The court of Pharasma’s judgement is laid out in a circle with the bench at the center; it must, in many cases, accomodate eight sets of counsel, though in this one there are only two. The court is surrounded by marble columns but has no walls nor roof; beyond it lies a vast field of asphodel and leafless trees under a permanent night sky. The court itself is well-lit without any apparent source.

“The court will come to order in the matter of Hell v. Heaven et alia,” says the judge. “The counsel for the plaintiff may make his opening statement.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” says the devil. “I will keep it simple. The defendant—” he points at Cansellarion— “has unlawfully invaded the territory of Hell and is waging an illegal and undeclared war against us. We do not ask that the Court compel him to stop; that has never been within its remit. We do, however, ask that Hell be permitted to defend itself.”

They declared war on Cheliax according to Golarion’s law of nations. Hell obviously knows that, so they must be playing at something else. He has no idea what, but he’d be dreading finding out if he were capable of that.

“Objection,” says one of Heaven’s lawyers. “Ser Cansellarion has waged war against a state on the Material Plane, made up of and ruled by mortals, whatever its relationship with Hell; this is simply not the business of this Court even were that war unlawful by the law of the nations of Golarion, which is it not. Hell is not at this time being invaded, though we do not in any way cede the right to do so.”

“The counsel for Heaven has a point,” says the judge.

“Ah,” says the devil. “I was expecting we’d get to this.” He produces a lengthy scroll and unrolls it on the table in front of him. “In fact, according to the contract between Hell and the reigning monarch of Cheliax, which you see before you and may examine as you wish, the nation of Cheliax is the property of Hell, and Hell considers it an integral part of its territory. Abrogail Thrune is not only the Queen of Cheliax—a mortal title—but the Lady Regent of the Infernal Empire on Golarion—a title granted direct of Hell, which supersedes her mortal crown. Abrogail Thrune rules Cheliax in Hell’s name and at Hell’s pleasure, but Cheliax is Hell’s, and Ser Cansellarion has invaded Hell as surely as if he had marched on Avernus.”

Surely that can’t be allowed—he’s not actually sure that it isn’t allowed. It’s not really the sort of thing Heaven would do even if it were.

“This has been adjudicated before,” says the archon. “In re Halfling Slave #157701, last year. The court found against Hell.”

“The court rejected Hell’s interpretation of Pharasma v. Abaddon, -15763 as a tacit endorsement by the court of the theory that the souls of mortals who die in one of the Outer Planes are the property of that plane, bypassing sorting. The court failed to rule at all on whether Cheliax is part of Hell, which might itself constitute a tacit endorsement of Hell’s claims in that matter.” This is pushing it but if the judge buys it they're done.

“Your theory of ‘tacit endorsement’ didn’t work then and won’t work now,” says the judge. “Just because the court deliberately declines to create precedent on an issue doesn’t mean we believe you about it. If you would like to convince the court that Cheliax is your territory you will have to actually do so.”

“Heaven would like to point out that if Hell does in fact rule Cheliax as part of its own territory, it would surely be in gross violation of a number of treaties on intervention on the Material.”

“We don’t rule Cheliax,” says the devil, a smile spreading across his face. “We own it. We own its soul.”

“Bullshit. Just because Abrogail says that doesn't mean it’s true.” Or even, for that matter, the sort of thing that could be.

“Objection: out of order.”

“Sustained,” says the judge. “On the other hand, I'm not sure he’s wrong.”

“As the defendant alluded to, this fact is not secret. It is known to every citizen of Cheliax and many people beyond. It is written in the contact between Her Infernal Majestrix and Hell. It’s unconventional, we admit, but it was legal and proper according to all existing rules and precedents for the sale of souls.”

“Those rules state that a commensurate price must be paid by the buyer,” says the judge. She's going to indulge the whole ‘selling the soul of a country’ thing for a minute and see where they go with it. “What price did Hell pay for the soul of an entire nation?”

“Investments in the infrastructure and education system of Cheliax, a number of senior devils to serve as advisors to Her Majestrix, and certain other considerations which Hell would prefer to remain secret from the other parties here but will describe to the court if required.”

So they paid for one massive intervention on the Material with another massive intervention on the Material. “I see,” she says.

“Your Honor,” says the advocate for Heaven, “countries don't have souls.”

