A halfling peeks out the spyhole and observes a guy! The guys has a truly implausible number of magic items! The halfling tries Detect Magic, flees, and needs to go lie down for a while!

"Senyor Riudaure! We're honored to have you here! Please, do come in!"

He steps inside.

"Good evening, Senyora Lachanessa. Is Senyor Esquerra in? Or perhaps I should say Delegate Ibarra."

"Delegate Ibarra is indeed in, he'll be down in a moment." Just as soon as he's finished casting lots and lots of spells so you can't easily mind control him.

If he were having the sort of interaction where he mind controls people then no one would even know he was here, idiots.

He sits down in the parlor and waits.

"Senyor Riudaure." 

He has bodyguards, too! And an apprentice, a Tien-looking young man with an oddly focused look. "I'm honored by the personal attention of such an extraordinarily capable wizard," Alexandre says. 

"Good evening, Delegate," he says coolly. "How have you been finding the Convention?"

"Pleasant enough," he says. Ah, this is the point where they notice what he's been up to. Persuasion, threats or bribery? "Her Majesty's speech was very moving."

"Yes, it was." If almost entirely predicated on lies. "I'm waiting to see if her best hopes come to pass. I'm contemplating retirement, myself, and a return to more native climes, now that our mutual foe is dead."

"I've heard it rumored," he adds, in a lower voice, "that Naima Cotonnet turned her into a pigeon, and that all the forges of Hell haven't been able to turn her back." It's true, of course, though he leaves out the ending. He's trying to sate Esquerra's thirst for revenge, here.

"Our mutual foe is fine, Senyor Riudaure. He rules nine planes, which each contain more servants than exist on this planet." He's rather annoyed that Riudaure thinks he'd make that amateurish a mistake.

"He shall have to find new governors for at least two of those planes; the archmagi killed the old ones for good last year. I also hear that he gave up nearly all of his remaining clerics on Golarion on the same day. He may be less fine than you think. But, at any rate, that wasn't what I came to talk about."

"I've found employment with one of the Archdukes. He's with you, I believe, in the Convention's committee against diabolism. He asked me to find him an address for 'Aspex Ibarra'. I expect he wants to tell you that if you continue to advocate for indiscriminate murder you won't like who gets murdered. Although, actually, I can just tell you that myself."

(He's not, actually, threatening to murder Esquerra, though he does realize that his words could be interpreted as such.)

"Let us leave aside your inaccurate description of me, Senyor Riudaure, as you are questioning the honor of a far more important man than I could ever hope to be." Nope, he totally can hope. "Unless you mean to call the promise of protection given by Elie Cotonnet a lie?"

"Even an archmage cannot stop a riot except by turning it into a massacre, and neither am I sure that he would override the will of the people, even if they declared that any Evil person seeking power—a category to which you undoubtedly belong—was to be put to the Final Blade."

"You would escape, of course. You always do. The country will not. So I ask you, Senyor Esquerra, did you come back to Cheliax to rebuild it? Do you want it to be stronger than it would have been if Asmodeus had never touched it, like you have become? Or do you just want to watch it burn?"

"I have wands of web."

The words what's in it for me hang in the air unspoken, before being carefully folded up and placed in a drawer.

"If every Evil person seeking power in Cheliax for the next century was put to death by Final Blade, Senyor Riudaure, I would be genuinely delighted - though, I admit, less so than if they were damned to the Abyss. I am not trying to rebuild Cheliax to be rich, any more than I myself am seeking wealth. What would the point be? Wealth is an instant's pleasure before you pass on, nothing more. I have come here to fight Asmodeus, to hurt him, to make those who knelt before him fear that justice is coming, and not all the promises of pardon or amnesty that ever there were can save them. I am here to humble those Asmodeus exalted, Senyor Riudaure, and to make it so that any who walk the path of the Thrunes see at its end the bleakness of the destruction of everything they ever loved."

He smiles coldly. "That, after all, is what an Abadaran would call the proper incentives."

"If you would like to go fight Asmodeus, the Church of Iomedae can advise you in how best to do that. Otherwise, the new Cheliax could use you. Disdain wealth as it suits you, but there must be something you want other than bloody vengeance. Perhaps we could arrange an incentive which is actually Abadaran rather than Calistrian."

