Oervind arrived, and the party spent a day burying or burning bodies, scribing spells, and scouting. Then Oervind cast shrink item on the construct, and Manudhar took him back to the tomb of the White Jackal. The rest of the party followed the army’s tracks several miles, to a clearing beside a rocky promontory.

More detailed scouting (invisible and flying) revealed a spot with recent magical activity, around a zone with suspiciously muffled energy. That led Sender to nearly stumble upon a goblin standing lookout in the stones. The party surrounded the goblin and broke invisibility. Chaos ensued as a dozen goblins screamed and bolted from various hiding places in the rocks, leaving only the unlucky scout to interrogate. He confirmed the party’s suspicion that the army had been gathered here from several points, courtesy of several bands of goblins (and one non-goblin band). The secretive cult that lived inside the hill was behind it all, he swore, but anyone else who went inside never came out alive. Studying the “non-magical” spot where the goblin said the door was, Edane found a visual flaw and pierced the illusion, passing her hand through apparently solid stone. The party told him to leave on pain of death, never to return, and let him run.

When Edane stepped through the illusory stone, she was attacked by what turned out to be a potent wight, drawn by the goblins’ screams. After the party fought it off, they found a room with a subterranean giant insect (an ankheg) and some eggs in a cage formed from interlocking animated troll skeletons. Strange, but not an immediate threat. It corroborated some divination that Sender had done while scouting the area.

Searching down an adjacent corridor, the party was startled by an earth elemental poking out of the wall with several cockatrices in its hand. It tossed the chickens and slipped back into the wall. Chaos ensued. A well-placed wind wall kept the birds’ petrifying bite at a safe distance, but not in time to save Shegger Gork. After the party disposed of the fowl, Aranethon begged his yet-unidentified patron’s lenience to exchange one of his known spells for break enchantment, to free Shegger from petrifaction. Fate (or his god) smiled upon him, and he freed his goblin friend from stony silence.