Dust of Dreams (Excerpt)

PROLOGUE

Elan Plain, west of Kolanse

     THERE WAS LIGHT, AND THEN THERE WAS HEAT. He knelt, carefully taking each brittle fold in his hands, ensuring that every crease was perfect, that nothing of the baby was exposed to the sun. He drew the hood in until little more than a fist-?sized hole was left for her face, her features grey smudges in the darkness, and then he gently picked her up and settled her into the fold of his left arm. There was no hardship in this.

Bantam Press (UK)

     They’d camped near the only tree in any direction, but not under it. The tree was a gamleh tree and the gamlehs were angry with people. In the dusk of the night before, its branches had been thick with fluttering masses of grey leaves, at least until they drew closer. This morning the branches were bare.

     Facing west, Rutt stood holding the baby he had named Held. The grasses were colourless. In places they had been scoured away by the dry wind, wind that had then carved the dust out round their roots to expose the pale bulbs so the plants withered and died. After the dust and bulbs had gone, sometimes gravel was left. Other times it was just bedrock, black and gnarled. Elan Plain was losing its hair, but that was something Badalle might say, her green eyes fixed on the words in her head. There was no question she had a gift, but some gifts, Rutt knew, were curses in disguise.

     Badalle walked up to him now, her sun-charred arms thin as stork necks, the hands hanging at her sides coated in dust and looking oversized beside her skinny thighs. She blew to scatter the flies crusting her mouth and intoned:

         ’Rutt he holds Held Wraps her good
         In the morning
         And then up he stands—’

     ’Badalle,’ he said, knowing she was not finished with her poem but knowing, as well, that she would not be rushed, ‘we still live.’

     She nodded. These few words of his had become a ritual between them, although the ritual never lost its taint of surprise, its faint disbelief. The ribbers had been especially hard on them last night, but the good news was that maybe they had finally left the Fathers behind.

     Rutt adjusted the baby he’d named Held in his arm, and then he set out, hobbling on swollen feet. Westward, into the heart of the Elan.

     He did not need to look back to see that the others were following. Those who could, did. The ribbers would come for the rest. He’d not asked to be the head of the snake. He’d not asked for anything, but he was the tallest and might be he was the oldest. Might be he was thirteen, could be he was fourteen.

         Behind him Badalle said,

         ’And walks he starts
         Out of that morning
         With Held in his arms
         And his ribby tail
         It snakes out
         Like a tongue
         From the sun.
         You need the longest
         Tongue
         When searching for
         Water
         Like the sun likes to do . . .’

     Badalle watched him for a time, watched as the others fell into his wake. She would join the ribby snake soon enough. She blew at the flies, but of course they came right back, clustering round the sores puffing her lips, hopping up to lick at the corners of her eyes. She had been a beauty once, with these green eyes and her long fair hair like tresses of gold. But beauty bought smiles for only so long. When the larder gapes empty, beauty gets smudged. ‘And the flies,’ she whispered, ‘make patterns of suffering. And suffering is ugly.’

     She watched Rutt. He was the head of the snake. He was the fangs, too, but that last bit was for her alone, her private joke.

     This snake had forgotten how to eat.

     She’d been among the ones who’d come up from the south, from the husks of homes in Korbanse, Krosis and Kanros. Even the isles of Otpelas. Some, like her, had walked along the coast of the Pelasiar Sea, and then to the western edge of Stet which had once been a great forest, and there they found the wooden road, Stump Road they sometimes called it. Trees cut on end to make flat circles, pounded into rows that went on and on. Other children then arrived from Stet itself, having walked the old stream beds wending through the grey tangle of shattered tree-?fall and diseased shrubs. There were signs that Stet had once been a forest to match its old name which was Forest Stet, but Badalle was not entirely convinced—all she could see was a gouged wasteland, ruined and ravaged. There were no trees standing anywhere. They called it Stump Road, but other times it was Forest Road, and that too was a private joke.

     Of course, someone had needed lots of trees to make the road, so maybe there really had once been a forest there. But it was gone now.

     At the northern edge of Stet, facing out on to the Elan Plain, they had come upon another column of children, and a day later yet another one joined them, down from the north, from Kolanse itself, and at the head of this one there had been Rutt. Carrying Held. Tall, his shoulders, elbows, knees and ankles protruding and the skin round them slack and stretched. He had large, luminous eyes. He still had all his teeth, and when the morning arrived, each morning, he was there, at the head. The fangs, and the rest just followed.

