Carissa is not planning to have Ione tortured if she tries her best and fails because of the tropes, or because something outside Ione's control did not work out. 

However (she does not say) they both presumably know perfectly well that if this fails Carissa, who is an Asmodean, is going to be being tortured, and is not going to be making decisions about the disposition of her subordinates. Unless she, too, escapes with Keltham.

She is assuming she'll receive orders from the Most High or from the Queen about that; it seems awfully dangerous to think about herself, with this headband on and Security probably extremely twitchy about Dominating her on the spot if she thinks something like that she might, hypothetically, if she fled to Osirion with Keltham, at some future point defect. And the person deciding whether Carissa should flee with Keltham or not should not be unable to think about that.

Rugatonn... will consider whose call that should be.

(Aspexia knows she does not have a talent for dealing with tropes as story-patterns, rather than as a kind of divinity with unshattered prophecy.)

Fennelosa's faked adventures have gotten him a recommendation for a military academy not too far away (they decided the extra minutes weren't worth the extra bits leaked) which he has been firmly assured by the fake Nethysians carries lots and lots of non-military history too, because politics and economics and social policy considerations are highly relevant to the military, and because it's a Nethysian-affiliated academy and aims to by its enormous library attract lots of wizards who mostly want to learn but are persuadable to defend Absalom and/or the world when relevant. 

This lets them throw in a ton of bona fide writing on the Chelish armed forces, which adds some bulk at minimal risk. 

(While this was going on, Asmodia finished her own math problem, and Keltham collected the Project Lawful Conspiracy Theories, even though the thirty minutes' weren't up; and Keltham glance-skimmed everything to try to fix the information content, though he didn't have anything like time to read it all.)

Keltham does not really get the 'military academy has the best library' concept, but it is not outside his general range of Golarion Weirdness and there's no obvious reason the Conspiracy would do that.  If Fennelosa thinks this is Ordinary's best foot forwards, let's try it.

Fennelosa will head on over, or at least appear to. 

It's a very big library, much larger than the one in the archduke's villa, much larger than the one in the palace. The illusionist is drawing somewhat on the library in the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye, which is even bigger, but this one is credibly big. Some levitating wizards are in midair, paging through books too high to reach without the ability to fly. 

He asks some people where to find Chelish history specifically. He's told it's a whole section, over there in the back behind Taldor and to the left of the River Kingdoms. 

"All right," he says tiredly to Keltham, on reaching it, "do I start pulling out books at prime intervals and ripping out the eighteenth page of each, or what?"

"...is that allowed or does it cause you to get arrested?  I would sort of expect the arrested thing."

"That will definitely get me fined an enormous sum of money. I wouldn't expect to be arrested so long as I pay it."

"Ripping out pages is entirely pointless."  Once Keltham has seen that page, Fennelosa taking it home with him doesn't add to the amount of information the Conspiracy has to create.  "Can we borrow, or buy, books?"

"We can commission a copy of any book for delivery later this week, which I assume is unsatisfactory to you, and buy or borrow them on the spot if the library already has two copies, which I was told was the case for most of the more popular books and a majority of the recent ones. I assume you didn't want to look at old books anyway."

...noticeably better than expected.

"All right, and does this section of the library have a - Living Library Index - person who knows which books contain what information, and can tell us if we ask them?"

Fennelosa will go track down someone who appears to work here and ask!

The answer is yes, each section has a responsible party at the academy who makes all decisions about acquisitions for that section. The Chelish section is supervised by Tono Berlinguer, a retired Chelish military intelligence specialist who, it happens, reconsidered his retirement when Nidal attacked Cheliax and has taken a leave of absence from the academy to lend himself to the war effort. 

"I assume you want us to go and get him?" 

"...Yes," Keltham says, after reminding himself of how scared and worried he is in fact feeling, and forcibly overriding a huge amount of internal reluctance to impose inconveniences upon others; of which it was said, once, that if dath ilan were ever to be destroyed, it would probably be because of somebody's reluctance to inconvenience others.

And meanwhile, because Keltham obviously isn't going to wait for that, he's going to try going through these books.  Question one, what exactly happened when Abrogail Thrune took over, what were the details of that fight, who died and why didn't they just come back the next day, what changes did the Church make immediately after coming to power?  If the books say it was all very pretty... Keltham has now been in Golarion longer than a day, and has seen a slave market for upwards of several seconds.

