"If you imagine demons tend to give a shit about their cultists, I have some bad news for you." 

He declines to listen to her on the grounds that he is basically out of other options anyway.

A couple of thieflings seize hold of his arms, allowing Lusilla to get off him, and drag him through a doorway.

...Possibly Lusilla should not have gotten off him, but, uh, she doesn't really see an...endgame...for that option. She supposes she could try to tell Kerismei that as a cultist he falls under Crusade jurisdiction, and killed him herself, but that would cause so many problems. She might've tried it anyway, to prevent torture, but the problems would fall mostly on Woljif and not her. Like, plausibly she would have to fight Kerismei, but she could probably beat her up, and Woljif said himself that he'd be in really hot water if anything happened to her. 

Lusilla turns to leave the hideout. 

"Don't think you're all free to go yet," Kerismei says without looking towards Lusilla. "We haven't seen what he has to say yet." 

"I'm going to get some air. Don't murder Woljif while I'm gone or I'll beat you up." 

Kerismei can't make a proper sarcastic reply because Lusilla is gone up the stairs too quickly, giving her the last word by default. Well played. 

She gives Woljif a sardonic raised eyebrow, as if to ask, do you think I'm afraid of her?

Uh-uh, no way, definitely not!!!

(Actually he has no strong opinion either way, but he knows what answer Kerismei is looking for, which is more important than the truth anyway.)

"Hi Seelah can I have a hug," Lusilla says when she gets outside. 

"Sure." Hug. "Things not going well?"

They can't be going too badly, or Lusilla wouldn't have come back outside by herself--and she doesn't look upset enough to suggest that everyone else is beyond rescuing.

"Theoretically things are going fine. We were right that the guy was a cultist, and he cracked immediately--like, in an attacking way, but it wasn't hard to restrain him or anything, so that's fine--but I think they're going to," she doesn't want to say the word but trying to soften it would be unacceptable cowardice, "torture him, for information, and I can't think of a way to stop them that doesn't involve beating up a bunch of not demon cultists, on behalf of a demon cultist, which--is," she was going to compare that to Hulrun standing next to a hole instead of hunting down demons but she's not actually sure how much information Seelah has about that whole mess, "a bad idea, in this extremely specific circumstance, and also it would get Woljif in a shitton of trouble, and--I'm responsible for him. Anevia said so."

Oof. 

"Have you considered that this whole thing may have been a bad idea?"

"Only every other round it was relevant. But I accepted responsibility for him!"

"I think, in the future, you should not do things that are likely to get people tortured, even if they seem like a really good idea for other reasons."

"Yeah, you're right." Sigh. 

It's a good thing Daeran is still loitering in the stairwell, and not witnessing this. This hug and sincerity do not need an acerbic interruption. 

...And then after enough hug she's going to go back down into the hideout, because she does in fact not trust Kerismei farther than Ember could throw her. 

It's not that Woljif thought Kerismei was going to actually try anything, per se, but he still relaxes just a little bit when the person who decided to throw down with Hulrun and got away with it for someone she knew less well than him re-enters the room. 

After a few more minutes and some murmured instructions to a deputy, Kerismei leaves the room to go oversee the interrogation. 

BLEAH. 

Kerismei comes out about half an hour after the interrogation started. Tired, but a little more relaxed; not friendly, but less actively prickly. "He confessed. Someone connected to a Baphomet ordered him to steal the Moon of the Abyss, and he decided it would be a good idea to drag us into it. He got the scroll to handle the golem, then betrayed us to Irabeth in order to pocket the Moon in the confusion. He thought we'd all get nicked and he could escape because he'd been expecting it."

"So you got it back off him? Lemme look at it one more time! I've always wanted to hold it, just once!"

Kerismei rolls her eyes. "He says when he got to the window display, the Moon was already gone. I don't know if he thinks we'll go easier on him than if he admits he already handed it off to his cultist contact, or if he's just too afraid of them to rat them out, but--" she blows on her nails. "If he still had it? He'd have given it up."

AUGH TORTURE BAD.

"But whatever, the important thing is that we got to the bottom of this." 

"And if we hadn't, you'd have done what you just did to Melroun, to Woljif." 

Shrug. "You have to admit, Melroun did a good job of framing him. It was half-done already, with how Woljif always panted after that amulet." 

That's not the point!!! That's so incredibly not the point!!!

But, like. Torturing a guilty person is not in fact...that much better than torturing an innocent person. 

And Lusilla doesn't think she's going to get through to Kerismei anyway. 

But. 

"But you don't mind being the kind of people where you can not do anything wrong, and get tortured anyway."