There were two exits from the suite, one into an unfinished chamber of hazy cloud-stuff that turned into a kind of maze, the other into a long corridor.
    "We have accomplished our task," Talon said.
    "We still have one dragon left," I reminded him.
    "Two-thirds of our primary task," Scott said more precisely.
    "And we still need to get this castle under control."
    "Do we?" Talon asked.
    "Yes," Thunderbolt said. We certainly weren't going to give it back to Traveler, or let it go wandering around on its own.
    Scott suggested we wait while he checked out the unfinished-looking maze. It wasn't much of a maze, mostly just that the cloud would occasionally come loose in a place and drift over to some other half-formed wall; as a whole it circled its way around a couple of pillars to an exit on the north side. Ninety feet of corridor later it connected with another hall, one end of which he concluded would eventually run around and connect to the other exit from the dragon room. The other way proceeded for a good distance, with three passages leading off on the sides before opening into what he thought might be another room, though given the distance and the generally misty color of things it was hard to tell.
    "So, shall we check out the long corridor, or the other long corridor?" he asked after reporting back.
    "I vote for the long corridor," was my reply.
    "OK, the one that doesn't involve the misty maze of passages all alike."
    We left the dragon suite into the long corridor. Two passages on the right, one on the left‹that one was closest‹and at the end, as Scott had said, a room.
    "Exploring this place is going to be exhausting," I noted, directing the carpet forward. The left-hand passage went on for about sixty feet before opening into a wide hemisphere; below us we could see the ground. Scott darted back for a bit of dragon-debris and tossed it; it bounced off the transparent floor. Under our lights, the wall began to glitter, where it seemed someone had mapped the world in precious gem-dust. Unfortunately there was no helpful "you are here" mark or even cryptic symbols. Just a map, albeit a lovely one; there was nothing else in the room. I tried pointing at the map to see if the castle responded; nope. Traveler hadn't given us information on that (surprise), although he had indicated that there were multiple control loci. But then it seemed he was less interested in getting the castle back than in making sure Gretchen's forces didn't hold it. This meshed well with our own intentions.
    We left the room and went back out, looking into the first right-hand corridor. Another sixty feet of passage led us to the library, full of books and scrolls and more giant furniture. On the massive table was a human-sized table and chair, looking more than a little bit silly in the room. On the table were some human-scale papers and a massive scroll, where Traveler appeared to have been translating and transcribing the giant script, which appeared to be a treatise on prismatic energy and its ties to the elemental plane of chaos. Unfortunately, it looked as if he had just gotten started before he was pushed.
    We returned to the main corridor again. Stephanie hissed.
    "Gnolls. Around the corner. Just one I think."
    Scott snaked around the corner; we heard a thump. Thunderbolt walked around after him, lightning leaking off of him; the gnoll dropped the axe he had grabbed and settled for cowering pitifully.
    "Hi!" Scott said. "So, what you doing?"
     "G-g-g-guarding."
    "Guarding what? Three dragons live here, I don't think they need a gnoll for a bodyguard."
    "Cattle."
    "Ah. How many other people are guarding the cattle?"
    "Uh...." He started trying to think of a lie, looked at Thunderbolt, who was spilling lightning from one hand to the other in an absent fashion. "Grak just went upstairs to warn people. We heard noises."
    "How many of you?"
    "Here? Thirty."
    "I wasn't asking for the world population of gnolls. So where's the control room?"
    "C-control room? There's the shrine."
    "Okay, the shrine then."
    "T-top floor. It is a shrine to our great queen, her high priest is there."
    "Oh, which high priest?"
    "We might know him," Thunderbolt said.
    "Yeah, we get around," Phoenix Talon nodded.
    "High priest Keck." That was a male name, so probably not the one we had pushed off the branch back in the west. Gretchen's forces tend to suffer from title inflation; there are a lot of high priests around. The gnoll told us that farther down the corridor were a room where the cattle were kept, and stairs leading up to the next level of the castle, which was apparently not the top; he didn't know how to get to there.
    We couldn't really let him live, but Talon made it quick, and then hid the body in the library. Blood pooled on the translucent material of the worked cloud.
    "Next time could you kill him in some way that doesn't involve leaking?" Scott asked.
    "They all involve leaking somehow," he shrugged. "I can't electrocute them."
    "Twist his head until it goes crack?"
    "Oh that's true...."
    I sighed loudly.
    We looked into the chamber where the cattle were supposed to be. Another huge room, this one L-shaped. A pillar of unfinished cloud ran up through the center; tethered to it were a half dozen cows, a few sheep, and four people. It seems gnolls have a rather broad definition of cattle. The people looked at us wide-eyed and motioning for silence.
    "They already know we're here," I said in a normal voice.
    "Hello," Scott said, looping over. "You don't mind if I unchain you, do you?" They shook their heads silently, so he did. "Head down there, second door to the right, hide in the library."
    "Ignore the smell," Talon added.
    "It's just a dead gnoll."
    "And keep quiet."
    More nodding. Two of the freed men carried the water trough, while two others led sheep.
    We approached the stairs, glad that we could fly, in our various fashions. At the top was a small platform (for this place) and a large opalescent door. Good place for an ambush; we arranged ourselves around the edges of the door before Scott slammed it and it disappeared, showing nothing but more corridor, which eventually turned. Hm.
    Nothing waited for us around the first turn, or the second. Three hundred more feet of corridor ended in another door; the gnolls who staffed this place must be in excellent physical condition. We arranged ourselves again, and hit the door.
    A ninety-foot circular room awaited. It looked like a foyer, with a cloak rack and a chair, and the recently abandoned remains—and lingering aroma—of a small gnoll encampment. On the wall was opposite us was a domed alcove about thirty feet deep.
    An entry foyer without any visible entrance, then. Hm. Scott tossed a brand from the gnolls' fire into the alcove, tapped the floor with a pseudopod and yanked it back as he started to feel something odd; the brand disappeared, teleported.
    "Wonder where that went? There's probably a whole bunch of gnolls who just shot a torch."
    It looked as if the only way the gnolls could have gone out was wherever that went. We were all a little leery of that course and decided to recheck the room and the hallway and see if we had missed something. There was nothing in the room. Halfway along the corridor we did find a discolored section of one of the blocks on the north side, and Thunderbolt found traces of soot that could have come from a gnoll's boot at the same point. Scott hit it, and a large section of wall disappeared, a normal cloud-giant-sized door that happened to have a much smaller trigger than most of them. Probably intended to be kicked rather than pushed. Or maybe it was supposed to be hidden; it would have been much easier to overlook if we were all thirty feet tall. More hallway, another door. No gnolls. We arrayed ourselves against ambush (again) and advanced.

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