Pug smiled. “You are good at your craft. I have two rooms occupying two different locations and anyone who steps through the door without knowing how to control entrances comes here. My office. It is my office, and I do work here, but it is in a different location.”

Laromendis glanced out the window. “The view?”

“Another illusion, reflecting what you would see if you were in the tower looking out.”

“Again, impressive.” Laromendis glanced around. “The other room, the one you enter if you do know what you’re doing?”

“That is for another time. Please, sit.”

The two exhausted elves did so, and Pug said, “I can see from your appearance you’ve been through a lot recently. I expect you’d prefer a hot bath, meal, and bed before any long interrogation, so I’ll keep this brief and we can delve into all we need to know from one another tomorrow.”

“That would be welcome, Pug,” said Gulamendis. “But two things I feel compelled to report first: I think we’ve found something never encountered before; we discovered on the abandoned world of Telesan an ancient fortress, human or close enough to human I’m fooled, but the demons have occupied the fortress and are keeping prisoners.”

Pug remained motionless, then nodded once and said, “I see.”

“I don’t know if you do,” said the Demon Master. “Demons don’t take prisoners. They eat everything they can and move on. It’s as if they’ve somehow changed from what I know them to be.”

“Isn’t that a conclusion you and Amirantha reached after your pet demons betrayed you to Dahun and Belasco?”

Gulamendis said, “That was…Yes, we did, but that was us being confounded at how their behavior changed. This is more that their nature has changed. They’re becoming more like us.”

Pug again nodded. His dark eyes studied both elves for a moment, then he said, “You said two things?”

“They seem to be at war with themselves.” He described the attack by one army of demons, at the behest of the illusion of Maarg, upon another, and the surprising organization of the operation.

When Gulamendis was finished, it was his brother who said, “Right before we abandoned Andcardia, we began to notice demons in the field who were not simply throwing themselves at our defenses, but who seemed to be instructing other demons, organizing them in a rough fashion, sending them in waves against specific areas of defenders. I didn’t think too much of it, well, because it wasn’t my job to think of it, and I was very busy running for my life most of the time.