Swamped

You decide to see if there's another way in. After all, you can't see beyond the door too well, and you'd look more than a little foolish if you slipped past those two guards only to run into a dozen more.

That's when you notice a small opening just above the surface of the water.

Perhaps you can find an entry point from beneath. You just need to slip into the water when no one's looking your way.

Which turns out to be rather simple, with the chaos caused by the bees. You just wait for both of the door guards to look somewhere else, then glide into the water.

It turns out to be hard to swim in the muck. And you weren't much of a swimmer to begin with - it's not exactly something you do a lot of in the desert.

Still, you manage to slip in, and thankfully the water is shallower once you make it past the opening. Seems the Marshguards built a floor underneath the surface.

Or maybe it's an old floor that sank, you can't tell.

Strangely, both the floor below and the planks above seem to be made of purple wood. You've never seen any tree this color, but it doesn't look painted either.

Well. Now you need to figure out where you can go from here, then work out some kind of plan for meeting up with your contact.

But the fortress is huge, from what you saw of it. You could spend hours trying to find a way up there. Is there some way you can speed up your search?