's response to a massacre than about the danger presented by the mob itself. It wasn't enough to win, or to defend the mansion; they had to do it while doing nothing even arguably wrong. He'd misjudged how much of a handicap that was.

"Is there counsel that the Iomedaen priests assigned to your service could have given you at that point that would have resulted in a better outcome?"

"That depends. I don't know what decision would have led to a better outcome overall. Tactically, if we think only about the immediate priority of defending the house, with no concern for the aftermath or the people outside, it would obviously have been better to direct everyone to kill, at minimum, the people with the battering ram and the torches, and possibly to have fired on the people holding the ladders, or into the crowd generally, and killed enough people to have prevented them from organizing other attempts to break the fence."

"But the safety of those inside was not, actually, just a question of defending the house from a particular mob. I thought, when I gave the order, that we were at more risk of the Queen executing or removing us for excessive brutality, or the rest of the nobility and the populace turning against us, than we were at risk of dying by the hands of the mob. Had we fired into the crowd, we would have had to defend the decision. It seems easy to say that we panicked and did something unnecessary, if everyone in the building was completely unscathed, and a hundred Westcrown commoners were dead. I know now that I was wrong about the risk posed by the mob, and that the line I set was too much of a handicap to let us defend the house, and all of the servants died for it. But I don't know whether I was wrong about the risks of the alternative. Maybe all the servants live, but I die. I'm not very clear, from the goddess's perspective, whether that's better, or if it depends on the crown's response, or whether I was right, and it's simply that being right results in a tactical loss, here."

" - I see. I don't have much information yet on the Crown's response, and don't expect to get an interview with the Queen. It makes sense that - not being seen to have responded with excessive violence - would have been an important constraint, under the circumstances. ...have you sought, and do you want, spiritual counsel on this situation? I know we're sending more priests as advisors, though I do not know the details."

"Badly enough in general that I've been tempted to have Marit or Arn raised, though I don't really expect it's the best use of the money it'd take. I suppose if none comes I should probably send for one of the others we left in Menador, but there aren't very many, for half a million people."

" - if you want them back in particular, my understanding is that the archmages offered resurrections but the Church was inclined to, instead, get empowered priests who can also serve Menador's priest shortages. But that decision was not made with any particular consideration for the working relationship already established over the last year, and if you'd rather have them particularly I'm sure you could get an empowered priest from somewhere for less than the cost of a Raise Dead."

Well, sure, he'd prefer that Marit and Arn not be dead.

"I think they'd be kind of disappointed, really, if I had them raised knowing it wasn't the best thing to do."

"I think we should stay for some spiritual counseling but we ought to finish the interview first, and not blend them. So at that time you attempted a defense of the house according to the rules you laid out, and lost, and the house burned. After that?"

"Are you looking for what happened while the house was burning, or what happened after we abandoned it? I personally kept firing until I saw one of the servants running around the edge of the house, and realized the cellar was open. I think a few of the servants may have made it out, but most of the people in the house were killed. I and Ramirez scaled the fence together and ran. Archduke Blanxart and Valentia died defining them. Aniol jumped out the window with his nephew, who died at some point in the process. Llei went out the back with Baron Ramirez's grandson, who I understand was also dead by the time he reached the temple of Iomedae. The rest of us met up at the main temple of Abadar, having heard the announcement about shelter."

"Is there anything Marit or Arn could usefully have done at that stage? Or were they dead by then?"

"Marit was killed when the crowd breached the gate, he was still out there trying to talk them down. Arn was alive when the fires started, but was hit sometime after that. Before we decided to run."

"Is there anything you can identify that they should have done differently, either once the building was surrounded or earlier?"

He thinks about it for a moment. "No, I can't. I think they conducted themselves with as much wisdom and honor as any man could. It's possible that I should have sent them to coordinate more closely with the Church in Westcrown when we first arrived, or that they should have asked to do so, which might have given them the opportunity to meet with Valia. But as it was, we agreed to prioritize it as soon as we became aware she existed and needed it, and that was too late."

"Is there anything you would have chosen to do differently, with the information you now have?"

Drip, drip, drip.

"I think I would have had a long conversation with Marit and Arn about which additional men to bring to Westcrown. I'd say I'd have found another place to stay in the city, but I'm not sure if anything better was on offer, I'd have to think more about that. I'd have sent Marit to the temple immediately, to make contact with Select Wain. And I'd have asked Count Cansellarion to remain in Westcrown the night of the third."

"Is there anything any other member of the Church of Iomedae or of Lastwall could have done differently to improve the situation?"

