Jonatan, the man who brought the proposal to reintroduce torturous executions to the floor, is findable, having just concluded a conversation with the Duchess of Chelam.

"Your excellency. Thank you for all of the work you do here in Cheliax. I am the representative of the Church of Iomedae who was assigned after the Four Days' War to the Archduke Narikopolus, to help him root out Asmodeus's evils in Menador, and he requested that I speak with you, if it is convenient, about the work of the committee on Urban Order."

This sort of meeting would normally be arranged by the man's servants, who could also communicate information like his name and title, but he supposes it makes sense that a Church representative wouldn't have any.

"Of course. I would be honored to speak with you about our work, and don't have other commitments until the committee meets."

A vaguely familiar man joins the conversation. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything private."

Well, does the Count seem offended? Marit has no hope of staying on top of the absurd pileup of noble grievances and insults here.

He doesn't seem offended, no.

"Your Grace, this man is a representative of the Church of Iomedae, in the employ of the Archduke Narikopolus. He asked to speak with me about the work of the Urban Order committee, though I don't know whether he intended our conversation to be private. —His Grace the Duke of Fraga also sits on the committee," he adds to the Church representative.

"Ah, business." 

He turns. "How can we be of assistance?"

Well that's weird and creepy. Or maybe it's normal outside Menador! Who knows! "Your grace. I am Marit Tenwaller, and the Archduke actually proposed that I speak to you as well as to Count Cerdanya. I am grateful for all of your hard work on behalf of this country." Not for many of the results of it but he can still appreciate the effort even though it is all catastrophically badly directed, and anyway that isn't really their fault; why would they have any skills relevant to creating wise laws?

"Your thanks is appreciated." Marit Tenwaller--he saw that name on a list. He thought he wasn't going to be revived. "Your work in Menador is appreciated as well, and I wish we had somehow managed to avoid your sacrifice."

"It's an honor to meet you, Ser Tenwaller. What matter did His Highness wish for you to speak to us about?"

"For the last year, I and my colleague have worked in Menador on un-indocrinating the population and trying to build the relationship with the government and the Church that people in a virtuous society possess. There is a great deal of work and we are of course not done with it, but it seemed possible that from the lessons we learned there would be some applicable to the work of your committee. In particular I think the Archduke hoped we could advise on the laws being considered about heresy and worship of prohibited deities."

He nods. "We discussed them briefly with the Lord-Marshal this morning, and I am optimistic that we will be able to come to a satisfactory agreement on the details. But we would be happy to hear your advice — there are a number of matters of implementation which the committee was uncertain about."

"I can speak only to what we experienced in Menador, of course. But what we found in Menador was that a great many men worshipped Asmodeus, not because they were trying to do wrong, but because they had been taught their whole lives to do so and had not actually been taught to stop. This was particularly true of people who were in various ways isolated - forbidden by their masters or their husbands or their wives from going to church services or speaking to anybody, unable to leave their homes, imbeciles. These were not men who posed a threat to the social order, and indeed were broadly victims of it. I think that they are not the people you would mean for such a law to target."

He is going to look to the Duke of Fraga, here. He hadn't intended to punish anyone for genuine ignorance, if there are men who have somehow managed to maintain genuine ignorance after a year and a half, but it was the Duke who brought the initial proposal to the Urban Order committee.

"Of course not. I did not think there were so few empowered cultists in the country that the Order of the Pyre or the Glorious Reclamation would waste their time with such cases. In Fraga we have been rather vigorous in promoting new churches, but--well, I am continually relearning how much better we have it than the rest of Cheliax." There are nearly twice as many people in Fraga as are in all Menador, but on the map his duchy is smaller than the largest Menadorian county. And he had favors to call in from half a dozen clerics, and has been eagerly courting others; the Menadorians apparently only knew to court the church of Iomedae, and didn't even get a cleric out of it.

"Hm. It's the opposite case, but presumably we could use the standard for 'theological innovation', where the accused is only punished if they fail to recant."

He grimaces. "That won't help with the imbeciles, will it."

"The Hellknights are reputed to be - very zealous, and not particularly merciful, and if charged with enforcing a law I would not expect them to necessarily share your sensible instincts for who is an enforcement priority."

Nod. "How would you see it enforced, were you crafting policy? I cannot speak for the Duke, but in my lands trustworthy, capable, virtuous men have been hard to come by." 

