The King Beyond the Gate

The story

Its back-story gives away, in passing, part of how Legend ends.

A hundred years after the siege of Dros Delnoch, the Drenai are ruled by Ceska, a councillor who seized power and keeps it by terror. His instruments are the Joinings, towering creatures made by melding men with beasts, and the Dark Templars, priests whose sorcery and swordsmanship make them the most feared men in the land. The Dragon, the elite regiment that might have stopped him, was disbanded and later destroyed when its veterans tried to resist. Ananais, one of its finest officers, was thrown into Ceska's arena against a Joining and survived with his face ruined.

Tenaka Khan also served in the Dragon, but he was out of the country when his comrades rose, and has been living in Ventria. He is descended from Nadir khans on one side and Drenai nobility on the other, which means the Nadir despise him for his Drenai blood and the Drenai distrust him for his Nadir blood. When his wife dies of illness he has nothing left to hold him, and he comes back meaning to kill Ceska himself. On the way he takes up with Renya, a young woman travelling with an old priest, and finds Ananais, masked and bitter. What began as an assassination becomes a rising around the mountain town of Skoda, where Rayvan, a woman who claims Druss as an ancestor, is already leading the resistance.

The company that forms is a mixed one. Decado, the Dragon's deadliest swordsman, has put his blade away and is working as a gardener at a remote temple. Scaler is a thief, nicknamed for his ability to climb almost any building. Skoda can bloody Ceska's forces but cannot beat them alone, and Tenaka comes to see that the only army large enough to matter is out on the steppes, among people who have little reason to follow him. The second half of the book turns on that decision, and on what it means to raise a Nadir army against a Drenai tyrant when you belong fully to neither side.

Reading notes

Gemmell's second novel, published a year after Legend, set the pattern for the whole Drenai series: a jump of generations and an almost entirely new cast, with the earlier book surviving only as history and song. It keeps Legend's central situation of a small force against huge odds, but takes it out of the fortress into a war in the mountains, and it gives its lead a divided identity where Legend's heroes had straightforward loyalties. Tenaka's position between two peoples is the most interesting idea here, and later books build on it.

It is rougher than Legend. The cast is large and some of it is thin; more than one reviewer has found several characters forgettable, the villains are evil without complication, and the final stretch is hurried after a long build-up. Decado is the strongest single thread, a killer trying to live quietly among plants and priests, and Gemmell would come back to the man who tries to put his sword down many times in later books. The Joinings are a fine piece of horror, more frightening than anything in Legend. It can be read on its own, but it lands better after Legend, and it should be read before Quest for Lost Heroes, which deals with its consequences.