Korva has been in emergency overdrive from the moment that Keltham first requested books from Ione, and has been commanding a small army of Chelish writers for at least the past half hour. She's fully aware that she has been given a task that it is not, actually, possible to do well. It's also a task that the entire project could succeed or fail on, and if the result is a failure, then she's not exactly going to expect to live a long life afterwards, no matter what the queen has said to her about how incredibly safe she supposedly is. Whether she lives or dies is, then, once again, quite possibly up to Keltham. At this speed, and this volume, a few missteps are absolutely inevitable, and Keltham, if he really cares enough to win this, should be able to find them. If Keltham doesn't catch whatever the mistakes happen to be (and she obviously doesn't know what they are, or she'd have fixed them), it's his own damn fault. 

Under other circumstances, she would probably be freaking out about all of that, but at the moment she is trying really really hard to completely ignore her emotions and act as a conductor for this entire ridiculous venture. She has books. Well, pieces of them.

...resulting conflict plunged the nation into a further two years of civil war, although much of the later fighting was contained to the province of Ravounel, where Infrexus Thrune had maintained a more significant base of political power, which continued to push for the recovery of Infrexus's remains. Throughout this time, there was also continued conflict on the border with Galt, primarily consisting of a series of skirmishes between ill-equipped military forces and local militia fighters. Although some have asserted that such skirmishes were a deliberate expansionist attempt by Galt, the pattern is more honestly understood as a result of underpolicing of the region by the Chelish military, which was otherwise engaged at the time. The smoldering ashes of conflict between Galt and Cheliax during this time are generally excluded from the casualty estimates given for the war of the succession of Queen Abrogail, as that fighting, though concurrent and related, was between Chelish and Galtan forces, rather than the supporters of Queen Abrogail and the supporters of Infrexus Thrune. As regards the succession war itself, estimates of the total death toll range from two to six thousand, with the majority of these casualties, as is so often the case, coming from the diseases which soldiers were subjected to during the campaign to retake Ravounel.

Egorian itself saw real conflict only a few times, much of it in the immediate aftermath of the coup against Infrexus. Although Infrexus's taxation policies and loss of the eastern provinces of Galt and Andoran had made him wildly unpopular, there were many at the time who believed that his niece, the rightful heir to the throne by law, was too young to rule responsibly, having celebrated her sixteenth birthday not three months before. Despite the full support of the Asmodean church, the first year of the young Queen Abrogail Thrune's reign was marked by a series of (unsuccessful) assassination attempts by everyone from Eastern revolutionary agents to a small band of extremists who intended to resurrect the previous queen, Carellia. The most notorious of these early assassination attempts may have been the incident on the 10th of Arodus, in 4709 AR, in which a band of Galtan agents disguised as members of the queen's own guard managed to infiltrate the interior of the palace walls before being caught.

It is difficult to say whether a successful early assassination attempt might have spelled doom for the young queen's reign, or what might have become of the nation of Cheliax afterwards. Certainly, if the queen were to die now, her resurrection would be almost immediate, and have no bearing on her legitimacy. However, at the time of her coronation, the queen's success depended not only on the military might of her Asmodean supporters, but on whether she could earn the support of the nation at large. As the demise of her predecessor had so recently proven, the leadership of the nation of Cheliax would depend not only on her unquestionable legal right to rule, but also on whether she could earn the respect and loyalty of the forces which ostensibly answered to her. While it is likely that the Church of Asmodeus would have recovered her remains and restored her rightful place even had she been assassinated, it is also possible that such an event might have served as a catalyst for further revolt, dragging out the civil war longer, or resulting in the loss of even more Chelish territory.
 

...okay, is it just his imagination, or is the whole business with 'rightful heir to the throne by law' and 'unquestionable legal right to rule' not only a bit incongruous with there being a giant civil war and Abrogail needing the Church of Asmodeus's support, but also the author possibly kind of quietly signaling that this fact which requires so much emphasis is maybe not actually true?  In which case you could maybe also infer that it's illegal or otherwise threatened-against to suggest that Abrogail wasn't the rightful heir?