“‘A decedent need not possess a conventional soul in order to validly sell his soul to Hell. In such a case the word “soul” shall be understood to mean self, essence, or sine qua non: that without which an individual is not himself.’ I quote the judgement of the court, Hell v. Constantine, 325. The sine qua non of a nation is its territory and people, as numerous precedents in the law of nations of Golarion and elsewhere attest; ergo, these are what Abrogail Thrune sold to Hell when she sold the soul of Cheliax.”

“This is ridiculous. That case was about a decedent, a sapient being of a world without immortal souls, and granted Hell the right to create de novo a soul with his personality and memories. It dealt with an individual clearly of a class with the ensouled mortals of Golarion, merely lacking a soul himself. Cheliax is not a sapient being. There is no instance of its class that has a soul.”

“That's actually not true.”

Wait, what the fuck?...of course there are countries with souls, this is Golarion.

“The counsel for Hell is” unfortunately “correct. The genius loci is a rare but known phenomenon in Creation. All examples of which I am aware originated as mortal souls, but if there were a place where they were naturally occurring, this court would not hesitate to judge the dead ones.”

“I will, therefore, ask Hell: does Cheliax presently have a genius loci?”

“We’re working on it.”

A lantern archon appears at Heaven's desk, says something to the lawyers, and disappears.

“None of this matters anyway,” says one of the lawyers. “Hell's ownership of a soul begins only at death and does not justify intervention on the Material Plane to bring a living person into Hell's custody. In re Riudaure (premortem), forty-eight seconds ago.”

“I haven't read the transcript yet but I guarantee you that's not what it says.”

“Indeed not; that case turned on the specific wording of the” she can't say ‘decedent’ because he's not dead “individual's soul contract and is irrelevant to this one.”

Damn. Well, back to their original argument. “Your Honor, the plaintiff is equivocating between two nonstandard definitions of ‘soul’. We concede that Hell might legally ‘own’ a mortal soul which has been transformed into a genius loci. We deny that this would grant them any legal authority whatsoever over the place in which the genius loci has been invested. In fact, the law of Hell attests to this: the archdevil Mephistopheles is, by all accounts, the genius loci of Hell itself, yet it is Asmodeus, and not He—”

“Your Honor,” says the devil, “the counsel for Heaven risks intruding unknowingly on secret matters which it is not permissible for a mortal, nor indeed an angel, to know. I will explain in private, if Your Honor would permit me—”

“You may do so.” The devil and the judge vanish.

So Mephistopheles is up to something. Unfortunately, he's not allowed to act on this information in any way.

The devil and judge return after a few minutes.

“The court is inclined to rule that, as Cheliax does not presently have a genius loci, the definition of ‘soul’ to be used in the interpretation of the contract between Hell and the Queen of Cheliax is that given in Constantine. Further argument may proceed on questions of whether this contract was and is valid, meaningful, or enforceable.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. This case, then, turns upon four questions. First, was the soul of Cheliax Abrogail Thrune’s to sell? Second, was Hell capable of buying it? Third, was the sale itself legal? Fourth, what actual concrete rights does ownership of the soul of Cheliax grant to Hell?”

“The answer to the first question is obviously affirmative. Your Honor, Abrogail Thrune II is an absolute monarch. She possesses a total, unimpeachable, and tyrannical right of obedience unto death from each and every one of her subjects, save certain of Asmodeus' own clerics. Her rights over her subjects may even, in certain cases, supersede Hell's—she has been permitted, though Hell had no part in the decision, to destroy or sequester forever souls which had previously been sold to us, an act which would be forbidden even to most devils in Hell.”

“I quote, in part, from her contract with us, but these rights were not granted to her by that contract, merely recognized by it; if tomorrow she should betray Asmodeus in the depths of her own heart, and thereby shred all the rest of the contract, she would not thereby lose them. We could thereby try to kill her, and would certainly succeed, but the law of Hell does not recognize any right that cannot be denied by superior force. She possesses these rights because she is the Queen of Cheliax, and she was the Queen of Cheliax before she signed her contract with Hell.”

“We could not have bought the soul of Cheliax from Abrogail the first, because she did not possess such rights until we gave them to her. It was not then the case that the monarch of Cheliax possesses, as a matter of law and custom rather than a boon of Hell, such tyrannical power. It has been seventy years. It is now.”