"Menador has had the same problem. I think that this is what inspired our Queen to her approach, which is certainly not the approach a state would employ under ideal circumstances but may be the best one in the absence of trustworthy and virtuous men for implementation. Fundamentally, the question is - if this law will be prosecuted cruelly and mercilessly against men who were never taught better, do we still wish it to be law? For some things like banning murder, I think the answer is clearly so. There is no prosecution of murders so cruel, short of Maledicting them, that I'd prefer we not have laws against murder. But for other things - I might want a very mild maximum punishment, even though in many cases a harsher punishment would be deserved, because I do not trust that the harsher punishment will be applied only when deserved.

I think I would not bar the private worship of Asmodeus at this time. As you said there are many more important things for our limited resources to be concerned with, and I don't think you can count on the Hellknights to prioritize appropriately - the convention must do that, by not banning what we do not yet want enforcement resources expended on. It should be banned eventually, of course, just not yet. If you want to empower the Hellknights to go after cults, I would want to empower them to arrest people only for suspicion of manifest worship - building alters, conducting rituals, being empowered as a priest - and I'd want the maximum penalties to be lenient until the government has earned the trust of the people that we ban gods for good reason and are not like the Asmodeans simply banning everything that we don't approve of. And until there are sufficient priests of approved gods available to the people - one thing that has them turning to unapproved gods is the shortage of healing."

"It seems to me that we wrong our subjects, if by excessive leniency we permit cults of Evil gods to flourish merely because our subjects do not trust us to ban gods only when truly necessary, or even because they have turned to Evil gods for healing. An empowered cleric of an Evil god can do a great deal of damage, not only to himself and his victims but to everyone he influences."

"My experience of formerly Asmodean people is that there is usually no course available that does not wrong them, and the question is only one of which policy will wrong fewer of them, or wrong them more repairably. If a woman bleeds out in childbirth and goes to Hell that is not repairable; if she has excessive sympathies for the cleric of Dretha that saved her, that is repairable. If murders are going uninvestigated because we are prioritizing Evil cults, and murders accordingly surge, that is also not repairable."

"The Queen's current decree bans proselytization, which covers schoolteachers and parents teaching their children prayers, but does not ban Mammonite cabals or poisoners working for Lady Despair. I think the country's security situation has not deteriorated further only because the Hellknights and local lords have continued hunting cults without explicit authorization to do so. Perhaps the first version of the bill should simply charge the Hellknights and others with seeking out those who compact* with fiendish powers, and let worshippers be. We might even recommend the Queen rescind her decree against proselytization, if we worry that children will be orphaned over it.

But I think we should consult with a catechized Pharasmin. I would not want us to abandon our duty towards our people's souls because we do not want to overly trouble them in the material, and if a man continuing to pray to Asmodeus damns him, then I still see the case for using the law to discourage that behavior, instead of merely encouraging behavior that redeems him."

*The Taldane word here is stronger than worship, but weaker than 'cleric', and subtly different from the 'manifest worship' phrase used by Marit earlier; Marit would likely count as having compacted with Iomedae.

He nods. "If a newly-empowered cleric of Zura is allowed to go free with a light punishment, and having been freed promotes His traditional worship and rites, that is just as irreparable as death by more ordinary means."

"To be honest, I'm not sure I have heard of either Dretha or Zura before." 

"I am not familiar with Dretha either," though the name has a half-familiar feel to it, "but Zura is a demon lord who commands Her followers to practice cannibalism." Her cults were one of the many problems that grew far worse after Aroden's death; it's not surprising that the Duke of Fraga wouldn't be familiar with Her.

“Drutha is the orc fertility goddess. There is an enslaved cleric of hers in Kantaria, doing healing for the locals. if she broke the laws, including against proselytizing, she would of course be punished. She has not spread her cult, but by saving many from death until they had time to repent she also saved them from damnation. Drutha’s only evil teaching to my knowledge is that there should be lots of orcs, and while I would see her worship banned eventually it does not come to mind as a priority in a country where millions of people have no access to priests.

If the Hellknights are currently conducting cult investigations perhaps the wisest starting point is simply to get a description of everything they are doing and think about whether we want more of it or want it to change. Who would we talk to for that?”

