"She's not lying enough," Abrogail says out loud to Aspexia.  No Security will hear them, neither of them trusts Security around a weakened Queen.  "She's volunteering too much truth.  She should not have told him that an inch of iron blocks divination.  It would be ruinous if he believed that truth and made a helmet for himself.  Her lies don't need to stand up forever, just for one day."

"Correct me if I err in my understanding of tropes, but if you tell Sevar that - even by proxy, such that it doesn't seem like her Queen's command - then the next lie she tells will be the one that Keltham catches."

"Yes.  I know."

Keltham is not able to truly rest.  He has too much to not think about, if the Conspiracy is reading his mind, including ideas by which right Broom should kill him immediately followed by everybody else in this installation who might've been in the telepathic loop.  He needs to run through all this faster than he'd planned, he will exhaust himself too quickly at this rate.  He really wishes he hadn't gotten those early indicators of mindreading!Conspiracy.

Keltham remembers to himself some videos he's seen over and over.  It's the closest he can come to clearing his mind, and it isn't all that restful.

"If it's all right with you, I'm going to write down some ideas I came up with, then rejected, which it'd be better for you to think of yourself -"

"Go ahead -"

Great, now he's thought it, the mindreading!Conspiracy knows it, and he might as well say it out loud to her.

"- but, sorry, I'm mostly tuning out things about the laws of magic, today.  If I pierce a Conspiracy, it won't be be because I got into the technical weeds of Spellcraft and outthought them there, it'll be because I managed to move the fight to my own home ground, which I am presently trying not to think any details about so don't ask how."

"Makes sense. They weren't spellcraft ideas, I do realize you'd be an idiot to trust me about that."

And she takes out a piece of paper and begins scribbling furiously. 

One place Keltham might be safe outside the interdiction is the Worldwound, if he'd taken the oath, and he could talk to all of the allied churches there. Rejected b/c if anyone did want Keltham badly enough to break the Worldwound oath about it they might do it and it's not worth the risk (is this bad decision theory? she's not sure)

Keltham could ask someone to bring him all of the deployment, logistics, casualties, honors awarded, disciplinary actions, etc., records for the Worldwound and for the Kuthite war. Maillol will hate this plan because they're classified, but it seems pretty impossible for a Conspiracy to manufacture on short notice. Rejected because: only works if Keltham thinks of it. 

Keltham could HANG OUT IN AN ANTIMAGIC FIELD so he stopped having to worry about mindreading. Rejected because: she has already pushed pretty hard for antimagic fields and he's ignoring her and if she suggests it again he will probably conclude that the Conspiracy has a way around antimagic fields. 

Keltham could ask for the Grand High Priestess to raise a gate to let him directly visit Hell, where Asmodeus can probably protect him from the interference of other gods. Rejected because: the Conspiracy could take him to some other place under their control instead; she can't think how he'd verify he was really in Hell. 

And three uniformed people visibly straight off the front lines in Nidal (you'd get in a lot of trouble for wearing a uniform that crumpled if you hadn't been summoned straight out of a war zone) walk in, holding an enormous top-tier scrying mirror and a very magic silk bag. 

This subtlety, like so many other subtleties, will be wholly lost on the young man out of dath ilan, who considers a bathrobe to be appropriate attire for the Chief Executive of Civilization.

"Hi.  Thanks for coming.  I probably shouldn't explain anything that hasn't been explained already."

"There should be a person who can do a lesser Teleport out to a destination I'll specify and Teleport back, a Greater Scry scroll and someone who can cast from it, and a Comprehend Languages scroll hopefully the divine version."

"This is Lord Marshal Fennelosa, wizard of the seventh rank, military emergencies unit, Her Majesty's Third; he'll be teleporting for you today. You're actually going to need a Greater Teleport if you want the teleporter to be able to go to a destination they have not previously seen, and they'll still need a pretty detailed description in that case. I am Paracount Fertinan Arayo, wizard of the seventh rank, from Her Majesty's personal security, and I'll cast the scry for you. In addition to a Greater Scry and a scroll of Comprehend Languages I also have a scroll of Detect Intelligence, per the request conveyed to us."

"Yes, thanks, that gets used in a separate experiment."

"Talk me through how Greater Scry works.  Assume high Intelligence in me and first-circle wizardy, but that I otherwise have approximately the knowledge of a small village cobbler about that."

(Carissa has authorized some lies, here: in particular, she's decided that you can't scry the dead. Keltham knows you can communicate with them -- with a Sending or similar - but hasn't been told you can observe them, and it's not the kind of thing one would naively expect to be true.)