“Absolute power accompanying an office does not make it Lawful to sell that office, in re Benedict, 1056.”

“Come on. The court held that it was a Chaotic act in that particular decedent’s circumstances, not that it’s illegal in a completely different jurisdiction.”

“Is not Abrogail Thrune required by her contract to maintain a Lawful Evil alignment? A contract that requires either party to violate it in the very act of signing is inherently null and void, in re Gödel.”

“She’s Lawful Evil, because trading in souls is an inherently Lawful Evil act, as literally millions of precedents affirm. Taking an office that entails a specific divine duty of stewardship and selling it to the highest bidder is a completely different thing. For one, the Queen of Cheliax doesn't have a duty of stewardship.”

“Order,” says the judge. “The counsel for the plaintiff may proceed to the second prong of his proposed test.”

“Very well. The next question at hand is whether Hell had the right to buy this soul, and can meaningfully own it. This specific situation is, I believe, unprecedented. However, for guidance we may look to Concerned Citizens of Axis v. Norgorber, 1899, in which it was held that an entity of the Outer Planes may legally hold property in a plane other than its native one.”

“Some may claim that the Material Plane, which is subject to treaties limiting intervention, is an exception to this. That question, however, was answered conclusively and negatively by Assorted Planes v. Aroden, 4606.”

“You guys invalidated that one when you murdered Him, I think,” says Cansellarion.

“The paladin might even have a point,” says the devil with a smile, “if we had murdered Aroden. But we didn’t; we just tell people that.”

“Objection, Your Honor,” says one of Heaven’s actual lawyers. “This is completely immaterial.”

The judge squints at Heaven’s table. This is not really how objections are supposed to work. “Sustained,” she says anyway.

(Hell most likely doesn’t know Who actually dealt the killing blow to Aroden, and it’s better that they not get the chance to ask.)

“It is true,” says Heaven’s advocate, “that the laws of the Outer Planes do not forbid Hell from owning property on the Material. The laws of Cheliax, however, do.”

“The advocate for Hell has made much of how the law and custom of Cheliax permit its Queen to sell her country’s soul. But in spite of what Hell would have the world believe, the law and custom of Cheliax are older than seventy years. Once, even, Cheliax was part of Taldor. And in the year 711 Absalom Reckoning, having defeated the lich-emperor Taldaris II in battle, the emperor Vitravian III promulgated a law to the entire Taldane Empire, which has since entered legal codes from Mendev to Osirion. It states that ‘only living humans, and not the dead, nor the devils of Hell, nor the angels of Heaven, nor any other kind of immortal outsider, nor fae nor wyrms nor elven-kin, nor the foul beasts of the Underdark, nor any other kind of creature whatsoever, nor the gods themselves, may hold property, title, or office in the Empire.’ It has never been repealed.”

“Objection,” says the devil. “The actual text of the edict is ‘the holy gods’. Asmodeus is an unholy god.”

“I would normally overrule that immediately but the counsel for Heaven does appear to have left that word out intentionally and I would like to hear why.”

“To be frank, Your Honor, we just wanted to avoid digressing into the minutiae of ancient Taldane legalese. This court has historically held that when it must needs interpret the statutes and agreements of mortals, a reasonable person’s interpretation of the author’s intent ought to supersede the literal text, as mortals are not presumed capable of the degree of care and precision to which the court is accustomed—Aroden v. Maelstrom, A.R. 8; Abadar v. Paizo, 2016. ‘Holy gods’ is a stock epithet in classical Taldane, and it is patently absurd to imagine that the Emperor intended to exclude the Good gods, but not the Evil ones, from owning property in Taldor.”

She also wants to avoid digressing into the minutiae of ancient Taldane legalese. It happens much less since Aroden v. Maelstrom established once and for all that petitioners don’t have to obey literally all the laws of their home country to be considered Lawful, but it's still really annoying when it does. “Valid, though this wasn't the way to do it,” she tells Heaven. “Hell, do you have a response?”

“Whether or not the interpretation called ‘absurd’ by the counsel for Heaven was the intent of the Emperor four thousand years ago, it is the interpretation of that statute in the courts of modern Cheliax, which is what matters here—Various Undead v. Crown, 4709.”

“I am not actually bound by the precedents of mortal courts,” she reminds the devil. Especially not a court presided over by a cleric of a god she's not currently supposed to mention aloud.

