Great. Can she go now?

This conversation can be over. She cannot leave, because she is a criminal who was conspiring with the Church of Asmodeus against the Reclamation government.

Outrageous, unconscionable lies.

Lilia spends her 'lunch break' in erroneous distress. As no god will ever declare her their fearless servant, noticing the distress is erroneous doesn't eliminate it. 

Her distress is most concretely erroneous because most of it is about having brought a problem to her superiors' attention without having pinned the blame on someone. Usually when bringing a problem to one's superiors' attention one figures out an idiot who is in some sense responsible for it, or can be made to look it, and blames them, so that the superior is neither impeded in admitting it's a problem by not wanting to themselves accept the blame for it nor inclined to blame you. This is not how the Reclamation operates, doing it would have been unwise, and any nagging sense that she failed to do it is just foolishness. 

If Alex, having reviewed her procedures, wants to make some small adjustments, then she calculated correctly; she acted as a Lawful Good person would, Lawful Good will have the chance to be more Lawful Good, they'll trust her more, and probably the interrogations will be less Evil, which is the sort of thing you sign up for being invested in when you start attempting to act as a Lawful Good person. 

If Alex, having reviewed her procedures, decides that actually interrogation is always unconscionable, then that will be an enormous disaster for the Reclamation and for Cheliax, but for precisely that reason he probably won't do it; he is a nice person, but she hasn't actually seen him be a nice person in ways that impede de-Asmodeaning his country. He did not hesitate to send people to Hell in order to win and she's not actually sure he'd have hesitated at torture if not for Iomedae forbidding it, and She doesn't forbid interrogation. She is unlikely to by accident stumble on a way to make him shoot himself in the foot, and if she can do that, then even if she had successfully avoided it probably someone else would do it at some point.

She spends a little while mulling over why, when nothing has happened to inspire recalculating any of that, she can't seem to let the dice roll and coldly wait to learn the outcome of her gamble, as you ultimately have to learn to do if you're in the gambling business. She concludes with a slight twinge of self-disgust that it's because she's grown rather fond of Alex. A notorious sort of error, in this sort of game; not one to which she's ever been prone, but she's never actually tried seducing likeable people before. 

When she tries to stop dwelling on it she finds herself dwelling instead on her mother's proclamation that she'd like it if Lilia grew to become a friend and companion. This is, of course, even worse.

"I can see how you came to conclude this was evil. I think - it is evil, mostly for the reasons we discussed before. But, as with killing an enemy in combat or executing a convicted criminal, it's the sort of evil that, when done towards a good aim or in defense of others, is - easier to forgive. It's certainly less evil than torturing someone, and I think it matters, that we're doing the less harmful thing.

If you're uncomfortable with it you are free to stop." He thinks this would be bad for the Reclamation, but you can't order people to do evil things they think morally equivalent to torture just because it would be bad for the government if they stopped.

Oh. She'd rather assumed that paladins had to get more worked up about Evil things, and therefore to conclude things they weren't worked up about weren't Evil. "I don't want to stop. I think we'd have three coup attempts on our hands by Signing Day. I don't even mind it, really, I find it relaxing. It's more that - 

- I know how to do Evil things. I don't know how Good people do Evil things."

"Regretfully, and trying to take the least Evil available option. I am sure there's more to it that I find intuitive and that the church has found some way to formalize, but I don't explicitly know what that is or the formal ways to state it."

Is he worried that he isn't explaining Good satisfactorily. That was not what she was steering for. "I can and do bother Iomedae's priests, you know. Always have, including when I was just trying to understand the ideology so I could brief our spies better. They're very helpful with some things, but - I still find I learn something from watching the implementation.

...and anyone who has spent their life in Vigil studying theology - well, I guess I just don't find their priorities very compelling? The important questions weren't in fact complicated."

"I never found them very complicated either."

This is going well after all. She meets his eyes, lowers her voice as though this has any effect at all on how likely they are to be overheard in a private sanctum'd meeting room. "You think I should keep doing what I'm doing? I know you won't order it, I know you won't be upset if I stop, but -

- when I asked you whether you would have, hypothetically, approved, if one of your people had wanted to go be the spymaster of Cheliax and had the resources to do it, I wasn't just enjoying being mysterious, the answer to that question was in fact important to whether we could work together -"

"I think it is necessary work, and you do it better than anyone we'd be able to replace you with. Whether or not you should do it... I think depends on the effects on you, and isn't something I know enough to say."

Lilia isn't worried about that because she has been irrevocably damned since she was twenty two. Lawful Good Lilia ...probably is worried about that, even though she also has been irrevocably damned since she was twenty two. Lawful Good people seem to worry about that a lot. 

It sounds kind of upsetting to worry too much, or at all, about the effects of her behavior on her character. She probably shouldn't say that.

