"As you will, then."

"I'm concerned with how you remain un-assassinated."

"People have been saying that about me for a while."

"Be serious.  I'm worried that Keltham hasn't killed you yet.  He has not much time left to do that before your child quickens with soul.  It's possible Keltham hasn't figured things out at all.  But with you staying so much in the Palace, he may not have had an easy chance to -"

"If I leave the Palace under unusual conditions, if I make myself an easy and predictable target for temporary assassination, Keltham may deduce exactly what I'm doing and why!  Asmodia was your own pet; did you learn nothing from her?"

Her voice is a bit dry.  "I am not sure I so trust all this complicated reasoning, that I wouldn't give Keltham a shot at killing you some easy way.  Instead of prompting him to, perhaps, crater all Egorian for it.  We should not neglect the ordinary form of the game while we chase this - absurdly elaborated one."

"I suppose I could stage some affair that leaves me exposed at a predictable place and time.  Whereupon Keltham, if he is truly Wished and headbanded up to INT 29, will deduce exactly what I'm doing and why, and maybe even that you were the one stupid enough to order me to do it.  Would that make you happy?"

"Perhaps.  I will think on it." 

"How goes your training of the would-be Keepers of Asmodeus, as holds you back from so much other valuable work in time of approaching war, on only the word of a Chaotic god?  Are there any hopes vague enough to be told me?"

She frowns.  "Vague enough?"

"If it's mysterious to me and not too hopeful, if the audience wouldn't know what you're talking about, that shouldn't prevent things from going mostly as you plan."

(Abrogail Thrune is not aware of how her own desperation to know - to be back in the loop on things - to be told anything, or for that matter given some hope of regaining her story-relevance and pride - is skewing this judgment.)

"Matters with the Keepers of Asmodeus go about as well as could be expected."  It would lack dignity if Aspexia Rugatonn cackled evilly; she hasn't done that since she stopped adventuring and went into administration.  Also, of course, she'd never show that much emotion in front of Abrogail; and also also it'd probably be too much hope to give her.

Matters with the Keepers of Asmodeus are going at least as well as could possibly have been expected.  Only the shadow of Cayden Cailean's involvement, that He somehow expects to benefit from this alongside Asmodeus, would hold Aspexia back from breaking into full-scale maniacal laughter if she were in private.

"You can probably go slightly less vague than that.  Are Asmodeus's Keepers all sixth-circles?  Has one reached eighth-circle?  Are they a significant-enough military force to matter?"

"Asmodeus has granted all of them His second circle, which is as much and more than any sane person would have hoped for.  All who've reached the second circle of wizardry are now training in mystic theurgy beside."

Which is another thing that Aspexia would laugh about maniacally under better circumstances.  Who would have thought that Intelligence, properly trained, could become a Wisdom bonus, to make for Asmodeus a cadre of wizard-priests?  Her eventual successor may have power enough to go toe-to-toe with Nefreti Clepati without two eighth-circles backing her up about it.

"But," Aspexia continues, "if twenty second-circles, of whom fourteen are training as bare-apprentice mystic theurges, are a military key to victory - the path is hidden from my sight."  Even if ALL TWENTY OF THEM would choose Hell over Elysium.

"You're almost smiling."

"You would almost smile too, in my position.  I've gotten them started on intrigues and backstabbing each other for pride of position, the stronger bending the weaker to their uses, and they are scrupulous about never doing so in a way that inhibits their group productivity."  Aspexia Rugatonn doesn't know why all this teaching matters, but it's so satisfying that she's not doing much questioning of Snack Service's claim that it does.

"Any good news from Korva Tallandria, that wasn't so good it had to be kept from you?"

Abrogail now deeply regrets having ever entangled herself with that woman, as now chains Abrogail to her management.  Abrogail had meant Korva to run the program for injuring Keltham with his asked-but-unwanted 144 children, but Korva's desperately-concealed revulsion at the thought was such that Abrogail doubted the tropes of forcing Korva to do what had been meant as a gift to her of satisfying revenge...

And as later attempts soon proved, Korva Tallandria seemed to be made desperately unhappy - Korva didn't voice it, of course, but it was unconcealable in her thoughts - by almost any possible task that Abrogail presented for her consideration. 

