With a slight turn of his head to indicate acceptance, the Conjurer indicated his brother should lead the way. Into a very dark night two elves ventured, neither of them certain of where they where headed, but both knowing there was nothing good being left behind.

Dawn found Gulamendis and Laromendis sitting under the shelter of an overhang, eyes smarting from the acidic smoke that hung on the hillside like an ill-conceived cloud of suffering. The three volcanoes were belching smoke and ash into the sky on a regular basis, and at one point Laromendis had observed it would be just their luck to reach their destination when one of the three erupted, destroying the portal. He was uncertain if it would be fate’s crueler irony to have them burned alive with the portal, or to stand on a relatively safe outcropping watching their last hope of escape go up in flames. He was inclined to think the second a more painful outcome.

His brother merely gave him a withering look and said nothing. As soon as he could, Gulamendis avidly began reading the volume he had purloined from the ancient keep. Finally he said, “As I understand this, these people, called the Edhara, were just beginning to experiment with portals. They had created the one we are seeking in a cave—I hope not too far from here—and had discovered a few relatively benign worlds. Then the demons found them.”

“Found them?”

“Remember what Pug said about the nature of rifts?”

“Not really,” said his brother. “I think that was a conversation you had while I was learning some things from that very odd creature from that world whose name I can’t pronounce. The fellow with the blue skin and those things coming out of his neck, but whose illusions…they were stunning.”

“From you, my not so modest brother, that is high praise,” said Gulamendis.

“I’ll grant him his due; he was very good.”

“Rifts have a loadstone quality. As loadstones draw iron to them, rifts tend to draw other rifts. So if you have an established portal from one world to the next, if someone is casting about for a random destination, there’s a better than average chance it will connect to a world that already has a portal on it.”

“I wonder if that’s why the galasmancer created Hub?”

His brother shrugged. “As the Regent’s Meet didn’t see fit to consult with me on the matter, I can only speculate.” His finger stabbed a page. “From here to the end it’s written very hastily.

“It reads much as the reports we had when our people first encountered the demons; massive assaults in chaotic fashion, no quarter asked or given, mindless wave after wave of demon of every stripe.”

“Obviously something is different,” said Laromendis. “Those demons we saw being slaughtered, and those in the keep to the north…they are nothing we’ve seen before.”