"Acknowledged."

It really wasn't the answer Pilar was hoping for.  She was hoping for something more like 'just do anything it tells you' or 'tell it to fuck off unless it gets approval from your superiors'.  'Use your best judgment' not so much.

"What serves best Asmodeus is not always what makes you most happy.  Even you, Pilar, are not always made most happy by what serves Him best."

"Understood."

Pilar knows that is true but Pilar doesn't have to like it.

"Do you suppose I am allowed to just plainly ask Keltham for the logic behind what he tried?  You reported to Subirachs on what had occurred, Subirachs reported to me in my capacity as your recent past sadist rather than as Queen, I write Keltham an incognito letter from one sadist to another..."

"Maybe? It tips our hand that you're paying a lot of attention, and, uh, from a tropes standpoint makes you a recurring character, but might be worth it, if he can explain himself. I could also just ask him for the logic, which is safer but perhaps permits you less to get at your exact question."

"I suspect the matter of the recurring character is a ship that will certainly sail at some point if it has not already; the real story does not make sense if I am mentioned in it but once."

"I could have sent the letter to you, to show to Keltham only if you deemed that acceptable.  The Queen of alterCheliax is solicitous of her subjects' rights in such matters, if no great stakes otherwise prohibit her from it."

"Alter Cheliax has so far been treating me as Keltham's possession, which of course it only does because that's what I said and I ought to be taken seriously when I say it. I don't think it'd make me responsible for deciding which letters Keltham reads." She is less terrified about disagreeing with the Queen than she would have been before, but it's still a very salient thing to do, like jumping onto a bed of hot coals while you have Protection from Energy up.

Aspexia Rugatonn is now approaching the table.

"My time here is up, I fear.  Well, Keltham will very likely show the letter to you if I tell him that it is safe to do so.  I think you may ask better followup questions than I myself would, if there is anything of Law in his answer."

Abrogail rises, smiles at Carissa with blinding levels of Splendour, and departs.

How does she smile like that. Why does she smile like that. Just for fun??

"Most High," she says. She is not gaping wide-eyed at departing Abrogail, she's not.

Aspexia Rugatonn drops into a chair without much ceremony.  "Subirachs.  Sevar.  A relatively minor matter first:  When Pilar's curse turned her in for unAsmodean thought, after she considered donating her new earnings to the Church without expecting to benefit herself thereby, you said that you thought you knew what mistake she was making.  What mistake do you suspect in Pilar, Sevar, and how would you remedy it in her if such fell to you?"

"I was directed to try to discover in myself desires that Axis could not fulfill, and to be supported in my education in cruelty and wickedness, because those are skills, skills that Asmodeus values in mortals, and if you try to loyally serve Asmodeus while possessing none of them you'll - end up too Lawful Neutral,  in my case, probably others would err in different directions.

It seems to me that Pilar is absolutely and unshakeably loyal to Asmodeus, but possesses little, herself, in an appetite for cruelty, or power, or slaves, or much of anything else, and I think it hadn't occurred to her that that could be a deficit, because after all, time spent pursuing her own personal interests is time not spent serving Asmodeus. But - devils are cruel, and enjoy cruelty. Asmodeus in making His servants did not actually make beings with no desire but to obey orders, even though He obviously could have; they are to obey orders and within the bounds of their orders to pursue Evil that pleases them. It pleases Pilar to obey, but she doesn't know what pleases her when obedience requires nothing in particular, or requires only that she do some Evil. 

That's what I think the error is. As for how to correct it, I have no idea, because Pilar is more devout than me, and this is an area in which I need to improve as well, and I would fear that in trying to teach her I would end up causing damage. I assume there's not an established route of escalating cruelty that takes people who don't find it particularly appealing and makes them masters of it, or it would have been offered to me. If I absolutely had to do something and there was no one else to ask at all I'd, uh, have her help Ione torture Ione's brother who Ione hates or something?"

"Mm.  I did not expect you to be able to correct Pilar in this particular matter of faith, but it seemed worth checking.  Subirachs?"

"Order Pilar to try out standard Asmodean enjoyments that cost money, read her mind to see if any such had appealed to her.  Do not order her to any enjoyments that resemble torturing orphans, per standing orders on Pineda.  Only once Pilar knows some other right path for herself, punish her for her unAsmodean thought.  With an additional punishment for the fact that her Chaotic Good curse usurped Lawful Evil's authority in presuming to have her reported and punished, lest she think that her curse have the power to punish her and determine the right path thereby."