"As it happens, Senyor Riudaure, I did speak with the Church of Iomedae before beginning that campaign of which has been one of the chief focuses of my life. I was approaching fifth circle, and asked a priest of Iomedae - Select Tavorae in Absalom - what a fifth-circle wizard with a small support party who truly wanted to injure the interests of Asmodeus as much as possible would do, and swore that this was indeed my intent under his ward of truth. This being something which he had heard before from many soon-to-be-dead wizards engaged in dangerous adventuring, he offered me four glistening copies of Lastwall reports complete with clear cost-benefit calculations, all neatly scribed. The leading proposal was killing demons at the Worldwound, with the Church promising to devote all relevant resources saved by their employing me to various small-scale anti-Hellish efforts they were carrying out. The second was going on a teleport route and donating all the profits to the Church of Iomedae. The third - lower ranked because they expected anyone who did it to die horribly - was interfering with Chelish shipping to Sargava in the hopes of making Chelish control over the colony impossible, and the fourth - similarly low-ranked - was attempting to disrupt the supply chain of the Chelish army operating in Druma."

"Each and every one of these was sensible, logical and well-justified based on serious study by capable, intelligent veterans of the army of Lastwall, who no doubt rested their deliberations on reports prepared by your department. I had not the remotest interest in going to the Worldwound, nor the remotest ability to persuade the Court of Exiles to follow me there or on a teleport route, and I am somewhat distrustful of anyone who says 'please give me large sums of money, I promise I'll fight evil with it.' And so that left me with two plans that you yourself may have seen, both of which consisted of 'attack targets the enemy is actively devoting large amounts of resources to protecting.' Because the diabolists could see they were good plans for the exact same reason that Lastwall could see they were good plans, and so were had invested resources in trying to stop them from working."

"I do remember the figures your cleric gave me, for how much damage these plans would do to the interests of Hell in the expected outcome. Seventeen percent and fifteen percent of the damage I did do, with my plan. Seventeen and fifteen percent. Because the Church of Iomedae considered plans that were sane and reasonable and honorable and had passed a cost/benefit calculation, and I considered plans that would work. And engaging in large-scale bribery to hide behind the screen of Absalom's neutrality while murdering Chelish nobles through teleport strikes and miraculously avoiding ever getting slaughtered by a pit-fiend-led rapid response team was not sane nor reasonable nor honorable, but it did work."

"All of this, Senyor Riudaure, is a long-winded way of saying that I don't trust the Church of Iomedae to give me better advice about how to fight Asmodeus than I give myself. You're Lawful, and I am not." Your organization is Good, and I am not. "If I had enough resources to actually change what strategy would best oppose the minions of Asmodeus, I would switch to a more personally aggressive strategy." But it takes a hell of a lot of magic items to make a large power differential and he really doubts Riudaure is prepared to bribe him that much, or to offer him a county. "I have no doubt that the new Cheliax could use me," but it isn't, "but at present I calculate that the best way for me to oppose the interests of Asmodeus in the Chelish state is in the diabolism committee and nowhere else."

"I congratulate you on your glorious victory in defiance of all expectations," he says, this being the standard Lastwall phrase for you got fucking lucky and you shouldn't try it again. "But I genuinely do not think that the diabolism committee opposes the interests of Asmodeus at all; rather, it supports them. The Queen and her advisors decided for clemency not out of any love of Hell's servants and collaborators but out of fear of renewed civil war and chaos of the sort that allowed Hell to gain a foothold in Cheliax in the first place. The diabolism committee threatens to undo that."

"But, actually, the main obstacle to the removal of former diabolists from power is the lack of people with whom to replace them. I have seen, as has my lord, that you are competent, that you inspire loyalty in your subordinates, and that you abhor many of the evils of Asmodeanism as well as Asmodeus himself. What we have yet to see is whether you are capable of wielding power towards any positive vision and not merely to the detriment of your enemies." There. If the man wants a fucking county, they do have those going spare.

"If the devils try for a renewed civil war in the next century or three they will be annihilated by three archmages," says a person who doesn't know the three archmages ticked off Geb. "The diabolism committee pursues the long-term freedom of Cheliax from infernal influence, not the short-term security of the most secure country in the world. Nonetheless, your point is recognized." That is a very nice offer! He thought they were completely unwilling to hand out territory to upjumped peasants if these upjumped peasants happened to be Evil. "My positive vision is a world in which every man in the world can be the best he can be. A world of not a single man going to waste unless it is he who wastes himself. A world of power but not cruelty, ambition but not sabotage, wizardry but not whips; one of obedience through mutual loyalty, bound above and below by earned service. A world I've done my best to build amongst my own Court." And amongst the various people he's rescued from Cheliax and gotten jobs.

"A Lawful world, and one wholly opposed to Asmodeus." Also an Evil one but he's not going to say that. "I doubt it would manage without a capable leader, but Archmage Naima has fixed the aging problem and -" he shrugs with an oddly modest pride "- I have worthy successors." Also through finding something better than lichdom, if he has to. He thinks he's the third-youngest Infernal Chelish wizard to reach fifth circle, but he might be second.

"Oh, it's not me you need to convince," he says, already rising from his seat. "The Archduke will be in touch."