"I don't think I care to cultivate the habit of being less bothered by bad things if someone else is doing them," she says. "I have several personality flaws but not that one. And - I know you were not, exactly, talking about the state of my soul, but I do recall that everyone else has to worry about theirs. I'll do it. But maybe I'll do Aspexia - only once it's strategically necessary, if we find it is, not just because I'm terribly curious."

"Just because you're terribly curious does seem like a bad reason to do that sort of thing... I think it's not immediately urgent but I think it is probably worth repeating the soul-trap, and the usefulness of any information we get out of her is going to decrease the longer we wait."

Well, all right. Alex said that Good people do interrogations reluctantly. Lilia can arrive at the conclusion she wants with exquisite reluctance.

 "...that makes sense. All right. I want to think about it for a little while - and about the security measures - but if it seems like a good idea in a week there's no reason to wait six months. - thank you. For observing, even if you ended up thinking I had better decide myself what to do."

"You're welcome. I'm sorry there wasn't the time sooner." He finds something slightly disturbing, in Montero's reasons for continuing to do her current work, but it's her choice and they do need her and he's not going to push back on it any more. It would be better if Montero had a proper confessor, though, one with the right training who's not busy running the country...but she doesn't have the patience for theologians, and he can't really blame her.

Aspexia Rugatonn authorized Montero's detention only reluctantly. It wasn't pity, just uncertainty. Montero seemed much less likely than most people to be a traitor, and the string of coincidences Abrogail pointed to could be easily explained as the work of an enemy archmage - and they know the enemy to possess one. Ordinarily, of course, it would be little loss to torture someone for crimes of which they were innocent, but Montero is not replaceable.

Also, insofar as Aspexia Rugatonn has the capacity to like people, she likes Montero. It is with slight regret that she eventually assents to have her arrested, and she is slightly distracted for the next few days, waiting for the news of whether Abrogail was right or whether Abrogail broke one of their most valuable assets in a fit of paranoid stupidity.

Neither outcome ought to have produced an interrogator as miserable as the one who crawls before her on the fourth day of questioning. Nor should ‘they haven't broken her yet' - which would be embarrassing, of course, but everyone involved would go to great lengths to avoid having to directly confess it to Aspexia Rugatonn's face, and she is busy and would have let them avoid wasting her time, at least until the fifth day.

"Yes?" she says, icily but not quite icily enough the man is paralyzed with fright. She can say ‘yes?' icily enough to paralyze a man with fright - she can say ‘yes?' icily enough to paralyze a pit fiend with fright - but then they don't talk, and this wastes time. 

"Most High, we have a confession that is of no use."

"Explain."

"She confessed to being a servant of Iomedae and of the Glorious Reclamation. And also to being a servant of Cortellus Thrune. And also to aiming to take the throne in her own right. And also to being a servant of Baphomet. She confirmed them all under an Abadar's Truthtelling that to all appearances was working fine. Mindreading confirmed them all as well."

So devoid of any magic items, any spells, any allies, and any warning - for if she'd anticipated the arrest she would surely have fled - Montero can beat a truth spell and a Detect Thoughts. This would be surprising to learn of most people but isn't, really, all that surprising to learn of Montero. She has always possessed tricks that her mother taught her, tricks no one else alive knew. She would, possessing this power, obviously never have admitted it.

It makes it easier to imagine she is a traitor; it is clear how she would have concealed her treason. But it mostly means they know nothing. 

She orders the interrogators tortured to death themselves, for incompetence, and orders Montero promptly executed. No power she possesses in life will let her withhold her secrets from the devil that holds her soul in Hell. She does the Malediction herself, to make sure it is done properly and because the strength of the caster of the Malediction affects the chances that any other priest can overcome it. 

Montero is bloodied and naked, her eyes glazed, her limbs crushed; she is barely recognizable. Aspexia Heals her and puts up and takes down an Antimagic Field, just to make entirely sure it is her and not a lookalike. Her eyes close, then open; she recognizes Aspexia. She opens her mouth and for a moment Aspexia thinks, with a flare of disgust, that she'll beg. 

"Most High," Montero says. "If I didn't like you, or at least hate your enemies, I'd've confessed to working with you to overthrow Abrogail. Caused some real trouble."

"May your obedience find its appropriate reward in Hell," says Aspexia, and Maledicts her. 

"And yours," says Montero, and then they kill her.

Aspexia waits three hours in case there are any complications with extracting the information in Hell, and then Communes with her god. Does it serve You to proceed as if Montero is a traitor to the Church and to Cheliax?

UNCLEAR.

Fine. A Planar Ally, then, targeting the devil whose name is on Cheliax's copy of Montero's soul-sale contract.

That, at least, works. 

"Do you own the soul of the mortal Lilia Ramona de Montero?"

"You're not authorized to know that."

