Riftwar Re-Read #14 – The Demonwar

Alright, here we go. It’s the Riftwar home stretch, with this duology, the Demonwar, and then one last trilogy to go. Now after the largely disappointing Darkwar I was prepared for the worst. But the Demonwar was something of a return to form for Feist. We’re not quite at the high level of the early books or the Serpentwar, but it’s definitely a lot better than the previous trilogy – so with any luck we’re in for a good end to the series. Time, and my next few reviews, will tell.

Rides a Dread Legion opens 10 years after the events of the Darkwar, in which magician Pug and our other heroes ventured to an Evil Parallel Dimension to defeat a Very Evil God. While various minor characters popped up and took up way too much screentime, the lasting consequences were a few reveals for the Grand Evil Plan that’s been bubbling in the background since Sethanon, the destruction of the Tsurani homeworld of Kelewan, and, unfortunately, the death of everyone’s favourite gambler Nakor. But Rides a Dread Legion soldiers on.

We are introduced to a new bevy of supporting characters, largely abandoning the extra focuses from the Darkwar (which is honestly fine by me) – though Kaspar, Tad, Zane and Jommy do show up from time to time. Jimmy the Hand III, however, finally takes the much more important role that he should have taken in the Darkwar, and provides us with plenty of casual thievery and skulduggery. Our new characters, though, are quite fun. We have Sandreena, a Knight-Adamant (basically a paladin) from the Order of Dala, who is pleasingly no-nonsense and practical. There is a minor element of ‘men writing women’ here – nothing award-worthy, but there are too many scenes where Sandreena laments how gorgeous she is for my liking. We also have Amirantha the conman/demonologist, who is very entertaining as well as showcasing a whole new school of magic – rare at this point in a very long series that is fundamentally about magicians. He’s also the little brother of Leso Varen/Sidi, everyone’s favourite mad necromancer, except Amirantha is nice. And there’s a third brother, Belasco, who is Even More Dangerous (because of course he is), and serves as one of our main antagonists. And then there are Gulamendis and Laromendis, the Space Elves.

Yeah, I should probably talk about the Space Elves.

There are a lot of elves running around Midkemia now. There are the original edhel (wood elves), the moredhel (dark elves), the eldar (high elves, who used to live on Kelewan but are now chilling in the forest), the glamredhel (‘mad’ elves, who are a bit bloodthirsty), and the ocedhel (foreign elves). Most recently, the Darkwar introduced the anoredhel, the Sun Elves, who hung out in some distant mountains guarding some very interesting angelic aliens. I was hoping for some more development of these angel-like entities in this book – it is, after all, the Demonwar – but we didn’t get any. (Apart from one line where a magician wonders: if there are demons, where are the angels? Which gives me hope for the future.) I assume Feist is saving that plot point for the very end.

What we got instead in this book was the introduction of the taredhel, the Star Elves, who have been off running an interstellar empire for the last few thousand years, but have also been being beaten up by demons for most of that time. Looking for a refuge, they build a rift to Midkemia – their original home – and start building a city to house all their refugees. Unfortunately for everyone else, they’re not actually very nice people. They’re big, strong, arrogant and powerful, and don’t intend to share their old homeworld… they intend to conquer it. It’s a bold step and a really interesting new potential antagonist for the series.

As this is, again, the Demonwar, not the SpaceElfWar, this potential conquest is left to stew while Pug fights demons. Which is a bit disappointing, but enough seeds were sown of a possibly inevitable fight that I’m largely satisfied. We get some great scenes of Tomas going full Dragonlord to cow the Space Elves into being friendly… for now. But largely the Space Elves – including POV characters Laromendis the illusionist and Gulamendis the other demonologist – serve as context for the seriousness of the imminent invasion of Many Demons, who have been annihilating their advanced interplanetary empire, and will surely wipe the floor with fantasy Midkemia.

