"You are. I don't want to die either, though. Even if they tell me to go I won't."

"I don't think it makes any sense right now. They need bullets more than they need field engineers, they're going to be giving up on anything a Mending doesn't fix and we could only with difficulty improve on that… if we had ten years we'd have such a good army. I don't think it's worth waiting but I was definitely imagining we'd have more time before it was directly engaged in the most important fight."

"It doesn't seem worth waiting, no. We'd have had such a good army, though… Maybe it's for the best. If we decide when it's all over that it doesn't make sense for Lastwall to be holding all the guns, we'll probably be glad they don't have planes or howitzers." Or nuclear weapons, but they don't speak of those anymore.

Iomedae asks her secretary to find her a priest who can teach her about her religion. Ideally one who is allowed to know who she is, though she can probably also work with one who isn't so long as they're not imaginative enough to guess.

…Any priest, or does she need someone senior or a theologian or something?

There are theologians? What…is the difference between a priest and a theologian?

Theologians are basically all priests, they're just priests with more of an - academic? - focus. They're usually not empowered themselves, and they do things like formulating communes and giving policy recommendations and stuff.

Iomedae is mildly surprised that they haven't asked to meet her. She sort of imagines that if you want to understand your god it'd be useful to have a version of her on hand even if it's a teenager who isn't sure she agrees with the god. You could at least pick out which were the persistent tendencies and which ones were situational. Raise a hundred Iomedae-clones in a hundred different families in Lastwall - she should suggest that, actually - no, the technology's way too distant - "I don't know. I'm trying to figure out if I should trust the Goddess. Is that a common problem?"

"It's not a very common problem, I think, and most people who have it are coming from a position of greater ignorance than you…"

"I actually don't know all that much formal theology. I read through the holy book but" now she's embarrassed with herself, "the week I got here, when my Taldane literacy was pretty shaky. I - maybe you should get a theologian who doesn't know who I am but would be very qualified to notice any ways in which I am a heretic, that would probably be very informative all by itself."

"Okay. I'll set something up."

"Young lady, I hear you had questions about the Goddess?"

Iomedae is not in her scifi jumpsuit or in uniform, in favor of looking like a wizard she saw in Absalom once. She isn't sure how to expect this to go but it probably goes differently if it is established she's already an empowered paladin. "I am trying to figure out if I agree with Her, and if I understand Her. The difficulty I'm having is that it seems hard to guess what She would want, if there weren't a country ruled by Hell and a rift to the Abyss, and if She'd finished her war with Tar-Baphon, and - I don't know. It's hard to evaluate a god who seems mostly busy barely not losing a lot of different wars. I think I want Her to win those but it's not the same thing as trusting Her. Do you trust Her?"

"I do. Is there something in particular that's causing you doubts?"

" - well not more than - I mean, do you trust all the gods?"

"Certainly not! But I assume you're not coming from a place of total ignorance - some people would trust Her just because she's Lawful Good. You're obviously not one of those people. What does it mean, for you, to trust someone?"

"...I guess I mostly mean, I don't have to be on my guard to not be wronged by them, and if I obey them then that'll go better than doing anything else, and I won't regret it later, and I won't end up wishing I'd done more research first."

"That's a very high standard of trustworthiness that you're looking for, though it's one Iomedae meets, at least in my view. Are you considering joining Her church?"

"My situation is kind of complicated. I think probably I mostly want to know the things that would be relevant to someone considering joining Her church….Iomedae can't possibly meet those standards in general, there are people who want, I don't know, some horrible thing, and it couldn't possibly go better for them to obey Her than to do anything else, unless by 'better' you mean 'more Lawfully Good' -"

“It is the case that if one is receiving orders directly from Iomedae - which is of course a pretty rare phenomenon - following those orders will go better by your values accounting for all the possible futures rather than just the one that happens. She of course cannot guarantee that as well as She could when prophecy obtained, but this mostly means that She has a higher standard for how sure she has to be that things will work out well in order to order them.”

“ - huh. People - have enough to -…I think I would’ve guessed that gods can’t do that for us for the same reason we can’t reliably do it for toddlers -”

“Well, as I said it was easier when there was prophecy. She does it infrequently now though that’s obviously not entirely the difficulty of knowing when Her orders will do right in total by the person She is giving them to.”

“Does She get around this by - saying things that technically aren’t orders, and not promising anything - say, if She just said ‘you could resurrect this person’ -”

“I think She does not do that, or rather not for those reasons. It is believed that it is often less expensive for Her to give people information that they would value having, rather than giving orders. But She applies the same standards to all communications She initiates with mortals, that collecting all the futures they are better for the mortals She is communicating with.”

“Do all the Lawful Good gods do that, or just Her?”