WHAT.

Keltham gets - a sense of inhuman presence, stronger than last time, and if you were going to assign emotions to sensory passing thunderstorms, more frustrated, and -

0th:  Detect Magic, Guidance
1st:  Comprehend Languages, Truthspell, Protection from Evil, Fairness x2
2nd:  Owl's Wisdom, Early Judgment, Augury (x2)
3rd:  Detect Anxieties, Detect Desires, Summon Monster III
4th:  Early Judgment, Enchantment Foil

That... is confusing.

First of all, the communications channel failed utterly.  Not too surprising in retrospect.  If it was a technique that worked, people would use it all the time, and have invented more complex codes for god-communication by now.  Obviously not reliable reasoning the way it would be in dath ilan, because his Chelish hosts could be concealing well-known techniques from him, and also because the entire planet of Golarion is one enormous gap of otherwise expected social competencies.  But still, not too surprising that it failed; Golarion continues to not look like gods are running the place or even talking to it a lot.

He's now got:

0th:  Detect Magic and Guidance.
1st:  One Truthspell, two Honest Pricing, a new 1st-circle Abjuration spell, his old Sanctuary, a new Comprehend Languages.
2nd:  Owl's Wisdom, two of an unfamiliar divination and two of another unfamiliar divination, one of which is hopefully the Early Judgment he asked after... oh, one looks to go by touch, that's probably the Early Judgment if he got it at all.
3rd:  Unfamiliar divination, unfamiliar divination, unfamiliar conjuration.
4th:  Unfamiliar abjuration.

...at least there were no Illusion spells.

If there's a message in what's left, it's not obvious to Keltham without knowing what other spells he has.  At least, not unless he has to negotiate prices twice today.  Negotiate prices urgently?  Hurry up and negotiate a price on info already?

Or, "They would otherwise cheat you, if you didn't have this spell, worry more about being cheated"?

Should he tap himself with the spell that's probably Early Judgment... no, actually he shouldn't do that until he's around somebody with a Dispel, Keltham doesn't think.  It doesn't have to be Early Judgment.  Keltham doesn't need to say that he already suspects what the spell does.

Keltham thinks.  Not just about spells.  He has queued things to think about.

Carissa wakes up again to her own internal clock, which is lots better than waking to the Queen of Cheliax evaluating whether to petrify you forever. (She's mostly not thinking about that. It's - she'll just stop being able to do her job if she dwells on it too much.)

She gets dressed and takes her Evil Bag of Holding and goes to check in.

Sometimes Maillol wishes that priests, also, actually needed sleep in order to prepare spells.

"Sevar," he says, not permitting any trace of fatigue to enter his voice.

"I'm soliciting correction or advice, if you have any."

"Going to need additional context, Sevar.  My superiors seemed relatively pleased by your performance, mostly because nobody could figure out how any more competent seducer could've gotten more success on Keltham.  What you did shouldn't have worked, and the fact that it did is suggestive that conventional methods wouldn't have."

"Specifics." Sigh. "Her Majesty wanted to know what I'd do if Aspexia Rugatonn told me that Asmodeus wanted the Queen killed. From where I'm standing it looks like all possible answers to that question are at least one of heresy or treason but if there's actually some standard answer that'd be great to know."

"That's our Infernal Majestrix, all right.  The answer in real life is that it's not the real Aspexia Rugatonn, or, I suppose, Aroden returned from the dead and got the drop on her with mind control.  For Asmodeus to move His clerics against her Infernal Majestrix would violate His pact with House Thrune."

That's so soothingly not heretical or treasonous. "Thank you. She also gave me this Bag of Holding and said that I may heal the injuries after I use it. Do you know what it does? Am I intended to use it?"

"Even if I did know, Sevar, I wouldn't tell you if the Queen didn't.  If the Queen wants it to be a surprise, it's a surprise."