"Talked to the Select, I expect. If there were other things, I don't see them from here. Spoken to the convention about whether they'd allow more than two Iomedans who are neither of them part of the Church, I suppose."

"All right. Do you have questions for us?"

Well, if they're offering he feels like he should, but he doesn't really feel like he understands the process well enough to know what they ought to be.

"...have you identified any specific failures? Is that done later?"

"That is usually done later, because it's useful to have all of the pieces in front of one before one starts assembling them. There are ...quite a few very obvious failures, though. I cannot imagine the report failing to observe that the Church hadn't made contact with or provided adequate training for one of its only empowered priests in Cheliax. Some people warned that Wain was ill suited to her role and those observations weren't followed up on fast enough. Those responsible for the city's security underestimated the possibility of riots. I expect it to be a very long list that implicates almost everyone in the Church in Cheliax, with the possible exceptions of the people we assigned to you. Though, yes, they should have been in touch with the rest of the Church in Westcrown as soon as they arrived."

"I see. Are you focusing exclusively on mistakes made by members of the Church, then?"

It seems really implausible that they listened to all of that and have come to the conclusion that Narikopolus made absolutely no mistakes at any point.

" - we have a tendency to focus primarily on mistakes that the Church could have prevented - so, if they're mistakes by other parties, to figure out at what point we could have gotten those other parties better advice. Since the point of an incident report is to do better next time, and - and in typical cases their audience is the church.

This one will have an unusually broad audience and I will probably have to consciously correct for the tendency to make recommendations for the Church. In principle the ideal is we make recommendations for everyone who would benefit from them and is interested in them, and any of them who are interested can also submit their own recommendations, including ones for us. I am certainly guilty of, as a matter of habit, hearing of an error by an ally and immediately thinking back to where the Church might reasonably have given them better advice. The Archmage Cotonnet found it a condescending sort of attitude."

"I see. I understand I'm not a member of your organization, and can't be called on in the same way in the future. But I do aspire to follow the goddess's teachings, and am aware that I need advice, and would appreciate having it. I can identify, right now, where things went wrong, but only a little of how they should have gone instead."

"Of course. So, hmmm, from my perspective, it seems like having even a single wizard of second or third circle in the building, someone who could get out a call for help across the city, might've been decisive. If that were the Church's manpower allocation we'd look at where all the wizards were and think about whether that was the best place for them - not knowing there'd be a riot, of course, but even from the standpoint 'going to a city with an unknown security situation'."

Drip, drip -

"That seems true. It's a bit difficult to reconstruct the decision, even knowing that the people of Westcrown were not very near the top of things I would have been concerned about when I arrived."

- oh.

He has no habit of designing default security that revolves around signaling for people who don't work for him and aren't hosting him to come to his aid. He has no habit of expecting people to generally want to aid him. Kind of strategically relevant, that.

"...I think I've generally neglected to think nearly enough about what security in a strange location should look like if teleport-capable wizards aren't reliably available, but signaling for nearby help can be expected to work."

"That makes sense. That's not an environment you'd ever operated in before? Marit and Arn should've had some familiarity with it, but Lastwall's arrangements for signaling for aid are very different."

"Well, it certainly works in Menador - or, worked in Menador, our actual signaling capabilities are much more limited than they used to be, with the loss of all of our fourth-circle priests. But in Egorian of three years ago, you wouldn't have signaled to the palace, or the watch, if there was an angry mob outside; you would have killed them all, and perhaps apologized for the mess after, to be gracious rather than contemptuous of the Queen's inability to maintain order in the city. You could perhaps have signaled for a noble ally, if you had one, but you would have to be on quite good terms not to lose anything by it, or be fighting some entity that would constitute a threat to the entire city if not handled immediately. Of course in the moment I realized that we ought to signal the palace, but I hadn't planned for it."

"I'm really much more used to worrying about the rest of the nobility than about peasant mobs." And don't particularly have a plan for dealing with violence from them, at present, which is really very uncomfortable.

"Do you think worrying about the rest of the nobility is still warranted, or is it a habit not appropriate to the new regime?"

"Without meaning any disrespect to any of them, or to the Queen's ability to appoint worthy men and women, I have really not known the whole long enough to say whether there are any among them who should not be trusted. They seem less given to plotting against one another than the previous set. But not thinking about how to signal the Crown forces in an emergency seems like an error."

