- he should be sympathetic but mostly what he is thinking is what unfathomable atrocity must a man like this have committed to still read evil.

"The Abyss also has a very high attrition rate to conflict and murder. Just to round out the whole picture."

"I did not realize it was so straightforward to destroy souls in your afterlives. I think it is nearly impossible in our world." Bitter half-smile. "Maybe our souls are more robust because they contain less of a person. I do not think our disembodied souls are even sentient." 

"I think that matches what Abadar said."

"Maybe Abadar can give them some pointers. He is at least a more similar kind of entity and maybe can communicate better." 

"Pharasma is the one that set up our afterlife setup but I am sure if He can be helpful He will."

Nod. "Speaking of the portal to your neutral evil afterlife, I am curious if you know why it has been getting worse in recent years? Also whether Osirion is helping as well as Rahadoum." This seems like a more charitable question than 'why aren't you' and also there could be secret aid that Hagan wasn't aware of. 

"We don't know why it's getting worse. The likeliest explanation is that a powerful entity within Abaddon decided to put more effort into expansion into the Material world. We don't know if they were prompted by anyone from here, or decided on their own, or why now in particular. We're monitoring the situation, but we don't have an army out there -

- we don't, actually, have a standing army at all. We have a series of agreements with the holy orders, guilds, mercenary companies, and so on of Osirion to participate fully in the national defense should we be invaded. If I threw an extraordinary amount of effort at those agreements I could renegotiate them, but I prefer not to. I wouldn't just be giving myself more options but every pharaoh of my line, and anyway there are some options it is worth taking off the table to save ourselves and our neighbors the expense of constantly preparing for a war.

That leaves us fewer options for responding to Thuvia's problems while they remain entirely confined to Thuvia; we could still assemble and send a force of some kind, but they wouldn't be enough to be decisive, and we don't like committing indefinitely to an effort we can't win. We do have people there keeping an eye on it, of course. We can and would send a force if someone were attempting to coordinate an international response on the general principle there should be an international response to planar incursions - you've got no business being a Lawful country if you can't coordinate like that - but the likely candidates to arrange something like that are all wrapped up in the fight against the Worldwound. 

Also the church of Nethys is opposed and Nefreti is the person most likely to successfully design and implement a permanent solution so I'm not thrilled about alienating her over it."

"That makes sense. Nefreti seems - very competent." Also terrifying. And extremely strange. "I can understand the value of having an agreement like that, and the resulting limitations." 

"Are you planning to join Rahadoum's forces there, then?"

"It seems the simplest path toward learning more." 

"We will be interested to hear how it goes."

"We would hope to report back within a month. I suppose if we learn key information sooner, I could Gate here and back to pass it on to you." 

"Maybe Hagan will let me keep an eye on him. Usually he goes around under a really impressive number of layers of antiscrying, several of which bite."

"Seems rather understandable to me, but yes, worth asking." 

"I don't know him to have any serious enemies - I keep track of that, in case they figure out who he is - I think it's all to interfere with me in particular." He makes a wide-eyed innocent face. "His loving brother who just wants to know whether to resurrect him. I don't have anyone on staff do the scrying because it'd upset him if his spells bit them."

"How thoughtful of you to keep that in mind. Does he think that you in particular deserve it?" 

"I bet he would say instead that I - own it? I am the one who wants to know where he is and I am the one who bears associated costs of trying to spy on him. If someone else themselves wanted to spy on him and then got hurt that wouldn't bother him. He doesn't like it when people have the power to arrange to not be inconvenienced by their mistakes." 

Nod. Leareth is quiet for a bit, thinking, and waiting to see if the pharaoh is going to jump in with anything. 

He does not. He looks unhurried.

"There was a conversation I wished to have," Leareth says finally. "Though it is not particularly urgent." 

"I am never terribly hard to find but it sounded as if you might be planning to depart fairly soon."

"I hope to, yes, since various important things are pending what we hope to learn in Rahadoum." And he expects it to be an interesting conversation, even if he also expects to spend it having the unaccustomed experience of losing arguments to someone smarter than himself.

"Anyway. I wished to discuss your policies around slavery here. I am - mostly not going to make arguments on humanitarian grounds, since the comparison with Velgarth is complicated by your afterlife setup. However, I think that there are also some arguments on economic grounds. I am sure that you do your own data collection and analysis here, that seems like something this country would have, and maybe my experiences will not add anything new. Still, since I have studied this question in depth and have many centuries worth of results to look at, I thought I might share my own finding that most social systems with slavery are less economically efficient than they would be without." 

"Oh, that's true here too, as far as we know, with some exceptions - such as that if everyone's a farmer it doesn't matter either way until you get them insurance and banking, at which point it's better that they're free, and that historically the bulk of public works projects in Osirion were conducted through requiring the offseason labor of a number of healthy men of local lords who required it in turn of their local population. But our study of this is quite new - not dating back farther than Osirian independence - and I'd be interested what you've learned."

"I think that is true in Velgarth also; there is little difference between being an enslaved or free subsistence farmer, though also those societies have tend to have...limited census information, which makes it harder to even study. And there are of course a number of other facts about a nation that affect its economy; whether existing infrastructure is good and institutions are well-organized seems to matter more than the exact proportion of slaves. Also there are a number of different setups referred to as 'slavery' in Velgarth, which can be very different from each other. There are certainly advantages to using slaves or conscripts for large public works projects, sometimes including faster economic growth in the short run - I have run countries before that had this arrangement - but if more than, hmm, three to five percent of the population are slaves, in the longer run that correlates with lower innovation. That one is probably the most interesting finding I have from a millennium of collecting statistics on this, since I participated in the founding of several different countries during that time and was able to observe them again centuries later."