"I'm getting the impression you're busy, personally. Doesn't seem better to slaughter them indiscriminately, though, if that's what's happening now."

"I think it is better to take someone prisoner than to kill them, presuming you'll kill them if they try to run anyway so they have the choice. If there's profit in going into the mountains to capture orcs, men will do it lots more than they currently do, and probably sometimes to orcs that would never have come down out of the mountains and never have harmed our people. If the orcs found a buyer for human slaves I think that would be bad for the people of Menador, not an improvement."

"The people of Menador grow their own food. Even more of it when they don't need to station as many men in the north."

It takes her a second. "And so you figure there are no orcs that don't live by raiding? They could hunt, maybe?"

"No, not in the numbers they have. Maybe if there were five hundred mountain orcs, and never any more. But there are enough up there, at least in my time, that this is completely impossible, and more of them every year we don't cut their numbers as much as we can. So all the orcs live by raiding sometimes, and all of them are bloodthirsty savages. But if you kill the men and make their children farmers, the generation that grows up like that is fine."

"I need to think about that." He might just be lying; he might be wildly bad at judging what civilization should look like. Even if it is true that you can civilize orcs just by killing all the adults and raising the children civilized, it is not clear that you ought to immediately go do that; if someone else regarded the Empire as insufficiently civilized and knew they could fix it by killing all the adults and adopting all the children she'd much rather they not....unless they were so civilized that no one who grew up in their society was condemned to Evil afterlives? Then maybe it'd be worth it - but also if they possessed such a secret the Empire'd want it, you wouldn't have to insist at swordpoint. Well. Maybe. Depending what form the secret took. 

But all orcs are damned, and maybe need not be; if that's not important, what is? "...do they want their children? Would they sell them?"

"...I don't know, I wouldn't expect it." This idea is uncomfortable, apparently. "I guess maybe you could buy the ones they otherwise kill, if you could find an intermediary they wouldn't attack, but I don't know that that fixes anything. I think for all their faults, the mothers often do love the ones they keep."