"...Yeah, that's fair." 

To get to the door they'll have to get close to the earth elemental. It has ignored them until now...

"An elemental that small probably isn't smart, but if we look big and threatening then I hope it won't decide to attack us even if it becomes hostile for some reason."

Seelah will play the part of a big and threatening wall of metal! She's pretty good at being threatening to people who don't know her any better!

A strange insider moves close to it! It's not one of those it was ordered not to attack! And it's made of meat like the others, hateful meat like those who bound it here. 

...but it has nice metallic earth around its meat? Is the earth-metal a good sign? Or just another poor creature like itself, tyrannized by the meat inside?

What if, tentatively, it pokes the metal skin. Not strongly enough to injure anything really made from earth-metal. And tries to talk to it, in Terran.

"--Do not try to scare it," Lucette whispers urgently to Seelah, and then kneels by Seelah and the little elemental, softly humming the tone that silver makes when you strike it. 

This new person looks like meat. It moves like meat. But it sounds, impossibly, like silver. It's a soft, comfortable sound, a sound that reminds it of the place where it grew and was happy.

Are these new meats... somehow... metal at their core?

It really really wishes it could just rest next to the sound of silver, rest and dream of home.

But after a round, the hateful meat's command binds it. Reluctantly, it returns to its work, moving and eating the earth.

"We can't dismiss it without a fourth circle spell... Mr Librarian, you said no-one here is a strong enough wizard to call outsiders." They very obviously did not fight a fifth-circle wizard today. "Do you know who called this one, and the water elemental?"

"No, they were here before me. One of the cultists has delegated authority to command it, you could ask him. ...He might be one of those you killed, I didn't pay attention to all the bodies."

"We can ask this Hosilla, if we ever get around to fighting her." Anything to interrogate Hosilla about other than neathers and the ritual is a welcome diversion.

"Right. We have one more child to bring home," Lucette sighs. "Poor thing. Alright, let's check the room." 

The door isn't locked, and the room behind it turns out to be as described. There are three caged medium-sized lizards, of the kind that live in the tunnels outside the Maze; they hiss and snap at the bars. 

In addition to the promised glaives, the place seems to have been used for miscellaneous storage; there are crates with carpentry and masonry tools and various odds and ends.

Lucette will give the odds and ends a very brief rummage for anything useful and then they had better go, since the kids aren't here. 

Usefulness is in the eye of the beholder (*)! All of these tools might be useful to someone on a mission which is not hers. (None of them detect as magic.)

(*) The one and only aberration Golarion doesn't have, and so safe to mention in casual speech. The saying originally meant beholders are tyrants who destroy that which they see no use for.

They send the librarian back to his room, and go back to where they put the three knocked-out neathers. (They haven't woken up yet; it hasn't been an hour.) Lucette, Lann and Seelah can each carry one - slowly, with the others helping - back to the tribe.

And then they prepare for Anevia to go spy with Lucette keeping well behind her to hear her dying words hear or see something and live to tell the tale.

(Seelah really, really hates that she can't be the one in danger.)

(Lann really, really hates that he can't be the one accomplishing something worth risking his life.)

(Camellia is pretty miffed that she's stuck with a bunch of ugly mongrels, but it's not like spying on cultists would be any more fun than that, if she's not meant to stab them!)

(Wenduag really, really hates that she can't be present to betray one side of the confrontation to the other protect her interests - okay, no, that's stupid, even if she betrayed Anevia and Lucette to Hosilla it wouldn't change the fact that they've slaughtered all the rest of the cultists, and even if Hosilla doesn't realize to blame Wenduag for that, she isn't a powerful master to serve anymore. The only factor in the equation is Savamelekh, and betraying a spy to him directly is honestly a toss-up in that it causes you to come to his attention as well.

She debated sneaking after the two but, ultimately, decided it was better to stay out of the whole affair. If Savamelekh suddenly teleports on top of the tribe she'd better... be patrolling the tunnels away from them, how about that. She'll do perimeter patrol.)

Anevia leaves Seelah her bag of holding as promised. Besides her personal belongings and a bunch of generically-useful items, it contains some letters to be hopefully delivered in the even of her death, and the maybe-cursed Radiance. And then she goes with Lucette back to the one room they haven't gone through yet.

The room past the long hall is square, and large enough to require pillars to hold up the ceiling - or maybe they're decorative. It's otherwise devoid of anything of interest, other than another door which will prove to be unlocked, beyond which stairs spiral up.

On that door is pinned a piece of paper which says, in messy handwriting,

If you idiots bother Lord S. again, you deserve whatever happens to you. 

     -- H.

Anevia takes her boots off and wraps her feet in tough-but-very-stealthy cloth, and makes doubly sure nothing she carries can possibly produce sound by clinking or rubbing against something else. She's already wearing mostly gray and black, but she puts gloves and a hood that leaves the fair skin of her face shadowed. 

None of this would be any good against a vrolikai or other powerful demon with true seeing, but it could save her life spying on mortal cultists.

It's a pity there are no buffs to be had. She does have a potion of actual invisibility, which she's saving for emergencies, but people don't make potions of silence since it doesn't last long and she doesn't have a wand.

The winding stairs will block line of sight, which is good for Lucette's chances of getting away but bad for her ability to judge how close she is to Anevia and where to wait. Anevia will come back to advise her, if there doesn't seem to be an extra risk to it.

Well, since the stairs block line of sight, Lucette can stay relatively close without being visible. She'll get as close as she feasibly can and then retreat one half-revolution away. 

That seems a bit risky, in that there will be a period in time during which they are close to each other and could both be caught! Can Lucette even fly quickly down the winding stairs to make her getaway?

...Lucette will retreat another half-revolution.