"Was I missing the part where you gave me a reason to believe anything you're saying when you're not under truthspell?"

"If you're not going to join the truthspeaking party, the remaining question I have for you is whether you're willing to sell me the right to take any of my other employees with me, free of Cheliax, at a reasonable price.  To be clear, unreasonable prices mean I get them later and you don't get anything in return."

Asmodia is not wrong that Keltham will have access to Ione Sala and that the version of the story Ione tells will, even if honest, likely be untrue, and omit anything that paints Cheliax in a better light.  Ione must needs be counterbalanced.

Asmodia - to call her a 'defection risk' would understate it, she's a defection certainty.

Yaisa - also a defection risk, but of no value to Cheliax now...

But no; Abrogail does not want Keltham to have a masochist with him.  Abrogail wants Keltham to find out exactly how impossible it is for Osirion to provide him with his true needs.

Meritxell - would be an excellent choice, otherwise.  Abrogail would in fact like Keltham to have somebody alive and Chelish by his side, simply to remind him of how utterly dull all the women in Osirion are by comparison.  And yet, not a masochist, so there will be a need in him that he must return to Cheliax to obtain.  Or begin an embarrassing and probably ultimately unsatisfying search in Absalom, if Abrogail reads those tropes right.

The problem being of course that Meritxell knows far too much.

Gregoria - does not want him, and Abrogail would like to send with somebody Keltham will let himself have sex with.

Pilar, same problem, even leaving aside all the other problems.

So she has no options, and must choose one of them.

"Meritxell Narbona is not for sale to you.  It'd be a mockery when Hell owns her soul, and we have always dealt fairly with the Evil Keltham who could be.  But I am willing to send our loyal subject with you, for a time, if Osirion offers strong guarantees of the sanctity of her mind, and that she will be returned to Cheliax at our demand."

"It is not in our interest to abandon you to Osirion to hear their errors and mistakes unargued, or leave their own little foibles not pointed out.  I do suggest visiting or scrying the slave markets in Sothis quickly, before they have a chance to clean them up for you, if you'd not end up living inside another constructed illusion.  All that the fake priest of Abadar told you about their treatment of women was true as well."

"The aim of all of our policies is building a prosperous free society where people make Axis and not Hell. We are very eager to learn from you about how to do that better." says the leader of Osirion's forces, but quietly to Keltham because his job is to avoid sparking a war with Cheliax, here.

"If your goal in keeping back the people who care about me is to use them as hostages against me, know that I consider it a threat.  Of the Lawful treatment of threats, I have already spoken, but I can say it again if you didn't read those transcripts."

"I've read them.  Asmodeus Himself instructed us to take no hostages against you.  All of my calculations are being done never considering the hostage value.  Asmodeus did not instruct us to avoid keeping behind anyone you cared about, if that was simply the result of our best path for our own benefit."

"Interesting claim, from one not of dath ilan, that you could do such calculations and confidently know they were unbiased.  It's possible you'll find out at some point that you should've been a little less clever and less exactly literal about what your god was trying to tell you not to do."

"Korva Tallandria not among my options here?  She seems like she'd do a better job of pointing out everything wrong with Osirion."

"I admit, I wasn't particularly thinking that you wanted her."

"Dath ilan has proverbs about the kind of advice that's easier to get from people who aren't friends with you.  Try it yourself sometime."

(It's a wordlessly obvious choice if you're dath ilani, for reasons that include Korva having just very loudly declared herself to be an Obvious Dath Ilani Story Protagonist who seeks out the truth and uses it to destroy things, Korva seeming like she'd be more useful for ripping apart the next layer of reality, the commonality with which dath ilani stories have plot turning-points where somebody gets tied to a chair and lectured on every single thing they're doing wrong; and, finally, the point that Korva seems to be maybe not doing as well at handling Cheliax compared to Meritxell.  Two days earlier Keltham would have questioned that last motivation as overly Good; he is now questioning that questioning.)

Korva does not search within herself for a preference between Cheliax and Osirion, between Keltham and her Infernal Majestrix. This is less suppressing anything and more just not putting in the effort to stretch in a particular direction.

She does look to Asmodia, though, carefully, almost invisibly, to see if Asmodia is sending any remotely visible signals about where she thinks Korva should be angling to go, if Korva has any opportunities to angle.

((Asmodia is massively torn between how this would be clearly good for Korva and clearly bad for Asmodia.  Asmodia is not of course giving any outward signs of this, at least not at Korva's level of Sense Motive.))