"'Sure," says Arayo. "Scry' is a fourth circle spell with a one-hour casting time that creates - in a scrying mirror or a still pool of water -- an image of a single target and their immediate surroundings, as viewed from a vantage point above their head. The target can with an act of Will resist being scried, in which case the scry can fail. They could also put up powerful magic on their surroundings which prevent a scrying sensor from forming in their vicinity, in which case the scry would fail. If the target is dead, the scry will also fail. The spell can be made more specific, more precise, and harder for the target to throw off if the caster has a better concept of the target or has some possession or body part of the target's in hand when they attempt the scry. Cantrips such as Detect Magic sometimes work through a scry, but they require extra finesse to manage and will fail if the scry is of low magical quality. It lasts about two minutes per caster circle.

Greater Scry is a seventh-circle spell with a one-round casting time that does the same thing, except the scry is of higher magical quality and it's easier to get cantrips to function through it and it lasts about two hours per caster circle."

"Is there a standard way of allowing the scryer to get a wider view, with a cooperative target?"

Oh shoot, Keltham was unable to stop himself from thinking of the obvious solution about carrying around a mirror that would reflect the surroundings.  Plausibly be slightly harder to fake in an illusion, too, though really a curved mirror would be best for that, he could look in closely to see if the curved mirror had the right kind of distortions, as might be hard for an illusion spell to fake if they weren't just casting a veridical curved mirror.

Keltham had wanted to avoid thinking of that, if possible, to see if the Conspiracy would tell him about it or not.

"Scrying with a cooperative target is usually used for military communications, rather than for, uh, getting a look at the surroundings, I'd need to think about it. ....the scrying sensor is reliably some distance about the person's head, so you could use Enlarge Person to make them taller? And of course they could fly around, give you a view of the area from the air."

"Possibly I misunderstood something, when you said the spell only viewed immediate surroundings, if the view-from-the-air trick works.  If somebody was standing on a hill somewhere, could you look through the scry out to the horizon?  And if not, the obvious solution that comes to mind is for a cooperative target to carry a mirror, that can reflect the more distant surroundings."

"The resolution isn't great but yes, you can see the horizon, and I'd expect a mirror to work fine. We can certainly try it."

"Ready to go literally as soon as I give the destination?  And somebody please quickly go grab a mirror, the Project should have several on hand - have Ione deliver it, please."

Keltham thinks about how he's planning to send Ione Sala with them, carrying a bag of money, to follow her while she hires some mercenaries to protect her for a day, with a Telepathic Bond to himself -

he's actually planning Ostenso

he's actually planning Absalom

he's actually sending Asmodia

"If it's somewhere Fennelosa has been to or gotten a good description of, he can depart - from outside the Forbiddance - as soon as you give a destination."

"Ah yes, right, the Forbiddance.  Let's start making our way outside, then."

he's actually sending them to the Worldwound

his real plan involves books

his real plan involves Prestidigitation

his real plan involves using a timed chemical reaction whose Lawfully expected duration he'll compute only after the fact, to detect illusions

They start walking out. 

"Do you happen to know if the Eleventh's been redeployed," Carissa asks Fennelosa as they walk. "- I'm cleared up to Sensitive, I was deployed with the Tenth and then with the Eleventh before this -"

       "They're still up north. - I think covering out to Terthule, because we haven't been replacing losses -"

"Mmm. Thank you."

       "Any time. My cousin's in the Eleventh." 

She told them not to lie about anything unauthorized, so it's not a lie. With the headband she can calculate in the back of her mind anyway that it'll be suspicious to Keltham, that it'd be better if this man hadn't happened to have a cousin in her regiment. 

Alter-Carissa is of course delighted. "- really? Who?"

         "Guillem Moya, he's third circle, evocation -"

It's not even a surprising coincidence, but that won't stop Keltham from finding it a suspicious one. "Oh! We've met. ...he was insufferable."

         "If all this is ever declassified I'll tell him you said so."

He notices, but there's no obvious reason for the Conspiracy to be any more likely to say that, as a lie.  He doesn't know family densities in Cheliax, whether there's correlations in which people get assigned where; it'd be a silly thing to jump on as 'too much coincidence'.  If he considered it a likely Conspiracy tactic at all, it would be as a denial-of-service event where Keltham has to think about that stuff.  As it stands, it's actually useful to him; it gives him something else to think about while he's learning not to think about things.

Is Ione there yet with the mirror, Conspiracy?  Longer delays make it more likely that somebody's trying to emergency-instruct her about what to do if Keltham sends her with on the Teleport - not that this is Keltham's real plan - that thought was itself an attempted distraction, of course - 

Ione was told to fetch a mirror and come here as fast as possible, but also she's pretty sure Keltham's real plan doesn't involve Ione.

"Here with the requested mirror!  Otherwise keeping quiet until Keltham says differently!"

She's quietly annoyed with how the Conspiracy has been mostly keeping her out of the loop on things, but can't deny that alterIone probably isn't being kept up-to-date on it and it probably helps with her reactions -

Oh, that's a nice military-grade mirror there.  Keltham must've asked them for a scry, somewhere, and she'd bet he's got more in his quick-draw scabbard than just wandering around looking for anomalies.

"Thanks, Ione.  Answer immediately, what were you thinking about between when you got the mirror request and when you arrived here?"