Lenamare did a double take and looked back to the Archimage as if he were insane. “Me, why would I have hundreds of demons running around the palace. Not even I am egotistical enough to think I could control that many.”
“Hmm,” Gandros nodded and stared off in thought for a bit. “Well, that does narrow the field.”
“Since they aren’t the council’s and you know about them, why weren’t we informed of them?” Jehenna asked. “As Council members, we should be apprised of such situations.”
Gandros arched an eyebrow and simply stared at her for a few moments. “As a Council member, you also have a right and might I say duty, to show up for Council meetings? Other than hearings pertaining to your own situation with Exador, you two, along with Exador, Randolf and Zilquar, have all been absent from recent meetings. One should hope you’d forgive us for not posting public notice about the palace.”
Lenamare made a harrumphing noise, unable to refute the chancellor. “So,” Lenamare said after a moment. “What is the plan to get rid of them?”
“We are still working on that; if you have any suggestions, we are open to them.” Gandros told him. Lenamare went silent and stared at the unused logs in the fireplace, apparently thinking.
Jehenna took the silence to ask Gandros, “How long have they been here?”
Gandros looked a bit sour; “Unfortunately, we don’t know for sure, one should hope not that long, given that no one noticed. Your associates, the ones with the two animages, found them and alerted Damien shortly after their arrival.”
“Hmm, most annoying they chose not to inform us as well.” Jehenna snorted, ignoring, of course, the fact that Jenn had informed her. Gandros shrugged.
“There is a way we could banish them from the city.” Lenamare stated suddenly after several more minutes of uncomfortable silence.
“Yes?” Gandros asked.
“It will require some work, but we could utilize the city wards along with some parasympathetic wards I would create to sort of suck all the demons out of the city, physically.”
“Interesting,” Gandros beamed suddenly excited. “and will it be strong enough to also compel the three archdemons that are wondering around the palace?”
“The what?” Lenamare and Jehenna asked in shocked unison.
Edwyrd would have loved to have discussed some of what he’d read the night before with Maelen, but he didn’t know how to do that without exposing his charade as an Animage. The stuff he read had been fairly basic; he’d had to skip over some of the more technical things, but it was pretty weird.
But it had informed him of some really weird stuff; apparently there was a second moon that went north to south; hence the whole thing about second tide. He just hadn’t seen it because of the time of the month, or months or whatever. Their calendar was insanely complex; and they tied it out to astrology. Astrology? Everyone knew that was nonsense; but on the other hand; demons, wizards, elves and dwarves were also nonsense; so maybe there was something to astrology here.
The weirdest thing, though, was that the wizards thought of what they did as ‘science.’ Except that it was ‘magic’; they even called it magic; science and magic were two separate things. Everyone knew that. OK, sure, there was that saying that said ‘any sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic to people of lower technology’ that got used a lot in movies. Now that might be well and good, but everything else he read was all mumbo jumbo about magic. Honest to god, magic.
He wasn’t sure why he was shocked though, he’d seen the magic work; he’d used the magic himself. Edwyrd supposed it was probably just the referring to wizardry as being a science that bothered him. He’d always been taught differently. Or had he? His biology teacher said that science wasn’t a thing, it was a process a methodology. That was why many science teachers talked about ‘the scientific method’ rather than ‘science’ as a thing. Could the scientific method be applied to Animus and Mana? Was that what the wizards were doing?
A lot of the intro material almost read like background info for some sort of roleplaying game, or video game. Of course, to be fair, he was a giant demon running around shooting blasts of fire and lightning bolts, so he supposed this was something like and overly immersive first person shooter.
He needed to stop that line of thought. However wacky, this was real life and real death for a lot of people. He really had killed people, viciously. He couldn’t let himself lose sight of that. He thought back to the soldier he’d popped. Edwyrd shuddered.
