"You don't know that!"

"...presumably if there are cultists they have some way in and out for supplies?"

Wenduag fidgets with the end of her scarf. "However they're getting them, it's hidden well enough that no one's managed to find it."

"But some of them are human, right? So there has to be some way to the surface, we just need to find it."

"Or they're doing it by teleport, are they powerful enough to do that?"

Lann looks pointedly at Wenduag.

"I don't think any of the cultists can teleport. Maybe some of the demons." Fidget.

"Aren't the Wardstones supposed to prevent that?"

"Well, they clearly weren't preventing it today."

"It'd depend where relative to the line the relevant parts of the maze might be, I imagine, even under non-Deskari conditions."

"Most demons can't bring passengers, so if humans aren't common underground the cultists must be coming down somehow. Not every day Deskari cuts a hole in the middle of Market Square."

Lann nods emphatically. "That sounds right to me."

"You're just saying that because you already wanted to try to make it through the Maze."

"If someone," the spiderperson perhaps, "could climb up the crevasse and get rope, it might be better to go up that way? Though I also don't know if Kenabres is in any position to gracefully receive you."

On the one hand, her extra limbs don't actually do that, but on the other hand, if she can come up with a way to do it anyway then maybe she can stop them all from poking their nose in the Shield Maze?

"Don't suppose you've got anything that could help me get a proper grip on the wall?"

"Wendu, we can't just leave the kids behind!"

"Chasing after corpses won't help anyone!"

"With a sufficiently climbable rope the stronger climbers can make several trips to get all your people wherever they care to be even if the children and infirm cannot make the climb alone, and then when a sufficiently powerful strike team can be made available they, unencumbered by civilians other than those they are rescuing, may be able to use whatever intelligence you have on the maze to clear it out."

"Would a strike team be willing to stick their necks out for a bunch of mongrel kids?"

"I don't know. If no one sufficiently powerful is willing to do this, then it is unlikely to be done, even if you try to bundle the mission's completion with other things people might otherwise wish to see accomplished."

That sounds an awful lot like 'no, but we're too polite to say it.'

"I'll help get everyone else safely up, but if you can't find a strike team wiling to take the job I'm going back even if I have to go by myself. ...I still want to find the sword, though, it'll be easier to get the rest of the tribes to follow us up to the surface."

For fuck's sake. She's not really sure how a 'strike team' is supposed to work, but maybe she can tell them that there are a bunch of incredible magical treasures hidden in the maze and then point them to the room with the elemental or something?

"It would really help a lot if you had some idea what circle of party would be called for to accomplish the task."

"Dyra's the only caster in our whole village, and she can't walk quite right. But Wendu's been in and lived to tell the tale." Pointed look at the spider-creature.

"Me and some of the other kids used to dare each other to go in. I'm the only one out of all of us who's still around, and I wouldn't be if I were picking the kinds of fights Lann wants to pick. Lann and I are the best hunters in our tribe, but I don't know how that compares to uplander magic."