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The next few minutes are a desperate running battle as you push past confused but well-trained guards, sometimes fighting, sometimes avoiding their patrols as they try to coordinate and hunt you down. The brick interiors are lined with torches and laid out like similar buildings in earlier history, making movement easy for both you and the Ziggurat's defenders. But the goal is simple; the goal is up. So you head up one flight of stairs, then another.

The stairs terminate in a small, unfinished room.

"Oh no," Therko says. He tries to turn around, but Cerulean Guards are storming up the stairs. Therko forces them back down the steps. Realizing they can't fight him from below, they retreat. But they're still down there.

"How long until sunrise?" Vecla asks.

"My watch stopped working a while ago," Alexius says, pacing the length and breadth of the room.

"What are you doing?" Control asks.

"Looking for secret doors," Alexius says. "Stralchus seems like a 'secret door' kind of man."

"Don't be ridiculous," Therko says.

"What's ridiculous is we're trapped here.I'd loudly and emphatically blame Crowchar, but that never seems to get us anywhere."

Vecla looks down the stairs, at the shadows of the Cerulean Guards' helmets cast by the torches. There must be fifty of them down there.

"We're trapped," she says.

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