     They all believed he knew where he was going, but they didn’t ask him since the belief was more important than the truth, which was that he was just as lost as all the rest.

         ’All day Rutt holds Held
         And keeps her
         Wrapped
         In his shadow.
         It’s hard
         Not to love Rutt
         But Held doesn’t
         And no one loves Held
         But Rutt.’

     Visto had come from Okan. When the starvers and the bone-?skinned inquisitors marched on the city his mother had sent him running, hand in hand with his sister who was two years older than he was, and they’d run down streets between burning buildings and screams filled the night and the starvers kicked in doors and dragged people out and did terrible things to them, while the bone-?skins watched on and said it was necessary, everything here was necessary.

     They’d pulled his sister out of his grip, and it was her scream that still echoed in his skull. Each night since then, he had ridden it on the road of sleep, from the moment his exhaustion took him until the moment he awoke to the dawn’s pale face.

     He ran for what seemed forever, westward and away from the starvers. Eating what he could, savaged by thirst, and when he’d outdistanced the starvers the ribbers showed up, huge packs of gaunt dogs with red-?rimmed eyes and no fear of anything. And then the Fathers, all wrapped in black, who plunged into the ragged camps on the roads and stole children away, and once he and a few others had come upon one of their old night-?holds and had seen for themselves the small split bones mottled blue and grey in the coals of the hearth, and so understood what the Fathers did to the children they took.

     Visto remembered his first sight of Forest Stet, a range of denuded hills filled with torn-?up stumps, roots reminding him of one of the bone-?yards that ringed the city that had been his home, left after the last of the livestock had been slaughtered. And at that moment, looking upon what had once been a forest, Visto had realized that the entire world was now dead. There was nothing left and nowhere to go.

     Yet onward he trudged, now just one among what must be tens of thousands, maybe even more, a road of children leagues long, and for all that died along the way, others arrived to take their place. He had not imagined that so many children existed. They were like a great herd, the last great herd, the sole source of food and nourishment for the world’s last, desperate hunters.

     Visto was fourteen years old. He had not yet begun his growth-?spurt and now never would. His belly was round and rock hard, protruding so that his spine curved deep just above his hips. He walked like a pregnant woman, feet splayed, bones aching. He was full of Satra Riders, the worms inside his body endlessly swimming and getting bigger by the day. When they were ready—soon—they would pour out of him. From his nostrils, from the corners of his eyes, from his ears, from his belly button, his penis and his anus, and from his mouth. And to those who witnessed, he would seem to deflate, skin crinkling and collapsing down into weaving furrows running the length of his body. He would seem to instantly turn into an old man. And then he would die.

     Visto was almost impatient for that. He hoped ribbers would eat his body and so take in the eggs the Satra Riders had left behind, so that they too would die. Better yet, Fathers—but they weren’t that stupid, he was sure—no, they wouldn’t touch him and that was too bad.

     The Snake was leaving behind Forest Stet, and the wooden road gave way to a trader’s track of dusty, rutted dirt, wending out into the Elan. So, he would die on the plain, and his spirit would pull away from the shrunken thing that had been its body, and begin the long journey back home. To find his sister. To find his mother.

     And already, his spirit was tired, so tired, of walking.

     

     At day’s end, Badalle forced herself to climb an old Elan longbarrow with its ancient tree at the far end—grey leaves fluttering—from which she could turn and look back along the road, eastward, as far as her eyes could retrace the day’s interminable journey. Beyond the mass of the sprawled camp, she saw a wavy line of bodies stretching to the horizon. This had been an especially bad day, too hot, too dry, the lone waterhole a slough of foul, vermin-?ridden mud filled with rotting insect carcasses that tasted like dead fish.

     She stood, looking for a long time on the ribby length of the Snake. Those that fell on the track had not been pushed aside, simply trampled on or stepped over, and so the road was now a road of flesh and bone, fluttering threads of hair, and, she knew, staring eyes. The Snake of Ribs. Chal Managal in the Elan tongue.

     She blew flies from her lips. And voiced another poem.

         ’On this morning We saw a
         tree With leaves of grey
         And when we got closer
         The leaves flew away.

         At noon the nameless boy With the
         eaten nose Fell and did not move
         And down came the leaves
         To feed.