"Good enough.  Try that and see how the initial steps go.  I so authorize it.  Should they fail, I think I would be interested in hearing what her curse suggested as an alternative."

"Sevar.  You inquired after your correction."

"I mark first that there has been a developing anomaly in our attempt to follow those orders we first received: you are simply more important at this point than an ordinary county's heiress or fourth-circle cleric.  The ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law would have us offering you far more theological support than a fourth-circle cleric would receive, should you request that.  That events have gone beyond Asmodeus's plans is one obvious interpretation, but for you to serve Him well in this world and be raised high within it, would also inevitably mark you as a priority for theological support over time.  Then the developing conflict in the instructions should have been foreseeable, and perhaps we were meant to follow those orders strictly no matter how important you became."

"Given that the orders came by way of a contract devil rather than Asmodeus's direct vision and intervention, I am now making the judgment call that I am to offer you no less theological support than your actual importance merits under the ordinary course of Asmodeus's Law, should you request that support, and I mean to tell the Queen that she is free herself to support your more material journey towards Asmodeus above the county-heiress level, as her own whims may move her."

"This is the most visibly dangerous decision you've seen me make so far, and if you feel any sense of nervousness about it yourself, this would be a good time to speak up."

- Carissa pulls the transcript of what the contract devil said out of her bag, opens it with her magic, rereads it.

"County heiresses don't usually have three Wishes and ten pounds of spellsilver," she says after a little while thinking. "We obliged a clarification anyway, when I tried again to sell my soul, and I didn't get told that I shouldn't possess such resources. I - do feel nervous, but I don't think I see a reason to decide differently."

"Hell, had it paid you such a price, would not be a slave of Church and Queen."

"Arguably, though it is rather a stretch, neither am I or Abrogail.  Slaves of Asmodeus, perhaps, but not of Church and Queen.  Mark well that I resorted to no such twisted interpretation when first we met."

"But on, then, to greater matters, which a fourth-circle cleric could not call in the Most High to clarify to her."  Aspexia Rugatonn looks tired, which means she is choosing to look tired, but that still means something and signals something even if it's a deliberate choice.  "You want to know if you're a heretic, or rather, if your heresy is wrong.  According to the doctrine of the Church, it is anathema.  According to the doctrine of Hell as we know it, it is anathema.  Even to offer your potential vassals some temporary and false hope in the face of Hell, is anathema under Asmodeanism as we know it, for Hell is the destruction of hope."

"The question is whether it is anathema to Asmodeus, and the problem we face there is that Asmodeus truly does not think in human concepts."

"To Zon-Kuthon, the object of torture is torture.  This only goes to show that not everything of Lawful Evil is thereby of Asmodeus.  What, to Asmodeus, is the object of torture?  Answer as you believe from within your heresy, and not from doctrine."

Carissa has thought about this endlessly and also the Most High's going to tear through it like tissue paper, isn't she.

Well. If it's false she wants to know that. She cannot build dath ilan on any lies.

"Asmodeus wants the error undone, of mortal free will; He wants His possessions not to possess that nature. He wants them obedient to Him. They should suffer if He wills that they suffer, and not only if He wills it for some reason, because if that weren't true then his power over them would not be absolute. Asmodeus desires that the power He rightly has over all of us is - reproduced after a fashion, that we own those weaker than us as Asmodeus owns us, and so obviously anyone I possess should suffer if I will it, and I don't need a reason, so long as I am myself obedient to Asmodeus, and not motivated by a rejection of His will. But the object of torture is the shaping of a soul, to be more useful, and closer to satisfactory; some torture is probably for the shaping of the torturer, not the victim, and it's still plainly Asmodean, to torture someone who is mine because I happen to want to and it doesn't undermine Asmodeus's goals.

But a slave of Asmodeus who just wants to cause their slaves maximum suffering at all times is indeed more like Zon-Kuthon than like Asmodeus; while perhaps bounds on their conduct can properly be placed only by those above them, and only on their own whims or insofar as it serves Asmodeus, it seems like they'd be a better slave of Asmodeus if they tortured their slaves exactly insofar as it improved them, in a manner that improved them, and thus left Asmodeus richer and not poorer. So torture is right whenever it strengthens Asmodeus, by strengthening his reputation or his tyranny or the incentive not to annoy him or his more valuable slaves, or by strengthening one of his possessions; but the purpose is strength."

