"...didn't have anything important in there except some nonvital notes."

It's - not fun, though, to find out that he can't leave important stuff in his room because it might get destroyed.

Or that Nidal, or Zon-Kuthon directly, was watching him closely enough to know where he sleeps - wait.

"Belief inconsistency.  If the attack was timed to the moment I tried to step outside, why were they specially targeting my bedroom, they wouldn't expect me to be there."

He looks up at Keltham. " - that's a very good question. I have no idea. Would they have thought you'd left something important there? Something they'd have wanted to steal or destroy?"

"...for that matter why fight their way through the villa at all, if they knew he was on the perimeter of the grounds? Did it seem from Security in the villa's perspective like most of the attackers were going for the villa?"

" - that was indicated in the first communications we got but communications stopped pretty quickly, if they changed targets twenty seconds in I wouldn't know. ...no survivors in the villa who didn't make it to the library, though, and apparently there were some survivors outdoors -" gesture at the two of them -

"Yeah.  All right.  That makes no sense to me at all."

"There's a saying out of dath ilan, backed by a Law I might otherwise have been teaching tomorrow - maybe still will, if I'm in shape for it.  Your strength in the Law is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality; if you're equally good at explaining anything you could possibly see, you have zero knowledge, because your degrees of surprise don't distinguish any possible event from any other possible event."

"I notice that we are confused.  Therefore, something we believe is fiction."

...could his god have timed it that exactly?  Keltham's bedroom being full of fire is not happy news about what would have happened if his god hadn't done that.

Carissa is pretty sure this guy isn't lying but if he is she is going to show him a lot of Fireballs. She can only cast a few per day but presumably someone will courteously leave him chained to something for as many days as it takes.

"What do we believe about what happened. That someone caused Pilar to be with us and our departure not to be the secret it was intended to be. That Nidal detected you leaving the Forbiddance and attacked. That - despite knowing where you were - they went through the villa and killed most of its defenders. That they Fireballed your room - how many rooms are similarly destroyed -"

          "I haven't done a full inventory but an explosion took out half the west wing, that's how they entered, and the banquet hall and the four rooms adjacent to it are burned as thoroughly. Of course, if you were guessing which room an important guest was in, you'd probably guess Keltham's - it's the suite styled for House Thrune when they're in Ostenso -"

"I am not a domain expert on Golarion, but.  If I try to come at this from a dath ilani angle.  We can probably premise, more strongly than we can premise almost any other part of this, that the timing between my stepping outside, and the attack, was not coincidental.  It's to within - something like one in five hundred parts of the day, or less, for it to be a coincidence that tight is something we'd see once in five hundred times."

"We then have a classic probability-theoretic-detective-story, that of accounting for coincidence: in particular, a coincidence of timing."

"Suppose that, prophecy being broken, we don't believe that any god managed to time it in advance by sheer prediction.  We furthermore believe Nidal didn't see me stepping outside, because they didn't know where I'd be."

"Then some other element of the sequence of events that led to me being outside, must have triggered the attack, or been timed with the attack."

"Furthermore, though more tentatively, at least one element in this sequence of events was chosen by an adversary of Nidal, because they plausibly would've gotten me inside my bedroom otherwise."

"This causal sequence started with my asking to cast my cleric spells - no, it started with Carissa returning from her shopping trip at the exact time she did.  It ended when I summoned the archon.  But I doubt Carissa should be looking for anything that timed the end of her shopping trip, because she had dinner after that, and with prophecy broken, you won't get two-minute timing at the end of a causal sequence like that."

"Something in that causal sequence either triggered the attack, or was triggered by it."

"When did Ione get her vision."

"Maybe eighteen, maybe twenty-four seconds before the attack."

"Why not send her a vision earlier?  Cheliax could have been better prepared.  An obvious possibility is that the assault was not legible until the last minute, maybe because it was successfully obscured from whoever sent Ione the vision.  But the assault was legible enough for my own god to send me a spell-vision of Zon-Kuthon's afterlife the previous day."

"If Nidal were otherwise planning an attack in an hour, say, but had eyes on Ione, but not me, they might have concluded they needed to attack as fast as possible after she gave her warning, in order to preserve as much surprise as they could.  So Ione got the vision as soon as I was outside of the primary-targeted zone inside the villa.  I want to say that, if that's the case, whoever sent her the vision had a grimdark sense of humor, but it could have just been the best solution to an optimization problem."

"We could have handled it without casualties if we'd had five minutes of warning. ....maybe Zon-Kuthon's people had some way to know we'd been tipped off, and reacted to the Security alert that went out immediately after the vision -"

"I want to emphasize that this entire mode of thinking is almost definitely completely illegitimate, but since somebody just happened to mention to me this morning that gods get clearer vision when they have clerics around, is there any not-incredibly-expensive way to check for sure whether one of the other girls in the library with Ione was a first-circle cleric of Zon-Kuthon who therefore looks just like a second-circle Lawful Evil wizard to Aura Sight."

(It is sometimes said in dath ilan:  If you put your reasoning into overdrive, you will often get somewhere, and the trouble is, you will often also get somewhere else.)

“The screening involved asking them under a truth spell after other magic on them had been dispelled, about affiliations and commitments to other gods. There are a couple non-Asmodeans, but no one who was secretly Kuthonite.”

“A couple non Asmodeans is a little high but not incredibly high,” she adds to Keltham, as Security’s not allowed to proffer that obvious lie. “The teen years are when kids experiment with religion and are likeliest to be followers of random gods.”

"Probably a complete empty-set search but if we haven't figured out anything else, suppose you repeat that screen in case somebody got clericed shortly after she got here, doublecheck whoever does the second screening, and consider that, if something like that isn't impossible, she may not know her new god is Zon-Kuthon or may somehow not know she's a cleric.  Zon-Kuthon could just not give her any spells.  Or she could have a hot-swappable personality, one self who's a cleric and one self who's not...  I should say, the same logic which suggests this whole bit also suggests that whatever test we come up with is not going to detect her."

“We can do that,” he says, a bit skeptical but mostly just very tired. 

And then another uniformed person, looking significantly sharper and ineffably more dangerous, steps in. “Her Imperial Majesty invites the traveler Keltham and any companionship he desires to the palace in Egorian while repairs are underway on his present residence.”

Oh good, something for Carissa to do aside from quietly panicking about how Keltham is using a reasoning process that he thinks is… above the gods? Beyond the gods? and which therefore she has no idea how to feed the wrong information and which is therefore going to ruin everything.

The something to do is, of course, “accept a personal invitation from Her Imperial Majesty to her home”, but, you know, at least she understands where she stands with that.

Governance at the Legislator or Chief Executive level in dath ilan does not have literally zero formality; Keltham can recognize a cue to go into Dealing With Very Serious People mode.  He stands a little straighter.

"I accept at least for myself, and for a set of others to be determined momentarily if you'll give me that moment."

"Carissa, who am I supposed to invite with me, is that like you, the other researchers, the survivors of the villa, what."

"Is Her Imperial Majesty's generous invitation aimed at the relocation of the project, or is her intent better understood as that Keltham relax and recover in greater comfort and safety while preparations for the project to restart are underway?"

           "While I cannot speak for her, Keltham's comfort and safety are at this time the highest of our project-related priorities."

"Me, and anyone else you'll want not-for-classes."

Is Ione a not-for-classes?  Definitely not in the Carissa sense yet.  "I accept on behalf of myself and Carissa Sevar.  When and if Ione recovers, she will be valuable for my learning, even if I am not teaching."

"Do you have possessions you'll need to gather?"

"I do."

"I don't."