"I'd believe it too."

"I realize," says Arnisant, "as I'm scheduled to die heroically taking down Tar-Baphon I don't get a vote about what you get up to after that, but I've got to say that fighting Nex for his domestic human population seems extremely far down the list."

         "Oh, obviously. And war is - the wrong tool for a lot of problems, maybe the entirely wrong tool for archmages with a domesticated human population. But."

"That wouldn't surprise me if they're domesticated. It also wouldn't surprise me if it's just being raised with the expectation that problems are fundamentally those things which a higher power solves. 

– But that's rather inevitable in a theocracy, really." 

...Careful.

"Huh, there I'd really disagree? Maybe a theocracy with a god actually powerful enough to solve all problems.

- you're going to justifiably complain this is hopelessly confounded, but I get thirty percent, forty percent recruits out of the Order of Measurements or the Order of the Stars - and those take orphans or cripples rather than selecting themselves extensively -"

Arodenite orders?

Yes. Measurements does statistics and measuring devices and standards, takes in crippled children who can't do physical labor. Stars looks at the stars, takes in orphans from cities because their monasteries are on isolated mountaintops and the like and have less disease.

"Oh, come now, Measurements is hardly a fair comparison."

"I did say it was hopelessly confounded. Measurements is more like seventy percent willing, actually, I take forty because I try to - exercise some extra discernment there under the circumstances, and because demand does end up exceeding supply - my Lay On Hands works as Regenerate," she adds for Elie's benefit. "So I have a very compelling pitch, at Measurements."

"Forgive me. I was raised in a country where the organized worship of all gods except Asmodeus was banned, and it may have colored my view of the whole enterprise. 

I am willing to defend the claim that the danger of theocracy lies in the direction of creating a people who are too willing to outsource their capacity for moral reasoning. Or, if you prefer, have a nice dinner and gossip about – Marit, was it's? – love life." 

"Or perhaps you could do both at once," says Marit, "And talk about how my love life reflects the excessive willingness of people to outsource their capacity for moral reasoning."

"Does it? If the Knight-Commander told you to get married, right now, for the sake of the cause – " 

"- huh, there's a question," he says thoughtfully. "- she made such a face, you know, when you proposed the experiment with people raising each others' babies, for half a second before she was sure you were joking - which is how I knew at all that you were joking, I can read her better than you - you can say what you were thinking, Iomedae -"

" - only the completely obvious thing that it'd be a horrendous abuse of them?"

"It's a shame how half the really interesting experiments are horrendous abuses of someone-or-other. Worst part of being a wizard, really." 

"And 'it would be a horrendous abuse' seems like an uncomplicatedly sufficient answer, for, should the Knight-Commander be ordering Knights to marry, in general. But I think a lot of that is about -" He's addressing Iomedae, mostly, rather than the rest of them - 

"- well, about how much confidence you could possibly justifiably have, that you were doing the right thing by their own lights, and how much they could justifiably have of the same thing. And I know you better, and you know me better, and so I'd say that you can, except arguably there's an additional party to the proposed sacrifice for the sake of Good, here, but if we presume the same thing holds - say I'm to marry Karlenius -"

"Heaven demands much of us," says Karlenius.

"Then I actually think that we're in the space of fretting about setting precedents, not in the space of unconscionable orders."

"Are there secret paladin rituals that grant incredible strength to a married couple, or something? I could see it if, for some reason, the cause needed a particular child, but I don't see how that would apply to Marit and Karlenius - Unless we're proposing additional changes...?"

"Oh, if there are secret paladin rituals that grant incredible strength to a married couple then the Knight-Commander hardly has to order us to do it," says Karlenius. "And I think that's - part of the point, actually - she could, and would, explain, and we are contemplating the case where she explained and we disagreed, and those cases feel - very specific to me, actually, hard to make a general rule about."

"In my experience, paladins of Lastwall generally just do what they're told." 

"Well, have you ever known their knight-commander - or Goddess, I guess, though it doesn't seem like the sort of thing Iomedae would do as a divine intervention - give them marriage orders?"

"I'm sure if she ever did they'd be very happy together." 

"I do think that to have a functioning army you need people to consistently obey orders that may not make sense from their standpoint, assuming they're not unconscionable," Karlenius says. "Obviously you also need small teams that have effective internal decisionmaking and can operate without orders or only with high level objectives, but there's a lot that can't get done if you can't assume a confusing order from the top will just be obeyed. Ceasefires! You lose ceasefires if you can't count on your soldiers to just obey orders that look locally like a terrible idea!"

"Be gentle with him, he's Chaotic Good," says Marit.

"Could pretty easily be simultaneously true that there are many objectives only possible to achieve with armies, and armies only possible to get to function with a very high degree of order-following, and that degree of order-following in the ultimate accounting damaging to the human soul."

"Particularly when your army is also a country and you're trying to raise children in it – 

– Marit, did my mind blank slip or am I just that obvious?"