Transported to yet another world, he is rescued from a frozen river by a group of Neanderthals, and a voice comes from the harp, telling him that friends will search for him on the river. Mullet and Finch confront him, demanding that he give them the harp, but he refuses and appears again on the airship, which is hurtling toward the ground. He loses control of the airship and finds himself in a conservatory with a harp, which shrinks to the size of his palm. He sees Mullet and Finch again, however, and tries to escape in a hijacked airship. With the help of other men from Earth, he rescues the princess, then flees from the angry Martians. His memory does not even extend to his time in the chess-land. He recognizes the chosen woman as the winged woman he met earlier, but he cannot remember when he met her. They find themselves on Mars, which is inhabited by creatures who demand a sacrifice of a princess from the planet Venus each year. He escapes with a young boy he met at an inn, whose name is Gally. He discovers himself in a place similar to the chess-land in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, where he is caught in the battle between the red and the white, as well as hunted by Finch and Mullet. Paul flees in terror and falls through a hole in space. There, he finds the bird-woman but Finch and Mullet have pursued him, and they have been transformed into monstrous shapes: Mullet is grossly fat and Finch has no eyes. Eventually, Paul runs off into no-man's land. Two of his comrades, Finch and Mullet, begin to express doubts about his sanity. He wakes from the experience to find himself back in the trenches, but realizes the experience was not a dream when he discovers the feather. In what he at first believes to be a dream or hallucination, he meets a woman with wings, who gives him a feather. The first character introduced is a man called Paul Jonas, apparently an infantryman on the Western Front of the First World War. The book tells the story of a group of ordinary people who are drawn into the network to stop them. These men include: Felix Jongleur, who was a child at the time of the First World War and is currently the world's oldest man Jiun Biao, a Chinese economist described as 'the terror of Asia' and Robert Wells, the owner of Telemorphix, the world's largest telecommunications company. The novel tells the story of a frightening virtual network created by a group of rich men known as The Grail Brotherhood. The 'Otherland' refers to a virtual world or worlds and the 'City Of Golden Shadow' is a city in the Otherland network to which the main characters are being summoned. City of Golden Shadow, originally published as Otherland, is a science fiction novel by American writer Tad Williams, the first book in his Otherland series.

Tad williams city of golden shadow