"Vigil has beacons installed throughout the city and surrounding countryside, made of a single piece of stone such that a single Light spell can make the whole thing glow; they can be observed from the castle and a response arrive quickly. I expect that wouldn't work in Westcrown" because the people of Westcrown are evil and foolish both. "We have not had significant incidents of mob violence and I'd have to review the handbook for handling it if you aren't personally a powerful enough paladin to be unthreatened by it. I think in more dangerous areas people sometimes carry scrolls or wands of Grease."

Beacons that light up easily are clever, though the distances in Menador are probably too great for it to be directly useful without alteration. He should think about it later.

"I think I should speak to several people about what personal security looks like under these conditions, but I don't especially expect discussing it now to be the best use of either of our time. It's useful to have realized the attitude that caused me to overlook it."

"It seems possible that there are other oversights in the same category - ways that the risks and benefits of operating in Cheliax have changed a lot in the last few years and you might still be using old approaches that aren't the ones you'd have come up with for this situation."

"That does seem possible." It does not immediately make it obvious what the new approaches should be, or what the new situation effectively is, but - he can consider it further.

"Other specific failures - I do think it would have been a good idea to have more direct ties with the Church in Westcrown, though that's mostly down to Arn and Marit as the people who could most easily have arranged those. They might have learned of Valia sooner that way, and Valia might have learned that the Church considers you an ally sooner that way. It also seems like an order to disperse and then firing openly, when they started trying to break down the gates, would have been the likeliest approach to keep everyone alive and conceivably not even had higher mob casualties than a full fight for the house did, but I understand your reasoning there was - partially political - and I cannot speak to whether you understand the Queen's mind correctly, though it would certainly be unjust for her to be angry with your self-defense assuming it short of 'fireballs in the city limits' or something."

"It isn't just about the Queen. Though it's also not that I believed that overall casualties would be lower if we fired into the crowd, and decided not to only because it looked bad. I thought we could defend the house, and I did think the mob might be discouraged if everyone who came onto the property was killed. I - guessed, I suppose, at a line that seemed moral, and didn't guess correctly about how large a handicap it would be. I don't remember if I made it clear, earlier, but Marit did go out and tell the crowd to disperse, and told them that anyone who stepped onto the property would be killed. While he was speaking, there were men who climbed over the fence with ladders, and we shot those as soon as they crossed onto the property, before the gate was broken down. So by the time it was, it was at least clear that we would defend the house with force. Maybe they would have dispersed if we had shot into the center, I don't know."

"The first person to cross onto the property actually broke his ankle, and everyone in the house hesitated to kill him until several others had also passed onto the property. It's very possible that was an error, but I suppose it seems like a difficult sort of error to plan to avoid."

"What do you mean by 'it isn't just about the Queen'? Also the other nobility?"

" - well, yes. We had many fewer friends, before the mob burnt the manor down. No one at the convention particularly spoke in our defense, when Select Wain called out the holdover nobility. It is possible that some other noble might have been willing to host us, but I did not ask, because very few people who might have been willing actually wanted the association before the morning of the fourth."

"If our intent is to help run the country, or to forge even very tenuous friendships, of the sort that might make it possible to signal for aid in the event of other danger, either at the hands of the law or outside it, and we begin by killing a hundred residents of Westcrown while getting away unscathed ourselves, how does that look? Like the remaining Thrune appointments are still every bit as brutal as the worst southern nobles that anyone here remembers, or has heard stories about, and like everyone ought to distance themselves further. The best we could have hoped to say was that we killed no one who was not actively and unambiguously in the process of breaking the law, and hope that it mattered. And compared to that - I certainly did not plan for the house to be overrun, but in terms of how it's changed the way the other nobility see us, it is possible that it's better than having succeeded at defending it. This seems - perverse, really, but it's not actually obvious to me that our overall position has gotten worse."

"...I'm not entirely sure I want that in the public incident report, really, though I suppose it should be down to what's best for the report."

"We'll keep it private. So - correct me if I misunderstand, but what it sounds to me like you are saying is that something enormously costly - being victimized in the riots, with many innocent people dead - bought you something extremely valuable - being wronged unambiguously enough that the other nobility ceased to regard you with as much suspicion - and you are unsure how to think about whether it would have been better to have been unscathed by the riots, but remained - distrusted and outsiders?"

"I think - I would guess that it would be evil, to intend to obtain something very valuable - key nobles now counting us among their allies, at the least - at the cost of the lives of a large number of innocent people who in no way wanted to make such a trade. And I didn't intend it; I intended to be seen as acting in a moral manner by means of actually acting in a moral manner. But it seems - morally perverse for the decision not to fire into the crowd to be a good one only because I was wrong about what would happen. And it seems tactically perverse to discuss how I could best have traded an outcome that has actually worked out quite well for me for one that would probably have been much worse, without at least acknowledging that that's probably what we're discussing."