"I think you are missing an important point about what Asmodeus might be trying to accomplish in the average and typical case of a worshipper subject to Him, because, in fact, you are not ordinary in how you yourself relate to being tortured."

"For most mortals in Golarion, Sevar, the way torture works is that they don't want to be tortured, so by torturing them if they do a thing, we ensure that they do not do it, or if we torture them in all cases but one, we force them to that exact path, and even, we can torture them unless some particular outcome eventuates and force them to try with such intelligence as is in them to find means to that outcome."

"I will pause in case you have questions about this seemingly unfamiliar concept."

It only works because no one knows any Law. 

She was not asked for comments, just questions. She's silent.

Aspexia, like a number of high-ranking Chelish authorities who scare people too much for them to talk, just runs Detect Thoughts instead.  It saves time on trying to scare people into not being too terrified to tell you things, or even on the less terrified ones trying to decide what to say in front of you.

"You are thinking that it only works because they don't know Law," Aspexia repeats for benefit of Subirachs.  "But knowledge of Law alone is not enough to convey immunity, I rather doubt.  I expect that Abrogail could shatter an average dath ilani if she wished, perhaps an average temple torturer could, and I expect that threats would work on them thenceforth whether or not they retained their knowledge of Law.  Mayhap not a Keeper, there is no way we may know from where we stand."

"Torture alone cannot force a greater devil to obedience if they do not deem you above themselves in Hell's hierarchy; greater devils, then, relate to pain and threats in some other fashion indeed.  There are torments in Hell even for they, when they fail, but they must be to other purposes than simply enforcing obedience from those that would not otherwise obey.  If a greater devil fell into the hands of Kuthites, say, they could not be moved to obedience for any amount of pain.  On a god it would not work at all.  Would it have worked on mortals in the days before they were cursed with free will?  I do not know, but I suspect not."

"Asmodeus is known to prefer mortals as they were before free will, even though this would render nonsensical any such system of tyranny as now exists in Cheliax.  In Asmodeus's Hell, devils are remade as beings who are more difficult to move by simple threats, and yet even for greater devils in Hell there is punishment."

"What to Asmodeus, then, is the object of torture?  What is to him tyranny, that in Cheliax we call this tyranny, but better would be if none here had free will or could be moved to actions by threat of torment?"

She thinks about it.

She's not surprised, that devils can't be moved by torture; it may take more than knowing the Law, but it is part of Law, and beings that Asmodeus chose to shape would not be so. That part feels right. 

It makes sense for Asmodeus to want more valuable devils. She doesn't need to understand Asmodeus to predict He wants that; whatever else He wants, if He has more valuable devils, it's easier for him to get. Torture making devils more valuable makes sense. If it's not the answer -

 - separate out some instances of it not being the answer -

- maybe torture is good to Asmodeus when it makes devils more valuable, but that's a small share of what makes it valuable and she's being asked to identify the rest. That doesn't require undoing every bit of reasoning that starts with the assumption Asmodeus runs Hell in a way that enables Him to better achieve His goals.

 - maybe torture doesn't make devils more valuable but otherwise causes Asmodeus to have more resources. For example, if Asmodeus had a deal of some kind with Zon-Kuthon and Hell were a blend of their tastes. ....no, feels wrong. For example, if torture is in some magical sense directly a source of power for Asmodeus, the way prayer is sort of understood to be. ....no, also feels wrong, if that were true it wouldn't be a complicated secret. Maybe torture makes minds more predictable to Asmodeus? Tortured minds are more alike, and so more useful? ....that's just a clever way to get back to her favored hypothesis that torture makes devils more valuable. Maybe torture makes the Good gods get all mad at Asmodeus and that in in some sense directly useful. ...also doesn't feel persuasive. 

- maybe torture does not cause Asmodeus to have more of anything else he cares about, and the only reason there is torture in Hell is because of Asmodeus's fondness for torture, like Zon-Kuthon, if not wholly like Zon-Kuthon because He does apparently care about several other things. In which case there is torture in Hell because Asmodeus likes it that way and no new way of training devils could improve the situation because Asmodeus doesn't regard it as potentially benefitting from improvement. 