Lilia has less fun than she would have expected taking Aspexia Rugatonn apart. This is, she knows, a predictable consequence of all this 'pretending to be a Good person'; to pretend at something effectively is to shape a part of your mind in that fashion for real, and so she has steered part of herself into not enjoying a good interrogation as much. In one sense, this was an unforced error; Alex wasn't expecting her to go around having moral disapproval of interrogations, and if she hadn't no one would have found it suspicious. But in another sense this was just the result of noticing something true, and things you deliberately don't notice because you don't want to process them will more often than not murder you in the end. 

Anyway it's still a reasonably entertaining endeavor. She conducts the interrogation in a Mage's Magnificent Mansion, with both of them Mind Blanked; adversaries cannot enter it, unless Asmodeus has appointed another ninth circle cleric who can Gate, and even then they should have considerable difficulty in figuring out how to target the Gate, and in any event she has a contingency to, if a Gate does open anywhere in the mansion, instantly dismiss it and drop them all into the antimagic field at the corresponding location on the Material.

(Aspexia Rugatonn instinctively permits a Mind Blank, but of course resists the Dominate Person, in fact resists it quite effectively even stripped of all her magic items. Lilia pricks her with an exotic poison obtained in Dtang Ma which drains away the senses, and then once she's insensible lands it.)

They were expecting to have more time; they'd evacuated some of the treasury directly to Hell, but not all of it. They had orders to establish another Asmodean kingdom somewhere on Golarion, more subtly the next time. There was concern about maintaining the Church's Rovagug-monitoring-and-response efforts, which Lilia of course doesn't begrudge them and wouldn't dream of interfering in. There were diamonds, six diamonds, smuggled directly to Hell by now. Most of the names to follow up on are ones that she knew already but there are a few leads she wouldn't have thought of pursuing. 

Lilia likes Aspexia Rugatonn because Aspexia, like Lilia, is an achievement by a higher power. Lilia's higher power is her mother, and Aspexia's is her god, but it's the same thing, in a deep sense. Most people are trying, however ineptly, to live their own lives, to attain their own desperate confused desires or self-concepts or escapes from their own errors. Asmodeanism calls it free will, and says it is a great error introduced by the forces of Chaos and Good. Lilia's mother was impatient with theology, and Lilia arrived at a different conception of what it meant that she was her mother's.

Myrabelle wanted a child who would obey her even when her orders were to commit treason, even when it became apparent that Myrabelle would spend and spend and spend the plausible deniability behind which Lilia was hiding until she'd spent it all and it ended with Lilia being caught and tortured to death. Myrabelle was a master enchanter. Myrabelle had built loyalty and devotion into Lilia's mind before she was even born. Lilia was Myrabelle's because the person in Lilia's position would be Myrabelle's, there was no other sort of person they could be. (They could fail Myrabelle, like Rose, but they couldn't not be loyal to her.) The question of why to obey Lilia's mother was then fundamentally the same in character as the question of why you're in your own head and not someone else's. You are always the only person you could possibly be.

Not that she could say that to Aspexia Rugatonn, but - they got along. 

When the interrogation is done Lilia relaxes the Dominate to permit Aspexia to speak volitionally, if she chooses. This is a foolish indulgence, of course. There is nothing Aspexia could say that could matter, and if there was Lilia would want to be sure not to hear it. But they have been friends for thirty years, or something like it, and she is curious if somewhere beneath the singleminded devotion to her god Aspexia is grieved that she was a traitor. And the Reclamation rules won't let her force Aspexia to answer. 

Aspexia Rugatonn has nothing to say to traitors and to the best of her powers nothing to think where they'll hear it, but she is not so perfected in Asmodeus's service that she is not reviewing, hazily, all the conversations of their acquaintance, trying to relabel happy memories as memories of error, as memories of opportunities to catch a traitor sooner, and as she does that she wonders if Lilia was her mother in another guise, or a thing built by her mother, because that's the natural thing to wonder about Lilia Ramona de Montero, once you learn that she's a traitor. She really does not seem the type to have done it independently.  Whereas Myrabelle - Myrabelle was the sort of person to have a deal by which Hell'd keep her secrets. 

There is some grief, in the error-correcting, and a profound loneliness. 

Right. Well. That went perfectly, then.

Lilia has the Reclamation's people trap her soul again. Brings the Lord Marshal her notes.

"They were planning to set up another Asmodean kingdom? Do you think you'll be able to find out where, or should we try to find someone with less on their plate?"

"Do you have a couple of those in your Bag of Holding with Teleport locations all over Vudra and Tian Xia? I'll handle it." Her mother will want to help.

"I don't, personally. The Church would probably have been able to find people for it... Thank you."

"I promise, I don't want to have to do this all over again any more than you do. Well. Maybe slightly more than you do. You can't even get any new paladin powers out of it."

"I probably cannot, no. And even if I did, they'd hardly help with running a country unless a half-dozen pit fiends try to assassinate me."

"The important thing to remember about pit fiends," she says in the tone of one instructing a small child in horse-riding, "is that they're more scared of you than you are of them."