"Are you sure this is a good idea? The Shield Maze is very dangerous, you know. You could take some time, think it over, maybe try it in a month if it still seems like a good idea?"

"A month? Are you insane? All the kids will be dead by then, and everyone on the surface too!"

...Blai's not sure if Lann means "everyone in Kenabres" or "everyone on Golarion". Kenabres either got sufficient reinforcements to mount a meaningful defense or it didn't, already, yesterday; if it didn't, the demons will find someone who can in the course of trying to sweep through the whole world before spending a month on wiping the place clear of life, and if it did, the fighting is probably all but over. Big fights are over in a round or two. But this is his - reasonably confident - speculation, not something he directly observed; he holds his tongue.

"If you are truly set on this path, I will not order you to stay, but you should be prepared for the possibility that you'll just be throwing your own life away." He turns to Blai. "And you, surfacer, it is strange to have so many of you among us, but I hope Lann has not given you the impression that you are not welcome to stay. The walls of our cave are sturdy, and ever since Dyra was blessed by the gods few of us have fallen ill."

(Not that he's thrilled about keeping a pack of surfacers around, but it would be wrong to force them into the Maze.)

"That is very kind of you. I do not think I can accomplish much of value to my goddess here in this village, so one way or another I must leave it."

"Gods watch over you, then. And Lann, please try not to get yourself killed."

"You got it, boss."

"Before we walk into the maze there's a spell I want to try, as close to the entrance to it as feasible; it should make navigation a little easier, if not unravel the maze part of the maze for us altogether. I'd also value whatever you can tell me about the place itself and the enemies within it - what spells and tricks did the cultists pull out, what kinds of demons did you see there..."

"Wendu's the one who'd know about most of that — WENDU! CAN YOU COME OVER HERE!"

Sure, here's Wenduag.

He lowers his voice. "Select Artigas is looking for information about the Maze. What sort of demons you saw, what sort of things can the cultists do, that sort of thing."

Right, okay, she can't lie, but she can leave things out.

"They worship the Demon Queen's mate, but their god is weak. Most of his priests die in one or two blows. But they can call on his powers to harm everyone within five or six paces, and most people are too weak to stand more than two or three of those. The spell his priests cast the most often is" (she switches to Abyssal for the incantation) "Divine Favor. His favored priests are stronger than that, strong enough they could kill me before I killed them, even if I caught them by surprise. Some of the cultists have their own magic, to make powerful creatures of rock or ice their slaves, or to shoot invisible slings that never miss, or to call down roaring fires, or to pull other tricks. His warriors fight with metal weapons, mostly glaives, as well as with crossbows."

...She probably can't avoid mentioning the neathers.

"Some of his cultists are neathers—"

"You never told me—"

"What, and let you kill yourself running after them? Some of his cultists are neathers, but they don't hesitate to kill other neathers. And the whole maze is littered with traps, but they're different every time. The demons change too. The most common are—"

She proceeds to describe dretches, cambions, schirs, and babaus. (She is just not going to mention Savamalekh. If Savamalekh is there he'll kill them all, and they won't be able to hurt her for lying.)

Blai nods at all this seriously. "We are understrength for a babau, but less so for the others. Do you have cold iron arrows?"

Headshake.

"I think Dyra's been stockpiling a few."

"Cold iron weapons will harm demons that would shrug off the force you could bring to bear with a normal arrow. ...I will go offer to write her a letter of introduction to Fiducia Boian, the Worldwound insurance adjuster, in the event of our success, and see if that will cause her to part with them." Off to wherever she's parked.

Dyra is sitting at the same table as yesterday. She seems to have acquired slightly more miscellaneous objects than she previously had.

"Hello again!"

"Hello. I hear you have some cold iron arrows. Would you be willing to exchange them for, conditional on our success - the odds improved somewhat by those arrows - my promise to then write you a letter of introduction to Fiducia Boian, who circuits the Worldwound as its insurance adjuster? He is a fifth circle cleric and would be more than competent to bring you up to speed on any Abadaran catechism you've tended to lack living in this village. I am well enough acquainted with him that I believe he'd take a meeting with someone I recommended on my recommendation and if he wouldn't he would at least know to expect me to pay him back for any inconvenience he felt was incurred over a timescale I cannot expect you to rely on me for."

That sounds... way too good to be true? But he's empowered by Iomedae, and she's reasonably confident Iomedae is an honorable god who wouldn't accept unfair dealing from her people.

She nods. "I have twenty. I'd be willing to trade them for that, if twenty is enough that you're still willing to offer."

"It is, yes." He would have made a BAD Abadaran not having any particular number in mind when he brought this up. "May we meet again on the surface and in Fiducia Boian's company." And he will give her a little bow before he brings the arrows back over to the archers. "Only for demons," he says. "It's not useful for cultists or any other kind of monster."

Nod. She and Lann split them fifty-fifty.

Now then.

"Lay of the Land."

Blai's proprioception expands, and where he would normally be able to sense his own limbs, now he can sense the caverns around him. Here's the path he took after he fell, his own memory of its twists overlaid with the intuitive sense the spell grants him. Here's a tunnel, leading to an artificial structure that feels almost like a gash in the land; here's a lake, and across the lake a shorter tunnel leading to the same structure. If he backtracks a little bit there's something that looked like a dead end but wasn't exactly. The spell isn't giving him a map, exactly, any more than he would be able to draw a self-portrait with his eyes closed purely from his own sense of his body, but it's enough to navigate from.

The spell can't tell him the exact layout of the maze, but it can give him an intuition for its general structure. Here's the main floor; if he goes this direction, there's something-that-presumably-corresponds-to-stairs down, and more stairs down nearby it, leading to something that feels like a very shallow version of the lake he's next to. Here's the deepest part of the lake. If he starts at the main floor and goes in this other direction, there's what might be stairs or might be a tunnel, less steep than the other path downwards; it feels like it's somehow blocked, a little like a tunnel that's caved in but not exactly. If he goes in yet a third direction, there's some sort of twisty path upwards, similarly blocked, and then a little bit downwards again, and then up and up and there'd be open sky.

The streets of Kenabres are less than a hundred feet above Blai. (Vertically closer, actually, than the place that leads out to the sky.) There are divinations that would be blocked by the ground between them, but Lay of the Land is not one of them; it would hardly be very useful if it were. He can't get a great sense of specific buildings, or even specific streets, but Kenabres is built on land just as surely as a forest is. As Blai reaches outward, he can sense that that land is marred with small crevices and massive rifts, with piles of rubble large enough they practically feel like small hills, with entire blocks of houses collapsed and near-impassible. The city center is very nearly divided in two; the city walls are in pieces. Throughout the city, there's a sense of pervasive wrongness, as paths that are supposed to connect to each other are cut off by dead ends and destroyed streets.