         At dusk there was another tree Grey
         fluttering leaves Settling in for the
         night Come the morning They’ll fly
         again.’

     

     
Ampelas Rooted, the Wastelands

     

     The machinery was coated in oily dust that gleamed in the darkness as the faint glow of the lantern light slid across it, conveying motion where none existed, the illusion of silent slippage, as of reptilian scales that seemed, as ever, cruelly appropriate. She was breathing hard as she hurried down the narrow corridor, ducking every now and then to avoid the lumpy black cables slung along from the ceiling. Her nose and throat stung with the rank metal reek of the close, motionless air. Surrounded by the exposed guts of Root, she felt besieged by the unknowable, the illimitable mystery of dire arcana. Yet, she had made these unlit, abandoned passageways her favoured haunt, knowing full well the host of self-?recriminating motivations that had guided her to such choices.

Tor (USA)

     The Root invited the lost, and Kalyth was indeed lost. It was not that she could not find her way among the countless twisting corridors, or through the vast chambers of silent, frozen machines, evading the pits in the floors over which flagstones had never been installed, and staying clear of the chaos of metal and cables spilling out from unpanelled walls—no, she knew her way round, now, after months of wandering. This curse of helpless, hopeless bewilderment belonged to her spirit. She was not who they wanted her to be, and nothing she said could convince them of that.

     She had been born in a tribe on the Elan Plain. She had grown into adulthood there, from child to girl, from girl to woman, and there had been nothing to set her apart, nothing to reveal her as unique, or gifted with unexpected talents. She had married a month after her first blooding. She had borne three children. She had almost loved her husband, and had learned to live with his faint disappointment in her, as her youthful beauty gave way to weary motherhood. She had, in truth, lived a life no different from that of her own mother, and so had seen clearly—without any special talent—the path of her life ahead, year after year, the slow decay of her body, the loss of suppleness, deepening lines upon her face, the sag of her breasts, the miserable weakening of her bladder. And one day she would find herself unable to walk, and the tribe would leave her where she was. To die in solitude, as dying was always a thing of solitude, as it must ever be. For the Elan knew better than the settled peoples of Kolanse, with their crypts and treasure troves for the dead, with the family servants and advisors all throat-?cut and packed in the corridor to the sepulchre, servants beyond life itself, servants for ever.

     Everyone died in solitude, after all. A simple enough truth. A truth no one need fear. The spirits waited before they cast judgement upon a soul, waited for that soul—in its dying isolation—to set judgement upon itself, upon the life it had lived, and if peace came of that, then the spirits would show mercy. If torment rode the Wild Mare, why, then, the spirits knew to match it. When the soul faced itself, after all, it was impossible to lie. Deceiving arguments rang loud with falsehood, their facile weakness too obvious to ignore.

     It had been a life. Far from perfect, but only vaguely unhappy. A life one could whittle down into something like contentment, even should the result prove shapeless, devoid of meaning.

     She had been no witch. She had not possessed the breath of a shaman, and so would never be a Rider of the Spotted Horse. And when the end of that life had come for her and her people, on a morning of horror and violence, all that she had revealed then was a damning selfishness—in refusing to die, in fleeing all that she had known.

     These were not virtues.

     She possessed no virtues.

     Reaching the central, spiral staircase—each step too shallow, too broad for human strides—she set off, her gasps becoming shallower and quicker with the exertion as she ascended level after level, up and out from Root, into the lower chambers of Feed, where she made use of the counterweighted ramp that lifted her by way of a vertical shaft past the seething vats of fungi, the stacked pens of orthen and grishol, drawing to a grating, shivering halt on the base level of Womb. Here, the cacophony of the young assailed her, the hissing shrieks of pain as the dread surgeries were performed—as destinies were decreed in bitter flavours—and, having regained some measure of her wind, she hastened to ascend past the levels of terrible outrage, the stench of wastes and panic that shone like oil on soft hides among shapes writhing on all sides—shapes she was careful to avoid with her eyes, hurrying with her hands clapped over her ears.