“It’s dispositive on the factual question of what the law of Cheliax is in this matter. Importantly, at no time did either party make any allegation whatsoever that Asmodeus did not validly and rightfully own the soul of Cheliax,” because they would have been tortured to death if they had, “or that He had not always possessed the right to wield supreme power therein. The question before the court was whether, given this obvious and incontrovertible truth, the other parts of the statute still applied, or whether it had always been null and void in toto. If you would like to overturn that precedent, we will happily, at this point, restore a handful of liches and vampires to their petty titles of nobility.”

“Your Honor, regardless of the interpretation of this particular statute, it cannot be imagined that the law of Cheliax forbids Asmodeus from doing anything, least of all taking possession of something that someone wishes to sell Him. As was affirmed by Cheliax’s own Court of Queen’s Bench in Crown v. Church of Iomedae, 4666, ‘The supreme law of Cheliax is the law of Asmodeus,’ and the law of Asmodeus is that He is already the rightful master of all Creation.”

“Very well. The objection by Hell is sustained. Heaven, do you have anything further to add on the matter of whether Hell was competent to purchase the soul of Cheliax?”

“If Asmodeus is already the rightful master of all Creation, how is it meaningful to sell Him anything?”

“Overruled; obviously Asmodeus is not actually the master of Creation. The question at hand is only whether Cheliax believes so.”

“Nothing further, then, Your Honor.”

“Plaintiff, you may proceed.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. The next question this court must consider is whether the sale of the soul of Cheliax was legal according to established regulations on the soul trade. Nirvana v. Hell, -12201 establishes a number of tests for whether the sale of a soul is legitimate. The first is whether the decision to sell is meaningfully the seller’s own. We affirm that Abrogail Thrune was of lawful age and sound mind according to the standards of her own culture, and under no enchantment, compulsion, or curse, at the time she signed her contract with us. Heaven disputes none of this; they certainly had no plans to contest the custody of Abrogail’s own soul when her mortal life ends.”

“Objection: unfounded speculation.”

“Sustained. Does Heaven in fact dispute the claims just made by the counsel for Hell?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“They can dispute it, if they like,” says the devil. “It does not matter. They can claim that Abrogail Thrune is young, that she was unwise, that she will predictably regret her actions. They would even be correct. This does not matter. What matters is whether this court would declare Abrogail Thrune irresponsible for the sale of the two souls which were hers to sell, a notion which is, when one considers some of the other cases that have appeared before this court, utterly laughable. Infernal Cheliax executes fifth-circle wizards who refuse to sell their souls; this was ruled not to invalidate the sales because, quote, ‘the coercion applied did not constitute a decision-theoretic threat as that term is defined in the Statute and Charter of the Alliance to Preserve Creation, -202436 A.R.’—Abarco & al. v. Hell, 4691. Notably, Abrogail Thrune was not even coerced—oh, she wouldn’t have survived refusing to sell her own soul, but selling the soul of Cheliax was her idea. Hell was skeptical at first. I have transcripts.”

“Heaven disputes that she could validly sell a soul. Of course they do; they have never once admitted that anyone could. That is why I ask, rather, whether Heaven would actually consider it worth the expenditure of its resources to make this argument if it were only Abrogail’s own soul on the line. ‘One may only claim to want what one is willing to pay for’—Order of Numbers 6:13. I think Abadar would know.”

“Objection: random quotes from holy books are not precedent.”

“I don’t think he was claiming it to be. He has, in fact, a point. If you don’t think Ms. Thrune was incapable of making the sale for some reason not already rejected by the court in any of the millions of soul-sale appeals we’ve heard over the millenia, I’m not really inclined to relitigate any of those. Did Heaven in fact intend to file an appeal for Ms. Thrune?”

“I wouldn’t expect to know whether we did or didn’t. Personally speaking, I would represent her if she asked me to.”

“Do you have any specific argument that you expect the court hasn't already ruled out?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“We may proceed, then, to the question of whether the price paid by Hell was fair. We do not, actually, expect the defendant to object to the magnitude of the price—at least, not that it was too small, which is the only direction of error that can legally invalidate a sale. Rather, we expect the defendant to object to the fact that the price was paid in a form and manner which ipso facto benefited Hell, even before we received anything in exchange for it. We maintain that this is entirely legal; indeed, that there is no other way we could have done it. Any price paid to the seller, even of a more ordinary soul, is necessarily an investment in what is thereafter Hell’s property. This was no different from a payment of permanent Arcane Sight to a wizard who then uses it in Hell’s service, which was held legitimate in the Abarco case. There is, indeed, no test Heaven can propose by which to overturn the sale of this soul which would not also overturn every sale made in Cheliax since the ascendancy of the House of Thrune.”

