Rides a Dread Legion

by Raymond E. Feist

  Besides, there were more important matters closer at hand than satisfying his academic and professional curiosities. Finding the other demon master would have to wait.

  He was now faced with the task set before him by the Regent Lord: to investigate the elves to the north, in a place called Elvandar. He felt a strange tugging at the thought, for while the Taredhel had established their own order of things, their own view of the universe, still at heart they were Edhel, the People, and ancient ties still abided.

  He considered what he knew of this region. He stood on the bluffs overlooking the sea, in a land the humans called the Far Coast. He believed himself to be near a city called Carse, south of another human population center, Crydee. North of that was the Elven Forest, if his brother’s intelligence was accurate, and Laromendis was nothing if not thorough. He weighed what he had in his travel bag and judged it a difficult journey on foot.

  He took one very long look around his position, knowing deep down he was unobserved, but still being cautious. He closed his eyes and began a summoning, and within a moment a huge steed appeared before him. Hell spawn, it might be, a demon of a lower cast, but it was very much like a horse, and he could ride it. Moreover, if it stayed uninjured, it could run as fast as the swiftest horse. In any case, it was a sight to behold.

  The creature blinked its huge black eyes against the light of day. It looked around and snorted. It had been summoned by this elf before and knew better than to attack or try to escape, for this was its master. It lowered its head and waited.

  It looked as much like a huge dog as it did a horse, though the legs were long and the body slender. It had a pointed snout, almost lizard-like, and the ears flattened back against the creature’s skull, like a cat’s when angry. A stub of a tail didn’t wag in greeting, but rather trembled slightly, a warning among its own kind that it was ready to attack.

  Gulamendis closed his eyes again, using a spell taught him by his brother, a glamour that would have any onlooker, save those with exceptional magic ability, see only a horse. It was akin to the spell Laro had used to disguise himself as a human while he traveled this land, and it had served him well.

  Gripping the creature’s scaly hide at the withers, the elf leaped onto the creature’s back and, using his legs, turned it northeast. There was a good-sized road a few miles in that direction, and it would take him to the human town of Crydee. There he might investigate a little, before traveling north to see his long-lost kin.

  Gulamendis moved his demonic mount through the fields. He had taken to riding off the road, just in sight of it, and found a game trail through the barrier land between the fields of a scattering of farms south of Crydee. He had abandoned what the locals called the King’s Highway when he found humans staring at him. At first he worried about his mount somehow not being disguised effectively by his illusion spell—he knew he was nowhere close to being the master his brother was—but he realized the second time some human children had risen up in the back of their parents’ wagon, shouting and pointing, it was the mere fact of being an elf that had caused the excitement. Despite this region’s proximity to the Elven Forest, it was apparent that elves rarely ventured south of what was called the River Boundary, and that he was the object of much scrutiny and comment.

  At least, from what he could overhear, these humans gave no hint they perceived him to be any different, in attire, manner, or mount, from the local elves. Still, he decided stealth served him better than trying to play the part of a local elf, and at first opportunity turned eastward, away from the road.

  He could ride along between the boundaries of these farms, most of the time being within sight of the road, without attracting too much notice. The crops were ripening, but not ready for harvest, so the fields tended to be unoccupied, and on those few occasions when he spied humans in the fields, he avoided them. His perceptions were clearly superior to theirs, so he felt no risk of detection.

  When he came to a relatively close cluster of farmhouses, he rode farther eastward, into the woodlands that led into the deeper forest, called the Green Heart by the locals, and moved north. In these woods he felt a strange disquiet, the echoes of presences that were both somehow familiar and yet alien. It was times like these he wished he had had more time to speak with his brother on what Laromendis had discovered about this place.

  As he returned to the strip of boundary land between farms, the sun set in the west, providing an unusually brilliant display of red, orange, pink, and gold light against grey clouds on the horizon. Gulamendis found himself holding back emotions, for it was hardly the first spectacular sunset he had seen over an ocean, but it was the first he had seen over an ocean on Midkemia. When last he had looked out over the seascape, it had been a grey and forlorn day, with haze masking the boundary between sea and sky.

  Every day he spent on this world reinforced one thing over all others: this was their Home. And something was wrong.

  He couldn’t put his finger on the exact nature of this sense of wrongness, merely that he felt out of phase with this place. And he knew deep down that the wrongness was within himself, not with this place. Perhaps the generations on other worlds, away from the nurturing magic that was Midkemia, had changed the People. He didn’t know, but he also knew concerns such as this one were academic compared to the immediate need to find his distant kin and discover what sort of allies they might be.

  For as certain as he sat on this masked demon, riding along in the evening’s twilight, he knew he alone from those laboring in the valley to the southeast understood the threat that was poised to strike this world. Deep inside him, another certainty was rising: this would be the last battle. If the Demon Legion found its way to Midkemia, if they discovered a path from Andcardia to this world, their Home, then all of the Edhel, every last elf born of this soil, every last elf returned from distant worlds, all would perish.