     From Womb to Heart, where she now passed among towering figures that paid her no heed, and from whose paths she had to duck and dodge lest they simply trample her underclaw. Ve’Gath Soldiers stood flanking the central ramp, twice her height and in their arcane armour resembling the vast machinery of Root far below. Ornate grilled visors hid their faces save their fanged snouts, and the line of their jaws gave them ghastly grins, as if the implicit purpose of their breed delighted them. More so than the J’an or the K’ell, the true soldiers of the K’Chain Che’Malle frightened Kalyth to the very core of her being. The Matron was producing them in vast numbers.

     No further proof was needed—war was coming.

     That the Ve’Gath gave the Matron terrible pain, each one thrust out from her in a welter of blood and pungent fluid, had become irrelevant. Necessity, Kalyth well knew, was the cruellest master of all.

     Neither soldier guarding the ramp impeded her as she strode on to it, the flat stone underfoot pitted with holes designed to hold claws, and from which cold air flowed up around her—the plunge in ambient temperature on the ramp evidently served somehow to quell the instinctive fear the K’Chain experienced as the conveyance lifted with squeals and groans up past the levels of I leart, ending at Fyes, the Inner

     Keep, Acyl Nest and home of the Matron herself. Riding the ramp alone, however, the strain of the mechanism was less pronounced, and she heard little more than the rush of air that ever disoriented her with a sense of falling even as she raced upward, and the sweat on her limbs and upon her brow quickly cooled. She was shivering by the time the ramp slowed and then halted at the base level of Eyes.

     J’an Sentinels observed her arrival from the foot of the half-?spiral stairs that led to the Nest. As with the Ve’Gath, they were seemingly indifferent to her—no doubt aware that she had been summoned, but even were that not so they would see in her no threat whatsoever to the Matron they had been bred to protect. Kalyth was not simply harmless; she was useless.

     The hot, rank air engulfed her, cloying as a damp cloak, as she made her way to the stairs and began the awkward climb to the Matron’s demesne.

     At the landing one last sentinel stood guard. At least a thousand years old, Bre’nigan was gaunt and tall—taller even than a Ve’Gath—and his multilayered scales bore a silvered patina that made the creature seem ghostly, as if hewn from sun-?bleached mica. Neither pupil nor iris was visible in his slitted eyes, simply a murky yellow, misshapen with cataracts. She suspected the bodyguard was blind, but in truth there was no way to tell, for when Bre’nigan moved, the J’an displayed perfect sureness, indeed, grace and liquid elegance. The long, vaguely curved sword slung through a brass ring at his hip—a ring half embedded in the creature’s hide—was as tall as Kalyth, the blade a kind of ceramic bearing a faint magenta hue, although the flawless edge gleamed silver.

     She greeted Bre’nigan with a nod that elicited no reaction whatsoever, and then stepped past the sentinel.

     Kalyth had hoped—no, she had prayed—and when she set eyes upon the two K’Chain standing before the Matron, and saw that they were unaccompanied, her spirits plummeted. Despair welled up, threatened to consume her. She fought to draw breath into her tight chest.

     Beyond the newcomers and huge on the raised dais, Gunth’an Acyl, the Matron, emanated agony in waves—and in this she was unchanged and unchanging, but now Kalyth felt from the enormous queen a bitter undercurrent of . . . something.

     Unbalanced, distraught, Kalyth only then discerned the state of the two K’Chain Che’Malle, the grievous wounds half-?healed, the chaotic skeins of scars on their flanks, necks and hips. The two creatures looked starved, driven to appalling extremes of deprivation and violence, and she felt an answering pang in her heart.

     But such empathy was shortlived. The truth remained: the K’ell Hunter Sag’Churok and the One Daughter Gunth Mach had failed.

     The Matron spoke in Kalyth’s mind, although it was not speech of any sort, simply the irrevocable imposition of knowledge and meaning. ‘Destriant Kalytb, an error in choice. We remain broken. I remain broken. You cannot mend, not alone, you cannot mend.’

     Neither knowledge nor meaning proved gifts to Kalyth. For she could sense Gunth’an Acyl’s madness beneath the words. The Matron was undeniably insane. So too the course of action she had forced upon her children, and upon Kalyth herself. No persuasion was possible.

     It was likely that Gunth’an Acyl comprehended Kalyth’s convictions—her belief that the Matron was mad—but this too made no difference. Within the ancient queen, there was naught but pain and the torment of desperate need.

     ‘Destriant Kalytb, they shall try again. What is broken must be mended.’

     Kalyth did not believe Sag’Churok and the One Daughter could survive another quest. And that was another truth that failed in swaying Acyl’s imperative.

