So overall I really enjoyed this one. The worldbuilding is pretty awesome and very creative. I never knew I wanted to know what kind of life would evolve under a pulsar.
I did struggle to picture how everything worked on this planet; what the creatures actually looked like, the size differences, how they can just yank quills free and jam them back into each other at random, what the snow paste was and how they created it/transferred it and all that. But I'm very glad Künsken didn't take time to explain everything. Just give it to me as-is and I'll figure it out eventually.
I like the story for the most part, Mok's acceptance of what his role must be in order to accomplish his goal, and his slow understanding of friendship truly means, and how that adds to honor rather than detracts from it. It was all very well done. However, I also had a problem with this because Künsken spends so much time developing this beautifully alien world full of creatures completely foreign to human beings... and then he gives them all human desires and human concepts and human goals. Now I get that, if they're made to be completely alien to us then we probably wouldn't understand them and there would be no story. But here we basically get, I am a chitinous-like creature with many legs and long quills that soak up microwaves from the pulsar overhead and I've earned these massive claws... for being a great assassin who's full of honor. Suddenly we've gone from alien to kung-fu.
And I don't think the concepts necessarily need to be changed, but, for example, there are many different words and different notions of "honor" in the many societies of Earth. Could Künsken not have just made up his own term for "honor" and then displayed the basic concepts of it and we would get the idea? I just feel like everything else was so deliciously alien, couldn't the basic concepts and goals be a little foreign, too?
Still, the story was good, I have no beefs with it, and I loved the world, so like I said, overall I really liked this one.