My answer is that through Leeana, the light can win the War without Wencit treading so closely towards corruption. She is the alternative to his destroying himself by killing millions of people. Heck, it may be that Wencit cannot win the War at all, simply any battle he chooses to fight. Perhaps the only way the light can win the war is through Leeana. An attack on Leenana with magic may be the best chance the dark has of winning the War. If they realize this in time, the Dark gods will pull the trigger and damn the consequences. Better to delay victory and rebuild their forces, then to accept total defeat.
So Wencit has seen this opportunity for ages as one small possibility he gradually nurtures into growing probability. It has grown now to the point where all the gods see it as an approaching cusp and the gods of light are actively hiding it from the gods of dark. In the introduction toWar Maid's Choice, RFC described who first understood the shattered nature of the new existence, Semkirk. Is it any surprise that he would have the most nuanced understanding about the complexities of the new reality?
I suspect that like anything one tries to study, alternative futures can be viewed as a tapastry from a distance or the weaves of the tapastry at very close range. Shifting ranges tends to cause the view of individual threads to be lost. If Semkirk can see a wider swath of the tapastry as a whole and follow each thread better, might he not be able to concentrate on one or two future cusps and follow the threads of probability back to the present? If so, then why can the Sword of the South or whatever device Wencit is using be like a microscope for probabiltiy threads? It allows the wielder to follow a select few probabilities with a great deal of clarity. Like a microscope it cannot be used to see beyond those threads under study, but it can allow Wencit to see how each small decision leads towards or away from the thread under study.
So, Semkirk showed Wencit the cusp and the threads that MUST manifest leading to that cusp and Wencit has been using the Sword (or whatever) to encourage choices leading towards the key probability threads. All the while the gods of light are hiding that thread/cusp from the gods of the dark. As was stated several times gods cannot make the choices, mortals do. It follows that mortals are better at guiding choices than gods are too, since mortals more thoroughly interact with the chooser of a given option fork. Under this interpretation, Wencit doesn't need to be Semkirk or his avatar, it is actually better if he wasn't.
This also means that Wencit's best chance of winning the War is not trying to win by himself. He may win whatever battle he decides to fight, but lose the War eventually. The morality question might not enter into it at all.
FriarBob wrote:Guys, you aren't thinking straight here. Even the supposed "gods of light" can't see anything but probabilities. They show good probabilities, yes, but still just probabilities, and they can only see "clearly" the "major" characters and players, not every single "minor" wizard on the face of the planet. If the Sword could show more, Wencit would not have it, Tomanak would carry it himself!
Whatever level of future prediction Wencit has available to him, it won't be more than what the gods themselves have. It just won't. Period. Weber is by no means perfect, but he's also not stupid. Therefore, Wencit knew what to do to save the day at the end because, for some reason or another, Leanna and Bahzell are absolutely crucial to the storyline and the eventual triumph of the light over the darkness (at least in this universe). There is also an extreme likelihood that the fact that magic was involved greatly helped his ability to detect what he needed to detect. A simple, plain, totally un-magically-aided attack would have a much greater chance of actually succeeding... probably. Remember that Wencit is essentially the equivalent of a savant at quantum mechanics while completely not understanding any of the underlying theory. But he can mess with those subatomic particles at will, and there is a literally unimaginable amount of power available there. Think about Travis S. Taylor and John Ringo's "Looking Glass" series, and their use of "quarkium". They tend to stick to real-world physics quite closely (with occasional deliberate errors for simple sanity). And a fairly small number of kilograms of said quarkium could literally shatter the Earth into an asteroid belt. Although the world's current nuclear arsenal could sterilize the planet (probably a few times over), we couldn't (quite) turn it into an asteroid belt. Not at this time, at least.
As for him not being willing to do what was necessary in the original fight, I would probably actually agree with you here. But Weber doesn't and never will. He believes in the "power corrupts" mantra, and he believes that allowing yourself to do something "gray-ish" out of expediency is the fastest way to corrupt yourself and become the enemy you're trying to fight. Of course, I don't really think this would be a gray area, but he would. I won't get into my other reasons for disagreeing with him, but I will point out that plenty of people have already tried to convince him to change his mind and failed. I very much doubt there is a new argument you can make that he hasn't heard and defeated (at least in HIS opinion) previously.
Thus Wencit is capable of winning the war completely on his own. But he won't do it. He just simply won't... UNLESS the Council is foolish enough to tempt him by attacking Leanna again. Because his morality is Weber's morality, and whether you agree with it or not, it's the way it's going to be. And thus there is no need to tone down his power level, because he won't use most (or even much at all) of the power available to him.