This book chronicles some of the time Caramon and Raistlin spent traveling as mercenaries after Raistlin took the tests at the Tower of High Sorcery and before the War of the Lance.
This is now the 15th book I have read in a row, and honestly I was a little let down. I wanted it to dive deeper into the brothers and what drives them. Maybe my expectations were too high, and I will admit to that.
It is set a few months after those famed tests that turned the skin of Raistlin’s skin and changed his eyes to see things only as they die. He is still getting used to his body being shattered and is haunted by dreams of a certain dark elf from those tests.
The brothers are traveling with a Kender which is always good for comic relief (not Tasslehoff).
The trio come upon a town that is having a problem. There are signs up asking for someone to come in and fix it. They quickly discover all the towns cats are missing, Caramon finds it funny and doesn’t care, Raistlin wants to dig into it.
Apparently there is a prophecy involve a gate and the weird missing cats.
The cats are missing because of a gate, a gate that leads to something that could let someone through into this world.
I don’t want to throw any spoilers out because I found this book more predictable than any DragonLance books before.
The Kender of course being a Kender gets into trouble, but also kind of solves the whole problem because of his natural curiosity. The entire book spends a lot of time foreshadowing things we know, which as a reader I guess is ok if you haven’t read the other DragonLance books, but if you have about 1/3 of the book was repetitious.
The one thing I did find interesting, it did start to hint at Raistlin’s thirst for power. Part of me was hoping we would learn more about what drove that, but perhaps in other books later in the series.
This book won’t stop me from reading other DragonLance books on my quest to get through all of them, and yeah I enjoyed it, but I really wanted more from it.
