"Does anyone have a good command of Utopian or Celestial, to tell an Ant Hauled eagle to bring a rope - and, I suppose, a note, the eagle won't be able to tie the rope to anything - to the top of the crevasse?"

Everyone else glances between each other.

"I know a couple phrases in Celestial?" says Anevia. "I could tell it to 'smite evil' and point at the top of the rift, and hope it gets the picture?" Long pause. "I assume a servant of the Inheritor's got no way to get anything that speaks Shadowtongue."

Camellia raises an eyebrow at Anevia.

"I could attempt to entreat the spirits to grant me magic of relevance, but I have no way to be certain whether it would work until I make the attempt."

"I bet I could get it to go up if I threw rocks at it and missed on purpose."

"I am not optimistic about any of these plans. I could prepare a Share Language but I think it might simply fizzle, on an animal target."

"Don't suppose there's any way you can get one that speaks Hallit if you ask really nicely?"

(Anevia does not sound very optimistic that this plan will work)

"I heard a story once about an adventurer who tied the end of his rope to an arrow and shot it clean across a river. No idea if it's true, though."

"A lantern archon or an arbiter inevitable would have truespeech, but I don't think either could manage the rope even with an Ant Haul. I suppose I could Planar Inquiry one of those and send it to ask for rope to descend from above."

"You could get an archon and an eagle, and have the archon tell the eagle what it's supposed to do? Kind of a lot of slots to spend on one rope, though, it feels like there's got to be a better way. Don't suppose Abadar's got anything helpful?"

"I can get a Floating Disk as a domain spell, but I've never found a way to get it more than a few feet off the ground."

"Generally speaking they can't unless you can; it'd follow you if you flew."

"Can clerics do that?"

"Most cannot. If you get Floating Disk as a domain spell you will be able to do so should you reach third circle."

She looks at him with big eyes. "Wow. That's so cool. ...I'm not an adventurer, but it's still cool."

"...We could ask Abadar to bump her up to third? Can you pay him to do that? I dunno, I'm running out of ideas."

"Abadar does do fiat circling for the Pharaoh of Osirion in particular, but we must assume it is phenomenally expensive and none of us, not even Lord Gwerm, can afford it."

"The proposal to employ a Planar Inquiry seemed the most reliable to me," says Horgus Gwerm, "but I defer to your judgment. Even an imperfect plan seems superior to living out the rest of our days like this." He gestures around the village.

"A Planar Inquiry would in the best case eat up quite a bit of the promised gold in payment for the outsider but perhaps we cannot do better."

"Is it possible to pay a lantern archon on credit, or would we need to donate our jewelry to the cause?"

The latter would be a problem for him, since his 'jewelry' is all from a Sleeves of Many Garments, but he's sure he can persuade Camellia to give up anything but her amulet if necessary. (He's never understood why his Mendevian brethren are so insistent on paying extraordinary sums for individual outfits, when a Sleeves of Many Garments can replicate any of them at less total expense.)

"I expect that a lantern archon would accept my or the Fiducia's or Ser Seelah's word on it but I do not at this time command such funds directly enough to be thus comfortable promising them to a cause of the archon's choice. Perhaps you have an account with the surface Bank of Abadar and could write a note for the archon to deliver while it's up there? - an Inquiried archon would be really present, not summoned, so I would dearly wish to have some way to be sure that whatever reinforcements have arrived and the demons have been driven back and, ideally, that the bank in question still exists, lest some demon take a shot at it..."

"I would certainly be willing to authorize the lantern archon to withdraw an appropriate sum from my account, if that's sufficient for the spell. If the Bank of Abadar in Kenabres has been destroyed, it would also be able to withdraw the sum at any other branch, but I admit that making the journey to Nerosyan might be rather difficult under the circumstances."

"Quite. Without better intelligence on the state of the surface I am not at all sure I can countenance risking an archon; if we cannot think of anything else I'll have to pray on it. We are for the moment at least not in immediate danger that there's any call for a hasty decision."

"It doesn't sound like you're planning to, but if you do end up deciding to purchase one of my spells, I'll need to know by the evening before so that I can prepare it," says Dyra.

"Understood."

At this point Lann walks back over to the group, frowning. He kicks at the ground.

"Chief Sull doesn't want to bring the rest of the tribe up to the surface. He thinks it's too dangerous."