"No. Before I go into more detail on that, who's your god?"

"Milani."

"I don't negotiate with Chaos."

"I'm Neutral Good. I keep my promises, although I do prefer not to make any to diabolists."

"I want someone Lawful. Verifiably so in some way that isn't Detect Alignment, which I can't cast."

"Very well."

She leaves and a few minutes later a man arrives. He's visibly a high-level paladin of Iomedae, wearing an Andoren army uniform. (Which is basically just a Chelish army uniform, but blue.)

He casts Zone of Truth.

"Your name and rank, for the record?" he says.

He repeats them.

"To be clear," he says, "this is a negotiation, not an interrogation. I will, however, have to provide certain information for my negotiating position to make sense. To proceed you will need to swear on your Law and the honor of your goddess not to use that information against myself or Cheliax until I grant you permission. If you do not think yourself capable of keeping that oath please find me someone who is."

"I will need to pray to my goddess for guidance on this matter, if I am to swear on her honor," he says. Which he then does.

Is this, uh, legit?

Sure, gods do this sort of thing all the time. Mortals inventing the concept themselves are pretty rare and I doubt he actually understands it, but yes, make the oath and keep it.

(Iomedae's comms bandwidth to random paladins, even high-level ones, is quite limited, so all that comes across is a vague feeling of yes.)

"Upon my Law and the honor of my goddess, I so swear."

"They think this is a fake defection. I am, in fact, defecting for real, but they don't know that. If I start giving away troop positions, Teleport locations, and such, then we will actually have half the Chelish intelligence service after us, and while they are mostly not so intelligent as the name may suggest, I am not in fact sufficiently confident that either of us survive that. I would greatly prefer not to die until I do something about the fact that my soul is owned by Hell."

(He hasn't actually decided whether he's defecting for real, but it's a real enough possibility that he can fool the Zone of Truth about it, while also trying to preserve as much option value as possible in the world where he doesn't.)

He nods in agreement. "Hell is a horror and no one should go there," he says. "We intend to do something about it too. In the meantime—well, when we have to execute Lawful Evil people we usually statue them, or barring that Plane Shift them to Abaddon, but neither of those protect a soul-sold defector from being assassinated by Cheliax. The only thing I can think of is a Contingent Soul Bind, which we could probably arrange, but it would trade off against lots of other important uses of Felandriel Morgethai's spell slots.

"If you want to tell us everything you know and then be a statue in a vault in Heaven until we fix Hell, we could arrange that."

(The fact that there are Good factions whose main goal is to improve conditions in Hell is not knowledge available in Cheliax, even—especially—to soul-sold Security wizards.)

What.

Why does Iomedae care about Hell?

It's obvious why the Good gods would want to overthrow Cheliax: it's the biggest stronghold of Evil on Golarion (that is, if you don't count the Worldwound), and it contains millions of people who would probably be Good or at least Neutral if they hadn't been tricked and threatened into Evil their entire lives. (This thought is not even heretical, in the Inner Ring; it's perfectly Asmodean to trick people into doing Evil, thereby exploiting the Contract of Creation, which damns those souls to Hell, for Asmodeus' benefit.) But Cheliax also contains a lot of people, probably all of the important people, who are genuinely Evil. If you're going to Hell anyway, why wouldn't you be?

The rest of the world, he supposes, is much the same, at least if you aren't in fucking Lastwall or some other country that's ruled directly by a god of Good. The difference between Cheliax and Osirion is that in Cheliax, everyone important is soul-sold and being Stupid Evil is high status, so people are mostly Stupid Evil, while in Osirion people realize that Hell fucking sucks and they don't want to go there, so they donate however much Pharasma requires to keep them on track for Axis. If Iomedae turns Hell into Axis Two, Her church loses half its income and a whole lot of people lose their only incentive not to actually deal with their problems in a way that Good doesn't particularly approve of. This does not, to him, seem like an improvement to the state of Good on Golarion.

Not only that, but Lawful Evil rules the most powerful nation on the Inner Sea even while being ruled by a god of Stupid Evil. If you overthrow Him and replace the faith of Cheliax with a Lawful Evil one that isn't fucking stupid, they probably straightforwardly conquer Golarion. He fails to see how this is an improvement from Iomedae's perspective.

"It would seem to me," he says, "that 'fixing Hell' would be an Evil cause rather than a Good one. I am—frankly unsure of what Iomedae's interest is in this."

"Iomedae's interest is that people not be tortured!" He would have thought this obvious but he does know that Chelish people are sometimes confused about whether torture is bad. "The suffering in Hell so vastly exceeds that caused by merely mortal Evil that it simply doesn't make sense to focus on anything else, although of course we are also quite opposed to Abaddon and the Abyss."

Oh.

"I am Evil, and doubt that I could ever be Good," he says, "but I do not, in fact, value the suffering of others as an end in itself, and it has always seemed to me that those who do ought be the enemy of all. If it is not, in fact, the case that the torments of Hell were demanded by the ancient gods of Good as a disincentive against Evil, or there are at least Good gods who reject this, then perhaps I have more interests in common with Good than I thought."

"Of course the torments of Hell were not demanded by the gods of Good!—well, if that does turn out to be the case we'll overthrow whatever god did that too!"

(It wasn't a Good god, but a Neutral one, who set up the alignment system, but they're totally going to overthrow Her too if they can figure out how to do it without destroying the universe.)

"Anyway, you said that Cheliax had instructed you to pretend to defect. What's the plan there, as far as they know?"

"Dispel the Forbiddance on Augustana's gatehouse so they can Teleport in a strike team. I think you either have to allow that, or statue me in a way that doesn't look like I had a choice; if they conclude I've defected for real I'm not sure we can keep me alive.

"—I don't, actually, want to be a statue yet. I've been waiting for years to betray them in a way that matters; I just don't think this mission is it."

"...that would not have worked. Our usual policy for defectors is to keep them far away from the actual fighting and use them in an advisory role only; for a wizard of your level, we might have made an exception, but if so you would have been assigned to a randomly chosen location, not the one you happened to Teleport into. For reasons which are obvious, given what your superiors were planning.

"That said, if there's a plan to win this war that's served better by Augustana surrendering, Augustana can surrender. I just can't imagine what that plan might be."

Oh. Yeah. That makes sense. (Cheliax hasn't thought very much about how to handle people defecting to their side, since there aren't any.)

"I had thought of several traps which Cheliax might be lured into by the apparent fall of Augustana," (obviously he isn't going to volunteer what they are to someone who hasn't confirmed he's cleared to know about that sort of thing), "but simple surrender would, I think, arouse suspicion. The city must fall by my hand, and you cannot simply return me there now. No one in the city when it falls may know that anything is out of the ordinary. If they do Cheliax will almost certainly learn it from them; they are very good at that."

"That would imply that you yourself must not be recaptured, I assume?"

"No. I'm needed. I can beat—"

—he could beat Detect Thoughts before, when he intended to betray Cheliax eventually but not right now, and possibly not ever if no worthwhile opportunity presented itself. He almost certainly can't do so now.

"I need someone who can cast Modify Memory here in the next, uh, thirteen rounds," he says, and starts explaining the plan.

Two days later in Ostenso, a priest of Iomedae is arrested for being a priest of Iomedae, and given how stupid it is to be a priest of Iomedae in Cheliax, presumably an Andoren spy.