From Gridley:
> First, that I be allowed to speak (2-way scry, teleport, there must be
> some way) to the chief cleric of Pelor on the island.

Yes, you can do 2-way scrying, though trying to do it from outside the
city walls would be awkward.  Teleport doesn't work so well on Diamond
Island - something about Devourers and "tainted astral space" and such,
maybe Etale would know more.

As a note, Paladins tend to be very bullheaded about "negotiating" with
creatures of evil.  They've been deceived far too often by people trying
to negotiate under false pretenses.  (Vampires in particular are bad about
this - they try to talk until they've Dominated half the opposing force,
then they fly off.)

> and the party is on its own and probably needs to fight its way through the
> Shining Cities' army to get anywhere they haven't already been.

Elan has two ranks in Knowledge:History, and he's _from_ Kher Keep, so he
knows this for free:

  There are a total of five armies on the island, though only two of them
  - the armies of Kher Keep and of The Shining City - are armies in the
  conventional sense, ie, composed of fighter-types.  With only one
  exception, none of those armies ever leaves its home city.  Diamond
  Island is, for all intents and purposes, hostile territory: any
  population center left undefended is likely to be attacked and
  conquered.

    A good example of this is that of Garelin's Sally, in the year 56
  after the War, when the armies of Kher Keep charged deep into the
  northern hills, seeking to destroy the undead ogres and giants that had
  wiped out Fort Braavos two days before.  Their trackers led the army
  for four days through the hills, in pursuit of what turned out to be a
  pack of thirty or forty ogre zombies.  They gained ground slowly but
  steadily: zombies can walk for twenty-four hours a day, but their sense
  of direction is weak, and in hilly terrain they often have to backtrack.
    On the fourth day of the sally, Sir Garelin received word from an
  exhausted messenger: Kher Keep itself was under siege from all manner of
  undead, including giant and athach zombies, mohrgs, and apparently a
  couple of spellcasters.  The shield had been holding as of morning two
  days ago, when the messenger left under cover of Invisibility - but too
  many of Kher Keep's clerics were with the army, and the outlook was
  grim.
    Sir Garelin broke off his pursuit of the decoy army of ogres and
  returned at high speed to Kher Keep.  He did arrive in time to break the
  siege, but the shield had been breached multiple times by that point,
  and many warriors had been killed.  Many undead were destroyed that day,
  too, so in some sense Fort Braavos was avenged.  But since that day, no
  more than one-quarter the strength of Kher Keep has ever been outside
  the walls at night.

    The only army that still actively attacks the undead at all is the
  Shining Army, and even those attacks are quite rare.  On holy days, when
  positive energy has been strong and undead are quiet, as much as half of
  the Shining Army may leave the city and try to destroy all the undead in
  one of the fallen towns.  Their most frequent target is Valiant, across
  the Diamond River; that town originally fell to a group of giant undead
  octopi from the river itself, and not much exists there that can't be
  defeated by raw force of arms.  Also, it's only a day's journey from The
  Shining City, so leaving does not cause much danger to the people at
  home.

The Paladins can almost certainly sense your general direction well enough
to chase you.  But undead are _not_ quiet right now - in fact, something
seems to have stirred them up quite a bit - and for any significant
portion of the Shining Army to leave the city would be foolish at best,
suicidal at worst.

> The only other thing that might help is tracking down the clerics of the
> Necromancer who cast this originally, and by now the trail is many days
> cold.

I rolled a Spot check of 24 for Selket.  (Possibly higher; I didn't
compute all the modifiers.  It's, what, +14?)  That second cleric you
killed, the sixth-level one that mostly got hit in the back with Spellfire
shots, looked awfully familiar.  He was the one leading the attack on the
bunker just after you all got cursed.

What did you do with those bodies, again?

> The only reason Gridley is even willing to think about NOT surrenduring and
> letting the Paladins kill us, remove our cursed armor, and rasing us is
> that he is worried about where the negative energy will GO.

This is very true, and also a very succinct way of putting it.