She followed him into the keep and they passed the kitchen workers preparing a meal for those who hadn’t eaten already. Brandos and his wife sat quietly in the corner, her head resting on his shoulder, holding hands. She had seen him go off to fight enough times that she knew there was nothing to say, apparently, so they luxuriated in the moment together in silence.

Amirantha led Sandreena up the stairs of the tower in which he had been housed, to the room set aside for his use. In the room they found Gulamendis avidly reading the volume. He looked up and smiled, the first openly friendly and genuinely excited expression either of them had seen on the elf since his first coming to the island.

“This is amazing!” he said. “Every time I reread it, I find new things about which to wonder.”

Amirantha said, “If you don’t mind, why don’t you explain to Sandreena why this book is important?”

“First, it is genuine,” said the elf. He slowly reached out and said, “Give me your hand,” to Sandreena. He gently placed it on the book and in a second she snatched it back.

“Demon,” she said. “I can feel it. It reeks.”

Like a delighted child, Gulamendis asked, “Where to begin?”

Amirantha asked, “Did you make any sense of that battle you and your brother witnessed on Telesan?”

“I think so,” said Gulamendis. “It would probably be better if I showed you.”

He moved the book over and opened the back cover, lying it flat on the desk. He carefully unfolded the last page, until a map was revealed four times the size of a normal page. The map had been drawn in a vivid style, in garish colored inks, with many illustrations of demons of all stripes along the edges, with small narratives below each drawing telling something about that creature.

But Sandreena was instantly taken with the map itself, for it was a massive disk, divided into two circles, outer and inner, with the center circle being again divided into segments. “This outer circle is where the two of us have plied our craft,” he said to Sandreena, while he pointed at Amirantha. “The beings we summon from here are what you most likely have faced before in your travels. The author of this work calls them the ‘lesser infernals.’”

“Lesser?” Sandreena shook her head in disbelief. “I’ve confronted some very big and nasty demons in my time.”

Gulamendis nodded slightly and said, “As have we all. No, lesser doesn’t mean strength or magic power, I am certain. It’s about organization, or rather lack of organization. It’s a demon-eat-demon realm.”

Sandreena put her hand near the map, just outside the border, and said, “What’s here, beyond the edge?”