Rides a Dread Legion is, like most first books in Feist’s later sub-series, largely worldbuilding and setup. We meet our new protagonists, hook them up with Pug and the Conclave of Shadows, and set them to investigating how to stop a war with the demons actually starting, while foiling the plots of Belasco the More Evil Wizard along the way. It’s a fun book, and Feist does a very good job of setting up the demons as a powerful threat, building on what he’d already done with the Serpentwar, where one demon nearly conquered the whole world. We visit strange new worlds, encounter strange new magics, and there are enough threats to pose even Pug a problem. To show this threat, Sorcerer’s Isle is burned down, again, this time by demons.

And then quite suddenly and brutally, Pug’s wife Miranda – magician and sass machine extraordinaire – dies. It’s not a big magic duel. It’s not a heroic sacrifice. She gets her throat torn out by a demon and just bleeds to death. Pug’s son Caleb is also killed in the fire. It is a genuine shock to both the readers and to the characters, and is just well written enough to not come off as a cheap hammering home of the threat, even though that’s of course what it’s meant to do. Losing Miranda hurts everyone, and makes sure we remember that not only is nobody safe, but that Pug literally had the Goddess of Death tell him that he would have to watch everybody he loves die back in the Serpentwar. And Feist hasn’t forgotten.

Tangent: the titles of these two books should really have been switched around. Apart from the fact that the titular Dread Legion only actually Rides out in book 2, the sentence flow just doesn’t make sense as published. But anyway.

At the Gates of Darkness picks up a year later, giving Pug and son Magnus enough time to be depressed, but not enough time to make any meaningful progress towards stopping the demons. The plot is actually fairly easy to gloss through, as it’s basically just more of the same from Dread Legion. Our heroes flit around planets looking for clues, the demons are evil, the Space Elves imply they’re going to wreck everyone at some point in the future, etc. etc. But Feist handles it well, picking up on lots of seemingly unimportant threads from the previous books in the way only he can. Remember that one dead demon we saw in Serpentwar 3? Yeah, that was actually critical to figuring out the demons’ plan. The desert fortress the Nighthawks were hanging out in back in Krondor: The Assassins? That’s the location of our final showdown, because you can’t write a place name like The Tomb of the Hopeless in The Valley of Lost Men and only use it once. I mean, good gods, Raymond, it was from a videogame spinoff 17 books ago and you’re still somehow making it relevant reading. My hat is tipped.

We have a satisfying enough final showdown with the demons and Belasco, with all our new protagonists taking a decent role. Amirantha uses his demonology, Gula and Laro fight demons the way only Space Elves can, but Sandreena also kicks some serious buttock. Jimmy III also does plenty of skulking for the public good. But unlike the Darkwar’s minor heroes, all of this lot feel important. We’ve explored their personal woes throughout these two books, and they were very nicely balanced: enough to make them rounded characters without taking up too much space, and more importantly intersecting with each other enough to make the presence of all of them at the end feel warranted. I like this crew. I hope we get more of them in the final trilogy.

Because we’d better get some tying up of loose ends in the final trilogy, that much is certain. Feist wraps up the demon invasion nicely, but yet again, Pug is left with more questions about the ‘Big Bad’ behind it all, and what their ultimate plan is. In terms of outstanding dangling plot threads, we have:

The aliens in the Peaks of the Quor who might be angels, and their elf guardiansThe Space Elves and their desire to conquer everythingHow Tomas is going to handle both the above sets of elvesWhat the hell Macros the Black was doing(Every time you think this one’s answered, he turns up again…)What’s going on on New Kelewan (something I felt was sorely neglected in this very Midkemia-centric book)And finally, the minor issue of who’s trying to destroy Midkemia and why

It’s a lot to cover in one trilogy. And it is only one trilogy. There are 3 books left, and while I have read the first one long ago, I can’t remember a single page of it. I’ve never read the last two.

There’s a lot to wrap up. But I reckon Feist can do it. Let’s see, shall we?