It's your life I'll ruin if I tip anybody off. And you don't actually get to go to Heaven for it, either, because you don't actually have a soul.

It's not about my soul and it's not about my cover. It's about - not letting our enemies win.

Also people not being tortured but Lilia never finds that compelling.

Fine.

Mislead.

She does not 'wait in line' - she appears at the podium, in between speakers, in a puff of black smoke, her hands visibly drenched with blood. Why not.

"Honored delegates. Allow me to identify myself before I speak, as I was not precisely invited and you might be wondering why to listen to me. I am Lilia Ramona de Montero, the spymaster of this great nation under Abrogail Thrune. The Lord Marshal and I have some history, and he can confirm this, if you like, or in any event he cannot deny it. The Delegate Tallandria spoke of riots, in Egorian in the summer of 4701, and I would like to assure you that those riots, caused by supply disruptions in the early years of the Galtan Revolution, made last week's troubles in Westcrown look rather trivial. We put twelve hundred men, women, and children to death for them! You should learn from our example.

I support this bill. I support this bill because it has been a year and a half since I got to slowly disembowel a screaming cleric of Iomedae, and I rather miss it. I was not expecting His Highness Cerdenya to be so considerate of my preferences, here, but he has been. This bill is perfect. Slowly disemboweling people might not be creative, but precisely because it is not creative it is very relaxing. It's a great way to relieve stress after a long day of service to Asmodeus. Aspexia Rugatonn and I would sometimes go down to the dungeons together, and collaborate on a subject, though not very often because I liked them screaming and she liked them quiet. This is the honored and storied history of our country and it should also be our present day.

Valia Wain in particular is someone I have wanted to torture to death for a very long time, ever since she rebelled against our noble and evil government. I am overjoyed to see that the new government has the vision and dedication to see it done, and you have my gratitude as well as my job application. No one in all of Westcrown is better qualified, I would submit, to carry out the sentences that the wise and merciful Count proposes."

Thank you.

Off she'll walk.

It’s a neat rhetorical gambit but she thinks Silvia (Dia’s deduction skills are stronger in omakes) did it better playing it subtly instead of claiming the identity of an infamous spymaster.  The sudden appearance (a dismissed invisibility?) is just plain over the top.

…considering the convention’s level of intelligence the over the top performance is probably better.

She's going to take this as... a good sign?

It's a sign of madness, definitely, but Good madness, which it is well known makes her mother happy.

She is a first-circle priestess and it would be very very stupid to try to openly attack Abrogail Thrune's spymistress. If that were going to work someone would have done it, there must have been someone decent in Egorian, even if they'd have been Maledicted for it.

And this woman has tortured hundreds of innocent people to death, and she wants to torture Valia to death, and if she's still alive everything she's done is covered by the amnesty and she will never ever ever get what she deserves, not until she's burning in Hell—

Shield of Faith. She wraps her fingers around the handle of her dagger and steps out of line and makes a run for her—

"Moderate illusion aura," Alexandre says. "Very impressive."

Alicia has never been more terrified of someone in her life than this but if Victoria is going to go charging in she can - do a battle song, it's not like any of her magic would matter.

It doesn't even occur to her to consider if it's an illusion; her brain is filled with terror and acting through the terror and absolutely no room for logically assessing the situation.

"I swapped our your wand of augury for one of Asmodeus's so we could ambush you, but you double-checked it with a Commune."

She will Levitate Victoria without even moving.

"I swapped out one of your wands of Augury for one of Baphomet's so we could kill your counts, and you didn't double-check it with a Commune," Alexandre tells her.

It would be, effectively, a treaty violation to smite her right now. He's only a little bit tempted.

Wow, someone is way better at this than she is.

...wait, she's real? And she's trying to be Good. And the archmages aren't stopping her.

Silvia suddenly knows who she wants to be when she grows up.

"The important thing is that we both had a great deal of fun and now we are free to go after Cheliax's true enemies, such as Valia Wain."

Now she's floating!!! And she's pretty sure she's more than five paces away, and there's a bunch of innocent people in between them, or at least she thinks so, it's kind of hard to tell what with the 'floating' thing—

—and she's going to torture Valia to death—

She throws her dagger at her. (It clatters against the floor about five paces short of reaching her.)

"With a thousand like her and Wain, the Thrunes could never have held this country. So I must insist you hunt them all down and ritually disembowel them. I am sure it sounds like a lot of work but it's great fun, really."

In case anyone was wondering, it's the President's day off.

Yeah, it figures that a 3rd circle (that’s her middle estimate, they could be lower with good use of purchased scrolls) illusionist pulled some cheap tricks with the Archmage taking a well deserved break from this madness.

He's pretty sure the amount of violence happening in this room right now should either be slightly lower or much higher, but he doesn't want to side with either of the people currently involved, so he'll... wait for the paladins to do something before drawing his sword?

"I have nothing against Valia Wain, Paraduchess."

He strides to the podium, just for propriety's sake. "Nothing whatsoever. It is the eight hundred innocent people she incited to their deaths who have a cause of action against her - they, and the adventuring party plotting to murder me. They also have a cause of action against her, since their doomed and foolish attempt to slay me will only end with all of their lives crushed - in strict obedience with all laws regarding self-defense Her Majesty has passed, of course.

