But Corwin has secret knowledge: in the shadow world of Avalon, where he once ruled, there exists a jeweler's rouge that will function in Amber as gunpowder should.

The immediate danger passes, but Dara threatens greater peril after walking the Pattern and revealing herself to be a creature of the Courts of Chaos, intent on destroying both Amber and the Shadows.

Avram Davidson gave the novel a lukewarm review, complaining that he did not "feel for any of [its] characters the slightest empathy, sympathy, or even osteopathy" and concluding that "there is nothing outrageously bad in [this] book of magic, intrigue, and warfare, but very little that is very good".

[1] Roger Zelazny wrote an explicit sex scene (by 1970s American publishing standards) between Corwin and Dara and was amused when the book's editor asked him to remove it so that sales to libraries would not be jeopardized.

[2] That deleted scene has never appeared with the novel but has been printed for the first time in The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume 3: This Mortal Mountain.