That seems like a better trade-off; Lucette's role is to hear things, not see things.

And so, Anevia creepts up the stairs, every movement slow and quiet and deliberate.

The stairwell goes up for several floors' worth of height. (This makes sense; something as big as the Maze couldn't be hidden beneath the city without being reasonably deep beneath it, although it doesn't hurt that Kenabres is built on a steep-sided hill.)

At the top there is an open door (good thing Anevia was being quiet!), which leads to a sort of balcony overlooking a room two stories in height but well under a hundred feet across. Staircases connect each side of the balcony to the room's floor, and there's another door at the room's far end.

The room currently contains:

- Three neather children, terrified and even quieter than Anevia if at all mortally possible

- An armored human woman with Baphomet's unholy symbol on a chain around her neck

- A large demon with huge bat wings, a long tail, and four arms, which are holding three different books open

Savamelekh is bored and angry and annoyed and offended and itchy.

This is normal. Any demon as old as him has learned to bear the constant indignities of life without counterproductively torturing his own minions or suicidally slaughtering crusaders. It's just the constant, background state of his existence.

Right now he is bored-angry-annoyed-offended with his minion for making him wait, and with the books for being wrong and stupid and sometimes knowing things he doesn't, and with his minion for giving him such books.

"How long until you fetch the sacrifice?" he demands of her.

Hosilla is also bored, angry, annoyed and offended. Unlike Savamelekh, she shows absolutely none of this in his presence. She keeps to her perfectly correct posture, grovels when appropriate (that is, nearly always), and waits for the opportunity to backstab the damned Alushynirran interloper for Lord Baphomet's greater glory.

"I am sorry, my lord, I do not know. It is hard to find and capture an aasimar with the city in such chaos." Just as she told him every five minutes for the past two hours.

Eventually he'll get bored or annoyed enough to go kill someone - outside her Maze, that is - and she'll go back to doing something useful, such as, for example, working on procuring said aasimar. This is a routine, nothing more. This is fine. Everything is fine.

"These books are wrong," he complains. "And stupid. And presumptuous. Mortals writing about the Abyss! Mortals who think the Abyss can be defined and described, captured in petty words! Mortals who dare attempt to put bounds on my glory!"

"Yes, my Lord. The crusaders believe these wrong books about the Abyss, which is well for its servants."

"But you dare give me this inane drivel to read?"

"My Lord, you commanded to be informed about the recent advances in public knowledge beliefs about the nature of the Abyss." You asked for it two hours ago, you idiot. "The crusaders consider this Lavinia an authority on the subject."

"She uses far too many stupid words to say something which is obvious half the time and wrong the rest." Any claims coming from a human about the quintessential nature of the Abyss, that Savamelekh doesn't already know about, are obviously wrong. She's not even a wizard! "And this is enough to mislead the stupid and the weak who call themselves wise!"

"Yes, my Lord. Perhaps she is a servant of Geryon." Now there's a fun thought... sadly, unlikely to be true.

He snorts in amusement, and turns three pages in unison. A minute passes in reflective silence.

Then Savamelekh cries out in anger and rips one of the books in half.

"My lord?" Hosilla inquires sweetly.

He throws the other books to the ground. "These books were written to waste my time," he hisses. "They make even less sense when read in parallel. She must be made to rewrite them while boiling in oil."

Then perhaps you should not read three books at once, Hosilla obviously does not say.

"Yes, my Lord. She disappeared with Terendelev's body. If you ask him where he took the dragon, he may give her to you." Ha, ha, but the posture of a dumb servant making dumb suggestions often works better with Savamelekh than a smart servant making smart suggestions Savamelekh hadn't thought of himself.

"No, better! I want to make her undergo a ritual based on this nonsense. If she comes back to the city, you will capture her."

"Certainly, my Lord." If Lavinia comes back without Terendelev, and the demon attack isn't repelled, this might even be borderline possible, not that Hosilla is stupid enough to try.

He paces impatiently. Kicks one of the neather children - not hard enough to kill it, he's not an idiot.

(This child is really unreasonably good at suppressing agonized whimpers!)

"I'm going to kill people. Have the aasimar ready by tomorrow morning, or I'll start killing your people." And he teleports out.

Hosilla lets out some of her own tension by unleashing a long stream of curses in Savamelekh's general direction, that asshole monsterfucking blaggard with more strength than cunning who isn't even wise enough to teleport just beyond the corner to catch out his subordinate ranting about him most traitorously, you miserable bag of slimy death!!

She tries kicking the other two neather children, on the principle that if anyone knows how to efficiently deal with frustration it would be Savamelekh, but it doesn't work nearly as well as she'd hoped. Maybe you do need that ridiculous strength to get it right.

"Back to the cells with you," she tells them, and the terrified children walk - or limp - ahead of her towards the balcony.

Anevia goes back down as quickly as she can while still being reasonably quiet! 

"Hosilla's coming," she whispers hurriedly, "the vrolikai left for the day. She has the children." Unspoken is that Hosilla may or may not have a way of contacting the vrolikai in an emergency.

"Let's retreat for now and get the others," Lucette suggests in a similar whisper. 

"When she sees all the bodies she may run away, and/or hurt the children," Anevia half-objects even as they run. It's not that she wants to take on the presumably-strongest empowered cultist here alone with Lucette. "Maybe I should shadow her from a distance while you get the others."

"Alright." 

As soon as they get out of the staircase, Lucette spreads her wings and leaps into the air. 

A labyrinth is, to put it mildly, not the best environment for flying in. It's still faster than going on foot. 

She reaches the entrance to the maze. Wenduag...isn't there, okay, probably there's a reason for that. 

"The vrolikai left, we're going to try fighting Hosilla." 

Seelah, Lann and Camellia are ready to race back to where Hosilla was last seen! They can't, as a group, be stealthy, but they can try to be quiet enough to hear Hosilla or Anevia if one of them starts shouting in an adjacent room.

Unfortunately, while Lucette flew over the rubble in the long hall and could fly back, the rest of them have to take the long way around.

What the Abyss? Has everyone in the place been killed, sometime in the last two hours, without her even hearing about it?! 

Gods damn it, she shouldn't have put up that notice. She should have told them to keep interrupting her and then Savamelekh wouldn't be as bored and also someone would have told her the place was overrun with mongrels, or whoever actually did this!

Now she has to decide whether to go look for survivors, or retreat above for reinforcements. Some of her men went looking for an aasimar, others just went to the Gray Garrison hoping to loot something. 

...eh, who's she kidding, she's not risking her precious skin looking for survivors. The next batch of inductees will learn to be wiser by cleaning up their predecessors' bodies. It's practically traditional at this point.

(Smart Templars stay in small, well-hidden cells, not band together in dozens right below the biggest fortress of the city guard. She gets lavish funding, but good staff is much harder to source.)

(Obviously she's smart; you do need at least one smart person to run every operation. She's in it for the lavish funding, obviously.)

However, she doesn't want to give up her prize - namely, the mongrel kids - and there are no holding cells in the sewers where she could securely leave them. This presents a certain conundrum.

She has no immediate solution, other than going back up with them - locking the door behind her - and waiting for one of her men to come back, at which point she'll leave him to guard the prisoners and go round up the others.