"Brother Gort, is that you?"

"Brother Woljif? I thought you'd pegged it in Irabeth's jail."

Snort. "Happy to see you too." 

"What's this about the Grey Garrison?"

"Right, so the temple round here--the temple of Iomedae--has a cellar, and a passage leads from it right to the Grey Garrison. The Thieflings, my pals, damn the lot of them, have been using this passage on and off to sell all sorts of stuff to the soldiers in the Gray Garrison." 

"Wait, you were smuggling stuff into the Garrison? Not out of it?"

"Here's a tip: soldiers always want stuff their commanding officers don't want them to have." 

It feels to Lusilla that there has to be a way to resolve "commanding officers don't want soldiers to have thing -> soldiers want thing -> organized crime steps in -> soldiers get thing anyway" into a form that doesn't leave the gap open for crime to happen, but...that falls firmly on the non-urgent side of problems that exist, right now, and currently it happens to be sort of convenient anyway. 

"Okay. Thank you for letting us know. You should probably either get out of the city or to the Defender's Heart, so as to, uh, be less vulnerable to random demons." 

"Right! Thanks!" 

He takes off in a direction that is definitely not the most direct path to the Defender's Heart. 

"Did you know about this?" Lusilla asks idly. 

"Not a clue. Thieflings keep secrets from each other too, y'know." 

"I am not the least bit surprised." 

Nobody in the party is an engineer, but when they find the narrowest point, Lann is mostly confident that there shouldn't be anybody directly below, so if they attempt to wedge miscellaneous rubble into the gap to create a place where it's convenient to pass over, it probably won't fall on anyone if they mess up. 

For safety's sake, Lusilla goes down and checks. If there's anybody close enough that they could potentially wander into the danger zone, Lusilla can't find them. 

Seelah really doesn't know much about engineering, but, and this bit is important, she is really good at carrying heavy rocks and heaving them into the hole. 

Eventually they have a structure that does not perceptibly wobble when Lusilla, star-shaped and floating off to the side, pokes it with extreme firmness. 

Seelah steps onto the impromptu bridge, carefully at first, and then with more confidence as it fails to shift under her weight. 

"It's safe!" she calls back to the others. 

The rest of the party clambers warily over the gap, relaxing visibly once they've reached the other side. 

The square isn't any emptier of demons, demon cultists, and people who are sufficiently more greedy than they are scared of demons that looting seems like a good idea than the rest of the streets, but it's only after nearly reaching the end of the square that they encounter someone who they don't have to fight. 

"Th-thank the gods," the man gasps, stumbling to a halt and putting his hands on his knees to support himself. "I've found someone who isn't fleeing in a panic! Are you crusaders? Mercenaries?"

Maurauders? Lusilla auto-completes. Their group had certainly found enough of those. She doesn't know if this guy was lucky enough not to run into any of those or if he did, avoided them, and is just not mentioning it because he wants to avoid scaring them off. 

"Crusaders," Lusilla says instead of voicing any of that. "We can get you back to the Defender's Heart, there are civilians there and crusaders protecting them." 

"No," the man huffs, shaking his head, "That's not--I'm a servant of Count Daeran Naevis Kael Arendae, and his mansion is under attack by demons! My master and all his guests are trapped inside, and the house guards are nowhere to be found! I managed to escape through a servants' passage to look for help! Will you help me? The mansion is only a stone's throw away, on the next street over!" 

Lusilla is about to agree immediately when it occurs to her that this could be a trap. She looks at Seelah. 

"...I haven't been in the city long enough to have heard much about Count Arendae, but none of what I have heard is good," Seelah says reluctantly, "but that doesn't mean he deserves to be left to the demons." 

"Well, I agree, obviously, as long as that's what's actually going on; can you check if that guy," she hooks her thumb at the messenger, "is actually Evil and therefore plausibly a demon in disguise or something?" 

The messenger looks offended but presses his lips together instead of saying anything about it. He is desperate. 

"Oh! Sure. Not evil." Or, if evil, not strong enough to read, which still rules out a demon. 

"Right, we'll come help," Lusilla tells the servant. 

"Thank you--it's this way," he says, turning to run back the way he came. ...He does slow down some when he sees that Seelah, in her heavy armor, is not keeping up with him. 

The Count's manor is visible from blocks away, once they're on the right street, mostly because of the several demons trying to break into the place and the group of cultists loitering nearby. 

There is a woman standing a little ways away from the main group of cultists. 

"Wearing a robe--check. Baphomet's symbol around the neck--check. Crazy eyes--check. Note to self--bring a mirror next time, to be able to adjust the optimal level of eye-craziness." She takes some notes on a crumpled piece of paper. "Everything is ready for the experiment."