Ivar frees himself from the increasingly incoherent party and follows after the others, intimidating his way through the cats who deem him not worth a fight. He arrives to find the others trying to hack through the door, whose lock is too much for Sasha (and in any case John has spiked the hinges on the other side). Looking through the slit which Sasha jimmies open, they can see John a few chambers further in working on an inner door. The two guards are knocked out on the floor.
Ivar tries to smash the door with his shoulder, but ends up smashing it with his head and is knocked cold. The others try to batter open the door while he comes round, but fail, and inside John finishes his lock-picking and enters the treasure room... only to fall down limp when he tries to scry out what it is that they are looking for in there.
This drives Sasha frantic, and Baba manages to bring Ivar to consciousness again. This time he beats at the door with his axe and they are able to get through. John is unconscious and breathing shallowly, but is alive. They check him over and take his various hidden daggers, his codebook, his hidden forged warrants and authorizations of various types, and his sapphire ring (well, Sasha takes that on the sly). Baba believes that John somehow exhausted his magic, drawing more power than he had somehow. Then they check the treasure room.
Which has everything a pirate king could want - locked chests contain presumable mountains of gold and jewels, but they ignore those and instead check the shelves, finding their orb and notes (and leaving behind the fake orb they made earlier and some scribbled papers), as well as a strange mummy, a few arcanological wands, some magic swords, crowns and scepters, jeweled furniture, silver spittoons, and so on. Sasha steals a jeweled orb, and Lucia grabs a wand, and they flee.
On the way out, they split up. Sasha and Gaius are nearly caught, and in ducking from the guard, who seem to be somewhat recovered, Sasha pushes Gaius out a window. Luckily he catches onto the sill, but it's still not the approved way to hide behind a drape. Ivar returns to the banquet hall and finds the Elven ambassador's doctor tending to people and bringing them around, protected by orc guards. He stashes himself under a table and pretends never to have left.
Lucia gets to the outer courtyard and finds that the drawbridge is up! So she decides to stir up the party goers to try to have them charge the gate. The Duke appears and tries to talk them down, and succeeds despite Lucia's rabble-rousing prowess. Luckily the whole thing has rattled the gate guards, and Gaius, who has been chumming with them, is able to get them to open the gate anyway. Baba, Lucia, and Gaius make their escape.
Sasha, running a little behind, runs into John Courage, looking a bit pale but ambulatory. He tells her that before something broke his scry he saw that the papers they were looking for were not complete - that some part of them remain with a woman. Perhaps Sasha and he should stay behind and try to recover those? She is sorely tempted, but manages to sensibly run for it and perhaps come back later. John tells her that the sapphire ring has been in his family for generations, but she can keep it if she likes, as long as she doesn't lose it.
Ivar, meanwhile, has been running around with the Duke as he attempts to restore order, trying to find out what's up with the Elven ambassador. It turns out that he arrived at the party with his physician and saw the effects of an Elven herb, and so treated the Duke and other party-goers. Ivar, unfortunately, pushes his dumb but innocent act a little too far, and the next refreshment he consumes is drugged.
Wondering whether he will make it out, Lucia scries on Ivar, and finds him a prisoner - not in a cell, in a guest chamber, but still guarded - and an unconscious prisoner at that. The others check Jeppo's house and find him being brought in by the Duke's men. It is decided to send the recovered orb and papers to safety with a chosen courier, while the others stay and attempt to recover Ivar (and perhaps other missing papers, if they even exist).