“How about we do that, then?”

“Objection, out of order,” says the devil with a melodramatic sigh.

“It's Heaven’s turn to speak,” says the judge. “Counselor, do you wish to let Ser Cansellarion give Heaven’s rebuttal?”

“We’d like to see where he’s going with this.”

“Very well, proceed.”

“You were just discussing how this court doesn't consider mortals competent to write contracts it takes literally. Why then are we competent to sign them? The standard established in the Paizo case would require you to defer to a ‘reasonable’ interpretation of the signatory’s intent, and no reasonable person actually intends to agree to be tortured forever for any price.”

“Aktun Consolidated Insurance Co. v. Hell, -6401: any positive discount rate on future experiences implies that eternal torment has finite present disutility.”

“Immaterial,” snaps the judge, and then to Cansellarion: “Are you asking the court to invalidate the entire concept of soul sales?”

“Yes! Hell’s entire case was that everyone knows it’s bullshit—they were pretty much bragging about it—but that you’ve been affirming the bullshit so long that now you have to keep affirming it. Well, you don't actually have to. You could always, instead, stop.”

FUCK.

“I don’t actually have the authority to do that.” It would start a godwar.

“Your Honor,” says one of the archons, “Heaven would, actually, like to ask the court to reconsider its decision in Abarco, as well as other soul sales from Infernal Cheliax, which are already acknowledged to be marginally legal. We find the analogy to the Paizo standard to be a persuasive argument which has not, to our knowledge, been brought up in any previous case on soul sales.”

“You know what, you can file a separate suit about it if you can convince me you’d have thought of it without this trial to prompt you. No one would use the court system if the outcome of filing a lawsuit might be that you lose fifty thousand souls over a completely tangential argument.”

Yeah that’s unfortunately valid.

“Does Heaven wish to make any further statement on this matter?”

“Yes, Your Honor. Hell ‘paid’ for the soul of Cheliax with a series of so-called ‘investments’ which, by its own admission, it would have preferred to make even if it had received nothing in return. We do not claim that this fails to be a ‘trade’ by some abstract Abadaran definition.” Which may be the first time anyone has ever accused Hell of being too Abadaran. “We claim, rather, that to classify it as such under the law would make a mockery of the principle of mutually limited intervention on which the order of Creation is founded.”

“Hell claims, for example, to have invested in the education system of Cheliax. Let us be clear about what they mean by that. The state of the education system of Cheliax is that Hell has replaced it entire, in order to indoctrinate Chelish children in the false and poisonous philosophy of Asmodeanism—”

“Objection, Your Honor. Rule of Procedure 44.9 prohibits counselors from disparaging parties of another alignment by the standards of their own.”

“Sustained.”

“—in order to bring souls to Hell, while also educating them in wizardry at a scale which no country at Golarion’s ordinary level of development could possibly afford, gaining Cheliax a substantial military advantage over all the powers of Golarion not directly and outrageously backed by one of the Outer Planes. Your Honor, do you imagine that Heaven would not prefer to teach arcane magic to all the apt children of Lastwall? We cannot afford to, not because we are poorer than Hell, but because if we did it, it would be considered an extraordinarily expensive direct intervention, whereas Hell may account it under the far looser rules governing interplanar trade.”

