There's exactly one book they have complete on even remotely that topic. It's on the shelf as Avistan's Queen and The Early Years of Abrogail Thrune II's reign and as The Uncensored And Thoroughly Illegal History of the Chelish Civil War. They'll take the second one off the shelf for him.

Keltham will read a few pages for real, then (tell Fennelosa to) flip through pages starting from whatever they showed him, leaving each page spread to be scryed only for four seconds or so for Keltham to skim-speedread.  (He once wrote a computer program as a kid to help him learn to move his eyes faster, and was disgruntled to learn that when he followed the shifting blue word as fast as he could, he couldn't understand what he'd read.  Nonetheless, Keltham can skim pretty darn quickly if he wants to, and can still notice anomalies at that speed.)

Keltham will speed-skim about a hundred pages that way... they do all seem to be there...

Wait.

Shit.

He thought about that tactic before he did it.

Meanwhile Asmodia is in a state of very calm total panic, considering what will probably be Keltham's obvious next move:

He asks for particular topics, and then, after reading each excerpt, generates a random number to decide whether to spend three minutes skimming a hundred pages from there.

Asmodia is not in fact seeing a counter to this particular tactic.  They can't just hand Keltham complete books open to different places, each time, because even at the speed he's skimming, Keltham will notice if he reads ahead and sees that he's reading an excerpt he's already read.

And then - then that just works, so far as Asmodia can see, Keltham wins, the Conspiracy can't counter that unless they actually have that many completed books and they don't -

She can't think can't think can't think of any counter - does Sevar have a counter -

The books that are complete but just about Taldor with the names changed. There's a bunch of those. It's ...not likely to hold, though. 

...Asmodia can think of one desperate thing to try.  She requests permission to gamble the entire mission.

((She has the Gardens, she can suicide if this fails and it's her fault, she does dare do this -))

- it's not like charging into this without a plan isn't gambling the whole mission. She should do what she thinks gives them the best odds, even if it makes failure more spectacular or more embarrassing.

"Uh, Keltham, I have an idea that so far as I can tell means the Conspiracy just loses.  Am I supposed to tell you about it or wait for you to think of it?  Because I don't have any way of knowing if you've already thought of it, and this idea seems to me like a strong test even if the Conspiracy thinks of it first.  I could be missing something of course."

because even if she can't solve it maybe Keltham CAN

"...okay, sure, tell me that one."

"I mean, possibly you already thought of it, because it seems pretty inevitable to me.  The idea here is to check whether all the books actually exist, right?  But if you only read a short way, they could be handing you much shorter fragments, since not all books are buyable to check afterwards.  If you try to read much longer than that, it takes a long time to do that check, plus if you intend to do it in advance, the Conspiracy can read your mind about it."

"So go on asking for information about particular subjects, but then after you've gotten the answer to your question, generate a random number, like 1-6, and try to speedread that whole book if it comes up 6.  They can't just hand you underlying real books open to different places, each time, because even skimming really really fast you'd probably recognize if you reread something you already saw.  So a library can't pass that test with high probability unless it actually has that many complete books."

"...okay, I probably would have gotten that one in another twenty seconds because you're right, it seems pretty inevitable, but it's still a good idea.  And it's good for me to know the Conspiracy would see that tactic too."

Does the proposal have any flaws?  Keltham considers this problem mentally.

Asmodia almost, but not quite, prays to Otolmens about it.  She remembers in time that sometimes her prayers get answered, and this wouldn't actually be a great time.

...he's actually not seeing it offhand, if he uses a random number generation method that they can't plausibly predict.  And picking a random random number generation method that then uses some environmental entropy seems like a pretty powerful way of doing that even in a low-tech environment that's reading your mind.

For that matter, if there is some very clever way to defeat the proposal, he shouldn't think of it now, he should think of it afterwards.  Maybe Asmodia asked that as a last-ditch desperate attempt by Conspiracy to make him think of a solution to a problem they couldn't solve themselves, though, also to be fair, that's sort of a nitwit clever tactic he can't see Conspiracy Asmodia actually being reckless enough to try.

