Big, bad, brutal – from the moment we first meet him, shackled alongside Felisin, it’s clear that the apparently thuggish Baudin is a stone-cold killer.

I know they're supposed to be other worlds or smth, but how do people keep entering them and getting lost? Fiddler, Crokus, Servant, and Apsalar find their way to Malaz City, where the Deadhouse’s Guardian Gothos reveals that Icarium is his son and his crime was to wound a warren while trying to free Gothos from the Azath (though Gothos wanted to be there). And the narrative while there is certainly a narrative payoff, no doubt, the reward didn't make up for the complexity of the climb.

We’re a collaborative review site run by volunteers who love Fantasy, Sci-fi, Horror, and everything in-between. The treasurer turns out to be in league with pursuing “pirates” and Elan and Kalam work with the Marines on board to foil his plan. The art director was so ignorant of spoilers that they decided to make sure the cover depicts the most impactful and the biggest event of the book. His warlocks Nil and Nether at one point open a tunnel into a raider encampment to destroy it, incidentally revealing water underground, and learn that a Semk tribesman has a piece of the destroyed Semk god sewn into him. Mappo reveals to Fiddler that he and Icarium have found carvings in Pust’s temple that resemble the Deck of Dragons, but with ancient Holds rather than modern Houses, and suspect that the shapeshifters’ Path of Hands may end at the temple itself and that Pust hopes that he and Icarium will defend it.

I’ve mentioned in my Gardens of the Moon review that the climax sequences felt anti-climactic, especially after having such an epic scope to the overall book. Coltaine insists that Duiker keep the bottle Dujek sent him because it’s more important that the empire’s memory survive than its soldiers.

Maybe I am being dense, but this is the second of his books that I have read, and I have the pervasive feeling as I progress through this series that I am missing something important, but I can’t put my finger on what precisely that is.