"Yeah."

"He's dead already, he was at the Tower of Estrod."

"Thank you, Seelah." Marit looks around the room, counts the skeletons. "And he doesn't have more undead, either. Seelah, do you have experience providing spiritual counseling to the condemned?"

"That's, uh, where you tell them that they should stop being Evil so they don't go to the Abyss or Hell? I've told people that, but I wouldn't say I've had training at telling people that, if there is more to tell them than that."

"I will see if I can get Irabeth to do a training when we return to the army. It is not a particular expertise of mine, either. I understand Shelyn to have a great deal of concern for the matter but Sosiel is, as we have discussed, unwell."

"I don't see any sign that he was recently enchanted," says Nenio.

As hoped for the process of taking off the breastplate has taken the heat out of Sosiel. He stamps at the ground, a bit angrily. "I think any man would throw a punch, or two, betrayed like that."

"A lot of men would, but men who would cannot travel with me, as they are a danger to their fellows. If you are easily provoked, that means it is easy for your enemies to get you to make a mistake. We have many enemies, and will be contending with enough mistakes without announcing to the world there is a specific mistake we make on demand."

"Shelyn commands us not to hate people. But ...I hate him."

"It is important to be competent to behave cautiously and sensibly in the presence of people you hate. Maybe it is also important that you grow to not hate him; I don't know. I'm not a Shelynite, myself."

"If he'd killed your friends -"

"I would feel considerable satisfaction at the fact that he could not do so again. I do not think I have ever been so angry at a man I wished the Evil afterlives on him. Or, not eternally. If I had the power to cause a man to be eaten alive by the maggots that formed out of his dying skin for ten minutes, or to burn in the fires of Hell for an hour, probably sometimes I would be tempted to use it. And, human nature being what it is, if I got in the habit of using it sometimes my anger would be so much greater, so much more profound, that an hour seemed the wrong scale for my anger, and I'd do three days, or five. 

I suspect, Sosiel, that if you could watch what remained of this man writhe and scream in agony until he eventually learned that the screaming attracted only the wrong kind of attention, you too would find your anger sated in an hour, or a day, or a year, or in any event some amount of time that is finite and thus much shorter than the possible duration of any sentence to the lower planes. If nothing else eventually you'll forget your grievance and he'll forget his name and he'll still be suffering, unless something has eaten him. I think that once you think about that enough it does not usually feel quite as important, to also break his nose. 

But don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that there is some just amount of time for this man to writhe in torment, and that the gods err only in making his sentence so much longer than the just one. Hell is not doing noble work a bit too eagerly. You cannot find justice by walking this path to the right stopping-point; you find it by walking a different path entirely. This man won't get justice. Almost no one will. He will suffer horrendously, and learn nothing from it, and no one will benefit thereby. Whatever it is that you are hoping that you could make him understand, he will shrivel into something farther and farther away from understanding it. 

We can't save him. But if we could, it would be right."

"Please don't kill me. Please - I swear, I'll do whatever you want. I'll serve the Crusade. I'll - I'm only nineteen. I didn't have a choice, I never wanted this -"

"I am not, myself, in the spiritual counseling business. But my understanding is that it works like this: you're lying. Because you are lying, the fact you bothered to say it will not save you, when you go to Judgement. But if you meant it, that would. If you truly and sincerely wanted to go serve the Crusade now, if you were really a person who would do that, then that would be enough, and you would not be damned. You don't have to convince me. You can't convince me. If I did assert I was somehow convinced I hope that it would occur to Daeran, if not to anybody else, that a demon had gotten a grip on me and I should not be listened to.

You just have to convince Pharasma. But the only way to do that is for it to be true."

"It is true. I don't want - the stuff you said - I just wanted to use magic - "

"Since you are trying to convince Pharasma, and not me, I would actually recommend not talking to me about it. I would recommend trying to think about - what kind of person would have warned the Shelynites, when they gave him shelter, and what you would have to change about yourself to be him. - Seelah will stay here and pray with you while you work on that. The rest of us will put these dead back in the ground - Lann, cover Seelah and shoot the prisoner if he tries anything."

"Yes, Chief."

"I never heard it explained like that. You're a very good speaker."

He isn't, not really, but an old friend was. 

They come back half an hour later, when they've buried the bodies and made sure no one's still in hiding or wounded anywhere.

"I'll serve the Crusade for as long as I live. I'm not useless, I'm a pretty good wizard. I wish I'd never done any of it and I don't want to go to the Abyss and I don't want to die -"

"I'm not the one you have to convince," he says, again, more tiredly. "If Pharasma agrees that, if you'd only had the chance, you'd have lived nobly among the Crusaders for the rest of your days, then you'll get that chance. But most of living among crusaders isn't having a sword right at your back. It's having a million small chances to be utterly selfish and not taking them. You would warn the Shelynites, if you woke up and it was two weeks ago?"

He nods. A bit frantically.

"And you know the people you killed, and you wish you hadn't, and if you could do it again you wouldn't?"

"Yes. Please - "