“Why is it, Your Honor, that the powers of Good cannot buy souls, even to save them from Hell? The soul trade in general is held Evil by analogy with slavery, but this court acknowledges that buying a slave in order to free them is a Good act, as is helping someone to escape an Evil afterlife. Why, then, can one not sell one’s soul to the afterlife of one’s choice? Because then everyone would do it. Hell’s unique privilege to buy the souls of mortals is considered a reasonable and limited intervention only because nearly all mortals strongly prefer to avoid Hell—even above and beyond the degree to which they prefer to avoid Abaddon or the Abyss, as statistics from Neutral Evil petitioners granted the choice show. Payments for souls are governed by looser rules than other interventions because the limiting factor was intended to be mortals’ willingness to sell, rather than Hell’s ability to buy. In the case of the ‘soul’ of Cheliax there is no such disincentive. Cheliax cannot be tortured in Hell. Its people can, but the woman who sold its soul has already demonstrated that she doesn’t care about that.” They’re sacrificing this point for Abrogail’s hypothetical trial, which hurts, but it’s vanishingly unlikely that Abrogail Thrune ever sees the inside of this courtroom whether they win or lose the lawsuit or the war. “She already believed herself irrevocably damned before she ever conceived the idea of selling the soul of her country, an act by which she lost nothing and gained a great deal. Your Honor, if this court rules that Hell can buy the soul of a nation from a puppet ruler whose ancestors it’s managed to keep on the throne for a few decades, and then by dint of that ownership defend their puppet against other mortal nations with such force as would be appropriate to a war in Hell itself, there will be nothing to stop their expansion on the Material or even slow it down. A ruling in favor of Hell risks turning soul sales into an asymmetric advantage for Hell that might end only with their total conquest of Creation.”

“Objection: Hell has always maintained that it knows a legal loophole that will lead to its total conquest of Creation. Without commenting on the object level on what we believe that loophole to be, the allegation that a certain ruling from this court might create such does not oblige the court to rule the other way.”

“Overruled. ‘Balance between the alignments is a fundamental principle of the order of Creation,’ in re Adam, -153718 A.R. You may convince mortals that you have a loophole in the Contract of Creation but you will not convince me.”

“Your Honor, Hell nonetheless maintains that a general balance of power between alignments does not preclude the possibility of mutually offsetting asymmetric advantages enjoyed by each alignment. The ability to conquer countries on the Material by legal trickery is an advantage uniquely suited to the nature of Lawful Evil, and does not even begin to offset the profound and inherent advantage which Good possesses by virtue of its greater alignment with mortal values—”

“Objection, uh—in the words of Iomedae, it sucks to suck.”

“Rule 44.9, also, She never said that.”

“Yes she did. Perhaps you can figure it out while you're bound not to use the information in any way.”

“Order. The objection by Heaven is overturned; internal alignment and ease of coordination have long been acknowledged by the court as asymmetric advantages of Good in Creation’s balance of power.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Where were we? Ah, yes—having finally established that Hell owns the soul of Cheliax, we may begin to ask what actual and concrete rights that grants us. To answer this we may take one of two approaches. The first is analogy with mortal petitioners—dead ones, not living, since the contract of the Third Damnation is very clear that the soul of Cheliax was transferred to Hell’s custody immediately, rather than on death as is customary for more ordinary souls. What rights does Hell possess over an owned soul in its custody which we do not possess over an ordinary damned petitioner? To answer this it would be simpler to ask what, at all, we cannot do to the ordinary damned—very little, in fact, but there are at least two such things. We cannot refuse them resurrection, except in the somewhat special case of Malediction. And we cannot use this court system on their behalf, Hell v. Church of Abadar on Golarion, 4071*. Both of these we may do for an owned soul. This suggests that Hell possesses a certain power of attorney over owned souls, which we will extend to the case of states in a moment.”

“The second approach is more abstract, but in some ways even clearer. What is the soul of a state? We have said ‘territory and people’. But, in truth, there is a better answer, a single indivisible object without which a state is not itself. The soul of a state is its sovereignty. And to ransom one’s country’s sovereignty to a greater power is a perfectly ordinary act in the international law of Golarion. Rulers are permitted to do this even in countries where the people are imagined to have rights.”

“That we are permitted to defend Cheliax in war follows immediately and without space for doubt from this understanding of our relationship with them. Does anyone at all deny that if Isger or Korvosa were attacked, Cheliax could lawfully come to their aid? Of course not; that is nine-tenths of this relationship as it exists among mortals. Our relationship with Cheliax is not perfectly analogous with any relationship between mortal powers, of course; to suggest so would be an insult to the majesty of Hell. We possess them far more absolutely than they own Isger. But this cannot imply less ability to defend them; the law of Hell, at least, is that property consists solely in the right to defend one’s possession with force. If we bought the soul of Cheliax without the ability to protect it from incursions of paladins, what indeed did we buy? To find that we cannot defend Cheliax as our own territory, this court would have to throw out the whole of the contract of the Third Damnation, and we have already established—indeed, Heaven has already mostly conceded—that it is surely and entirely legal.”