That feels like an actually dangerous heresy, the kind of thing where if she believed it she'd - she's not sure what she'd do how about she stops thinking about that. What is it with her new urge to when she thinks of something dangerous keep thinking about it, like there's always a safe answer at the other end.

....though the best time to have unsafe thoughts is right now while they can be corrected promptly. 

Okay.

If the point of torture is that it makes Asmodeus weaker, makes His triumph less likely, but He likes it, so it happens anyway even though it makes devils worse, then Carissa thinks Iomedae kind of has a point. Carissa in that world is not going to betray the project because she mostly cares about Carissa and they are competent to make that not in the interests of Carissa, but she'd cease feeling like Good was obviously and plainly her enemy. Good would kind of deserve to win, if Asmodeus wasn't trying to because He was so busy torturing people in ways that undermined his other goals. The contempt that Carissa feels for anyone else who undermines Asmodeus, she feels for this hypothetical Asmodeus, undermining himself.  

There; she thought it; now it's obviously not the answer to the puzzle, so keep thinking. 

The answer is not that a Hell with torture leaves Asmodeus weaker than a Hell without it; now that she's actually thought it it's self-refuting. 

So it leaves Asmodeus stronger, or at least the same. 

But she's not supposed to just again give the answer 'to make devils better', that would be - failing to engage with what the High Priestess is trying to say to her - 

What does pain have to do with tyranny?

Well, someone who can hurt you without reprisal is above you. Maybe that's important; maybe in a sense there's no real chain of command, if everyone's seamlessly working together to advance Asmodeus's goals, and for it to be a tyranny at all it has to be clear who can hurt who. That explains why torture is allowed; it doesn't explain why it's a particularly common proclivity. Is torture unique in having that property? Or maybe another way of thinking about it is - is everything which has that property torture?

If so, then this tea was torture; it was, after all, orchestrated in significant part to make it clear to the girls on the project who could hurt who. And the elaborate rituals of formality among nobles are torture too; they are after all about establishing who can hurt who without reprisal, communicated with every degree of incline of one's head -

- yeah, that's not a useful definition. Torture is one way to communicate that, but not the only one. But maybe the others bottom out in torture. Or, they could just bottom out in final execution, but that would be horrible and wasteful; better for everyone if they bottom out in torture. Except people like Asmodia. 

Carissa's authority on the project, she is well aware, is located in significant part in the girls' knowledge that an experiment is being run, and that if they're incompetent even when barely punished then they'll be properly punished. She's doing without much torture, but not without the threat of it; the threat of it underlies the whole thing. 

That feels like it might be as close to an answer as she's going to get on the spot, but the thought of backtracing inferences into spoken words is suddenly quite intimidating. Well, presumably the Grand High Priestess is reading her mind.

"I am.  Abrogail has certainly made progress on her goal of having your thoughts not collapse when you know they are being read, and in teaching you to think in Asmodeus's service without being afraid of thinking."  Aspexia hopes that was, in fact, the right goal.  It was certainly a very proactive one.

"Further facts to consider:  Hell - not Asmodeus, who cannot speak to us except in sharply circumscribed vision, but Hell - has never made any offer so merciful as you are contemplating, even though, you might think, Hell could gain advantage by making that offer to souls that would otherwise come to Asmodeus not at all.  Because other souls would then demand it?  Possibly, even as those recruited to your Project, if they were warned, might demand more than others to sell their souls -"

"No, Sevar, you should not do that.  Hell is circumscribed not in how many souls they may buy, but in how much they may pay out and in the minimum they must pay per soul.  If you'd succeeded in your sale, I expect it would have been worth it, to Asmodeus, but it might have caused ten or a hundred others not to be able to sell theirs, this year, I do not know the exact rate of exchange.  Let your recruits sell you contracts on themselves such as you sold to Keltham, if you dislike the thought of devils cheating you."

"I don't think Hell is advantaged by being known to make such offers, not in - the current world they have to negotiate with. But Civilization's going to be bad for Hell, if we don't figure out how to make it good for Hell; the correct general policies are going to be different in a world that's building Civilization than they were in the world for all of history."

"Mm.  Leaving aside the question of Hell negotiating with a more Lawful future Cheliax, I do hope to hear some acknowledgment from you that you will not warn your new recruits of their fair prices.  It is theoretically a matter of the Queen to make it an order, as it is Crown rather than Church which depends on soul-sales to function, but I doubt she will be amused if she must tell you herself what I am telling you that she'd tell you."