Earlier books in the series are worth reading and have an amazing story and cast, but the series should have ended there. This book drags on, building more and more onto a story that had already reached the point of a satisfying ending. The new storyline and added characters could have shined in a spin off series perhaps, but being tacked onto the end and treated as a continuation lowers the quality of the work as a whole. The fact that no one stays dead is an added issue I had with the book, it cheapens any potentially emotional scenes because I began to just expect them to magically appear again a few chapters later. ( )

Unfortunately, after 3 books of 5/5, in this one the series has run out of steam, imagination and pace. For 35 chapters nothing happens, then, boom, in 5 chapters everything happens. The antagonists are lame and undescript, the story is slow but straightforward, lacking the great twists in the previous books, a love relationship is awkward and not believable, other interactions are not credible, some characters are completely undeveloped, there is too much useless talk, and so on. A malus for me (though a bonus for some other readers) - the Goblin - One-Eye conflict gets more stage time, though I find their endless feud unfunny, unimaginative, annoying and, in this volume, a filler in a book already mostly composed of fillers. ( )

Tras la devastadora batalla en la Torre de Hechizo, Matasanos conduce la menguada Compañía Negra al sur, en busca de los Anales Perdidos. Los Anales serán devueltos a Khatovar, a mil doscientos kilómetros de distancia, una ciudad que puede que exista sólo en la leyenda… Ya que es el origen de las primeras Compañías Libres.
Cada paso de La Compañía es acosado por sombrías figuras y, mientras siguen avanzando, siempre hacia el sur, a través de una jungla infestada de alimañas, ríos llenos de piratas sedientos de sangre y ciudades, muertas y vivas, su número crece hasta que su fuerza se cuenta por miles. Pero son vigilados constantemente por los Maestros de las Sombras… un nuevo y devastador enemigo.

This surprised me by being the first "Black Company" novel to end on a cliffhanger rather than a reasonably resolved plot, but I didn't mind it at all -- I was going to read the second half of this duology next in any case. Croaker remains a wonderful protagonist and narrator, possibly even more so now that he's in charge and it is truly 'his' story. The new viewpoint character added here (Willow Swan) admittedly doesn't quite match up to the stellar secondary viewpoints in the previous books, but I still enjoyed those chapters a good bit, too. It was also fun how the first hundred pages or so parallelled the time frame of the events of "The Silver Spike" (of which the protagonists are ignorant), giving an extra layer to the early part of the story. Which, considering it boils down to "people travel quite far and then finally get sucked into a local war", was engrossing and fun from beginning to end. My sole complaint about the world is that too many idioms, expressions, concepts or even single words feel too fetched from real history. Someone can't look "caucasic" in a world without the Caucasus mountains, as a random for instance. But it's a relatively rare and definitely minor issue that would need to happen much more frequently to truly take me out of the narrative. Two thumbs up, and I sally happily forth to the next volume. ( )

What an ending!!!!! ( )