Join me as I review The Broken Sphere by Nigel Findley, live! Share your thoughts on this fifth novel in the Cloakmaster Cycle. You can pick up The Broken Sphere here: https://www.amazon.com/Broken-Sphere-Spelljammer-Cloakmaster-Cycle/dp/1560765968/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1RO93EH7UN36R&keywords=the+broken+sphere&qid=1658249993&sprefix=the+broken+sphere%2Caps%2C113&sr=8-1
About The Broken Sphere
The Cloakmaster Cycle follows Teldin Moore’s search for answers to questions revolving around the mysterious cloak he’s been bequeathed. In The Broken Sphere, Teldin’s magic amulet allows him to “see” through the eyes of the great ship Spelljammer, giving him clues to its location.
Review
Intro
Welcome to another DragonLance Saga review episode. It is Bakukal, Fierswelt the 22th, my name is Adam and today I am going to give you my Spoiler review of The Broken Sphere by Nigel Findley. I will be spoiling the story, so if you don’t want to know it, stop watching now! I would like to take a moment and thank the members of this YouTube channel, and invite you to consider becoming a member by visiting the link in the description below. You can even pick up Dragonlance gaming materials using my affiliate link. This is my perspective only, and if you have any thoughts or disagree with mine, I invite you to share them in YouTube chat.
Teldin Moore is alone. The Elf legions gave him a line of credit so he bought a single person spelljammer and traveled to the planet Crescent in Heartspace. There is a Great Archive there he is wanting to search for information about the Spelljammer and The Broken Sphere. There he meets a half elf named Djan Alantri who is a child of ‘the path’, a religious organization on this planet. Djan saves Teldin from ‘would be’ assaulting thugs. They agree to meet for wine after Teldin visits the library. He collects a lot of information from the Gnome run library and meets Djan for a drink. He decides to change ships and hire a crew, inviting Djan on board.
They buy a new squid ship and hire a crew, only to discover someone is sending mercenaries after Teldin. He then discovers Julia from the second book, and is looking for him with a heroic looking man named Beth-Abz. Teldin gets warning imagery from Beth, but ignores it. He listens to the incredible confidence of Julia finding Teldin and is convinced it’s sincere, explaining that there is something about Teldin that is shaping reality, it could be the cloak or Teldin himself. They are hired on and this leaves Teldin wondering who sent those men after him.
Teldin was on his way to the harbormaster when neogi death spiders in the atmosphere began battling the local authorities, so Teldin fled to his ship and demanded that the ship take off immediately. They seemed to have successfully evaded the Neogi, and were headed to the edge of the Heartspace sphere. Captain Berglund was hired by an unknown person that knew exactly where and when Teldin would bring his ship the Boundless Possibilities out of the sphere and the ship was sabotaged from on board, so the pirate engaged them as expected. Teldin was stunned but on his way through wildspace, he confronted Beth-Ahz, and it turned out that he was actually a beholder that believed in individualism, rather than the hive mind of his species. Teldin made him show the crew who he really was and most everyone accepted it. Now Beth-Ahz was Teldin’s only defense against the dolphin battleship pirates. But he was more than enough.
They decimated the pirates and captured them, demanding to know who hired them and why. All Captain Berglund knew was that he was supposed to abduct Teldin, keeping him unconscious and deliver him to the Illithid homeworld. Knowing there is a saboteur onboard, but not wanting to spook them, they keep their eyes open and release the pirates to their broken ship. They continue on to the planet of Nex, as was the original plan. It is not on star charts but it was noted in the library, so Teldin is confident it will be there. They get to the sphere to find that it is very small. They enter it and it’s pitch black, no stars or anything visible. Teldin consults his cloud and discovers a gaseous world and at the center of the sphere the planet Nex is surrounded by space dust. They approach it through the dust to see it is orbited by many tiny suns. They map a way through only to find a sun altering its course catching up to them. Teldin takes control and evades the sun, and once they are in the atmosphere, something on land begins firing at them, taking down their ship!
