Servant of the Shard by R.A. Salvatore

Minor spoilers possible!


Servant of the Shard by R.A. Salvatore is the third in the Paths of Darkness series. It continues right where The Silent Blade has ended. Artemis Entreri, has risen to the leadership of House Basadoni, the most powerful in Calimport. No outsider knows that he is sponsored by the sly Jarlaxle and his mercenary group of Drow - dark elves, who are reputedly treacherous and full contempt for rivvil, the non-drow.

Entreri has a problem. Though favored by Jarlaxle himself, he is hated by his two top-lieutenants, Kimmuriel and Rai-gy (I keep to the old spelling). Now Jarlaxle is slipping under the influence of a powerful, self-aware artifact with its own ambitions - Crenshinibon, the Crystal Shard - and is in danger to be replaced by one of his underlings. Entreri knows, he won't survive a change in leadership. So he undertakes the difficult task to save Jarlaxle. For that he has to outwit the drow lieutenants, the Crystal Shard and Jarlaxle himself.

This setup promises us an intelligent plot and R.A. Salvatore delivers. The flows of power among the dark elves and House Basadoni, greed for power, treachery and wholly unexpected loyalty are the ingredients for an exciting novel, at least for the first two thirds of the book.

Jarlaxle is anything but the stereotypical drow and Entreri wins through insights in his characters. He becomes more complex when he starts breaking his no-friends-rule without turning away from his cynical world view. Kimmuriel and Rai-gy are also interesting written. The rest of the characters remain two-dimensional.

The story remains exciting until Salvatore brings in the priest Cadderly. He had this character established in his Cleric Quintet series as powerful good force in the Forgotten Realms. Personally I think the Cleric Quintet were R.A. Salvatore's weakest novels and Cadderly doesn't convince me. I don't claim to know all the D&D rules but I expect that a good-aligned priest in supposed high standing with his god can use better methods to gather information than torturing demons. Cadderly appears to me as hypocritical bigott. His wife Danica also seems annoyingly self-righteous.

R.A. Salvatore would have done better to leave them out of this book. Anyway, the showdown is somewhat anti-climatic. Killing off a few minor, but interesting characters isn't enough. Well, if he had killed off Cadderly instead...

To come to a conclusion isn't easy. The first two thirds of R. A. Salvatore's Servant of the Shard are great and I will re-read them certainly several times. But I just didn't like the last part of the book. I now understand the readers better who say that evil or neutral characters in the Forgotten Realms are far more interesting than the good-aligned ones. Because that's the best summarization for this book.