"I'll ask." He gets up. Knocks on the door.

The guard opens it. "Ready to go?"

"Yes, thank you."

And he can get escorted back out and to the main level of the city, from where he can find his way back.

The next time he's in the dining hall he mentions, as soon as it seems loosely apropos, that the prisoner was wondering if she'd be allowed to go to Hell.

This causes people to make faces. "Cheliax really gets to their heads."

"I hate Asmodeus."

"I hate Pharasma."

"What, for not grading on a curve?" 

"You know what I mean."

"We don't let people kill themselves especially if there might be strategic intent - having potentially arranged a resurrection, say," Isavel says. "We - don't categorically avoid executing Evil people but we try very hard not to."

"She mentioned that you can turn people into statues."

"That is possible to do," Isavel says. " - we don't do it as a matter of course, even with people who are Evil. But in a case like this where she has information we don't want Hell to have, if we had to kill her - we might do that, yes."

"Are you likely to have to? She has anti-magic handcuffs- - maybe you need those for other things on a routine basis -"

"Wizards are very hard to securely hold. We mostly don't try it on a routine basis. If an even more pressing emergency need to imprison a wizard came up that  - would be a difficult situation."

"Not an impossible one. You can do it with a geas, but you have to renew it regularly and be sure of your wording. But - I don't think your friend is wrong to believe that we'd prefer holding her to be a temporary solution not a permanent one. Nor to believe we don't want her to go to Hell - where, I do feel it's important to point out, she will promptly be lit on fire for years and years."

"Lit on fire."

"Yes. The first plane of Hell is continually on fire and they leave all the new arrivals to suffer in it. Because they're Evil."

That sounds fake. "Uh huh."

"You can ask her! Asmodeans agree that Asmodeus tortures everyone in Hell, they just believe this is fine since - they're Evil."

"I think there are more epicycles," someone says. 

"Sure." Isavel sighs. "Since anything Asmodeus chooses to do to people is definitionally right since He matters and they don't and it's gracious of Him to bother enslaving them. Something like that."

"She did mention that last part. I was unclear on why it was -" Adjectives fail him.

"I think the idea is that - people matter less than gods, and ought to obey and serve them -"

"And Asmodeus is the most powerful god, and they think He'll win in the end..."

Kyeo shakes his head. "It seems like a strange thing to think, that the magic aliens are inherently more important, just because a magic alien self-servingly told you so."

"I think...people have a natural longing to be part of a bigger whole. A holy order, a nation, a cause, a religion...there's nothing wrong with it by itself, it's natural and good. But - it can be pointed at institutions that are unworthy of it. And Cheliax is a country designed to point it at a being as unworthy as one can possibly be. And lots of things are convincing, if they're the only thing you've ever heard..."

"The thing we want to do," says Isavel, "is convert your friend, but - if she thinks she has to go along with it to not die then it won't actually work - it's better if it's her idea -"

Kyeo is sure glad that his bigger whole is just literally the People of Ibyabek, there's no way for that to be an unworthy institution. "Why doesn't it work?"

"I think if you are trying to believe something so people won't kill you you end up....believing something entirely different? I'm not sure. If it gets to the point where we're going to have to kill her if she doesn't convert we will tell her that, but we're not at that point and she'll have better odds if she's trying because she thinks Asmodeanism might be wrong rather than because she thinks it is right but that she'll have to lie to us to live to go to Hell and serve Asmodeus."

"How do you usually try to convert people?"

"Wait for them to ask questions. Try to answer those honestly. It's - not really something you can push, not if you want to - help people decide what the truth is, rather than bully them into agreeing with you."