Winter Warriors

The story

The Drenai have finished conquering Ventria. Their king, Skanda, has sealed the victory by marrying Axiana, daughter of the Ventrian emperor he defeated, and she is expecting his heir. With another campaign in prospect, Skanda is also trimming his army. Around two thousand older soldiers are being sent home, among them the veteran general Banelion, known as the White Wolf, and three men who have served under him for most of their adult lives.

Nogusta is a black swordsman from a family that bred horses for the Drenai army, and a talisman he wears gives him glimpses of what is coming. Kebra the Bowman is still one of the finest archers alive, though his eyes are starting to fail. Bison is a vast, bald wrestler in his sixties with a drooping moustache, a gap-toothed grin and no instinct at all for keeping quiet.

Something else has taken hold in Usa, the Ventrian capital. A dying sorcerer, looking for a cure, has let Anharat back into the world: a demon lord banished long ago, with the rest of his race, by his own twin brother. A prophecy holds that the demons will return on the deaths of three kings, and the last of the three is Axiana's unborn son. The hunters sent after him are the Krayakin, undead riders who can recover from almost any wound a mortal weapon gives them.

The first to sense the danger is the queen's midwife, Ulmenetha, a priestess of the Source. The defence falls to whoever happens to be close by: the three old soldiers, a young officer called Dagorian, the Ventrian swordsman Antikas Karios and a handful of street orphans. Most of the novel is a pursuit, with a queen close to her time, a haunted forest to cross and an enemy far stronger than the people guarding her.

Reading notes

Winter Warriors was the eighth Drenai book published and needs none of the others. The cast is new and the war is its own; the older history it mentions is there for colour. That makes it one of the easiest ways into Gemmell, and it shows him doing what he did best, which is putting plain loyalty under impossible pressure to see whether it holds.

Its real subject is age. Gemmell had written old heroes before, Druss above all, but here he has three of them, and each has a body that is letting him down and a past that has not finished with him. Kebra's failing eyes and Nogusta's losses get more attention than the chase strictly needs, and that is where the book is strongest. The orphans who attach themselves to the old men supply the warmth, and at times the sentiment runs close to the surface. The demon plot is more conventional, and readers who come for the supernatural may find it the thinner half.

A note on placing it. Banelion, the general called the White Wolf here, has nothing to do with Gemmell's later novel White Wolf. And although the book came out between The Legend of Deathwalker and Hero in the Shadows, it is set near the far end of the Drenai timeline, about three centuries after Legend on the fan-compiled timeline that was talked through with Gemmell. The Ventrian emperor Gorben and his general Bodasen, figures from Druss's lifetime, are mentioned only as history. Its demon mythology also links it to Hero in the Shadows, which is worth reading alongside, though neither book depends on the other.