“ - shouldn’t…what? Let him write the constitution? …shouldn’t marry him? - well, if you’d told me that before he proposed, I wouldn’t have agreed, but I can’t break it off. What’s the concern?”

        “I wish I’d forseen it and could have told you in advance, but given that I didn’t I’m afraid you’ll have to find a way to break it off - It wouldn’t be fair to Cansellarion. He hates us, very understandably. For you to marry him would be a serious betrayal, one that I’d avoid without good reason.”

“I don’t think I could - keep being both Lilia and Carlota - without Riudare catching on eventually. If you think it would additionally be unfair to Cansellarion - fair enough. I will leave you my spellbook, for whoever you find to keep an eye on the neighbors for you, and only be Carlota. I only stopped in the first place because I was afraid the situation would escalate enough to destabilize the government.”

          “No. You can be Carlota, but - It would still be wronging Cansellarion to marry him.”

Lilia spends a while stuttering internally with no clear sense of what she is trying to get through the stuttering. “Yesterday you said you wanted to know if there was anything I valued more highly than the ability to send my enemies to Hell. Forget the schools. I want this.”

         “You do? How much you, how much Carlota?”

“ - oh, I think Carlota and I are of one mind. Lilia should not exist. No one wants her to. As you say, her allies hate her, very understandably. You made her for a purpose. She did not succeed in it, though it was a reasonable bet in expectation. There is no reason for her to remain. I did not contemplate this much the last year when I was being Carlota all of the time, because there was no - sharp contrast. But since the riots there has been. Sometimes I am Lilia and sometimes I am Carlota and I like being Carlota and I don’t like being Lilia. We should let her die. You can make another one, if you ever need another one.”

            “I want you to exist. Not just a perfect spy. You.”

That hurts very badly. Why does that hurt very badly. Because she would have given anything, her entire life, to hear it, and now it is only being spoken to refuse her a life that she actually finds appealing. She stands there, expression blank, trying to find -

“Why? So once a week she can report to you on all your enemies? Because that is the most substantive interaction we have had since I was a child. So you can feel like you did the right thing? You obviously did. So you can feel like I’m all right? If you want that, let me be someone who is all right.”

         “I would like you to be someone who is all right. But - surely there is someone else you as Carlota could be happy with, besides the single person in the country who would be most upset to learn his wife was secretly my daughter?”

“ - if I call off the engagement I destroy all my prospects. No one will know what I did but they’ll know it was something terrible, if he was willing to drop me over it two days after we got engaged. And it’ll - it’ll break Carlota, because Carlota would not do it, she is so excited about this and it’s important to her and ‘Carlota, but she broke off her engagement’ is like - when I try to imagine it she comes up with ‘I was under a Suggestion spell and should beg Alexeara to fix it’ - she wouldn’t do it, so there isn’t a version of her that did it, and none of the things she wants from her life are achievable in a world where she did it -”

          “I expect there is probably a way and I believe that you can find it.”

She’s probably right, of course. It is a horrible complicated messy situation but it is probably still possible to claw out of it some things that matter to Carlota. She just doesn’t want to. She wants to marry Alexeara. She wants to win everything and fix everything and not work twice as hard to miserably piece together a tenth of it. She wants to marry a man she genuinely likes and respects and not just one who is willing to take damaged goods if they come with a duchy. 

But what she wants doesn’t matter, and never has. 

"I understand. I - give me a few days to figure out whether I can mitigate the political damage."

       "Of course."

Lilia Teleports to a stone bunker deep below the earth somewhere in Druma, and starts sprinkling silver around a calling circle.

The Order of the Rack, the Hellknight order that engaged in censorship, was founded on a pact with powerful bound outsiders, as many Hellknight orders were, but these ones were not devils. They were a kind of aeon singlemindedly focused on preventing the spread of knowledge. And, when they arrived too late to prevent the spread of knowledge, on unweaving it, scrubbing it right back out of the world.

Cheliax did not just have the capacity to demand all the old books be burned. They had the power to turn the words on the page to uninteresting gibberish, to erase also letters that were written about the contents of those books, to rip the tree of knowledge out at the roots and burn every leaf in one instant.

They just had to capture the creator of that knowledge and feed him to the agnoias. 

The person an agnoia devours, the world forgets. Most of the world forgets immediately, as soon as the person leaves their line of sight. Their loved ones forget more slowly, the way one forgets a dream; it is vivid, then it is fragmented, then it is a vague sensation of wistfulness.

Lilia knows she has fed people to agnoias - six of them, specifically - but she does not know who, or why.

What she does remember is that it was an enormous hassle.

The agnoias were very hard to bargain with, and picky; they would help erase the legacy of a wizard-inventor, happily, but absolutely refused to serve their purpose by executing rebel leaders in such a way that all those they inspired would forget their memory. Hell's interests were only sometimes in concordance with those of the agnoias. The negotiations were made all the more exhausting by the fact that it is impossible to reason in the presence of agnoias; around them there was only a vast floating void of ignorance, all recollection of the conversation's purpose fled. You could repeat words to them only if you learned to memorize the words as a meaningless collection of sounds. They realized after a while it was best to bargain with them in a language you didn't in fact understand. 

