...Gorthoklek will of course also be unavailable, nor will they be able to summon whichever devil supposedly bought Carissa's soul...

...phrasing it as 'buying souls' is starting to make him more nervous, after seeing the slave market in Absalom.  You would think, people would not phrase it that way, or would find some way to rephrase it more reassuringly, in a world where slavery was also a thing.  Maybe Hell phrases it that way, because nobody in Hell is worried about slavery, and the mortal world follows suit...

...that slavery market really didn't look like a place that people could escape, just by walking out of Golarion, and into an afterlife where you buy consensual enhancements over thousands of years.

He was supposed to be listing out the evidence incongruous with Conspiracy.  Not starting to connect the pieces together, until he made sure he had all of them.

It no longer feels to Keltham like he'd be defending his world disintegrating, by doing that.  It feels like he'd just be delaying the destruction-by-truth, delaying the pain, for longer.

All right.  Connect the pieces, as they'd be connected in Conspiracy.

Obvious statements are obvious:  The person he knows as Abrogail is not the Queen of Cheliax, the Zon-Kuthon war never happened.

- Asmodeus is the god of compacts, the contracts Keltham signs with Cheliax are binding on them when it purports to be somebody representing Cheliax, and they can't just lie about that to him.  Abrogail, herself, never signed any contract except the one stating consequences if Carissa fell in love with her; the rest was all Lrilatha, or one time a supposed representative of Chelish governance.

- There isn't actually an interdiction... no, Keltham can't quite rule that, so early.  Broom has no obvious Conspiracy-purpose if Otolmens doesn't exist, and even the Conspiracy might hesitate to lie about that.  But something is keeping Keltham's god from him.

- The Conspiracy can read his mind, but doesn't do so at all times, they weren't doing it last night when Keltham was first thinking about this.  They panicked when they got the information on which spells Keltham prayed for this morning, started reading his mind then, and told Ione to supposedly be in the toilet.

- Fennelosa kicked a child; Carissa talked about feeding putatively sapient rats to other rats and selling tickets; the slavery market, the wizard teacher hurting his students after class.  It points to - anti-Light, the thing that 'Zon-Kuthon' is supposed to be - being present in Absalom, in that wizard teacher whose book talked a bunch about Asmodeus, in the mind of Fennelosa, in the mind of Carissa.

- If Conspiracy, they're probably lying about being unable to identify his god.  Can Keltham figure out which god it is?  They wouldn't have first said the name after Keltham got clericed, so if this is solvable, it'll be a god that got mentioned as Lawful Neutral before Keltham got clericed.  Which Keltham thinks narrows it down to Abadar, maybe Irori, he doesn't remember if Erecura was mentioned before he got clericed... he thinks after... and then after Keltham did get clericed, they'd cast whichever god it actually was in a negative light, because any accurate representation would start Keltham moving in that direction.  Well, that makes it obvious that, if it's one of Abadar / Maybe Irori / Possibly Erecura, from among those three, his god would be Abadar.  Banking is the obvious fit for Mad Investor Chaos.  It's the thing that could be a misrepresentation of the god of Honorable Trade.  Could also just be that the Conspiracy didn't have the bad luck to mention the real god of Coordination to him before he got clericed.

- Cheliax telling him about a huge push to manufacture spellsilver over one month.  Why tell him that?  It makes no sense on Conspiracy...

If they have to report revenue to him monthly, because that was in the compact, and they expect a lot of revenue in one month, they would need an excuse... for what reality?  Revenue from a war, using ultimately Project-derived weapons?

That's - that's really not good, at all.  Keltham would be responsible for stopping that, one way or another - but the contract isn't written in a way that implies that Cheliax owes him revenues from stealing other people's stuff using Project-derived weapons - is it?

Table that one, keep thinking.

