Again it glances at Aspexia Rugatonn not denying this, and then goes to crank the floor-door iris open.

These beings are very regular and predictable once you have a small amount of experience with them!  If you have any experience dealing with free-willed mortals it's a relaxing change of pace.  It makes you wish that all the workers on your project were this easy to predict!

The platform, notably devoid of any safety rails, or anything to hang onto except those rough chains, sways and tilts in the heated breeze that rises up from the opened iris, even as the Marzach goes to wait by the chain's reel.

She is, in fact, beyond fear of mortal things like falling by now. She steps onto the platform without giving the devil another glance.

Aspexia too shall step onto the platform, following Sevar's lead, though she does trouble herself to catch a rough chain in one hand.  It will, obviously, cut her hand, as they sway about the air, but it's simpler to apply a trivial healing spell at the bottom, than to take flight about the whole descent to stabilize herself.  Hell is full of choices like that.

- sure, Aspexia is the expert.

The platform begins to lower, and sure enough it sways about and the chain cuts into Carissa's hand where she holds it, little barbs in the roughened surface catching at her palm's skin.

She could have asked for a scroll of Overland Flight to have today, and it would perhaps have suited her pride better, but she's made rather a lot of demands of Cheliax as it stands, and it seems worse trope-wise to rely on things not in her own power. She prepared Flight, but that lasts only briefly, and she only has one, because she went instead for redundancy on Fox's Cunning in case the negotiations drag out; that Aspexia cannot cast for her.

And as the platform lowers Dis is visible below them,  long pale streets and the two twining rivers and black towering spires such that the overall impression is of being lowered into a pit of spikes, only to realize as you approach the spikes that they are much much taller than you. 

The air is heavy with smoke and sickly-sweet, and there's no wind; the platform is swaying only with the slight involuntary motions of its passengers. 

(It's now been slightly over exactly ten minutes since they departed for Hell.)

"Carissa.  Do not sell your soul.  This is an absolute order.  If you want to protect Cheliax this is a wrong and counterproductive move."

She has enough Splendour to only slightly visibly startle. "Hard to talk out of this" since I don't know why I decided it, "told you what it'd take to make me stop. I'd be yours, if everything else I have to protect would be safe that way."

There's no further reply, of course, because Sending permits one exchange only.

Is it possible that the effect on Keltham is the point? That for some reason doing this causes something good to happen with him, but not if she knows about it? ....no, she thinks that Keltham wouldn't treat someone setting their memory-wiped self up to threaten him differently from directly threatening him. And she's not threatening him. 

She has something in her mind next to Keltham that wasn't there yesterday, some intuition or learned-habit, that says - a vague formless thing, that Cheliax isn't safe from him - she already knew that though -

He won't destroy it while she's out, will he? It wasn't just the risk to her holding him back? 

- doesn't matter, cooler Carissa and Abrogail and Aspexia will have made the tradeoffs, her job is to execute on them - 

- her hand is dripping blood, now, from the wire that she's holding. Probably that's on her; she's clenching at it excessively fiercely. The black spires of Dis have grown into buildings around them, and more have emerged through the haze; the people walking the pale streets no longer look like distant scurrying ants, except the ones that are in fact ant-like in body plan.

They land. She casts Infernal Healing to fix her hand. 

It's easy to see, from the air, where the Iron Scepter, the palace of Dispater, is; it's at the center, the greatest and most elaborate building, with both rivers twined around it like necklaces. 

The ground is burning. Carissa is resistant to fire.

The ground is screaming at her in agony. 

Fixing the paving stones and making them useful is going to be difficult but it's definitely on her to-do list. 

(Keltham, love, you can't protect all my concerns for me while I sit in safety, I've gone and put all of Hell in my concerns.)

And she walks, with the Unseen Servants holding up the hem of her dress and no other concessions to the landscape, through the streets of Dis, unhesitating, winding her way across red-hot metal bridges towards the palace. She has activated the pin of Glibness, by now, but it's not mainly Bluff she's leaning on. This is Asmodeus's, and she has been commanded to go to Him without thought of other choices, and to remember that she is not Irori, and so here she is, where Irori would never go, to give herself over to Asmodeus; He alone can win a contest among the gods simply by ordering it won for Him. 

She is afraid, but not very afraid. Smarter Carissa had a plan.

She reaches, in time, the gates of the palace, and the devils standing to attention there; smarter ones, older ones, leering horned devils, a winged munagola. 

Words bell forth from a Bdellavritra, from the end of the giant sluglike form that has three human heads, all speaking in high voices like slime dripping into ears.

"Who seeks entrance into the Palace of Dis?"
"What brings a mortal to the Palace of Dis?"
"With whom is your appointment?"

"I am Carissa Sevar. I have come to bargain with Dispater."

At the sound of the name 'Carissa Sevar', every devil's head, or other sensory appendage, turns in her direction.

Something covered all over with spines speaks in a sound like screeching metal.  "I will raise you as a pet, and sell you to a Duke of Hell when you are better trained."

"I will bargain with Dispater as I am, today, because Asmodeus's interests in Golarion will not wait on us; after that the Lord of the Second will of course make arrangements for me as He sees fit."

"And what if I -"

Destruction.

The spell doesn't slay the thing, but it howls away half-disintegrated.

The gates of Dis's palace are opened, then, for Carissa Sevar to pass.

Right. That's everything going according to plan, then, mostly, probably. Not that she knows what the plan is.