(Yes, Lilia was able to use the fact that negotiations with the agnoias were happening in a language the negotiators didn't speak to prevent the agnoias from communicating their agreement to have Elie Cotonnet delivered to them to be consumed, and was thus able to avoid having to avert that plot some more costly way. The agnoias would actually have been very happy to consume Elie Cotonnet.

You're welcome. Sometimes she's even glad she did it.)

It is not safe for Lilia Ramona de Montero to defy her mother. Lilia Ramona de Montero's mother has a blind spot here, a contemptible one, but it is not an infinite one. She knows that Lilia is very dangerous, and she knows that Lilia can lie to her face. 

If Lilia wishes to defy her mother - even if she has not, actually, yet decided what to do with the blazing desperate thrashing desire to defy her mother - she needs to, in the next few hours, ensure that her mother does not recall that she ever existed, or her defiance will be measured in hours and she will be destroyed before the next dawn. 

There are probably a lot of ways to do this. There are not very many that Lilia knows, that she knows that her mother does not know, and that she can do right now.

One cannot, obviously, make a plan for someone to come and fetch or resurrect a person after they are devoured. This plan will be forgotten. One could, possibly, set a contingency that activates after one has been devoured; Cheliax did not actually test this theory, because there were not so many sixth circle wizards capable of casting Contingency that it was worthwhile running experiments like this on them. 

(She can in fact infer how it works entirely by considering which tests she doesn't remember running, and would have run.)

They had suspected that if you bind an agnoia, and it devours you, then after the world has forgotten entirely that you exist (and, importantly, after the binding has dissolved and the agnoia returned to Axis), the contingent Raise Dead (or contingent Heal? she's not sure that being devoured by an agnoia involves being dead, actually) would restore you. 

She's not going to ask an agnoia, obviously. Agnoias don't answer questions. She is going to ask some other more reasonable aeon what magic suffices to reverse an agnoia's devouring, and then whether when the devouring is reversed the effect is reversed too. 

And then she will feed herself to the creatures of fog and mist, and be devoured, and everyone will forget that there was ever any such person as Lilia Ramona de Montero; and then, hopefully, the contingent Raise Dead she can easily cast will restore her to life, but not to memory.

"It won't work."

Lilia does not startle because it would not help. She does start casting a silent dimension door to the surface -

"Oh, don't be rude," the man says, and counterspells it. "When I've come all this way to help you, too. It is a clever plan, for someone who needs must with only hours to work improvise her escape from the archmage who enslaved her. It would work in the narrow sense that she'd forget you. It won't work to achieve the thing you actually want - because you are Lilia Ramona de Montero, and you are also Carlota - the one who has done all the work at the convention so far. The agnoias will devour her memory also, and the decrees she wrote, and all the work that is a consequence of her. You would unravel half of Cheliax in your own unraveling.

 The thing you want is to surrender one of the lives you've led and keep the other. But the agnoias do not devour by parts."

"Interesting," says Lilia, who has no reason to believe anything said by random invaders of her underground hideout.

"I can offer you what you want."

And who do you work for, someone might ask, but of course she knows the answer. Hell is no longer ruled by the god of tyranny. Now it is ruled by the god of secrets.

"What is your offer."

"The world will forget Lilia Ramona de Montero ever existed. It will not be as if Lilia Ramona de Montero never existed. You don't want that. All your works will remain; but no one will recall particularly who Cheliax's spymaster was, and your mother will not remember who her daughter was, any more than anyone recalls who succeeded Abrogail I of Cheliax."

Lilia has memorized many Thrune family trees. She casts back through them, suddenly alarmed. Abrogail 1 died in 4672. Terthule was coronated in 4674, as the third Thrune king. So there was one in between. Terthule was Abrogail's nephew. Did his father rule? Did Abrogail have children? She did have children. How many children? Squinting at the family tree in her mind's eye it's clearly three, but she only can call to mind two of them -

"I am allowing you to notice that it's odd," the man says. "Because otherwise this conversation will be tedious. Ordinarily it would not strike you as odd, just as it never did when you committed those family trees to memory. Lilia Ramona de Montero will be as gone as if an agnoia devoured her. But Carlota will remain."

This is Mephistopheles, and he already owns her soul. "Your price."

"Two tasks, both of them within your power. The first - Razmiran."

"Naturally." 

"For as long as Razmiran is mine, for as long as Xer holds against Cyprian's armies, no one will remember Lilia Ramona de Montero. If the war is lost, if my country falls, or if the other condition is not met, they will remember her again. That is the deal I offer you."

She has some ideas of how to do it. Another Andoren provocation, one in Galt, that Cyprian feels obliged to respond to. She can still contact that cleric of Gorum she knows of, bring him in on the other side. Lastwall's stretched so outrageously thin it's easy to stretch them thinner -

It feels like Carlota is screaming in her head. She would not have expected that. She ignores it. It is for Carlota's sake that she is doing this.

