Here is the way I justify Jzaridue's exit into Ghelve's Locks.
I say there is another entrance/exit into Jaridine below Ghelve's Locks. Perhaps the last flight of stairs up to the shop fold up and down. A sealed off hall leads from the staircase to an outside wall (one of the rings around Cauldron, on Ash Street). This old gatehouse had its doors sealed when Jzaridune was evacuated. Ghelve's Locks was the Jzaridune's outpost on the surface, a safehouse, it's secret entrance was for gnomes only.
This explanation allows for merchandise to be traded between Jzaridune, the Underdark, and Cauldron. There is still only a ten foot avenue to transport items, and the stairs still need to be circumvented, not to mention an elevator. But magic could help eleviate these concerns.
Details on the Malachite Fortress imply that it was built by gnomes and dwarves. The gnomes subcontracted out to dwarves for security. The Malachite Fortress should be considered a branch of Jzaridune. I say the jail cells were converted apartments/barracks for a population. The fortress was not finished, so more homes would have been built.
Another dungeon of gnomish homes could be hidden within Cauldron's depths. Perhaps they have collapsed.
I played it as though Jzadirune was a secret enclave and Ghelve's Locks was once a magic shop served by Jzadirune. The gnomes wouldn't reveal their secret, even if all they had to do was go to one of the local temples and pay for a remove curse. The Vanishing is kind of silly in that it's so easily cured but it managed to wipe out a small town (which is really what Jzadirune is).
The thing that bothered me was that the only way into the Malachite Fortress was through Jzadirune, aside from the passage to the Underdark. I made a third way in that had collapsed in the intervening years. I also had my dwarves a bit goofy and had them forget about the Malachite Stronghold once Zenith left. It's covered in the adventure that Zenith Splintershield was the last dwarven defender to rule the MS, but he led a party off into the Underdark and was never heard from again (but you'll find him in Zenith Trajectory, Chapter 4). The dwarven cleric in the party is now hailed as the dwarf who rediscovered the Malachite Stronghold and the local dwarven temple to Moradin (which I added) has sent a new contingent down to reclaim the Stronghold.
Ghelve contacted gnomish mages through Skie and a contingent of gnomish wizards has reclaimed Jzadirune. I had hoped that the party would broker some kind of truce between the gnomes and dwarves, but I think the highest charisma in the party is a 10, so they were blowing Diplomacy rolls left and right and basically provoking an all out war between the dwarves and gnomes.
When the first war party of dwarves knocked out the gnomish guards of the entrance to Jzadirune (on their way to the elevator) the party just healed everyone, said, "Can't we all just get along?" and stopped trying to be diplomatic. The left and tried to forget about the whole problem.
So the Stormblades have brokered the peace (lots of charisma in that party, along with all sorts of diplomacy ranks). The party may have discovered the two places, but the Stormblades have made them safe to live in. Ghelve is converting Ghelve's Locks into Ghelve's Gateway, and he's charging a small fee for tourists to go see the great Gnomish Enclave and Dwarven Stronghold (tours run every other day), as well as selling magic items that are again coming out of Jzadirune.
The Stormblades are going to spend the winter leading forays into the Underdark, until they come back being chased by something awful (haven't decided what yet) and the dwarves collapse the tunnel behind them. The Underdark tunnel has to be gone for the start of Zenith Trajectory, and the Stormblades seem like just the group to do it.
Was Jzaridune "wiped out"? When the dwarves left Malachite, the gnomes were suddenly in danger from the underdark (nobody watching their back). That, plus the vanishing, made Jzaridune a not-so-good place to be anymore and they simply left. I didn't see Jzaridune as a city so much as maybe a small camp.
How about his: Jzaridune was founded by a small group of heretical gnomes. They sold magical items both to Cauldron (through a shop at Ghelve's location) and to the Malachite. Eventually the heretics angered their god to such a degree that he sent the Vanishing. Many of the gnomes vanished, the rest abandoned Jzaridune. The gnomish church ordered Jzaridune to be "forgotten".