And is it his imagination that this book is - not so much better written, really, as - more informative, more alive-sounding? - than the previous set of Chelish history books?  Or just more interesting, somehow?  And should Keltham be attributing that to the library having better book-taste than the bookshop operator who stocked the book personally attacking Abrogail Thrune, or to the Conspiracy frantically upping the level of its game as it became clear Keltham wasn't happy with their earlier efforts?

Keltham will read a few pages ahead, and then skip to randomly later in the book, and then read the page before that, whatever it is.

This excerpt has pages before and ahead; if he skips way ahead, they'll transition him to a different excerpt on a related topic. He lands in a discussion of the early stages of the modern Chelish education system, and the transition from a handful of private, paid establishments to a push towards public education available to the children of all subjects of the crown, which also has pages before and ahead of it.

...why is the Crown not just offering to pay for skill-mastery outcomes and letting anybody who wants to try their hand at producing those?  Does Governance, like, not have any adversarially resistant way of measuring whether learning has occurred, such that if they offered to pay for learning somebody would inevitably teach to the test without producing real human capital; and yet Governance does think they have some adversarially resistant way of measuring process inputs to education, where those inputs inevitably produce learning, such that they can pay people to teach but not pay for learning at all?

Somehow Keltham doubts that this is the case!  In fact he doubts that anybody in Governance even thought about it in those terms!  Somebody get a seventh-circle priest of Abadar in here!  'Never pay for the input when you can pay for the output, and if you can't robustly measure outputs you probably can't robustly measure inputs either,' goes the saying out of dath ilan.

It's still a good book, though.  Is it for sale, or borrowable?

He'll ask! 

They don't have a second copy of that one at this time. Two gold to commission one. 

        "What's the fastest you could get me a commissioned copy? If I commission a copy, and pay triple, can I take this one just for today?"

"....no, sir, because we'd be using this one to make the copy."

At this point Berlinguer walks in. He's a plump elderly man whose eyebrows look a bit singed. "Fennelosa! I hear you urgently need me for something?"

     "Consultation on the books. It's a long story."

All right, now he can try for more of a pattern of queries and answers that should be harder for Cheliax to have completely covered by trying to write books in advance.

Book with more detail on the specific aid provided by Asmodeus's Church to Abrogail, what concessions or policies they demanded in return.  Does Berlinguer know where to locate something like that?

"Military aid provided in the war?" Here they've aggressively repurposed a lot of books about the original Chelish Civil War, where, thank Hell, House Thrune was led by Abrogail's grandmother also named Abrogail. "The best source is Campaigns of the Chelish Civil War, which is in two volumes, should be right over here..." He pulls them out. "We also have Hell Shows Its Hand, which is much more popular but, I think, worse, and Avistan's Queen. If you're interested in a more academic lens I like 'a realist account of the Chelish civil conflict'."

"What exactly is a non-realist account - never mind, let's just try the 'realist' one."

He pulls it off a shelf. "Realism is probably at your level of exposure best understood as the academic way of describing work that proceeds from the assumption that conflicts are incented, rather than ideological, that conflict arises where there's weakness and ends with an overwhelming show of strength. Someone analyzing the Chelish Civil War through an ideological lens would study the doctrine of the Asmodean Church and write about how it compares to the ideologies it displaced in appeal; someone analyzing it through a realist lens would focus on how the Church succeeded in establishing the Queen as an absolute monarch, by backing her up with the use of force. Sorry, no one explained to me - who are you, and what's your urgent interest in this?"

"Don't ask," Fennelosa says tiredly. 

"I'm not a soldier anymore, young man, I am allowed to be curious about things."

The banter is very well-executed but it won't help at all if he looks at the wrong book.

Keltham will open that one to a random place, read for seven pages, return it.

Keltham will then have the thought that next time he needs to just flip through a lot of pages rapidly, skimming just enough to verify rough continuity of text and subject, to avert the Conspiracy being able to cheaply manufacture a bunch of short excerpts.

Unfortunately, Keltham is juggling a lot of cognitive balls right now, and has temporarily forgotten the juggling ball that is the Conspiracy reading his mind.  He thinks about his next intention to read a lot of the book overtly, loudly enough that you could pick it up from his mind even if you weren't Abrogail Thrune.

"Abrogail's first major policy shifts during her early years," Keltham says.

Feed him something we have the complete book of.