     ‘Destriant Kalyth, you shall accompany this Seeking. K’Chain Che’Malle are blind to recognition.’

     And so, at last, they had reached what she had known to be inevitable, despite her hopes, her prayers. ‘I cannot,’ she whispered.

     ‘You shall. Guardians are chosen. K’ell Sag’Churok, Rythok, Kor Thuran. Shi’gal Gu’Rull. One Daughter Gunth Mach.’

     ’I cannot,’ Kalyth said again. ‘I have no . .. talents. I am no Destriant—I am blind to whatever it is a Destriant needs. I cannot find a Mortal Sword, Matron. Nor a Shield Anvil. I am sorry.’

     The enormous reptile shifted her massive weight, and the sound was as of boulders settling in gravel. Lambent eyes fixed upon Kalyth, radiating waves of stricture.

     ‘I have chosen you, Destriant Kalyth. It is my children who are blind. The failure is theirs, and mine. We have failed every war. I am the last Matron. The enemy seeks me. The enemy will destroy me. Your kind thrives in this world—to that not even my children are blind. Among you, I shall find new champions. My Destriant must find them. My Destriant leaves with the dawn.’

     Kalyth said no more, knowing any response was useless. After a moment, she bowed and then walked, feebly, as if numb with drink, from the Nest.

     A Shi’gal would accompany them. The significance of this was plain. There would be no failure this time. To fail was to receive the Matron’s displeasure. Her judgement. Three K’ell Hunters and the One Daughter, and Kalyth herself. If they failed . . . against the deadly wrath of a Shi’gal Assassin, they would not survive long.

     Come the dawn, she knew, she would begin her last journey.

     Out into the wastelands, to find Champions that did not even exist.

     And this, she now understood, was the penance set upon her soul. She must be made to suffer for her cowardice. I should have died with the rest. With my husband. My children. I should not have run away. I now must pay for my selfishness.

     The one mercy was that, when the final judgement arrived, it would come quickly. She would not even feel, much less see, the killing blow from the Shi’gal.

     A Matron never produced more than three assassins at any one time, and their flavours were anathema, preventing any manner of alliance. And should one of them decide that the Matron must be expunged, the remaining two, by their very natures, would oppose it. Thus, each Shi’gal warded the Matron against the others. Sending one with the Seeking was a grave risk, for now there would be only two assassins defending her at any time.

     Further proof of the Matron’s madness. To so endanger herself, whilst at the same time sending away her One Daughter—her only child with the potential to breed—was beyond all common sense.

     But then, Kalyth was about to march to her own death. What did she care about these terrifying creatures? Let the war come. Let the mysterious enemy descend upon Ampelas Rooted and all the other Rooted, and cut down every last one of these K’Chain Che’Malle. The world would not miss them.

     Besides, she knew all about extinction. The only real curse is when you find yourself the last of your kind. Yes, she well understood such a fate, and she knew the true depth of loneliness—no, not that paltry, shallow, self-?pitying game played out by people everywhere—but the cruel comprehension of a solitude without cure, without hope of salvation.

     Yes, everyone dies alone. And there may be regrets. There may be sorrows. But these are as nothing to what comes to the last of a breed. For then there can be no evading the truth of failure. Absolute, crushing failure. The failure of one’s own kind, sweeping in from all sides, finding this last set of shoulders to settle upon, with a weight no single soul can withstand.

     There had been a residual gift of sorts with the language of the K’Chain Che’Malle, and it now tortured Kalyth. Her mind had awakened, far beyond what she had known in her life before now. Knowledge was no blessing; awareness was a disease that stained the entire spirit. She could gouge out her own eyes and still see too much.

     Did the shamans of her tribe feel such crushing guilt, when recognition of the end finally arrived? She remembered anew the bleakness in their eyes, and understood it in ways she had not comprehended before, in the life she had once lived. No, she could do naught but curse the

     deadly blessings of these K’Chain Che’Malle. Curse them with all her heart, all her hate.

     Kalyth began her descent. She needed the closeness of Root; she needed the decrepit machinery on all sides, the drip of viscid oils and the foul, close air. The world was broken. She was the last of the Elan, and now her sole remaining task on this earth was to oversee the annihilation of the last Matron of the K’Chain Che’Malle. Was there satisfaction in that? If so, it was an evil kind of satisfaction, making its taste all the more alluring.