"But Valia Wain is Good. Valia Wain is being tortured appropriately to this! Valia Wain will hear this speech, realize more doomed innocents who want to be heroes are going to die as an inevitable consequence of her speech leading to other doomed innocents trying to kill someone far more handsome and intelligent and capable than they could ever be, and then scream in agony and beg her superiors for the mercy of going to Cheliax and preaching another sermon to not murder me, and her superiors will say that this is an inefficient use of teleports and will kill 3.7 people on average more than the alternative use of the resources, and then she will be tormented by knowing that the evil acts she took to fulfill her fine and noble goals have scarred the world further, and she will wish desperately she had never been born.

"That's why Good people are fun! They're self-torturing! You hardly need to disembowel her, even a little bit!

"So, as Delegate Ferrer may be surprised to know, I am opposed to this bill. Good people you don't need to torture, Lawful Evil ones like you should be maledicted to the Abyss, and it's really only Chaotic Evil ones who should die in agony and they need to be fed to the lions if we don't want the poor beasts to starve, since nobody else is."

That speech was awesome! CLAP CLAP CLAP!

This part of the loyalty test is really really hard! She's pretty sure you fail if you cower under your bench but that is, in fact, what she's doing.

Victòria doesn't think she's one of the thousand bravest people in Cheliax? She barely even fought the Asmodeans until Asmodeus had already lost. That — is not actually important compared to figuring out if there's a way to kill this woman — probably she should have thought harder about that before she charged her with a dagger — her holy symbol is a little pointy but she really doesn't think it would work as a weapon—

'Good people are self-torturing' is the kind of thing you believe if you're not particularly good at torturing Good people. You can hurt them way more than by making them realize they harmed the world, actually. 

Okay at this point you should leave, the point has been made and you're upsetting Alexeara.

Alex is a big boy, he can handle it. "Like our wise Count Cerdenya, I do not want Valia Wain to be tormented with the knowledge of her failure and her determination to set it right. I want her to be tormented with the severing of her tendons and the gouging-out of her eyeballs."

"Please, and the futility of her determination to set it right. She'd hardly be tortured at all without that!"

"As for the eyeball-gouging, that lacks elegance. It lacks panache. Anyone with eyeballs can have them gouged out. What's the point of a punishment that isn't specific to the victim? It's hardly poetic at all."

Lisandro will grab his delegate and his familiar and Teleport out, the only thing to do when one finds out Lilia Ramona de Montero is paying personal attention. Especially if she is already talking about gouging out eyeballs. He does it even as the baby anarchic adventurers are facing the consequences of their doomed charge. He'll regret leaving them behind for the rest of his life, but the other option is regretting it for the rest of his life and the rest of his afterlife. He hates the fact that he fled when Andoran had their revolution for the same reasons as why he's doing it today, but does not actually hate himself enough to face malediction.

If she flaps her arms like a fucking bird can she fly down — apparently not — why isn't anyone doing anything—

Because she just tried to commit murder on the floor of the convention.

If she actually does anything he can smite her. But not for - minimally violent self-defense -

"Poetry? You misunderstand me, Esquerra. I am not a poet. I am a busy woman, who spends all her time in the diligent service of her country, and has a few scarce hours for enjoyable hobbies like torturing Iomedaen priests to death, and I wished to commend the Count Cerdenya on his diligent work to enable this hobby of mine; the discussion of what forms of torture are most artful I have had a thousand times, with better artisans than you, and such matters of taste are in any event not the remit of this convention."

"Thanks to the fine work of the armies of Rahadoum, Paraduchess, there are no better artisans than me."

There's someone who wants her to drop Victoria. She's spent the last several moments wrapping spells around herself - heroism, invisibility, alter self - before her dart flies out. She's not the best at throwing weapons in the world, but she's got pretty good aim normally and with all her magic and song up she can reliably hit a person in half plate through the gaps in their armor.

It doesn't hit Montero, and she doesn't even have the decency to dodge or let it skitter off magical protections. Displacement? 

"Now, now, girls. Iomedae considers bravery a very important virtue but you will notice she did not at your age run to Gallowspire to throw sticks at Tar-Baphon."

Go sit down before my fiance murders you. 

He's too principled. ...and I have a contingency.

She's a Calistrian, not an Iomedaean, and if Iomedae thinks people shouldn't try to kill Evil Asmodeans who tortured hundreds of innocent people and are planning to torture your best friend then Iomedae is wrong.

...She casts the spell that makes it harder for Lawful people to hurt her. Unfortunately this does not actually stop her from being in the air.

He doesn't usually attend the floor sessions anymore, but the Archmage's day off is a good day to have an invisible eighth-circle wizard with permanent arcane sight and glasses of true seeing watching the proceedings. The Lilia Ramona de Montero who just spoke is, as several people have already guessed, an illusion. The surprising part is that she's a sixth-circle illusion cast by an allegedly third-circle wizard.

He's only seen the face of the true Lilia Ramona de Montero in sketches and by reading the minds of others. (The illusion's face is different, but that's unsurprising.) He didn't know it well enough to immediately recognize a younger, presumably Reincarnated, version of her. Given another reason to contemplate a connection between Montero and the Duchess of Chelam, however, he absolutely does.

Message to Cansellarion: It will take time to confirm it, but I have strong reason to believe that's the actual Montero, and that Carlota de Chelam is and has always been a false identity.

(He starts casting Discern Location. Under normal circumstances he would expect her to be long gone and/or Mind Blanked by the time it finishes, but Chelam can't do either of those things without arousing a fatal level of suspicion.)

("Out, Mateu," she says when Lisandro vanishes, and the archduchess and six people disappear from the line and arrive in Kintargo, leaving three more staff to back away slowly and flee.)

We're saving that plot beat for mainline threads and so, somehow, Third Alex doesn't get the message.