"I realize that it would be better, morally, for the servants to have lived, and that we should probably discuss how I could have better have achieved it. If the cost of doing the right thing is to be momentarily perceived as evil, then I suppose I still ought to do it. I mean to be perceived as doing the right thing, and I mean to achieve that by actually doing it. It's personally confusing, if I've successfully achieved it by doing something that was actually evil, and if doing the right thing would have momentarily accomplished the opposite, but - it doesn't, actually, change my intent to be sincere about this."

"I just think we should be clear that it's not very obvious to me whether I actually lost anything. Other people did, certainly. My sister is without a home to return to. Llei and Aniol are really quite upset about having watched their children die. The servants are mostly dead and not being raised. I want to avoid all of those things, and I'll talk about how they could have been avoided. But you shouldn't think about avoiding them as obviously resulting in a better outcome for me, after the point where the house is already surrounded by the mob, because it's not at all clear that it does."

"One habit I find useful when contemplating situations like that is to tally up the costs - half a dozen resurrections by the archmages, fifteen or twenty men dead and not raised, the - terror and resentment and frustration of people who have experienced a horrific act of violence and do not yet feel again secure - and then say to myself, if those costs were worth this benefit, then it seems quite likely we were previously underprioritizing that benefit. 

Because - probably there was a way to get it at a lower price than that.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that those costs were paid by a distributed coalition of allies, and not all yours to decide how to spend - with perhaps half of that money we could have funded this city's orphanage for the next ten years so they can go back to taking dropoffs, and brought in some people from Lastwall to staff it, and and won a great deal of goodwill from the populace that way, and employed a full time teleporter to take other nobles back and forth so they could check on their realms and won some goodwill and connections that way and lessened the convention's toll across the country, and Lord Cansellarion could make a point of having invited you to every social occasion I understand him to be constantly bombarded with, and we could serve food at the church for the next month so the audience is larger and more attentive and make a point in the sermons of explaining why from the perspective of the Church you've done things right since the country's been freed and should serve as an example to other people hoping to make the same transition -

And, you know, have three of the Archmage Naima's resurrections left over. 

If this was worth it at this price it was probably possible to do, or mostly do, at a much lower price, and our main error was not noticing it'd be worth that much."

"I have to say that I don't think I can take responsibility for that one."

"Absolutely not. That goes in our part of the incident report. Lastwall experiences itself as having very few spare resources, and I think the Archmage Naima does likewise, but both organizations could have noticed they wanted to purchase this and purchased it, and you had no way to do so, and no reason to think either organization would do it if you asked.

And there is indeed something perverse about - benefitting mostly because the harm that you were experiencing abruptly took a form that was obviously an ally's fault so they had to pay for it. I think it is commendable to notice it. But I think the useful first draft of an answer in such cases is usually that making things worse is a very expensive way to make them better, and if it's somehow the least expensive one available then other things already went wrong.

I am in any event glad you are in a better position now. Are there remaining ways we are - neglecting to pay for something that would be worth it even at a much higher price?"

"I think Westcrown, and in particular the convention and the nobles assembled for it, would benefit enormously from more guidance from the organized church. I would certainly personally appreciate further Iomedan counsel, for myself and the other lords staying here. I don't know if it's worth it to you, but they are not at their best, following the events of the third. At the worst I will send for one of the lay priests we left in Menador, but there are... four of them, now, for half a million people, and it would be better to have someone as soon as possible."

"...Menador can also give more men to the Worldwound in exchange for Iomedans, or at least can certainly do so after the convention. We'd been discussing with Marit and Arn whether that would free up more Iomedans for Menador, right before the riot, and they seemed to believe it might make an enormous difference. But we absolutely can't do it at a ten to one ratio again."

"Yes, many of our recommendations are going to be around how the Church can provide more support in Westcrown. It will come at the expense of many other things but that's the nature of the business. My current impression is that we intend to replace your lay priest advisors with one lay priest and one empowered priest. I think we might be able to trade well-disciplined troops one to one, now that there have been some reforms and we can be confident it'll be possible for them to behave Lawfully here, but I'll have to go back to Lastwall to figure that out.... we should also consider getting you and the other Menadorans some security and staff on an emergency basis. You currently have no guards or staff remaining?"