     Among her people, death arrived winging across the face of the setting sun, a black, tattered omen low in the sky. She would be that dread vision, that shred of the murdered moon. Driven to the earth as all things were, eventually.

This is all true.

See the bleakness in my eyes.

     Shi’gal Gu’Rull stood upon the very edge of Brow, the night winds howling round his tall, lean form. Eldest among the Shi’gal, the assassin had fought and defeated seven other Shi’gal in his long service to Acyl. He had survived sixty-?one centuries of life, of growth, and was twice the height of a full-?grown K’ell Hunter, for unlike the Hunters—who were flavoured with mortality’s sudden end at the close of ten centuries—the Shi’gal possessed no such flaw in their making. They could, potentially, outlive the Matron herself.

     Bred for cunning, Gu’Rull held no illusions regarding the sanity of Mother Acyl. Her awkward assumption of godly structures of faith ill fitted both her and all the K’Chain Che’Malle. The matron sought human worshippers, human servants, but humans were too frail, too weak to be of any real value. The woman Kalyth was proof enough of that, despite the flavour of percipience Acyl had given her—a percipience that should have delivered certitude and strength, yet had been twisted by a weak mind into new instruments of self-?recrimination and self-?pity.

     That flavour would fade in the course of the Seeking, as Kalyth’s swift blood ever thinned Acyl’s gift, with no daily replenishment possible. The Destriant would revert to her innate intelligence, and that was a meagre one by any standard. She was already useless, as far as Gu’Rull was concerned. And upon this meaningless quest, she would become a burden, a liability.

     Better to kill her as soon as possible, but alas, Mother Acyl’s command permitted no such flexibility. The Destriant must choose a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil from among her own kind.

     Sag’Churok had recounted the failure of their first selection. The mass of flaws that had been their chosen one: Redmask of the Awl.

     Gu’Rull did not believe the Destriant would fare any better. Humans might well have thrived in the world beyond, but they did so as would feral orthen, simply by virtue of profligate breeding. They possessed no other talents.

     The Shi’gal lifted his foreshortened snout and opened his nostril slits to scent the chill night air. The wind came from the east and, as usual, it stank of death.

     Gu’Rull had plundered the pathetic memories of the Destriant, and therefore knew that no salvation would be found to the east, on the plains known as the Elan. Sag’Churok and Gunth Mach had set out westward, into the Awl’dan, and there too they found only failure. The north was a forbidding, lifeless realm of ice, tortured seas and bitter cold.

     Thus, they must journey south.

     The Shi’gal had not ventured outside Ampelas Rooted in eight centuries. In that short span of time, it was likely that little had changed in the region known to humans as the Wastelands. Nonetheless, some advance scouting was tactically sound.

     With this in mind, Gu’Rull unfolded his month-?old wings, spreading the elongated feather-?scales so that they could flatten and fill out under the pressure of the wind.

     And then the assassin dropped over the sheer edge of Brow, wings snapping out to their fullest extent, and there arose the song of flight, a low, moaning whistle that was, for the Shi’gal, the music of freedom.

     Leaving Ampelas Rooted … it had been too long since Gu’Rull felt this . . . this exhilaration.

     The two new eyes beneath the lines of his jaw now opened for the first time, and the compounded vision—of the sky ahead and the ground below—momentarily confused the assassin, but after a time Gu’Rull was able to enforce the necessary separation, so that the vistas found their proper relationship to one another, creating a vast panorama of the world beyond.

     Acyl’s new flavours were ambitious, indeed, brilliant. Was such creativity implicit in madness? Perhaps.

     Did that possibility engender hope in Gu’Rull? No. Hope was not possible.

     The assassin soared through the night, high above a blasted, virtually lifeless landscape. Like a shred of the murdered moon.

