"- that's just ....not really how criticisms of a country are written? You either write that the King is wise and being misled by unwise advisors, or, as the author of On The Manifest Failures Of Character And Leadership Of Abrogail Thrune, you write about how the King is bad at their job. Or you write about the necessity of uniting to exterminate the people of Cheliax, but I actually don't stock that kind of nonsense, I think it's deleterious to the national character."

"...do you have any books critical of Cheliax which don't contain the sub-phrase 'Abrogail Thrune' in the title."

He can't buy this shit.  It's not just the implied disservice to Abrogail of rewarding an author who did that, it's the near-certainty that everything in the book is going to be wrong.  Sane people don't give books titles like that.

"I assume you do not want a similar book on her predecessor?"

"Her predecessor?"

"Infrexus Thrune? When he was in power I had brisk sales of "The Scandals And Idiocy of Infrexus Thrune" and after his death I did well with "The Best Thing Infrexus Thrune Ever Did For Cheliax Was Drown" though if I still have any copies they'll be hard to find, they stopped selling well a decade ago."

"Sorry, I'm not as familiar with Chelish history as I should be.  Infrexus Thrune drowned and then - his daughter Abrogail inherited the country?"

" - his niece, and, no, there was a civil war which she won. Do you just want - an ordinary history of Cheliax, maybe -"

"I'll take up to twenty different ones, if you've got that many."

"I assume that doesn't count different editions of the textbooks issued in Chelish schools? I have ten of those alone but they only change a bit here and there, most years."

"Sure, I'll take them all."  He's impressed with the putative Conspiracy if they've produced a textbook series with slight variations like that - though Asmodia is that smart, as is Carissa for that matter.  "What else you got?"

"A Tactical Account Of Thee Chelish Civil War, I don't know if military history is an interest of yours but it's acclaimed as a very well-researched work of military history, How The Church Claimed Cheliax, also mostly a military history but focused on the involvement of the church of Asmodeus, The Revival of the Empire, which I thought was shlocky nonsense, Avistan's Queen which gets indecorous in places but has some interesting details about court in Egorian..."

"That's four.  Anything else?  Reign of whatwashisname the drowned guy?  By the way how does drowning manage to be a permanent problem around here?"

" - he was drowned by his personal guard when they decided to go in for Abrogail. It wasn't itself militarily decisive, but, well, when that's how you die you can't particularly expect coming back to go well."

Okay, that's kind of, um.  Attractive and worrying at the same time, really.

"Any other books on Cheliax, critical or otherwise."

"I have specialty trade publications? Chelish grain imports by year for the last decade, Chelish wizarding education, Chelish military contracts..."

"I'll take those too.  But just the four books on Cheliax, aside from the textbooks and trade publications?  Can you bring those out?"

A loss of internal cognitive control, a flash of betrayed thought; Keltham is planning to ask for literally any other books at all putatively by any of those authors.

That's very good to have advance warning of because they did not attribute those books to specific noted historians but they totally can do that on ten seconds' notice.

Out he comes with the four books.

Then he'll ask the question he was planning to ask.

A wordless flash of insight - people having different probabilities of using particular words, phrasings - it doesn't have to be that exact thing it just has to be any Law known to the far more literate dath ilan - or just wordless style or sheer assessed Intelligence -

KELTHAM MAY HAVE WAYS OF DETERMINING WHETHER TWO BOOKS ARE REALLY BY THE SAME AUTHOR!

Yes, occurred to me too. Just the way teachers deliver the same lecture differently, it doesn't have to involve any Law. The actual author of one of them also authored a fake history of Andoran and a fake history of Galt for us, and another one's going to have been coauthored.

Carissa is not in general faster than Asmodia to Wall concerns, but with the headband on she sure is.

"Oh, yes," the proprietor says. "- the author of The Revival of the Empire wrote a few other histories, which I thought were if anything even worse - I stock the ones for Andoran and Galt because people like reading those, they sell well, but they don't like reading the one about Absalom because it's so inaccurate, which should really make them think, if you ask me. And A Tactical Account Of Thee Chelish Civil War is coauthored by a Chelish general and the military historian Kaaris Thembley, and I know Thembley's put out one on the Galtan Revolution as well, though I don't  have it in stock."

He'll take those, then!  Sure, the Conspiracy could've thought of that, but it's more competence than they necessarily needed to have.  1.7x to Ordinary or so.

- now how many similar books does he have about Taldor, Osirion, or Nex?

"Well, not the textbooks, since they don't have standardized education. I've got - let me see for you - eight volumes on the Nex-Geb war, A Guided Tour Of the Mana Wastes, Magic in Quantium, The Last True Princes of Taldor, Rot Behind The Great Walls - that's Taldor - Taldor's War With Qadira in six volumes... Osirion: In The Shadows of Giants, Osirion Land of the Pharaohs.... and trade publications for all of them, I suppose."

All right then.  He'll pick all of those up.

How much does he have about theology, alignment, afterlives, such that Asmodeus or Hell would have significant coverage, like, at least one-twelfth of the book?