Teldin narrowly steers the ship into a meadow on the planet Nex’s surface but the ship is destroyed, and cannot fly. They note the world around them is strange and alien in every sense of the word. They begin to explore and come across a sentient species with six limbs and three eyes one on each side of its triangular shaped body. They refer to them as trilaterals, and they are a primitive species that can only communicate roughly with Teldin through his cloak. He follows them to their wise one who tells them that a species came to their planet and gave sentinece to the world, which now takes care of them. This is why the sun and blast from the planet took down the Boundless. It thought they were dangerous. Teldin asks them to help repair his ship, and they agree but then insist he leaves.
Once outside of the planet, they realize they have no leads, so Teldin uses the medallion that merges his consciousness with the Spelljammer. He discovers it in the crystal sphere of Vistaspace moving through a fire giant planet called Garrish. It’s two months away from them! Knowing the Spelljammer will probably be gone if they travel there, but realizing they have nothing else to go off of, they head out. On the way I am thinking, but what about the saboteur from the beginning of the novel? And then one of the helmsmen came up dead. So the sabbateur is still at work and has moved to murder. They are unable to determine who it was by the time they arrive. They get close to the planet to see metallic ships exit the fire planet. They begin communicating with Teldin telepathically! It turns out they know of the Spelljammer and tell Teldin where the broken sphere is that the Spelljammer returns to periodically but it would require him to track magnetic fields in the phlogiston, something mortals cannot do.
Suddenly Dargeth approaches Teldin to report someone was tampering with the catapult. Teldin goes to ask Julia if she saw anyone messing with the catapult because Dargeth said she was helping him. Julia denies that she was involved and leaves. Then Lucinus tells Teldin that he did see Julia messing with it. Now Teldin is convinced that Julia is the saboteur. She mysteriously appeared where he was and now mysterious stuff is happening. He has been duped so much by women he feels ashamed for letting it happen again. That evening he meets the beholder Beth-Abz who begins to tell him he saw two people talking about sabotage but before he could get the names out, he died of poisoning, and nearly destroyed the ship in his death throes. That night Teldin wakes to hear someone sneaking into his room and toward him. He grabs a secret crossbow and shoots the figure, which turned out to be Julia with her sword out. Dying, she asked if it was dead. Stunned, Teldin turned to see a magical spider leap at him. It damages him, but he was able to kill it ultimately.
Now he knows Julia wasn’t the saboteur and he killed her for no reason, and the fact that he loved her destroys him. This point in the book was so tense I couldn’t put it down, and when Teldin realizes the truth it hits me really hard. Furious Teldin hears screams and the real saboteurs, Dargeth & Lucinus, lit a signal fire to alert Grampion in a nearby nautilus ship to attack, as they had killed all helmsmen. The nautilus attacks, ramming the boundless, and the mercenaries attack. As the Boundless’ people are dying, Teldin changes shape into Dargeth and goes to the nautilus asking to see the captain. The captain is unaware and Teldin captures him, revealing him to be an Arcane, and the brother of T’k’Pek from book two. His name is T’k’Res and he is trying to stop Teldin from getting to the Spelljammer to ensure the Arcane’s monopoly in magical technology and help generation in the universe. It all comes down to business. All the deaths that Teldin was the inadvertant cause of, all the people he loved and cared for murdered for money.
Teldin eventually forces the arcane and his crew to switch ships and give him the means of navigating to the Broken sphere. They finally refuel after taking the Nautilus and renaming it Julia, and head out to the Broken sphere. Once they arrive they see the fabled Spelljammer, just as it turns to them and begins an attack run.
This was an incredible novel. It had me hooked from page one and wouldn’t let me go. I finished it faster than all of the other novels and it’s the second best in the series after the first novel. I feel like I truly understand Teldin Moore and I want to know what happens in the final novel in this and all Spelljammer novels. If you like space fantasy, murder-mysteries, spelljammer, or sci-fi, you will love this story!
Outro
And that’s it for my review of The Broken Sphere by Nigel Findley. What do you think about the anthology? Did you have a favorite story in the collection? You can email me at info@dlsaga.com or comment below.
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