"Don't worry, my dear innocent boy.  None of my advisors are friends with me."

"As for your fascinating, I daresay somewhat Asmodean request, I fear I shall have to decline.  We did not mirror your own error, Keltham; Korva Tallandria is now become far too valuable to Cheliax," and is a defection certainty and knows too much.  "Will you have Meritxell, then, or nobody?"

Keltham turns to his upcoming hosts and raises his eyebrows in inquiry.

"We'll - commit to chaperoning her, and to not reading her mind or enchanting her, as is illegal in Osirion anyway. I cannot without more consideration commit our government to sending her back, if when you ask for her she wants to stay."

"Then we can, perhaps, send her along in some short time when your government has reached a decision there."

"You're not even asking if Meritxell wants to go, Keltham?  I'm pleased."

"Yeah, see, the whole mindreading and torture thing makes the concept of informed consent or even having opinions really quite questionable.  When Meritxell has been placed beyond the reach of all threats, and had a time then to think for herself, it will afterwards be possible to meaningfully ask her if she wants to go back."

And meanwhile, you don't even ask, or give her a chance to express her opinions.  Very good.

"I suppose it does befall me, at this point in the lineup, to describe my own relationship with you, Keltham."

"When I ascended to this throne, I promised myself I wouldn't die of old age on it.  That, after all, would mean that I'd played my reign far too safely, and lost out on most of the fun."

"It would be fitting for me to lose my head and crown to the person you could become.  Someday.  Sometime in my sixties, perhaps."

"Not this Keltham, though.  That would be absurd and embarrassing."

"And meanwhile, Carissa is due some punishment for her failure.  But I will take personal care of it, and ensure that her due punishment does not weaken her.  And before you think to object, be told that such as Carissa Sevar cannot be allowed to punish herself, which is the alternative."

"So I shall take charge of your Carissa, for a time.  She does need a keeper.  But I'll keep her properly owned by you, awaiting her true master's return.  I haven't forgotten the compact you forced me to sign, after all, that if an untampered truthspell ever shows Carissa to love me more than you, she's to be delivered to your ownership in chains."

She's leaving out a very great deal about their relationship, her and Keltham and Carissa.  But there are secrets Abrogail must yet keep, for how they chain into other secrets to one aware of tropes.

Oh, and the last line of course is for the Osirians' benefit.  What must they be thinking, now?

One of them is thinking that she's quite certain that a woman of Irori could manage to be her own keeper, did she wish.

Derrina signed up for an advertisement for a rapid response group that might need to fight an army, in a good Lawful Neutral cause, so long as she was hanging around Sothis anyways.

Since she didn't know that advertisement was aimed at the interdiction zone, her signing up doesn't count against Irori, as Derrina understands it; Irori's interventions outside the noninterference zone are not bound to avoid causal impacts on the zone, they simply cannot be chosen on the basis of their zone impacts.  Everything touches everything, sooner or later.

Still, to tell Sevar, within the zone, the information that she learned directly of Irori - that might be a bit much.  She is not privy to the exact boundaries drawn by gods; she should not push them.

"I can stay in Cheliax and keep watch on Carissa Sevar for you, Keltham of dath ilan, if Cheliax grants me appropriate safe-conducts about it," Derrina calls from within the army.

"And what negotiating leverage would enable Osirion to demand such a thing?"

"I have some idea of what Keltham is prepared to pay for Carissa Sevar's safety, as it happens.  But allow me to give a more Chelish answer.  Keltham, truthspell, please."  Derrina is already walking towards him.

...sure.  Tap.

"I herewith resign from Osirion's army and relinquish my pay from this expedition."

"Be told, Abrogail Thrune, that if I'd attacked by surprise, I could have killed at least you, and probably also Aspexia Rugatonn."

Derrina, as it happens, is being totally honest about this.

Golarion combat balance is normally structured around the assumption that a heavily speed-focused 10th-level monk cannot, before she attacks, read off a scroll of antimagic field.

- has she, this whole time, been completely wrong about Osirion and everyone in it. 

Because -

- even if only one in a million of them is like that -

The rest of the Osirians are mostly busy concealing their reactions of 'wait, we had a girl along?' and 'wait, we had a girl who can assassinate the Queen of Cheliax along?' and in many cases 'wait why didn't we do it, then'.

"Wouldn't be the first time I've been killed.  Keeping me dead is a lot harder.  Now who's this with the temerity to make that claim?"