(*In which Hell attempted, on behalf of Maledicted petitioners who had bought resurrection insurance, to sue the Church of Abadar for having failed to resurrect them.)

“Hell now claims—after leading this court on a tour of spurious arguments on subjects ranging from the fundamental nature of the soul to the property law of ancient Taldor—that Cheliax is their protectorate. They could have claimed this at the first. There would have been no dispute; that, unlike owning a country’s so-called soul, is a legitimate and uncomplicated posture for a greater power to adopt toward a lesser. Why, then, did they not simply make the claim, today or seventy years ago? Because they didn't want to pay for it.”

“Your Honor, what we have witnessed here today is none other than that ancient Mephi—”

“Objection.”

“Overruled; as much as He might like me to, I cannot and will not actually place the name of the Lord of the Eighth under seal.”

“—that ancient Mephistophelean tradition: a scam. Hell did not want to pay the intervention cost of having Cheliax as their acknowledged protectorate, so they instead claimed to have bought its soul, an obviously farcical notion which the rest of the world sensibly regarded as nothing more than a lie intended to make the people of Cheliax believe themselves already damned. Now, and only now that the Infernal regime in Cheliax faces a real threat, do they claim that their purchase—for which they paid a fraction of the intervention cost of creating a true protectorate on the Material—amounts to the same thing.”

“Your Honor, this case should never have come to trial. The so-called Contract of the Third Damnation should have been thrown out as soon as any authority with respect for the true spirit of Law got a look at it, because—and this is a fact which has been too little mentioned in arguments today—countries don't have souls. Hell's ability to invent a definition suiting their purposes, and twist precedent into accepting it, does not mean that ‘the soul of Cheliax’ is an actually meaningful phrase, and a meaningless contract is as void as a self-contradictory one. Hell asks what, indeed, they bought. Heaven answers that, if they bought anything at all—if their contract is not totally null and void—they bought a token which they and their puppets might imagine to have meaning, in dealings between themselves; but this court need not imagine so. Certainly they did not buy any sort of right to intervene on the Material Plane; that, at the very least, was never Abrogail Thrune’s to sell.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

Shit. Fuck. Damn them to Hell.*

Heaven isn't angling just to get the suit thrown out. They're not even just trying to retroactively overspend Hell's intervention budget. They're trying to get the entire contract thrown out, as the result of a suit brought by Hell.

Which would move them one step closer to destroying the Crown of Infernal Majesty.

(*Unlike the citizens of Infernal Cheliax, devils are perfectly well allowed to think of this as a thing that people might not want to have happen to them.)

“Does the counsel for Hell wish to make any further statement?”

“No, Your Honor.” It’s fairly obvious at this point that he’s going to die a painful death when he gets home; indeed, that that was probably his superior’s entire intent in assigning him this case.

The judgement of the court is as follows:

1. The nation of Cheliax on the Material Plane is a formal protectorate of Hell as that term is defined in the Third Convention on Intervention, -15921 A.R., the establishment of such being the clear intent of both parties to the so-called Contract of the Third Damnation.
2. A state of war exists between Hell and the Order for the Reclamation of Cheliax.
3. The Order was the aggressor in that war.
4. Accordingly, Hell is entitled to make purely defensive interventions, within territory formally and actually controlled by Cheliax as of the beginning of the war, at the reduced rates specified by the Third Convention, according to the rules for the defense of a formal protectorate specified therein.

Wait, did he just…win?

He’s not that familiar with the formal protectorate rules. They aren’t often invoked in Golarion’s star system, because the intervention budget cost scales with the technology differential, and—

Ah.

5. The expanded definition of ‘soul’ given in Hell v. Constantine applies only to sapient beings. The sale of the ‘soul of Cheliax’ was not a valid soul sale and was not properly governed by the rules governing such.
6. Hell acted unlawfully in creating a formal protectorate without paying the lawful intervention cost thereof.
7. Hell is hereby ordered to pay the full accrued cost, plus interest and penalties, at once. It will have the opportunity to appeal the exact amount once that has been calculated.

(That might take a while.)

Well, things are going to suck for Cansellarion, but this might actually be better for their interests overall than the thing they were originally aiming for.

Indeed.