Ione does not have Comprehend Languages prepared, as it happens.

"Wanted to ask you a question about a book, but only if this is a good time," Keltham says.

"It's a fine time," Ione says, after the Security officer translates, correctly decoding this question as being about the Security officer's presence.  "Any time is a good time for questions like that, now that people have seen me do it once."

"Gratitude-for-inconvenience-incurred.  Book containing a maximal number of descriptions of cleric spells up to fifth circle?"  His god may not have played its full hand, and it seems good to know about the fifth circle too.

"Books about magic aren't always... let me think."

There's - what is there in the Ostenso library?  They have a copy of a book she knows about that includes all known cleric spells, including up to 9th, including some Asmodeus's clerics can't get.  Is there a book that only lists cleric spells that Asmodeus's own clerics can get?  Either that doesn't exist or Ione needs to know more about it.

Security needs to give her some sign about whether that book is available today or if all the copies are out of the Ostenso library but Ostenso can request they'll be returned soon, or, or what?  1 if book available, 2 if not a kind of book that can be retrieved, 3 if the only copy is out of the Ostenso library but they can ask for it back, 4 if Ione should go on thinking until somebody can give her more instructions.

...they are going to want it to have a couple modifications to, say Glimpse of Truth that aren't yet completed, so...3?

"Um," Ione says, glancing at Security, and then sighs, as if giving up on something (in the character she's playing, on directly admitting in front of a Chelish government official that Ione retrieves books from other libraries).  "Ostenso is a wizard academy, there's only one compendium of cleric spells in there and somebody currently has it borrowed.  Uh, you could ask Security to send a message to the library to get the book back, and I could try again later."

...somewhat suggestive of them wanting time to quickly reprint something?  Actually, though it's a bit post-hoc, Keltham thinks he'd have guessed a priori something like a 30% chance that a real wizard library would have no unborrowed books on all cleric spells and... it's not quite fair to say 100% if they want to fool him, because they could choose other means of fooling him.  Call it 2.5:1.  You don't actually want to ignore your 2.5:1 likelihood ratios, they can logarithmically add up pretty quickly.

"Thanks for looking," Keltham says.  "Anything that just has a brief list of all the cleric spells up to fourth circle by name?  Even in passing?"

"I - I don't think I can look through all the contents of all the books that narrowly, if it's not what a whole book is about," Ione says honestly.

"I hate to ask this," Keltham says to both Ione and Security, "but can somebody maybe just flatly write down a list of a bunch of cleric spells they remember up to 4th circle, with, like, one-sentence descriptions of what they do."

"I can," Ione says without hesitating, because she doesn't see Security telling her to pretend like she couldn't do that.  "Come back in... maybe an hour?"

"All right.  I'll just ask for some paper for notes, then, and find other things to think about for an hour," so he can forget what he saw as much as possible before he has to think about it any more.  What else is there to think about instead?  He at least needs to itemize all the things he wants to ask Carissa about sex while they're not actually having sex, but some other things happened today too.  And he can work out a rough general spell-granting code, for attempted communication with his god, in advance of knowing which exact spells he could ask for to signal various conditions.

Off with Keltham!

"The fourth circle divination Glimpse of Truth is called Glimpse of Beyond, and detects Polymorphed people, secret doors, and things hidden on other planes," Security tells her once he's definitely gone. "The books will back you up by morning. Keltham's god isn't known. Otherwise just show us your first draft."

"Don't lie to him - about anything - unless you've checked it with me first," Carissa adds.

Zon-Kuthon keeps mostly to Himself, by His own choice, but also by choice of the other gods.  When somebody of the same kind as yourself wanders into the Void and comes back with inverted values, there is an uncertainty about whether, if you talked to the victim too much, something infohazardous might start to happen to you.  Zon-Kuthon negotiates little, or not at all; He has little, or no, use for alliances and dealings.  He keeps to Xovaikain, His true realm, and to Nidal, the material shadow of it.

