It's definitely the former. Nefreti also takes some tea. Drinks it in peaceable silence.

"Okay. You want my help to defeat Lorthact. Are you claiming that this will work out well for me?"

" - well, together we can destroy him and raid his false realm of all its souls. I am not a philosopher; I do not know if this is the pursuit of the good, for you."

"Does it involve me dying in any substantial way? Does it involve drawing more attention of the sort that I'd prefer to avoid, or is that a lost cause by now anyways? I'm interested in doing it, if it can be done, but I want to know the cost."

"You won't die, or not very much," Nefreti says. "It is certainly the kind of doing to which attention will be paid, but so is this conversation, and so was your adventuring in Vigil."

"A lost cause, then. Oathday night, in Almas?"

"We will have to travel to his false realm, and when we do he will return there. We can start in Almas but there is no real reason to."

"All the better, I suppose. Are we using my way in?"

Nefreti gestures for a box on one of the towering shelves behind her desk to come float on over to their conversation. It contains a pinch of something sulfurous, a shrunken essay written in a man's unfamiliar hand, and a block of gold. 

"That's…not very metaphorical, is it."

"I don't actually speak in parables and puzzles. I speak very plainly and then everybody gets confused. It'll take us there."

"Fair enough. I don't suppose you know all of his weaknesses and can advise me on what spells to prepare?"

"You'll want Greater Angelic Aspect. I have a scroll for you." A different box on the wall. 

...It's a useful spell. She hasn't cast it in centuries, she never managed to get it working with her braindead god. And it was Iomedae's favorite spell. "Thank you," she says, only half resentfully.

"There are a lot of petrification traps in his demiplane, I would not have given it to you only because you desperately need to get over her by Oathday."

She wants to protest that it has been almost a thousand years, that it was a relationship of a single week that she has had plenty of time to get over and so must already be over - but this year has not been kind to that delusion. Iomedae is clearly still very important to her. Iomedae is clearly still very upsetting to her.

"Why do I need to get over her by Oathday?"

"You'd have to be over her for it to be a good idea to tell you."

"I met the Chelish defector," Iomedae says. "I asked her about the wedding invitation and she interpreted it as a - coded message. Which I guess makes more sense than some good thing having resulted directly from her attending a wedding. I really wish she could've picked some different code and saved us a lot of worrying."

"I wish that too. I'm sure there was another way available, it just seems so - pointlessly disruptive -"

"And kind of - showy, right. 'I know everything about you, even things you don't know yourself yet' - Cansellarion also looked incredibly irritated at Nefreti. He silently watched the whole conversation, presumably because - it was an easy conversation to make mistakes at, right, it felt like she was learning more from it than I was -"

"Mmm. Did you make any mistakes - or nearly make any mistakes he was there to prevent?"

"If I made any I didn't notice them and he didn't say in front of her but we didn't speak afterwards. Once she got the coded message the defector wanted to leave. …you know, I think I hadn't fully imagined out all the implications of - she trusted his Law as far as to be taken prisoner, as an enemy with incredibly valuable information, and in that situation I feel like I'd be constantly worried that it'd been a mistake or that I couldn't really trust an enemy that much and you'd think a Chelish person would be more paranoid than I but - she wasn't. Not about that. It was very soothing."

"I'd say it comes from having paladins as enemies but it's not like we weren't more paranoid than you're describing about helping Lastwall, and we're not even prisoners. And I'm a bit surprised they teach enough about paladins that defectors would notice they're safe around them."

"She was important. She said, uh, 'we keep the idiots ignorant but I can't do my job if I don't know what a spy sent to join a Lastwall paladin order needs to know and say.' And she said that Abrogail being in a bad mood had made her day to day work environment worse. But - why work for Cheliax at all, if you knew you had a choice and knew it was a real one -"