You know, a surprisingly convenient plot device comes to mind. The rest of Jzadirune just "vanished." :)
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Things I have done:
1) There were other entries to the Malachite Fortress and Jzadirune, but those have been collapsed by dwarves in the mines as those enclaves were either not suitable for habitation or too empty to be able to block a threat from the Underdark.
2) My group went to one of the mines and hired an old dwarf for a day or two and he checked all the collapsed exits to Jzadirune and the Malachite Fortress, as he was part of the "Demolition Crew".
3) The Vanishing was much more virulent 75 years ago, the strains infecting the magic items in the gnome enclave are much less potent than the original ones, hence they are now curable by a "Remove Disease" spell. I think the SCAP HC states as a possible further adventure after the campaign, that a more virulent version of the Vanishing could appear (that would be the original disease then).
The Underdark tunnel has to be gone for the start of Zenith Trajectory, and the Stormblades seem like just the group to do it.
When I read that part of "Zenith Trajectory", I decided that the tunnel from the Malachite Fortress to the underdark didn't need to be collapsed. Sure, the group can decide they want to take that route to find Zenith but at that level, traveling 10s of miles through twisting, unfamiliar tunnels filled with all kinds of subterranean horrors.
But wouldn't it be easier to take the more or less straight route on the surface? (Yeah, I know, players surprise you all the time...)
My players haven't gotten there yet (actually, we won't even start until Oct 11th), but if they decide to take the underdark route, I'll flesh something out for them.
I'm using its collapse to build rivalry with the Stormblades. They were talking about going after Zenith at the end of Life's Bazaar, so giving them the opportunity, and then having their rivals block the seemingly easiest way to Zenith should make for some fun.
One thing is bothering me about Jzadirune. The Vanishing is relatively recent in history. How is it then that the vanishing and the fate of the gnomes is not common knowledge (I think it was DC 20/25 history check?).
The Vanishing happened 75 years before the start of "Life's Bazaar." While that may not seem a long time, the majority of Cauldron's citzens are human, so most of the humans alive when the Vanishing occurred will be dead.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Jzadirune was an enclave of gnomes that created magic items. How many people in Cauldron could afford to purchase what they made? Therefore, how many people paid attention to Jzadirune? It's possible that a lot of folks were only peripherally aware of Jzadirune's existence. After all, it appears that only one small shop led from Cauldron to the enclave.
Here's my take on Jzadirune: This small enclave was multifunctional. It served as a business (magic items), a place to research magic (the library -- mostly for gnomes, though), and a gnomish cultural center (hence the theater). While some people actually lived in Jzadirune (the guards and leaders of the enclave), many others lived in Cauldron above.
Problems bubbling up from some natural caves below (i.e., the underdark) led the gnomes to contact a group of dwarven mercenaries. The dwarves worked the caves into the fortress it is today and settled there.
After the Vanishing, the dwarves were effectively cut off from Cauldron though, in truth, they had very little contact with the city anyway. They continued their guardianship until Zenith decided to undertake an underdark jihad.
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I agree with alot of the things that were put here, the simplist solution for there not being other ways into Jzadirune or the fortress is that the tunnels were collapsed, either on purpose or merely through misuse. After all after the dwarves left its just underdark creatures that have access to it from the inside. Ghelves locks could very easily have been built atop one of the other entrances and being a gnome he could have even been from the city.
What I wanted to make a point about was the fact that Jzardine was a colony of craftsmen and wizards. A curse that might seem simple in a more normal town can have a strong effect in a city that doesn't focus on clerics. Remove curse might be a fairly low level spell but if all your clerics are at the cure minor wounds stage of things you are probably out of luck and by the time they realized they needed to flee to the surface it was too late for the majority. The book itself says that some did survive though and some even still ply their trade.