The spells his god sent him, in the version of Conspiracy where his god is not on the Conspiracy's side and they faked the Zon-Kuthon godwar:

- Sanctuary, Protection:  You are not physically safe where you are.
- Invisibility Purge:  People are hiding from you.
- Glimpse of Beyond:  In other dimensions / behind secret doors / the people around you are not who they seem.
- Spell Immunity:  Spells are being, or may be, cast on you that you wouldn't want cast.  You need to figure out what they are.
- Aura Sight:  Your god is Lawful Neutral... maybe, you are Lawful Neutral, he has only the Conspiracy's word that Aura Sight says anything about his god.  Or also the Conspiracy could have been spoofing that spell.  He does not know for sure even that his god is Lawful Neutral.  His god could straight-up be Iomedae... though his god's presence back then didn't really feel like something that used to be human at all, let alone ex-feminine.
-- Or he needed to know somebody else's alignment, somebody who wasn't really Lawful Evil.
- Detect Desires, Detect Anxieties:  The people around you have desires and anxieties unknown to you and which it is important that you know.
- Summon Monster III:  Get outside the Forbiddance, talk to something that is not one of your hosts... or the obvious other use of the summoned entity (Keltham's mind is by now used to not thinking of this specifically, lest it be mind-read).
- Enchantment Foil.  Be wary of mind-control being used on you.

...could everyone around him actually be Chaotic Evil?  They sure didn't seem 'Lawful' by his standards...  Doesn't quite seem right, unless Carissa was lying about very basic things very early... and that remains a possibility.

And then there's the last spell:

Vision of People On Fire, Burning and Being Healed, In Terrible Pain, Begging to Die.

If it's not meant to communicate Zon-Kuthon's afterlife, what it's meant to communicate - there's other possibilities, but - that could be the afterlife that people around him are heading to, or, some bad future that happens if Keltham works for the Conspiracy - but the seared wounds healing to be burned again, didn't look like that was mortal Golarion -

- the message is not that all the afterlives are like that, or at least, Keltham doesn't think his god wants him to think so, because there was the Early Judgment spell, the beautiful city - did Keltham touch a god from beyond known Golarion, are all the Golarion afterlives like that -

Maybe he can resolve that last question, using the overly-clever-combo that occurred to him last night, after thinking about how different people tapping him with Share Language sometimes had different connotations for words like 'Good' and 'Evil'.

Tongues, plus linguisticanalysis.

Keltham takes the five torn pages out of his shirt, from five different phantom library books in five different languages.

He may need to flip through the whole books to find words to analyze.  But Keltham is also hoping that he can just use the pages to anchor that language in his mind, and Tongues will give him the rest.  It will not make him as fluent a speaker as Share Language, Keltham doesn't think; Carissa's Baseline did not sound right, did not sound native, when she spoke to him using Tongues.

- as the very first thing Carissa did, before she had any idea at all who Keltham was, before she knew he was not of Golarion.  If showing him the capability of Tongues was a terrible idea for the Conspiracy, good luck hiding it from him then, Conspiracy Carissa.

Keltham casts Tongues.

Picks a random torn page, anchors a language in his mind.

And goes looking, within this language he now sort-of-speaks, for words that sound phonetically similar to (among other potential roots and cognates) 'Asmodeus', 'Hell', 'Zon-Kuthon', 'devil', 'compact', 'oath', 'Cheliax', 'Lawful', 'Evil', 'LawfulEvil', 'LawfulNeutral', 'Abadar', 'Iomedae', 'Good', 'Sarenrae' -

"Sevar, if you want to try the fake escape plan, I think the time is now.  If Keltham decides within his mind that he's heading toward Osirion or a church of Abadar, our options get a lot more constrained.  Even statuing him for a week at that point - doesn't feel explicitly forbidden by Asmodeus, but it sure would be flirting with the edges of our Lord's commands, meaning we don't."

"If Keltham explicitly says he's planning to leave the Ostenso region and invokes the contract Lrilatha signed on behalf of Cheliax, we're separately bound by explicit compact with him to not hinder whatever he does in order to book passage out."

“Understood. Get a Telepathic Bond between Manohar and Ione up and then - Ione, go.” She won’t be able to feed Ione lines inside the Rope Trick but they’ve rehearsed this.

Of course, it’s still not going to work.

The Chelish dialect of Taldane has been optimized by something akin to natural selection, over the last decades, to no longer contain openly uncomplimentary meanings of 'Hellish' among the bourgeoisie whose children sometimes become Security wizards.  In the first couple of generations, things became hellishly challenging, hellishly relentless, hellishly sadistic and cruel.  Not hellishly bad.  You didn't say that where an Asmodean priest could hear you, meaning, anytime, and your children grew up not hearing it used that way.  In the couple of generations after, Infernal loanwords into Chelish-Taldane started to displace less precise, less useful, overly general terms like the Taldane 'hellish'.