"Currently, we are entirely reliant on the generosity of the Duchess of Chelam. Everyone we brought who is not related to a delegate is dead. If it's cheaper for you to supply teleports than to assign staff, we should have passable replacements in Menador, but anything that will stand up to a genuine concerted effort to do us harm will be a much larger operational sacrifice. Nearly all wound supply goes through Menador, and that the wizards exist doesn't mean it's necessarily worth it to reassign them."

(Drip.)

Lastwall, too, is in a position where any Teleports requisitioned for all of this are coming out of ones for Worldwound supply, or war supply, and paid for in lives. "I don't think we - nor, it sounds like, you - can afford security sufficient against a serious second attempt on your lives. I suppose that as the people who will bear the costs of a second attempt if it succeeds the archmages might be interested in paying to prevent it, if you have in mind a way they could that they aren't doing yet. 

I would predict that not having any staff would significantly reduce your ability to do the work of the Convention, is that right?"

"It will. It also makes it harder for the Duchess of Chelam, who is sharing hers, and who is involved enough in convention organizing - the primary organizer, really, not counting Cotonnet - that that's probably the greater loss to all of us."

"We have staff capable of doing the job, just not here. The only difficulty is transit. We should... probably just pay for the teleports to send for them in Kantaria and Taggun Hold. They're going for absurd rates in the city, these days, but I worry that the convention is moving quickly enough that the need for support is quite urgent. If you do want to assign someone yourself, though, it would at least make it easier to coordinate with the church about the convention. Having someone at the mansion, even shared between myself, the duchess, and Archduke Blanxart, seems worthwhile. But the priests you plan to assign may be sufficient."

"We will endeavor to assign someone who can be a point of contact for the three of you with the Church. I'd stay myself but the northern armies don't have a third circle paladin in Teleport range of the Worldwound as long as I'm here and that is the sort of thing that features in another incident report, down the road." Third circle paladins can give everyone around them a smite and this is the ability that saves a fortress every year or so. 

"My guess is that it's worth your paying for the Teleports to send for additional staff, for the reasons you just laid out. ...also, if Teleports are unusually valuable in the city right now, conceivably some of the Worldwound wizards should be ferrying frantic merchants about the Inner Sea this week, if you have the organizational flexibility and the supply margins at the Wound for that." Abadarans like to say that prices allocate goods efficiently. In his experience of the world this is not true - prices allocate goods away from Worldwound forts and critical staffing needs and towards panicky merchants -

- but precisely because it is not true if you go and do the highest-priced activities sometimes you end up wealthier and can then, yourself, allocate goods efficiently using your reason rather than prices.

Drip.

"That's possible. I'll consider who we have and send some letters. Supply is at least the sort of thing that permits a little flexibility, even if we can't afford to use them for ongoing security."

"Did you have other questions for me?"

"No particular ones. Thank you."

"All right. And outside the incident report, you mentioned wanting spiritual counseling. Can I be helpful to you there, or did the incident report cover most of your concerns?"

"I suppose it answered the most immediate one. You think - I should have told everyone to fire into the crowd. Even if it looked worse. But also that this is not the most important aspect of the situation to have gotten right, and that any agonizing is better spent thinking about avoiding such situations in the first place."

"Hmmm.... I think that would probably have been a better option. Or given one of our priests the command of your men, so if there were any questions about the decisions they would be the ones to answer for them, though I don't know if they were competent for that command. But I think it speaks well of you, that you were trying very hard to minimize how much of a terrible thing had to happen, and that it's generally a much better habit of mind to be - trying very hard to find those things, even though it will tend to result in errors in this direction, than to be not trying at that."

"...I don't really think they were. I think very highly of the priests you sent, but they were young men, and - even if I got things tactically wrong, by trying to be moral, I don't really think we should expect it would have gone much better to hand command to Arn."

"I suppose I wonder a little whether we should have gone with Ramirez's plan and let them kill us. I'd like to say we could have anticipated being raised, but going back it doesn't actually seem especially obvious, and doesn't seem obvious that the crowd wouldn't have stormed the house afterwards anyway. ... couldn't have asked Aniol to go out, in any case, and I don't know how many they were looking for."

"I don't have good guesses about how the mob would have responded, there. It is of course a perfectly reasonable thing to contemplate and might have been the right decision if it would have worked, but - it's not usually the kind of thing that's the right decision. Usually if I heard someone was considering it I would want to chide them to remember that Iomedae wants them alive and is not served by losing them, though I don't think you're exactly making that error, here."

