She left Paragould empty-handed, Kaazak having gruffly dismissed her as an unwelcome distraction from his task of summoning his “queen of glory.”
Some backstory I’m writing on the fly
Lady Gabriene’s family had placed a large part of their family fortune, and leveraged quite a bit more, into a venture to equip the True Federation of Magic with Techno-Wizard devices engineered by Shifters that would allow an army to take command of a legion of demons, such as the ones summoned to the defense of Tolkeen. They believed that once the Federation saw a demonstration of a handful of hostile, intractable demons bent to the will of anyone capable of powering a Techno-Wizard device, there would be no limit to how many might be commissioned. It might even lead to the destruction of the Federation’s enemies, and Lord Dunscon’s gratitude would be great, indeed.
But the team of Shifters hired for the work, led by a particularly conniving and overconfident one named Werdric Chesterton, let their own ambitions cloud their judgment. They became convinced that they could use the devices to control not just demons captured in the wild, but the very demons that serve the leaders and rulers within the Federation, all the way up to Lord Dunscon himself. With the demons under their control, they reasoned, they could turn the infernal creatures against their masters and leave a power vacuum into which Werdric himself could step, commanding an army of Shifters who command an army of magic-wielders who command an army of demons. The temptation was too great, and Werdric put a plan in motion to enter the City of Brass with his cadre, begin binding every demon they could find, then move onto Dunscon’s palace with the remaining devices and bind the very demons that serve him.