Okay.  Let's try that then.

There's an instant of spinning horror before Asmodia stops trying to see the world from Keltham's dath ilani viewpoint quite so hard, and remembers that she is of Golarion.

'Random' numbers?  Prophecy is broken but it's not that broken!

AUGURIES!  Use Auguries every time to check if it's the right time to hand him an excerpt!  They're fallible but if Keltham doesn't do too many checks we'll have a CHANCE of fooling him!

...if they've got no Auguries prepped and no scrolls of those, then they're all going to die, but that won't be Asmodia's fault.  She really felt like she was doing an unusually good job here, involving her taking some huge professional and hence personal risks, that gave Cheliax the best chance it could have had, if other people did their parts and prepared adequately.

...the facility has three Auguries prepped daily, two for Project Lawful's use on weird experiments, one for actual Security reserve.  They've got a couple of scrolls of Augury in storage as a backup to that.

That's enough to check the next few cases, while somebody Teleports to Egorian and back to fetch more scrolls, ideally along with an arcane savant to cast from those scrolls.

Asmodia continues to show promise, and yes he appreciates that she risked herself there.  But those other thoughts verge on attempted self-defense against punishment, and would get her lit on fire most places that aren't Project Lawful.

Acknowledged, Asmodia thinks back at him.  ((She'll go on being smug, just more privately.))

Aspexia's spells, even the low-circle ones, are really quite valuable at her caster level.  With few exceptions, she only requests spells from Lord Asmodeus that she plans to use that day.

There's relatively little need for preparing against such contingencies by wasting your spell slots, when you can afford to carry around a bag of holding containing, among a lot of other things, two dozen Augury scrolls.

Acknowledged, belay the previous request for scrolls, just get us the arcane savants.

Auguries take a minute to cast, though, how are we -

Number the books Keltham requests, do Auguries in parallel across our clerics about the result of "using an excerpt on Keltham's Nth request".  That should still work so long as the request and its consequences are within the half-hour prediction window.

...all right, the library seems to be passing Asmodia's Obvious Testing Method.  So far.

They're getting some errors, but so far all of them have been of the form where they use a complete book and didn't really need to.  So far.

At some point, Keltham's intuition informs him that he's gotten about as much evidence out of this as he could get; his randomized random number generators have fired three times, and three is well-known to be the largest possible number.

He's asked Fennelosa about ability to buy six books, and three of those have been for sale.

All right.  Let's call it here.

Next up... is... that.

Praised be Asmodeus. Also them. She's not going to think 'they're doing well, this is going to work out', because if she thinks that it definitely won't. But she thinks they earned some sorely needed twos there and will earn more from the erotica.

So!  Time to carry out exactly the same procedure on somebody's pornography collection.

It doesn't feel like a deadly challenge to the Conspiracy, this time, more like - he basically knows that this test is going to be passed, Snack Service wouldn't have suggested it otherwise.  But still.  Sure, let's try it.

Fennelosa will go across town, then, at a brisk walk, and declare himself calling in a favor owed to Lady Sali.

The illusionists might want to edit out the exchange that follows.

"You look - Chelish."

     "Straight from the front. It's a long story."

"Do you need anything?"

      "Just the books."

"How do you know Lady Sali?"

      "Through Cayden. Like I said, it's a long, long story."

But once that's worked out, Keltham can run his tests on the erotica collection. 

It actually goes noticeably easier than trying to launch Chelish history queries.  Mainly because Arnsen Puddleton has read every one of the erotica books in his collection, to the point of doing better than a dath ilani computer's search index.

For example.  At one point - inspired by Carissa's idea about asking to interview children with pox marks specifically - Keltham asks via Fennelosa if any of these books have a section where a masochist gets tied to a bed and then fed chocolate.  Arnsen cheerfully plucks one of his books off the shelf, and promptly flips through to exactly that.

Why Snack Service is allowed to help with this but not -