In my mind though, I think that what we are seeing there is more of a Ajokli-spiked-Kellhus, rather than just Ajokli. To me, Ajokli making pacts with Hell really doesn't make much sense, since he (seemingly) would already have tremendous power there.
There's the tiniest spark of suspicion in the back of my mind that the truth of Ajokli's nature/origins isn't quite as simple as we've been led to believe. Yeah, Cnaiur becomes Ajokli at the end of TUC. That's pretty clear.
But just who is
Cnaiur at that point? He's spent 20 years hating Kelhus, hunting Kellhus, devoting his every moment, every last smoking swazond of his crocodilian soul to seeing Kellhus brought to ruin. But hatred binds souls even more surely than love. He is still Kellhus' puppet. His soul is entirely bent around the head-on-a-pole that is Kellhus. Goaded by the hatred that Kellhus seeded in him, he has made himself into the perfect place for Kellhus to hide from the judgement of the Outside.
That's why Ajokli cannot find Kellhus' soul. Because a god cannot look inside himself. Ajokli is, at least in a sense,
both Cnaiur and Kellhus, because he was created by Kellhus's soul acting upon (moving) Cnaiur's soul.
The scene in the Golden Room and Malowebi's revelation mirrors Cnaiur-as-Ajokli's blindness perfectly. Ajokli is carried into the World hidden inside Kellhus, and Kellhus is carried into the Outside hidden inside Ajokli.
And if I'm right about all that, then it actually makes perfect sense that we cannot find a logical division between Kellhus speaking and Ajokli speaking in the Golden Room scene. Because neither Kellhus nor Ajokli can tell where one starts and the other ends either. Statements that don't make sense from either standpoint exclusively are exactly what we should expect there.
I now confidently expect, at the end of TSTMNBN, to read of Mimara gazing upon Ajokli with the Judging Eye and seeing Cnaiur and Kellhus. Fucking.
(Of course, my track record with this sort of thing is
abysmal, so...)