  Crydee had proven an interesting and entertaining diversion for a short while. Gulamendis had easily avoided a noisy and ill-organized town watch that had marched the perimeter of the town with little attention to details. It was clear this was a place untroubled by conflict for some years now. He had ridden quietly through an otherwise dark street past one or two buildings with lights on, but attracted no attention to himself.

  The harbor had a tidy waterfront, with a long neck of land to the north boundary running out to a stone tower that appeared to be more of a watchtower than a lighthouse. There was a light, but it was hardly a beacon, being more of a single brazier that gave a faint illumination. Gulamendis assumed no ships were scheduled to arrive after dark, and any arriving unannounced would do well to lie off the coast and wait for dawn to enter the harbor.

  He turned his mount northeast from the mouth of the harbor and skirted the town along its northern boundary. He was curious about the castle high above the town, on a steep rise, but knew it would be guarded by men more able than the town watch he had avoided. He still knew little about these humans, but he was an elf of keen observation and sharp wits.

  Their social organization showed them to be in command of the region. Whatever neighbors might have troubled them in the past—elves, dwarves, goblins, or trolls—they had been driven out or disposed of. That made the humans dangerous.

  His race had not encountered humans in centuries, and those encounters had always ended in bloody war. While some human tribes had been relatively peaceful, a large number had proven warlike and aggressive, and after several failed treaties with various tribes, the stance of the Taredhel had shifted from peaceful contact and negotiation to preemptive obliteration.

  The dwarves had proven more troublesome in some ways, less in others. They were much tougher and difficult to root out of their underground communities, but they also were far less aggressive, willing to stay within their own territories without problems. Only twice had warfare erupted with dwarven clans, but both had been protracted, bloody wars.

  Gulamendis realized with a sigh that those historie
s were now academic, for every world in which the Taredhel had encountered humans or dwarves had been overrun by the Demon Legion. With a sinking sensation in his stomach, the Demon Master wondered if he was on a fool’s errand. Even if he could find potential allies among these humans and the other races on Midkemia, would his own people welcome their aid?

  Turning his mount around, he rode past the local inn, which seemed lively enough by his standards. A steady sound of voices, some laughter, and music, if that’s what it could be called. Taredhel musicians played a very soft and lyrical type of music that was supposed to mimic the lofty emotions of the magician’s experience, as a means to share that bliss with those who had no magic. As Gulamendis’s experiences with magic hardly contained any that could be called lyrical, he felt as the soldiers, farmers, and laborers must have felt listening to the great singers and musicians of his people on festival days—not that there had been many of those since the coming of the Demon Legion.

  The Priests also kept traditional songs of prayer and welcoming, as well as other, more primitive music and instruments, as a way to keep in touch with the original culture of the Edhel. It was seen as more devout—or academic, depending on one’s view of faith—and rarely heard outside the temple.

  The music coming out of the inn was boisterous, loud, dissonant, and as best as the elf could tell, fun. Those singing seemed to be enjoying themselves greatly. He could not understand a word, as he spoke no human tongue, let alone one of this world. His brother had several spells that allowed him to understand and be understood, but there was neither time nor circumstance for him to teach Gulamendis. Had he not learned the spell of disguising his demons years before from his brother, Gulamendis would have had to ride through the forest the entire way north.

  Leaving Crydee town behind, Gulamendis wondered how fared his brother, and then bleakly wondered if he still lived.

  Laromendis pointed his wand at a demon climbing the wall and unleashed a bolt of energy that struck the creature in the face. Clawing at its eyes, the demon fell over backward, having lost its purchase on the stone wall. The wand had been given to him by a magician named Sufalendel, for which Laromendis was eternally grateful, for at the moment his more subtle illusion magic was next to useless.

  He stood on the northernmost wall of Tarendamar, shoulder to shoulder with soldiers, priests, and magicians, attempting to repulse the fourth attack this day, as the demons sought to swarm the defenses, gaining access into the last bastion of the Taredhel on Andcardia.

  The great barrier had been erected in a massive circle around the city of Tarendamar, over a hundred miles in radius. Other defenses had been placed around the planet, huge traps designed to obliterate demons by the hundreds, death towers that spewed evil mystic fire at any moving body within a hundred yards, a network of tunnels under the mountains to the north of the city, and all had proven useless.

  The demons had scourged the planet, leaving nothing living in their wake. Within a year of finding the portal to Andcardia, they had driven the widely scattered population of the world to Tarendamar, forcing the total abandonment of over four hundred other cities around the planet, and countless towns and farming villages. Entire forests had been defoliated, and lakes and seas now churned on silent shores, devoid of life. The demons left nothing alive behind them, feasting on any creature they found, no matter how small. Scouts had reported not even insects abided after the demons departed.

  The only advantage the Taredhel possessed over the demons, besides their superior arts, was the demons’ single-mindedness. They had elected to attack the barrier in one location, a canyon that funneled them into the defenders’ strongest position—merely, it was assumed, because it was the shortest route from the portal to the city. Certainly, early in the war, they had attacked on many fronts. Now they came in a straight line from the gate to the city.

