The Mothers began by returning to the trophy room and taking down all of the items from the wall so that Siosiann could see if any of them were magical. As he was talking down one of the shields from the wall, Kurtalla was injured by a spear that shot out of the wall. When Fonesca removed one of the walrus tusks to place on the pile, one of the mounted humanoid heads, with a sandy beard and very bristly tightly curled hair, started screaming in giantish. Gaspode was able to tell the others that it was letting everyone know that there were thieves about. The Mothers pulled the head down from the wall and, after realising that one of the wall hangings was not dampening the sound sufficiently, smashed it to pieces. Siosiann痴 spell revealed magic in a case of crossbow bolts; one of the shields; a suit of plate mail sized for an elf and one of the walrus tusks. These items were catalogued and stored.
In the next chamber to the east, a similar prosaic task was begun. Gaspode went to each chest in turn checking to see if it had been trapped and then opening it and checking its contents. On the third one that he came to, he failed to notice the glint of the contact poison around the rim of the lid, so when he opened it he suffered immediate agony shooting up his arms and into his chest. The effect passed fairly quickly, however, and he was able to resume his efforts after some ministrations from Levi. Only two small gems and a few gold and platinum coins were found in the chests, but Gaspode uncovered a secret compartment in the lid of one of the chests that contained two leather scroll tubes. After checking these for traps too, he handed them over to Fonesca for further investigation.
Kurtalla began a systematic check behind all of the wall hangings in this space. When he reached the east of the cave he found that a hanging there concealed a natural passage off to the northeast. The Mothers moved to this passage and began looking around carefully. In an alcove Kurtalla spotted a metal lever jutting out horizontally at a height of about ten feet. The passageway continued on after a turn to the southeast. The general consensus was to pull the lever down, so Hunnath did just that. The next thing that they saw was grey skies and sooty clouds. Taking in the landscape around them, they saw a steep hill rising to about three hundred feet about two hundred yards from their present position. Two huge obsidian doors, standing about thirty feet tall barred entrance to the chambers at the base of the hill. Beyond, the party could make out an active volcano, belching fumes and fire into the night sky. The whole of the area around the party was covered with a thick lair of cinders, making footing uncertain. Their immediate surroundings were level, a circular area about fifty feet in diameter with a narrow path leading down towards a large roadway that ran from the huge doors down, south of their position into the distance.
Taking a few moments to compose themselves the Mothers looked around for a method of returning, but nothing obvious occurred to them. They realised that they were not quite ready for this turn of events and that they wanted to get back to the rift as soon as they could. They reasoned that the chain would be the best way to accomplish this, but they knew that they would have to wait until dusk to use it. Consequently, Jito cast some area-effect invisibility spells on the whole group as they moved off to the edge of the area on which they arrived, trying to shelter behind the edges of the low ravines in the vicinity. The group waited quietly there and took the opportunity to spy upon the comings and goings from the strange hill-fortress. Patrols would come and go out of the obsidian portal, each consisting of twelve gnolls accompanied by two fire giants. They left approximately every two hours and overlapped the returning groups. Each patrol went down the larger road to the south and returned from there. The Mothers were not discovered in the whole of the night or through the next day and so when dusk fell they were ready to use the chain to return to the rift. Gaspode duly held up the parchment and they all found themselves back on the ice. They quickly tried the known path to the lower level of the rift and returned to the chamber with the wall hangings and the chests. This time they tested the full extent of the tunnel beyond the lever and discovered that it led down through the ice almost to the foot of the glacier miles to the south. Overhanging ice and rocks hid this entrance from casual observation. Once they had returned to the cave the Mothers decided to rest and re-learn their magics with a view to an assault on the lair of the fire giants.
One day later, the Mothers again found themselves on the cinder-strewn path. They immediately headed south, hoping to intercept a patrol. Jito cast the invisibilities required to conceal them along the path, though not to silence them. After half a mile they came upon a crossroads and they went east (left). Once out of sight of the crossing the Mothers arranged themselves in ambush formation around the path and awaited a returning patrol. It wasn稚 long until the requisite two giants and twelve gnolls came into view. Mighty blows from the fighters stopped the leading giants in their tracks but did not fell them. The gnolls were in a state of some disarray. Only minutes later the whole patrol lay dead, except for one badly injured gnoll who had been battered into unconsciousness. Some attempt was made to clear the roadway of the bodies of the fallen, but Fonesca pointed out that the gore and blood would be hard to miss despite these attempts. They brought the gnoll around and began to question it on the activities in the hill. The creature revealed that they we in King Snurre痴 realm, dread king of the fire giants. When pressed it also mentioned that the King痴 daughter had risen to prominence in the court of the king in the last couple of years. She had become his main advisor and strategist. It was rumoured that she had suggested the alliances that had been forged between the giant-kin and other creatures. It protested that it was only a vassal and had no great loyalty to the giants. Kurtalla was all for killing the creature but Levi stayed his hand. Instead the gnoll was instructed to stay with the group in case its knowledge would be required later.
The Mothers then went back along the path towards the hill, and just after they had passed the crossroads they saw twelve bloated spider creatures with wolves' heads approaching them from all angles. When Fonesca sent a blast of illumination into their midst they did not move, but almost instantly a ring of magical darkness obscured the creatures. As the Mothers formed a ring against the approach of these beasts, the creatures appeared behind them in the centre of their formation! There was nothing to it but to fight in close combat, and each of the group had a spider-like fiend to contend with. Luckily the group were under the effects of a defensive harmony from Levi, so they proved hard to hit. But both Levi and Siosiann were bitten by the creatures in the attack before the last of them perished. Each of these succumbed to the effects of whatever venom these creatures possessed, for they fell into a catatonic state and were unable to be roused by normal means.