"I expect the Queen told you the bag contains something you want, besides just pain.  If so, I expect she expects you to try it, and that she will re-evaluate her impression of your courage if you don't.  This should be obvious, Sevar, and I have not had so much sleep in the last two days that you should try my patience."

No one showed up in your bedroom to threaten you with nonexistence, Carissa wants to snap back, but for all she knows they did, and anyway there's no point in arguing that she has justification for being bad at things; the project doesn't care. "Do you have the books on Taldor."

"You'd think the Imperial Ministry of Historical Accuracy would have enough writers to get one fictional history written in a day if they split up by sections.  Turns out, 'We've got a mysterious truth-detecting outsider on our hands and your fictional history needs not to read as obviously false to it from directions that none of us even understand' is not a request that their previous careers have prepped them to handle."

"What I have for you instead are the three best actual books on Taldor that could be located.  And a ten-page outline of the rough course of pseudo-Cheliax since fifteen years ago, all of which had to be produced by Inner Ring people not worried about getting executed for heresy if their entire story wasn't just about the flawless excellence of Hell and House Thrune.  We're working on finding some way to get the rest of your book written by less important people.  Security outside your room has both items."

"That's probably enough for us to work off for today. I should see drafts, I'll notice some things that read false to Keltham that other people won't - I am surprised that it's not broadly believed someone better at seducing people would've been better at seducing him, is it -

- uh, am I importantly wrong about some of the things I told him that I wasn't even lying about."

"One.  I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific.  Two.  Are you sure you want to be more specific, given that your mistakes seem to be playing excellently to Keltham and that you are still, basically, an Asmodean and bringing him closer to our Lord.  Asmodeus made that your call, Sevar, it was very distinctly not left to me or even Rugatonn to decide."

'still, basically, an Asmodean' stings even though Asmodeus chose her and she already knows it was partially because she's doing theological innovation far above her previous station. She tries very hard not to use that as an input into what to say. 

"Keltham's going to have the other girls too, and if I'm doing something wildly unlikely then they're not going to do it and that's going to go badly. And I don't think we can put that off very long, though we could probably do a week if we have to. If you think my ignorance of this is really important to preserve we can have someone else brief the group on Carissa-errors they should pick up, but they won't know how I got to the errors, and that's a - substantial black box I'm working around...if there's nothing significant enough that it'd come up in advising the other girls then I guess those things can go uncorrected for now."

What are Sevar's actual heresies?  Maillol can't easily count them.

Most centrally, Sevar believes that Asmodeanism is about making everyone ultimately better off, which is the central example of propaganda that gets fed to the Outers and that the Inners know better than to believe.  Lots of Outers know better on some level, they just know that they'll die if they say it out loud or even if their thoughts are too honest about it, producing a kind of pseudo-belief that shreds apart words from wordless knowledge; an inner disintegrity that is then useful for many further ends in molding people, and probably aesthetically pleasing to Asmodeus as well, though it's hard to be sure with gods.

Maillol does not think the time has come to drop that particular enlightenment on Sevar.  She has had too little taste of privilege and power, she is too close emotionally to Lawful Neutrality and too exposed to Keltham's contrary examples.

Sevar thinks that Cheliax's tyranny is painful in part because the pain is educational and necessary and ultimately beneficial to the people being punished.  She thinks Hell is painful in part because that pain is necessary to produce the useful and refined beings that Asmodeus desires as tools.

Maillol is not sure when, if ever, she'll be ready to hear that the cruelty is the point.  You get told that either after you've sold your soul, or after Asmodeus has chosen you as a cleric. 

Maillol doesn't think he should just refuse to answer either.

"Sexually, you seem to have acquired the idea that it would be right for Keltham to do as he wished with you, once you gave yourself to him.  On conventional Asmodeanism, one would say that it is right for Keltham to do as he wishes with you because he has the power to get away with it within a lawful system that offers you no defense.  Keltham could come by that power because the Church told you to be obedient, because Asmodeus and his greater slaves like myself gave you to him to do with as he pleases, or because some girl was born into slavery to her slave parents and Keltham bought her and decided to enjoy strangling her in bed."