  Laromendis glanced upward, out of habit. Had any fliers been overhead, warning would have been passed. He once again marveled at this powerful magic, a huge, invisible wall of energy, only hinted at when struck by a demon’s magic or falling body. The spellcasters had originally erected a dome, but at huge cost, until it was discovered there was a height above which the demons apparently could not fly. The spell was adjusted and the dome lowered, gaining the defenders weeks, even months, before the magic that fueled the barrier was exhausted. Laromendis caught his breath and kept his thoughts to himself. Around him, grim-faced soldiers, magicians, and priests awaited the next assault, despite, to a man, sharing the same thought: this was pointless; eventually the city would fall. But the Conjurer wouldn’t be the first to speak aloud those words, lest someone turn his ire upon Laromendis. Besides, while the city might fall, each hour here on the wall gave more of the Taredhel the opportunity to flee through the portal to Midkemia. Thinking of Home, Laromendis wished fervently he was now there, with his brother.

  Then a voice shouted, “Here they come!”

  Three times since before sunrise the demons had been beaten back, leaving thousands of rotting corpses littering the planes outside the wall. So high were the dead piled that the last assault ran up the bodies of their fallen brethren as if they were an earthen ramp, gaining them an additional twenty feet on the wall from which to launch their assault.

  Laromendis held a dagger in his left hand, against magic not proving effective, and watched for a moment, catching his breath, as another wave of fliers approached, coming low and fast. These were the most dangerous and unpredictable of the Demon Legion, for it was unclear where they would strike next. Something had changed in the last two days, as the fliers—some of them, at least—were now able to pierce the barrier.

  The hand-to-hand fighting was now the order of the day, and again the Taredhel had the upper hand. Despite each demon being physically the match of any two elven warriors, the elves employed magic arts unparalleled. Not only were magic-users able to cast spells that would wither demons in their tracks, or stun and confuse them, many of the weapons used had been enchanted to cause far more damage than would be expected. Swords would cause flaming wounds or festering agony, arrows would stun with mystic shock, and high above, green flames of death rained down on the attackers from death towers constructed over the last month. The demons would eventually take this position, but they paid an unimaginable price in doing so.

  The fliers dove. In the previous onslaughts they had hit the top of the wall, trying to create a breach in the defenses, so the crawlers—as Laromendis thought of them, those demons that could scamper up a wall of stone like spiders—could gain access to the top of the defenses, make their way to the gates, and open them. One time before, they had purposefully overshot the wall to land in the open bailey between the defenses and the outer city, and mount an assault on the gate’s defenders. The few who had survived the transit through the barrier had been quickly dispatched by “flying” companies, squads of the best soldiers ready to rush to any position needed.

  The death towers began to spit their evil green energy at the approaching fliers, and Laromendis watched in fascination. Necromancy was an art so dark no magic-user admitted to an interest, yet here was something so anti-life it must have been the art of necromancy that had conjured it into existence. Even if no necromancer lived, the forbidden volumes and tomes must have been taken from the vaults of the Regent’s library. No sane being could imagine these hideous engines of death, let alone design one. Could those who designed the towers do so and remain untouched by madness?

  The huge black towers had been erected along the wall, each topped with a crystal of some material so black it seemed to drink in the light. Nothing reflected off the surface of those crystals. Each pulsed with wicked energies that unleashed a bolt of green light, which flew forward, toward the fliers. The green pulse didn’t even need to strike those creatures, merely coming close to them, and their lives were sucked out of them. Silver-white lights, like tiny bolts of lightning, flew from their bodies into those passing green bolts, and the f
liers stiffened in midair, falling in rigor to their death below. Those farthest from the death bolts kept coming, to be received with death by any elf on the walls of the city.

  The fighting was the bloodiest of the war so far. Every effort was being made to hold the monsters outside the city walls as long as possible. The translocation portal in the center of the city was being employed to transport the Seven Stars, and every magician who could be spared from that task was on the walls, lending their skills and arts to the city’s defense.

  A scampering demon came up the wall so quickly Laromendis was almost taken unaware. He flicked his right hand and the bolt of energy from his wand missed the creature entirely. But it was enough to distract the creature and he sliced at its neck with his dagger. The creature’s neck was like a tree trunk, and he barely cut into it, but it was enough pain to distract it from its task of climbing the walls and it lost its purchase, falling backward onto another climbing demon. Laromendis wondered if others noticed what he did; the fliers were now breaching the energy barrier at an alarming rate.

  “We can’t keep this up much longer,” he said to no one in particular.

  A veteran soldier next to him grunted, which he took to be agreement. The warrior was too busy cutting off the head of a flier who had gotten past the death tower defenses to speak. He was ignoring a serious gash in his left shoulder, which Laromendis was certain would cause him to faint from blood loss if he didn’t get the wound tended to quickly.

  “Get that shoulder dressed!” he shouted. “I’ll hold them!”

  He conjured up an illusion, one of those he had prepared against this sort of contingency. A creature appeared in the air above him, a regal wrathbird, seventeen feet of wingspread and all anger and muscle. Talons that could cut a man in half and a beak that could snap through armor were suddenly confronting the remaining demons on the wall. The illusion was so real that they hesitated, which was all Laromendis wished for. He aimed his wand at the closest and sent a death bolt to strike it full in the face. It fell clawing its own eyes out in agony before it died.