Before Zon-Kuthon, there was Dou-Bral, who helped fight and imprison Rovagug.  It is unclear whether Zon-Kuthon would in some new battle fight to preserve all the pain that exists in the world; or if, Dou-Bral having once thought that the joy and beauty of the world outweighed its pain, Zon-Kuthon would now think there was too much pleasure in Existence, and that it ought therefore to be destroyed.  Or perhaps Dou-Bral was too optimistic, in the days when Dou-Bral fought to defend reality; and if Dou-Bral knew what would have become of Pharasma's world, He would have tried to destroy it, even as Zon-Kuthon apparently seems content with its continued existence.

No other god in creation likes Zon-Kuthon.  From Asmodeus's perspective He is a pretender to Lawful Evil; from the other Evil gods' perspective, an obsessed fanatic of no use to anyone; from the perspective of Neutral gods, an impediment; from the perspective of Good, a horror.

Why then does Zon-Kuthon continue to exist?  Among the less pleasant facts of reality is that among the real reasons why the other gods don't band together to destroy Zon-Kuthon is that, as the last Lawful Evil competitor to Asmodeus of any significance, He is a threat for other gods to hold over Asmodeus - that there is at least one other competitor they could back for Asmodeus's position, if He grew too troublesome. Iomedae and Sarenrae, to be clear, would not keep Zon-Kuthon around just as a foil to Asmodeus, if those four were the only gods that were; but in a world where the existence of Zon-Kuthon is a constant weight on the negotiating positions of Asmodeus and say Gorum, trying to destroy Zon-Kuthon could be a mistake even if that were possible.  Iomedae is more calculating now than when She was human, because She is better at it; She would not destroy Zon-Kuthon if the end result was for Asmodeus to grow stronger and for Hell to last victorious.

Of course, some gods are less scared of talking to Zon-Kuthon than others, if they've already seen all the way to the end of the Void, where lies the Double Void, which flipped Nethys's utility function's sign right back!  No, that's not actually what happened, but it makes about as much sense as anything else that Nethys could or would tell you about it.

Hey, Zon-Kuthon, Nethys sends.  You see this mortal over here in Cheliax, the one who fears you and is horrified by you?  You're admittedly missing some context, but it'd be hilarious if you sent some minions to assault his location sometime soon...

And Carissa goes back to the temple to look for Maillol. She is very tired and suspects, somehow, that this won't be a nice quick twenty minute debrief before bed.

It sure isn't.  Maillol acidly tells Sevar that nobody needed to promise Keltham that people were actively working to identify his god, up until that point they had the option of saying later that somebody spotted it as Abadar but that they were worried about his adopting Osirion's sexual morals or just that people were still consulting each other about if that was allowable to disclose.

This is, mostly, the fault of somebody whose screaming can be distantly heard in Maillol's office, because he was fucking fed up with this whole scenario and this screaming is at least a little consoling.  Much worse for that guy, he's getting a permanent notation on his file saying that he doesn't think fast enough on his feet to take point on complicated situations, like that incident with Otolmens's oracle.  Whom Carissa was also responsible for remembering the existence of, even if it wouldn't have been her job to try to yank the guy out of the room fast enough.

Maybe it was somebody else's fuckup who put her in a bad situation, but she is now the one responsible for recoveries, and on the Abadar thing she muffed the recovery.

"You're going to spend an hour practicing with Elias," Maillol tells Carissa.  "He's going to throw situations at you where Keltham runs across something we've been hiding or sees something he shouldn't, you're going to come up with excuses, fast.  If they involve you saying that you've got to talk to me before you can figure out what you're authorized to say now, that's not great, but Elias won't hit you."  Ferrer's sickening fake smile vanishes.  "Any time you start saying too much in front of Imaginary Keltham and making up excuses that are any more complicated than they need to be, Elias is going to hit you."

"I acknowledge my errors. I acknowledge I need the practice and I know if I argue you're going to make it longer, which you are very welcome to. To my mind we never meaningfully had the option of telling him it was Abadar. Abadar has a country right near here and he already knows that, and it's an incredibly obvious place to go when he gets fed up and leaves. If you want him to even contemplate hiding out in a forest or extradimensional space somewhere and not contacting other governments he needs to think he has an obscure god, not one running a country right next door. He's not stupid enough to fail to think that I might be lying about the sexism or that there might be a good justification for it, and it's not an argument-against-Abadar strong enough to stop Keltham trying to contact them. You should find him an obscure Tian deity.

