This series is still holding steady at very good but not great. In this particular book, I found myself more emotionally invested than I had been in before (the Seren Pedac - Trull Sengar / Trull Sengar - Onrack story lines were particularly well told, as was the Udinaas story line).

The one negative that seems to be cropping up more and more is a tendency to (lazily) rely on extended debates between two characters to illuminate themes in the novel. There are some fairly complex ideas going on in this series about relationships - friend / friend, lover / lover, siblings, master / slave, abused / abuser, conquered / conqueror, etc... and for the most part Eriskon does a great job of exploring these relationships within the plot of the book. More often though, these extended conversations--which read a bit like an overheard graduate students' conversation, are being used as a crutch to explain or develop themes.

I found, as well, that with so many characters, it often takes a lot longer for one characters storyline to reappear and, for the minor story lines, it was sometimes long enough that I had almost forgotten who the character was or what was happening--and so had to look at the list of characters in the front of the book to remind myself (which was annoying). Overall, though, the scope of both the world created and the ideas explored is more ambitious than (possibly) any other fantasy series I've read. I look forward to the last few books!