"The other condition?"

"Tell me what you know of the actions of the Archmages Cotonnet, and your mother, and Shawil and Dujardin, on the day that the spawn of Rovagug attacked."

" - I was compromised by Volnugar. I was not involved in that planning."

"Ah, my mistake. I thought I was speaking to a gifted spymaster, one who is about to have all her enemies forget that she exists. Learn the answer by the end of the year or the deal is off; that is the other condition."

"If you get two conditions, so do I. I want my soul back."

"Huh. You know, I suppose it would be rather inconvenient, to have the rights over your soul controlled by someone who doesn't know you exist. Fair enough. Get Dujardin to tell you all a human can remember of what took place on that day, and I will void the contract by which Hell holds your soul."

Lilia can interrogate people in their sleep. It's almost too easy. 

"Those terms are in principle very appealing. Are you offering to pay all of the legal fees?"

"I have already -" he pulls out a contract with a flourish.

Sometimes they go for that and it's really funny.

Lilia spares it one contemptuous glare in which she is very careful not to let her eyes resolve on the words.  "If you will pay all associated legal fees I will have my lawyer, in Axis, draw up a contract along the terms you have just offered me. If you won't pay all associated legal fees, go back to Hell." He can of course take her with Him but there was no way of surviving this interaction, if He didn't genuinely intend to make the deal.

"I'll pay nine hundred ninety thousand nine hundred ninety nine parts out of a million of the legal fees. To avoid encouraging you to be wasteful with my money."

How much does he expect that to cost - no. 

She nods, with as much dignity as a mortal can muster when being toyed with by a god. She Plane Shifts. 

- you're not going to do it you're not going to do it you're not going to do it -

You don't exist. You are a delusion I have been entertaining because it nicely complemented some other delusions I was entertaining.

We should go straight to the Church and - Alexeara'll know if there's some way to use this -

All right, I think it's time that you and I had a conversation. You are a hallucination, and a particularly stupid hallucination. I have had to break a great many people, and I know how I will break you, if you make me. I will wear your face and I will walk the road of your duchy past people who recognize you and cry out in joy and run to bow before their duchess and I. Will. Maledict. Them. Until Carlota does not exist, until Carlota does not want to exist, until Carlota is a distant and unpleasant memory like the most recent occasion I was tortured to death.

Or, you can stay in your place, and get everything you want in life. I really recommend that choice.

You have to talk to someone. The lawyers will - take some time - you can get a quote and then you can go talk to someone. The real Carlota. 

Doesn't agree to confidentiality without twenty four hours' notice, says Lilia with a kind of vicious miserable glee. 

The first part of that was a good idea, though. She should go get a quote. It will take the lawyers some time.

If she wants ....a rush order contract with Mephistopheles.... in which he agrees to erase her from living memory - including herself? excluding herself? did they specify? - in exchange for her preserving Mephistopheles's control of a specific mortal geographic territory with contested borders - then yes that will take some time. And also be outlandishly expensive. Yes, Mephistopheles did send notice of his intent to pay most of the costs. It will still be expensive. 

Heaven can protect you from your mother. 

Oh, do they have a way out of soul-sales now, they should really have mentioned. Heaven would offer me the protection of turning me into a statue and holding onto me in case in the future they get less fucking incompetent.

And that would be better.

You get one more stupid petty sniping comment and then I really will kill someone in front of you just to shut you up.

If you ask to talk to Alexeara confidentially then you can - still do this - if you don't end up liking any of his alternatives better.

The thing is that Alexeara would be sure it was a trick, a manipulation, and she cannot bear it. 

She is not willing to say that even to herself.

She finds the bitter mocking voice again instead.

"Alexeara, dear sweet Alexeara, I have a problem. I would like to erase my existence from the memory of everybody who has ever lived so that my mother and her friends do not murder me the second they realize that I hate them and I want them all to die. I have an offer from Mephistopheles but I'm interested in seeing whether Heaven will counteroffer and charge less in legal fees. Also I'd like to marry you."

Carlota doesn't respond, because she told her to stop talking. She feels so much better when there's no chittering Good nonsense inside her own fucking head, the one thing that has generally, historically, belonged to her. 

She should, in fact, think about whether she has better options. She doesn't think she really does; Hell holds her soul. She doesn't want to ride out the rest of the convention being spurned-scandalous-Carlota. She is probably not thinking clearly, when she thinks that she would prefer to go to Hell, but she does not want to do it.

Her mother will kill her as soon as she admits to herself that Lilia is willing to defy her. If her mother doesn't have the nerve, which would be contemptible, her allies will do it, quite plausibly the second Alfirin relates the conversation to them.

Mephistopheles doesn't offer real escape.

But the people she has worked for her whole life aren't even willing to offer her pretend escape.

"I thought of one term I want to add to the contract."

"What's that?"

"If I kill my mother, and she goes to Hell, then after that, I'd like her to remember me."