I appreciate that you are monitoring a tendency towards excuses more complicated than they need to be. I am noticing a tendency towards plans that require using a degree of ability to manipulate Keltham's environs which I would prefer he believe Golarion magic does not enable.  The High Priestess asked me, this morning, if my recommendation that we explain Otolmens to Keltham overrode her very reasonable heuristics about sharing less about Otolmens, and I was not willing to persist in a recommendation against such advice, but if I'd thought through that her plan involved us consistently deploying reflexive counterspells to protect the invisibility of Otolmens' representative while Keltham flings around fourth-circle cleric magic aimed at discovering concealed things, I would have persisted in my recommendation.  If Invisibility Purge hadn't discovered Otolmens' oracle Glimpse of Truth would have, you can't inconspicuously counterspell True Seeing, and then it's apparent we deliberately hid him from Invisibility Purge discovery. If I had thought of the oracle fast enough I would've told Security to do nothing using abilities other than 'put people in other rooms', and if that wasn't fast enough to solve the problem, so be it. Abadar's going to keep giving Keltham spells in that genre, and honestly the oracle is the most innocuous explanation for them. 'have an invisible person running around with Security constantly counterspelling and actively interfering in Keltham's efforts to discover them' is an extraordinary expenditure of our effort to keep a secret I at this point forcefully recommend we stop keeping. Otolmens is the kind of institution Keltham is used to cooperating with and we should tell him sufficient true things for him to conclude that."

"Your argument on Abadar is reasonable and I have downgraded my estimate of the severity of your error.  It remains that your current excuses are too visibly extemporized.  Your excuses wouldn't fool me, Sevar, they look like excuses to somebody who knows what that is.  I'm not saying you should be choosing excuses to fool me, you should be choosing them to fool Keltham.  But right now, we're only getting away with this because Keltham is an outsider, and that makes us pathetic and unworthy of the responsibility Asmodeus placed on us.  Yes, you need a dose of that practice now and not just later.  That you're already exhausted is part of the point.  Twenty minutes with Elias today, more later, and don't mistake the reduction for mercy, it's about the degree to which you being slightly better-rested tomorrow is a military priority."

"I've filed your request for somebody who can train you in conventional honeypot tactics.  I've filed your request for the alternate Taldor history, and put my own commendation and priority on it; it's not just a workable idea, it gives us an organizing principle that this chaos of an operation desperately needs.  We'll tell Broom that we're fine with Keltham's terms for showing himself in front of Keltham, and ask him politely not to stalk Keltham invisibly until we see how much Invisibility Purge Keltham throws around, assuming that's what you meant.  I'll re-query our policy on keeping Otolmens's existence a secret to the people authorized to make decisions that potentially destroy Golarion.  You'll brief the girls tomorrow morning on your new plans.  Am I missing anything, Sevar?"

"No, sir." It is in some strange way cheering, to be told that they are pathetic and unworthy of the responsibility Asmodeus placed on them, because of course all humans are pathetic and unworthy but it only merits comment if in this context they are expected not to be. Maybe sometimes when the stakes are high enough some humans figure out how to not be pathetic and unworthy. Or at least how to be less so.

She looks over at Elias. How much does he look like he would prefer this training to involve hitting her a lot. ...yeah, valid. Carissa, too, if she were in a different role in this operation, would feel like hitting Carissa a lot. 

"Keltham figures out that you don't really love him," Elias says, smiling at her. 

"Gosh, accusations about drawing ones internal conceptual boundaries wrong are the kind of thing I'd have guessed would be Complicated Romance in dath ilan. In Cheliax no one's running around with a baseline expectation anyone could possibly have drawn them coherently in the first place."

" - that's not even an excuse."

"Best excuses usually aren't. - I think I should get to hit him if I have a really good one," she tells Maillol.