"He doesn't really feel that anything is real and I don't think I even see that improving. It's not exactly something one can persuade him of. Maybe tomorrow he'll be in more of a mood for strategic planning, but the thing that feels wrong....I would be very surprised, if it were no longer wrong tomorrow. 

He's not a cruel man. Maybe Cheliax was trying to make him Evil that way but if so that's a fact about them, more than about him."

"How would you do it?"

"How would I make Keltham Evil, your majesty? Not with girls he could hit. I - 

- I'm not sure I should speak of this, actually."

"Because it's critical of Our office? We'll bear it."

"He wants to be surrounded by happy people who are grateful for him, and not damaged people who desperately need things from him. He wants things to make sense and happen for reasons. He doesn't want to do his best and be hated and resented for it. 

He wants something that his world, maybe, really could offer, but Golarion, when it offers it, is lying. 

He said, 'if reality is going to throw tiny detective stories at me on top of that then this so-called reality can burn', and reality does, in fact, do that - keep having more detail, where you don't want it, where you aren't grateful for it, and so he's going to decide that it should burn."

"Well, then, we'll pay him to not burn it."

"With what treasury."

"I don't know! Cheliax's, if necessary! But We're not going to - not going to let Asmodeus have permanently destroyed something this important."

"Is there - some thing we could do on the women's policy front, that'd be helpful -"

"I think the things that Osirion might contemplate, your majesty, are very different from the things Keltham might desire. Part of that is that he's accustomed to a society where, I think, there aren't really any women, just people who like dressing up as them. And part of it is - it felt like there was some important disconnect, when we were discussing the differences between Osirion and Absalom - like he thought that in the long run if you didn't make men care for their children it wouldn't make any difference in how many children died - I should've asked, I didn't understand -"

"I think it's some kind of heredity-theory, like, say the propensity to abandon your family is heritable, and say you spent ten thousand years letting men decide whether to abandon their families or not, and say men's children starve if they abandon them, then eventually you'd have a population descended entirely from men who of their own free and voluntary will don't abandon their families."

"When you find yourself making a face like that just speak your mind, Zakiya."

"I don't think Keltham, when he said what he said, was proposing that we spend a thousand years doing that. He's too impatient. - your majesty, I'm afraid that it could be done in two generations, if you were harsh enough about killing all the babies whose fathers abandoned them, and that Keltham'll propose that and you'll do it."

"Well, We probably will, if Keltham asks us to; I'll offer you no false comfort there. But I doubt that the first answers of a young man to a puzzle he's never encountered before are also where he'd put money on a prediction market, once he's recovered some."

"What if he doesn't recover, your majesty! Not tomorrow, not the next day, not in a year! What if he'll only ever see us as an annoying set of puzzles where everyone's horrible for no reason!"

"You can bet yourself it won't work, if you think it won't work."

"I don't know if it won't work, my lord, I just don't want you to do it."

"It strikes me as an increasingly dangerous situation, that I haven't spoken with Keltham, that he won't speak with me. There's - some confusion here, and I don't think it'd survive a real effort to uncover it."

"He seemed firmly opposed."

"I have to say, I thought once he was no longer the prisoner of the forces of Hell things would get easier.

I also thought they'd invade. Especially with Keltham presently very unstable, it seems a better time than next month will be. Why haven't they? - you're dismissed, Zakiya."

"Yes, your majesty."

"Nobody's going to kill all the abandoned children until I've sat down with Keltham and ensured that he and I make all the exact same predictions about what will happen and why."

"I'm glad, your majesty."

"Do you have odds for me, that Keltham will be all right in a couple of weeks?"