Three of the five other languages Keltham can now anchor his mind on, have adjectives that obviously sound a lot like 'Hell' and mean 'torturous' 'painful' 'hope-crushing' 'soul-destroying' 'very extremely bad' -

The screen on his Rope Trick entrance shatters, and Ione pokes her head up through it, holding her mouth open to display a small cookie.

Ione Sala quickly finishes climbing in, swallowing the cookie, and says,

"Swore an oath not to tip you off if you didn't already know, Snack Service says the decision theory is still complicated so it can't help directly but it gave me a cookie to celebrate you finding out, mindreading spell is fifth-circle they don't have a lot of it I'm gambling everything on it not running right now, I faked a dropped paper slip from you in your handwriting saying that you wanted Ione Sala to come up and answer some questions, we've got only minutes at best, step one of my plan is for you to poke out your head and call in Sevar and Asmodia with Sevar coming in first and Asmodia following a minute after, Sevar's new earrings look genuine to my Detect Magic and there's a complicated reason in their game why the earrings would actually be real, so you'll do things that count as Evil, there'll be some other tactic to make sure you can't just order Sevar to speak truth, but maybe it doesn't work if Sevar doesn't know it's coming, or it's just a special exclusion in the earrings, step two of my plan is stun Sevar, put the earrings on her, have her get the drop on the Security outside and use their Teleport scroll, unless you've got a better plan, this one is me making the entire thing up since I got the cookie, they read my mind too."

The feeling, of all of Ordinary's remaining probability mass vanishing, the moment Ione starts talking, is like -

Already know?  Keltham didn't already know - did he?  He wasn't finished already knowing.  Didn't have a chance to have a proper moment of realization.  He was still supposed to integrate everything and double-check.

It was just supposed to be a misleading line of thought that would have an obvious better answer, once Keltham finished thinking it through.

There's an emergency ongoing.  Execute a core fallback.

The emergency is unfortunately too complicated for Keltham to fall back on simple methods of reasoning, but he does switch off all of the emotions he can, leaving only distant sadness and delayed pain and a sickness in his stomach, a trembling in his hands.  The body can't be denied as easily as the mind, but then, you can also do an awful lot with your mind.

Does he believe Ione?

You would really, really, really have to not think very much of dath ilan to imagine that the answer is 'yes'.

10% that it's the simple truth, and even that much is only because of tropes and how much he doesn't know about True Reality.  90% that it's a Conspiracy salvage attempt.

Within the Conspiracy side, there's - possibilities that he shouldn't let them read his mind about.  (Will he see an opportunity for a real escape inside the fake escape.  Can he get Carissa and innocent!Ione with him when he goes.  Does innocent!Ione go to the Fire Afterlife / Hell if Keltham doesn't play along.  He won't do anything that reduces his chance at his primary escape plan.)

"Okay.  So the next step of the plan is for me to tell them to send up Carissa, and then Asmodia a minute after Carissa comes in."  Keltham starts to lean down towards the Rope Trick's opening -

"Control your expression.  Control your voice.  Security would notice instantly that something's wrong with you."

"Like this?"

This sure is an earlier point for the plan to fail than the earliest point at which she imagined it failing.

Yeah, okay, he can read that expression, no doubt because Ione is making an effort to be readable to him.

Keltham casts Eagle's Splendour on himself, only thinking when the gesture is half-complete that he's expending a resource for the sake of playing along with a lie, but it's not a key resource and his hands have finished the motion before his worrying cortex can manage to inhibit it.

He's not really at his best.

Keltham had wondered before why Splendour/Charisma was a reasonable characteristic to be one of only three major mental attributes at the center of Golarion's conceptualmagic.  Splendour didn't seem on par with Wisdom, let alone Cunning/Intelligence.  He didn't see what manipulating people, or pretending to be other people, had to do with, like, sorcery casting, or paladin casting.  It seemed like a case of there just being Three Attributes, two of which were in use by wizards and clerics, so the third one got assigned to sorcerers and paladins even if that made no sense.

That, of course, was when Keltham didn't need Splendour.  When his mind wasn't in a posture where increased Splendour would make a difference to anything but play-acting.

Keltham's hesitating will firms itself, his faltering drive moves back into motion -

- his emotions grow stronger, but the spell also increases his ability to crush his emotions down and his ability to continue despite them; and when that's added to dath ilani disciplines, it's enough to go on delaying the pain.

"Better?"

"It'll have to do."