"Don't misunderstand this as critique of the strategy you ended up executing, Sevar.  Telling him that it was okay because you consented was an excellent move.  He wouldn't have gone for it otherwise and he's just starting out with his first tentative steps away from his Lawful Good society."

"But the fact that you believe what you told Keltham seems to have more to do with certain bizarre personal hangups of yours about events in countries that aren't even Cheliax.  Right now, Sevar, the number one person most likely to drag you off to a bedroom and do as they will with you, is the Queen of Cheliax, who is not, to the best of my knowledge, male, and has no doubt killed any number of men after making good use of them.  Whether any of them consented is utterly irrelevant to her soul's standing with Asmodeus.  She's the Queen of Cheliax.  There's no recourse from her, no appeal, no court, she doesn't just have the power to do what she wants with you, she has the legal right, which is the difference between Evil and Lawful Evil.  Then for her to take what she wants from you, if she happens to want it, is the most natural and Asmodean thing in the world."

"That you think it's more Asmodean from the Queen's perspective, if you happen to have consented, if you happen to have given yourself to her, is the heretical part.  Maybe it's more Asmodean for you if you become a willing slave to the one who hurts you, a shadow of how it will be in Hell.  It is not more Asmodean for the Queen to think that it becomes more right if she has your consent.  That will not be what Asmodeus is thinking when you come to Him in Hell."

"The obvious endgame on seducing Keltham would be to lure him deeper into sadism and domination with this talk about consent, and then lure him further to the point where he feels that he has the right to make use of somebody who hasn't consented to him at all, and does that.  That will be the point that he starts to detect as Lawful Evil and be bound for our Lord's Hell."

"And Sevar.  This is not a male-versus-female thing.  Asmodeus really, really doesn't give two shits about that.  You've met our Queen.  You should already know better."

"- I understand. Thank you. I think I can get Keltham there, if we don't ruin everything in the next month before I've had time."

Maillol reaches into his desk, and then pauses, because he has a feeling he needs to get this part of the conversation done earlier, in order for them to happen at all, because Sevar is about to be distracted.

"If you're looking for somewhere to open the Queen's gift, Sevar, try the torture chamber on the right; there's no torturer currently on duty there and the junior priest stationed outside has healing spells.  Though doing that right away may come at the expense of being able to prepare spells before you're scheduled to brief the other girls in the morning, depending on how elaborate the Queen's gift turns out to be."

"It's also been suggested to me that you, Sevar, had to buy your own intelligence headband because requisitions was being weirdly obstructionist about it and gave you a two-week delivery time.  The one you purchased will, on this version, arrive with the next delivery we get, later today.  You say that where the girls and Keltham can hear.  Then somebody, possibly Ione, should mention to Keltham the wild but unlikely theory that the delay is because they're planning to prepare cursed intelligence headbands, which exist just like cursed versions of most other magic items exist, and in particular have been famously known to do subtle influences and mind control and even make people dumber on certain subjects without realizing it.  It's not impossible that they had at least one cursed headband lying around to substitute for the one you bought, to slip it to you immediately.  The point being that Keltham shouldn't just ask to borrow your headband from you, though that's in any case something that wizards tend to be really fucking insane about."

"Those are lies to Keltham, though," except for that very last part, "so your final call.  The suggester wasn't in our chain of command."

"...probably a good idea. Or someone can suggest that the delay is because you have to check if they're subtly cursed, and then Keltham can generate for himself the hypothesis that we might be doing that deliberately."

Right, well, that's basically what he had to say to Sevar, or it had better have been, because now he's not going to get anything sensible from her for a while.  Maillol reaches again into his desk, and offers Sevar the intelligence headband.

(He wishes it was possible to actually curse the things with some subtle maleficent voice whispering to wizards to not be so insane about intelligence headbands.)

- blah blah blah Carissa is a good Asmodean her only motivation is to be a less imperfect slave.

She puts it on.