The plan is that, unless there are entities here which think and write books extremely quickly compared to Keltham, they probably cannot fake an entire library in order to control Keltham's flow of information.

"Lots of random sampling, accompanied by trying to infer back the world that the pages were written in.  I'm not trying to acquire thorough knowledge of anything, just orient myself to this whole universe."

"Well, if you find the personal diaries of the Archduke you've got to copy a page down so we can mysteriously reference it at parties, later, and make him wonder how much we know." That feels like the right amount of aesthetically Evil while completely unobjectionable even to Good which Keltham seems comfortable in.

Dinner arrives. It is generous heaps of a dozen different things, since they didn't know what he'd like; fish and rice and bread and shellfish and vegetables and stuffed pheasant and seared meat and fruits and pastries.

LADY WHAT - she must have been joking, even most criminals wouldn’t do that and no sensible Archduke would just leave his personal diaries in the library either.

Keltham samples everything, and will gravitate towards the more protein-heavy dishes accompanied by fruit, treating the pastries and bread as a dessert.  He chews the first bites deliberately, experiencing and considering, and then eats much more rapidly after he has already Observed the New Experience.

The food is much better than at the Worldwound and she's going to enjoy it while it lasts. She also suspects people are frantically making some arrangements in the library so it's better for Keltham not to be done too quickly, though she's also not going to observably stall him. 

When they're done she'll ask which rooms are free and pick one out and demonstrate the symbol on the door. "See you in the morning?"

"Suppose so.  I check explicitly: you don't expect me to accidentally get lost on the way to the library, or lost on the way back, in a way that I can't recover from by running into somebody to talk to."

"I expect not but if you want an escort I could make space in my schedule."

"Eh, think I'm fine checking empirically how lost I get without you, before I assume it's bad enough you need to be always following me around.  I'm just checking that it is, in fact, inside the disaster class where you can sensibly plan to see what actually goes wrong and then recover, instead of some plausible-seeming missteps being bad enough to require advance foresight."  This language and the number of words it takes to say things oh his ass.

"You will not wander off a cliff or through a portal to the Abyss if you get lost, and probably some of your security's following you, so it should be recoverable."

Under other circumstances Keltham might ask about intelligence-amplification headbands that might prevent him from forgetting his path; but mind-amplification is also mind-alteration, so Keltham is not about to just yank one of those things onto his head, even if supplied, before he manages to run across some mentions of them in the library.

Keltham shall now attempt to explore yet another place where no dath ilani has ever been.  How is he doing at Finding the Library?

If he asks the staff they will show him down a flight of stairs and through a courtyard to a ....very modest library, really. Two rooms with high ceilings and shelves full of books.

Also it's full of teenage girls sitting three to an overstuffed armchair and giggling.

Is there anything that looks like a section on gods, or a section on global-factional-politics?

(Keltham is (a) bent on his mission and (b) processing teenage girls as extremely normal inhabitants of libraries.  It may take him a bit of a delayed drop to ask what they're doing in a supposedly high-security area and why the gender ratio.)

There's a section on theology, which looks rather sparse, and a section on world affairs which seems to have the global-factional-politics he might hope for. 

The teenage girls observe him raptly but don't interrupt, he looks in-a-hurry and also (to Detect Magic) there's clearly several high-level invisible people shadowing him, which means it would be a bad idea to make sudden movements, even ones that are just accidentally dropping your pen on the floor so as to strategically pick it up. 

(Keltham rolls against his SED to notice the attention.  Fails.)

Theology seems like the highest priority.  Pull a random book and look at a random page.

A series of mental exercises for Asmodeans, to practice submission to the will of their god blah blah blah, meditations for executing on their intentions successfully. Meditations to consider before making a promise. Meditations for raising Asmodean children. Meditations for blah blah blah anticipating Hell in a productive and confident fashion.

Hm.  Seems broadly consistent with the picture Carissa drew, so far.  Different random page?

The physical structure of Hell. It's not technically a plane, but nine of them; the only one accessible from the rest of the universe is Avernus, the first, where souls go when they die. The second is only accessible from the first (and third), the third from the second, etc. 

Let's try a different book.  Do any of them look like they'd have information about the other gods?

Nope! This library contains no books about gods other than Asmodeus. Those are illegal in Cheliax and could have been acquired on very short notice but spot-modification would be, well, hellish.

Okay that's downright odd, given the extent to which negotiations between gods formed part of this world's Foundations of Order, in the mental picture Keltham was drawing; you shouldn't be able to understand current reality without knowing who had what utility function.  Book on history of divine negotations?

Also no!

(That's....not even a kind of book that can be found on short notice; it's probably in some private libraries but not Chelish private libraries.)

A book about Shelyn, goddess of art, love, and beauty, has turned up on a shelf in the corner; he must've missed it in his first scan.

Great, let's flip to a random page in that one.

Shelyn once had a brother, but then His utility function was inverted and He became a god of torture; it's very sad. 

SHIT WHAT okay let's temporarily forget breadth-first search and read the pages before and after that one.

For a time, she and Dou-Bral shared the portfolios of beauty, love and the arts, and were worshiped by the early Taldans, until at some point they argued, and Dou-Bral abandoned Golarion for the far dark places between the planes.

When Dou-Bral returned to Golarion, he had become the god of mutilation, misery and torture: Zon-Kuthon. Believing that Dou-Bral still existed within Zon-Kuthon, Shelyn reached out him, but he pierced her hand with his black nails. When Thron, their father, tried to welcome him, Zon-Kuthon captured and tortured the wolf-spirit beyond recognition.

One myth speaks of how Zon-Kuthon first came into conflict with Abadar, the god of culture, wealth, and stability. Seeing the crimes Zon-Kuthon committed in Golarion, Abadar knew that he must be punished, and made a bargain with the evil god. Zon-Kuthon agreed to go into exile on the Plane of Shadow for as long as the sun hung in the sky in exchange for an item of his choosing from the First Vault. This imprisonment was not meant to be over as soon as it was, though, and when the sun stopped shining upon Golarion during the Age of Darkness, Abadar reluctantly honored the deal, giving Zon-Kuthon the first undead shadow, which the Midnight Lord has used to craft evil creatures in his realm of Xovaikain ever since.

Okay, the utility-function-inverting thing does not sound like a thing that typically happens to humans walking around, but SHIT Golarion has issues.  How do you even manage to negotiate to a multi-agent-optimal boundary with the god of mutilation, misery, and torture?  Would it accept nonsentient things to torture if the nonsentient things were configured carefully enough to match its utility function, or is the utility function too precisely inverted to accept that?  Does it have any interests in common with the unflipped gods besides the continued existence of the world despite Rovagug...

Let's put this book back for now, and go look at global politics.