"Heaven help us." It is dangerous to know too much about demons, in Mendev, and he also is not a fan of there being lots of orcs. Is Menador really so poor it cannot contract a cleric of Abadar? Well--perhaps they would still want a second cleric, even in that case.

"Lictor Rouen Stought of the Order of the Pyre is the one I would start with, but the Order of the Godclaw also has relevant expertise and has a representative here who I haven't yet met. A gnome, I believe, and so he should be easy to find. I believe the Lord Marshal of the Glorious Reclamation is collecting a summary of their efforts in this area, but I haven't received it yet and so can only guess at it."

"I'll go speak to them at once and try to get you some useful examples of the problems on the ground to reason from. Thank you, gentlemen."

He nods. "We appreciate your counsel."

The Lictor is not difficult to find, since she's accompanied by a pair of armigers and appears to be of the opinion that Hellknight plate is only acceptable to not wear when asleep. The elected delegate she's speaking to finds somewhere else to be very quickly, when a priest of Iomedae wants to talk to her.

She gives him a proper salute, person-of-a-higher-rank-to-person-of-a-lower-rank-in-a-distinct-service-branch. "Ser."

"Lictor. Thank you for your time. I advise the Archduke Narikopolus, and he mentioned that the Urban Order committee is discussing the best way to combat illegal cults. I want to make sure Cheliax's limited enforcement resources are directed at the cults causing the most problems, and I do not have a good sense of what resources your order currently has, how it is using them, and what work is going undone that in your assessment ought to be done. I think the committee would benefit enormously from a few examples of the sorts of problems you're dealing with and of the sorts of problems you'd like to deal with if you had more resources or broader remit, as they plan the cults law."

Rouen nods. "A summary of our recent activities has been registered with the Queen and the Reclamation." Because in a practical sense, the Reclamation is the Church. "The Order of the Pyre presently consists of five hundred and forty-one knights and seven thousand, six hundred and thirty armigers. Our chief activity is eliminating cults of forbidden deities; in the past sixteen months our chief targets have been demons and diabolists, though daemon, demodand, asura, rakshasa, qlippoth and div cults are all presently within our remit, as are those of the Evil gods. Her Majesty the Queen and the Lord Marshal of the Glorious Reclamation have been provided with appropriate copies of our reports.

"The most recent eight troubles that have come to my notice in the remit of the Order of the Pyre were -" she checks her notes "- a Skinsaw cult headed by a former cleric of Asmodeus attempting a human sacrifice ritual to open a rift to Duskfathom, identified through a program of investing randomly selected murders in all major cities, a clique of Worldwound veterans who had returned devoted to Deskari engaged in a plot to disrupt food shipments to the Worldwound, identified through reports of increased locust activity in the region, a Kuthite cult in western Menador spreading copies of the Umbral Leaves, identified through the fact that there are always Kuthite cults in western Menador distributing copies of the Umbral Leaves, a cleric of Baphomet disguised as a cleric of Asmodeus who had taken over a town in Sirmium, identified by his community's continued access to conjured water, a Moloch cult in the army near Corentyn, identified through the assassination attempt on one of our members during a regular garrison inspection, a Lamashtu cult breeding horrors in the Whisperwood, identified by the escape of the abominations, and a witch of Kabiri killed while attempting a ritual of lichdom, identified through a program of monitoring sales of known ritual components. Fuller descriptions of these investigations can be provided if the Committee wishes them.

"The chief concern of the Order is not with expanding its resources or remit, but with maintaining our existing charter as an organization and the establishment of coordination mechanisms with the inquisitions of the permitted gods and with royal agents similarly acting against illegal cults. There is presently an inefficient duplication of labor, and moreover three times in the past sixteen months we have faced overt conflict between knights of the Order of the Pyre and their fellow royally chartered allies, due to a combination of the failure of the allies to identify themselves and their disbelief in the continued legitimacy of the Order. An additional thirty-seven times the Order has found itself in conflict with entities identified as regional militias or watch forces, though in thirty-two cases these proved to be affiliated with criminal organizations under investigation by the Pyre. The establishment of an official by the Queen with the authority and staff to maintain a list of forbidden and permitted deities and ensure the ability of those organizations loyal to the Crown to avoid conflict between their members, particularly between national organizations and regional security forces, would be of great value to the Order."