The deadliest man in Golarion's doorman opens it for her. He is very quiet and very superior and a halfling. He extends his hand.

Galfrey drops a bag of coins into it.

He will, in public, slowly count them to make sure there are exactly six thousand coins.

Actually, there are significantly fewer because of all the oversized coins and Azlanti platinum.

Once he has made sure there are six thousand, he will give her the two extra (he's very good at estimating weight and value in his head), then incline his head, shutting the door after her once she's inside.

She will follow. Is there a new pattern for which steps are safe and which are trapped?

Indeed.

The deadliest man in Mendev is in his library, which is the second-best in Mendev (Galfrey's is sixth), reading.

The deadliest man in Mendev is a basalt statue; his eyes, hidden behind cylinders of smoked glass, are chips of ruby, his stony scalp bare of hair. The statue was originally designed with muscles, then more muscles were added during construction, and once that was over the sculptor had decided to add more, just to be on the safe side. He is nine and a half feet tall (permanently enlarged, but when he came to Mendev as a youth he was still taller than Galfrey) and broad enough to match. Safe in his own home he wears more magic items than Galfrey does on the battlefield.

He demonstrated at age nineteen that he could kill a shachath without any weapons, using nets, harpoons and his bare hands. If, as the tavern rumors say, it is true that there Areelu Voreesh has somehow survived the death she suffered at Galfrey's hands and survived throughout the ages alive even unto the present, then there will be two people alive in Golarion who remember Iz today: the fiend that opened the rifts that destroyed it, and the man who walked from there to Nerosyan, teaching himself how to use wands, scrolls, lances and field artillery along the way and killing every demon he saw with homemade traps when they worked and his fists when they didn't.

He worships Irori, but not, as he puts it, in a girly way.

He shuts his book with a snap, rests it on a table by his chair. Galfrey's unexpert eye can identify it as Collected Essays Of The Church of Abadar in The 47th Century, Volume 27, recently published in Sothis for a clientele of national governments, very very senior priests of Abadar, and, apparently, him.

"Paladin Galfrey."

There's an important sense in which Galfrey could justify not taking offense, or even consider this an act of bravery. He has, openly, said that he considers all governments a collective hallucination, no more real than the dreams of a madman, and that if he was going to treat any government as legitimate it would be one freely chosen by the citizenry, not one based on who cut off whose head four thousand years ago. Standing up to monarchs in their own capitals by denying the legitimacy of their rule does take courage, and in fact, if she wanted, she could consider this very generous of him, since it recognizes her achievements instead of leaving off the title altogether, which is what he does with practically everyone else.

In fact, she's pretty sure he's just being an ass because he dislikes her as a person.

"Drezen has fallen." 

He gives her a what an idiot look. "There's an afterlife."

"Not, Actrand, for the survivors."

"Then I expect you to 'pray'" - the concept is dripping with disdain "- that there were very few of them, then."

She dislikes him quite a lot more than she dislikes most people who are actually Evil.

"It was a bulwark against the demons of the Abyss, and one of the last remnants of your homeland."

"I do not, Paladin Galfrey, have a homeland." He pushes his glasses (a minor magic item, originally crafted so that he could resist gaze attacks) up towards his eyes. "The idea is illogical, and leads to false expectations about the nature of reality."

"Then why do you live so close to the border? Why stand here, where you can stare out, on a good day, and see the Worldwound, that was once Sarkoris?"

A very slight smile. "For the weather, Paladin Galfrey. I like the cold. Heat clouds the brain, cold sharpens it."

He looks Garundi. He isn't. His ancestors were shamans for one of the minor tribes up north, their bloodlines intermixed with the earth elementals they worshipped, until the tribe got wiped out in a feud with one of their rivals. Those of the survivors who hadn't been enslaved - shamans and all - drifted up in Iz ("the big city," by the standards of Sarkoris), where they intermixed with the locals. Actrand was a day laborer when he the world ended, unloading barges, doing construction, and hating everyone he met.

The last part hasn't changed.

"I've come to beg your help reclaiming the city."

"No."

"Do you think you can't do it?"

"No, Paladin Galfrey. You simply cannot meet my price."

She is actually aware that this person reads Good, somehow. She thinks it has something with his hobby of going into the sewers and killing everything that his other glasses don't think are sapient, but sometimes she's not sure that should do it.

"They say the balor Khorramzadeh rules the Near Worldwound, and we expect him to make his capital there. My reports have it he is rapidly becoming a god, and already making progress on his ascension to the status of demon lord."

Another slight smile. "No, Paladin Galfrey, you cannot tempt me into it either."

"Not with a challenge and not with the artifacts he bears?"

"No."

"Then if another Crusade doesn't come together you may need to move out."

"One presumes this is not a threat, Paladin Galfrey." He cocks his head slightly, and his spectacles shine.

"I'm afraid it's geography, Actrand. If the border moves east Mendev will be short a capital."

Or they could just man up and kill the demons themselves. "Or you could do the work yourself, Paladin Galfrey." 

She's had some trouble growing stronger since the Wardstones were placed. Possibly this is simply because no terror, no stress, could match that of the Crusade at its peak, though she has other explanations that she finds more likely. "I have not, so far, been successful at that, Actrand."

"Or you could become competent."

"Once again..."

"Once again," he says. "Well, Paladin Galfrey, I see I had best brush up on my Skald. Kalsgaard has excellent markets, this time of year."

"Then is that it? You will leave Mendev and Sarkoris to their fates, whatever that may be, because of a grudge against me?"

"Do not flatter yourself, Paladin Galfrey." The black lenses of his spectacles glittered. "I leave nearly every country on the planet to its fate, as do you."

The difference between protecting a country and not doing so is more than a hundred times a life's work; the difference between protecting one and protecting two is, given that, nonexistent. "You don't happen to live there."

"No," he said, smugly, "I don't." 

"- Then this is purely a matter of -"

"You should learn to honor your agreements, Paladin Galfrey."

"I did, in fact, pay you your full salary!"

"No, Paladin Galfrey. You paid me one-eighth of my salary, and paid seven-eighths of my salary to a debt collection agency, to which I sold it to for eighty-seven percent of its value when you refused to deliver as contracted."

Half her supply wagons had been burned by Deskari's eighth-circle and it was pay her mercenary very slightly late or not feed her troops.

"I am sorry, and I have since paid more to enter your home than you lost then."

"I flatly do not understand how you are Lawful."

She flatly does not understand how he is Good.

"I do my duty."