Ozimar holds the highest office of the Iron of the Eternal March, the Hammer-Primate, and he has spent it on a single idea. He believes the conquest of a people is not finished while that people still keeps its own rites. A province can be garrisoned, its fields worked by slaves, its old lords hanged or bought, and still it is not truly Gorath's, because down in the slave-quarters someone is carrying a finished thing to a hidden fire and praying over it in the old way. Ozimar means to end that. His primacy is the program of ending it.
What he is trying to put out is Krondeum's rite, and the cruelty of his reasoning is that he understands the rite better than most of his own chaplains do. The Drasnian carry a finished article to a clan-hall fire and name aloud the hand that will carry it next. To Ozimar this is sedition with a liturgy. A slave who names a carrier is a slave claiming that the work is his to give and that there will be a free hand to receive it some day. That is a future, and the empire cannot let a slave own a future. So the naming must be forbidden, the fires snuffed, the smiths who keep the rite made examples of. Ozimar does not hate the Drasnian. He hates that they still have somewhere to put their hope, and he has organized the war-faith to take it from them.
He is losing, and the shape of his defeat is worth tracing. The harder the Iron presses, the deeper the Drasnian rite goes underground and the more converts drift toward Serel's schism, which offers the same god without the erasure. Ozimar cannot denounce Serel as a heretic, because Serel's argument is that the dwarves read Krondeum correctly and the Iron does not, and the dwarves have kept the rite for longer than Gorath has been a name on the map. To call Serel a heretic, Ozimar would have to defend a reading of the god he half-suspects is the wrong one. So he prosecutes the dissidents for disobedience and never once for doctrine, and the gap between those two charges is the crack the schism keeps widening.
I am told the dwarves had this hammer first. I am told it as though it should shame me. It does not. A child finds a sword in the dirt and calls it a toy. That is no argument that the sword is a toy. — Ozimar, to the chaplains of the Azantir primacy