"It's really that it's the only other thing any of us thought of, and it would be hard for anything to have gotten more people killed. But I'd rather not die, if it can be helped. I don't go around being especially afraid of it, but if we're assuming we don't get raised - though I think we can predict that we would have been - it's still quite a lot to give away for the sake of a hundred people bent on murder."

"Not a good trade," he says, fairly emphatically. "- the being raised contemplates it, but the raises are far from free for our allies. I don't think you had any good options, at that point, not really. Sometimes one really doesn't. To the extent that the Church put you in that position, which is certainly somewhat the case, I regret it, and will be thinking about what we could have done to avoid it."

Nod. "Well. If that's all you need - I can always use advice, but I think I can go a few days without making any awful decisions as long as nothing else extraordinarily dramatic happens in them."

"I will probably though only probably be less busy in a few days. I expect it is most useful for me to complete, and get you a copy of, the incident report, and introduce you also to your replacement priests, and then we can discuss any remaining matters that are better discussed with me than with them. Your confidential comments will not be included in the incident report at all, unless you let me know tomorrow that you want them included in the most secret version for the Church. ...that's not the standard way to handle confidentiality but I get the sense you have a hard time interacting with it and so am taking an additional level of caution around it."

"I'm afraid I'm not especially familiar with the Church's confidentiality procedures. I think - it risks losing the things that were gained, politically, if the gains are discussed publicly, and not particularly carefully."

"Usually I would just ask you with whom you wanted it shared, and do that. For matters more sensitive even than that, the policy is to share it with no one at all, treat it as utterly secret, unless on reflection a day later you authorize its further sharing. To give you more control over what is and ought to be your decision. If on reflection you want the private Church report to contain it, you can tell me that tomorrow. Otherwise it will not. Under no circumstances will the public version, for the reason you just gave."

Nod.

"All right. I have some letters to send, I think, and I'm sure you have other work as well."

"I am very grateful for your time." 

Even after the paladins leave, Narikopolus doesn't really think about all of his wizards, or why none of them are assigned to stay with him. He doesn't think about a mass grave of hastily-buried buried unwilling mistresses. He doesn't think about someone initially responding to the new justice orders by simply moving his torture garden inside. He doesn't think about annual sacrifices to devils that he hasn't bothered to confirm have definitely, positively been discontinued. He doesn't think about horrible crimes committed after the amnesty. He doesn't think of men who despair of ever escaping hell, and don't see the point in trying. He doesn't think about men who are on their best behavior, and whose best behavior is still terrifyingly, shockingly stupid.

He doesn't think about it because these men, too, serve Iomedae. They serve Her just as surely as the ones with hidden copies of the Acts once served Asmodeus. No private exercise of conscience can change whose army they fight for, or the fact that without them, basic military operations would crumple.

But Asmodeus did not see it that way, and Narikopolus thinks without thinking that Iomedae will not, either. Let the Church or the Crown - old or new - know that the hearts of men are complicated, and they will inevitably come to burn them for their imperfections.

Narikopolus has never in his life stuck his neck out for anyone, politically. If Iomedae's forces see this ugliness and order him to send half his teleports to hell, then Narikopolus will swing the sword himself, if commanded. But he won't point them out. He won't help his masters tear their own forces to shreds. If he runs them well enough, they may not ask. And if Iomedae's gaze does fall on them - well, then he can honestly say that he hadn't been aware of any serious crimes committed for months and months, and hadn't been thinking about the old ones (though the habit of thought is really for casual mind reading, and not meant to stand up to truth spells). It was an error not to report them then, of course, but he was much, much worse at being an Iomedan then, and still trying to keep his lands from falling apart.

It's possible that if Narikopolus were thinking about it, his assessment might now be different. He might have call to reassess whether the Iomedans are as wasteful or stupid in their pursuit of purity as the Asmodeans. He might be able to consider whether he could tell them anything under confidentiality, and expect that anything he revealed wouldn't immediately run to the top of their command chain. He might be able to have any of these people talk to Iomedans, and get a better sense of what the rules are. He might be able to trade teleport favors, and let the Church make better use of his resources in achieving their shared goals - because even worse than decimated, the fact is that Menador still has more slack in its teleport operations than Lastwall does.

Maybe it would matter. Maybe it wouldn't. But Narikopolus isn't looking there, so it is not possible for him to see another way.

He does send letters, asking for specific lower-circle wizards to be brought down. He asks Llei to write a few, too, as Taggun Hold has more wizards than anywhere else in Menador. But he doesn't call his teleporters to stay any longer than needed to drop them all off.