Fantasy novel main character Ghendt? finds tower, travels time, fights against dark force

Question

I'm struggling to find the title of this book I read a few times growing up and really enjoyed. Main character, pretty sure is named Ghendt, is in the Stone age, hunting, and comes across a tower. Inside he meets some sort of divine force that starts training him. I think it takes the form of a cat outside the tower, and he refers to her as "Em" since she has emerald eyes, and when he's outside the tower she can communicate telepathically with him. He then travels through doors in the tower to different time periods like the Bronze and Iron age. He has to find certain people and affect events in certain ways, while there is a dark force with its own avatars working against him.

Tried all sorts of ways to Google that but coming up blank. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be happy to hear, would like to read the book again, maybe get the kid interested in reading as well.

Answer 1

You're remembering a stand-alone book from David Eddings - The Redemption of Althalus, first published in 2000.

The story tells the meeting of a thief (Althalus the protagonist) and the antagonist Ghend. Ghend attempts to trick Altahlus into stealing a book from a house at the end of the world, so that Ghend's master (Daeva) can rule the world.

Althalus travels to the house and that is where he meets the cat you remember, who he calls Em or Emmy (short for Emerald) due to the colour of the cat's eyes.

Emmy turns out to be a Goddess (Dweia) and she keeps Althalus in the house and helps him learn to read the book he was sent to steal.

The rest of the story tells how Althalus, Em/Dweia recruit a party of others destined to help them fight Ghend and how they overcome the threat of Ghend and Daeva.

Em/Dweia communicates with Althalus via telepathy frequently, and over long distances, as they and their party of comrades thwart the plans of Ghend across a number of ages as you recall.