Abrogail's actual conclusion is that Korva is the walking emotional disaster that Keltham thought she was, that he in fact correctly identified her trope; and that Korva will remain an emotional disaster until Keltham somehow wins her back over, and fucks it out of her or beats it out of her or whatever he is supposed to do.

"Tallandria guesses that at her present rate of progress on diamond chemistry, she might in the best case be able to produce her first specks of diamond dust in another month or two, and greatly scale the process around a month after," Abrogail answers.  Every task Abrogail suggested had just made the jilted trope-girl tie herself into a tighter knot of unhappiness and self-hate, until finally Abrogail had left Korva to her own choice of tasks; and that had been what she'd picked, even before the news out of the City of Brass.  "Tallandria's alchemical investigation says that diamond is primarily a crystal of Element-6, the key ingredient of coal, possibly adulterated with some further element or quality that her spectroscopes can't detect yet.  If there is no hidden ingredient to it, she expects that the right use of heat and pressure should be able to form purified Element-6 into diamond, given that it seems to form naturally in the ground to be mined and what Keltham said of such 'geological' processes; but she guesses the synthesis results will come out as diamond dust and forming large pure crystals will prove much harder."

"Tallandria is skeptical of Keltham's maybe-capability to mate smaller diamonds into large ones.  She guesses that without knowing the exact crystal structure, Keltham shouldn't be able to Prestidigitation-alchemize two diamonds into one larger diamond, no matter how cleanly-cut their matched surfaces or if he's able to work within a vacuum. It didn't happen naturally when Tallandria tried it, nor when she attempted obvious blind manipulations of 'potential energy surfaces'.  Tallandria remembers, and transcripts agree, that Keltham at INT 18 said he couldn't think of any simple way to find crystal structures without advanced technology out of Civilization, specifically generators for ultra-tiny light particles and very fine detectors for those."

Aspexia doesn't bother to comment anything along the lines of 'Unlimited diamond dust for Permanencies seems enough to win this whole war', whether Cheliax obtained it first or Osirion did; this is obvious to both of them, along with the fact that they shouldn't take a few extra months to wait.

"It seems some evidence against the image of Keltham's apparent doings reported by Hell out of the City of Brass, I suppose, and the image of his purchase orders for smaller diamonds in Golarion.  I'm not Asmodia to say how much evidence in numbers."

"It's the sort of thing that a smarter Keltham would enjoy bluffing us about; that seems more than probable.  The probability that he could actually do it - Tallandria thought she'd have put 5% on it, if the question hadn't immediately made her think it more probable."

"I do presume you've instructed Tallandria that if she does have some unexpected breakthrough, she is to conceal it from you and report it first through Church channels?"

"Naturally," Abrogail says with considerable bitterness, all carried by the word itself rather than any slippage of tone.

"And the status of the rest of Project Lawful?"

"Doing no better or worse than I expected.  No great breakthroughs in chemistry since last you asked; no new information of Keltham's stolen from the Scientific Revolution beyond what we've spied already."

"Meritxell, Yaisa, and Gregoria, are all being maintained in a state that should fall well short of Keltham needing to rescue them.  Tallandria seems unalterably miserable; I've had her research section moved somewhere that Keltham seizing her wouldn't do as much damage."

"Maillol is not recovered, and will probably not recover fully, but I'm keeping him in best condition to be held as negotiating-material against Sevar, whom I read as possibly caring about him.  Likewise those Security besides Olegario who were most loyal to her; and that useless fool whom Sevar rescued from my dungeons.  We are not instructed by our Lord to hold no hostages against Sevar; and she earlier stated that the Lawful Evil form of 'decision-theory' should concede it no threat if you're the sort of person who'd enjoy wrecking somebody that Sevar cared about, but might refrain from doing so if paid."

"Careful.  That seems perilously close to stating a hopeful plan aloud; in fact I would say that you've gone and said it."

Abrogail's lips press together thinly, but she makes no reply to this.  "Any news of Pilar Pineda that I'm permitted to know about, since that, too, is now apparently being routed through your offices?  It can be good news so long as it's sufficiently enigmatic and confusing, remember."

"I expect many of the reports I'm receiving are false.  Either that, or Pineda has gotten herself into an amount of salacious trouble that I would have sincerely thought required time dilation."