Toll the Hounds (Excerpt)

Chapter One

Bantam Press (UK)

      Surrounded in a city of blue fire, she stood alone on the balcony. The sky’s darkness was pushed away, an unwelcome guest on this the first night of the Gedderone Fete. Throngs filled the streets of Darujhistan, happily riotous, good- natured in the calamity of one year’s ending and another’s beginning. The night air was humid and pungent with countless scents.
      There had been banquets. There had been unveilings of eligible young men and maidens. Tables laden with exotic foods, ladies wrapped in silks, men and women in preposterous uniforms all glittering gilt – a city with no standing army bred a plethora of private militias and a chaotic proliferation of high ranks held, more or less exclusively, by the nobility.
      Among the celebrations she had attended this evening, on the arm of her husband, she had not once seen a real officer of Darujhistan’s City Watch, not one genuine soldier with a dusty cloak- hem, with polished boots bearing scars, with a sword- grip of plain leather and a pommel gouged and burnished by wear. Yet she had seen, bound high on soft, well- fed arms, torcs in the manner of decorated soldiers among the Malazan army – soldiers from an empire that had, not so long ago, provided for Darujhistan mothers chilling threats to belligerent children. ‘Malazans, child! Skulking in the night to steal foolish children! To make you slaves for their terrible Empress – yes! Here in this very city!’
      But the torcs she had seen this night were not the plain bronze or faintly etched silver of genuine Malazan decorations and signi.ers of rank, such as appeared like relics from some long- dead cult in the city’s market stalls. No, these had been gold, studded with gems, the blue of sapphire being the commonest hue even among the coloured glass, blue like the blue .re for which the city was famous, blue to proclaim some great and brave service to Darujhistan itself.
      Her fingers had pressed upon one such torc, there on her husband’s arm, although there was real muscle beneath it, a hardness to match the contemptuous look in his eyes as he surveyed the clusters of nobility in the vast humming hall, with the proprietary air he had acquired since attaining the Council. The contempt had been there long before and if anything had grown since his latest and most triumphant victory.
      Daru gestures of congratulation and respect had swirled round them in their stately passage through the crowds, and with each acknowledgement her husband’s face had grown yet harder, the arm beneath her fingers drawing ever tauter, the knuckles of his hands whitening above his sword- belt where the thumbs were tucked into braided loops in the latest fashion among duellists. Oh, he revelled in being among them now; indeed, in being above many of them. But for Gorlas Vidikas, this did not mean he had to like any of them. The more they fawned, the deeper his contempt, and that he would have been offended without their obsequy was a contradiction, she suspected, that a man like her husband was not wont to entertain.
      The nobles had eaten and drunk, and stood and posed and wandered and paraded and danced themselves into swift exhaustion, and now the banquet halls and staterooms echoed with naught but the desultory ministrations of servants. Beyond the high walls of the estates, however, the common folk rollicked still in the streets. Masked and half naked, they danced on the cobbles – the riotous whirling steps of the Flaying of Fander – as if dawn would never come, as if the hazy moon itself would stand motionless in the abyss in astonished witness to their revelry. City Watch patrols simply stood back and observed, drawing dusty cloaks about their bodies, gauntlets rustling as they rested hands on truncheons and swords.
      On the balcony where she stood, the fountain of the unlit garden directly below chirped and gurgled to itself, buffered by the estate’s high, solid walls from the raucous festivities they had witnessed during the tortured carriage ride back home. Smeared moonlight struggled in the softly swirling pool surrounding the fountain.
      The blue fire was too strong this night, too strong even for the mournful moon. Darujhistan itself was a sapphire, blazing in the torc of the world. And yet its beauty, and all its delighted pride and its multitudinous voice, could not reach her tonight.
      This night, Lady Vidikas had seen her future. Each and every year of it. There on her husband’s hard arm. And the moon, well, it looked like a thing of the past, a memory dimmed by time, yet it had taken her back.
      To a balcony much like this one in a time that now seemed very long ago.
      Lady Vidikas, who had once been Challice Estraysian, had just seen her future. And was discovering, here in this night and standing against this rail, that the past was a better place to be.
      Talk about the worst night yet to run out of Rhivi flatbread. Swearing under her breath, Picker pushed her way through the crowds of the Lakefront market, the mobs of ferociously hungry, drunk revellers, using her elbows when she needed to and glowering at every delirious smile swung her way, and came out eventually at the mouth of a dingy alley heaped ankle- deep in rubbish. Somewhere just to the south of Borthen Park. Not quite the route back to the bar she would have preferred, but the fete was in full frenzy. Wrapped package of flatbread tucked under her left arm, she paused to tug loose the tangles of her heavy cloak, scowled on seeing a fresh stain from a careless passer- by – some grotesque Gadrobi sweetcake – tried wiping it off which only made it worse, then, her mood even fouler, set out through the detritus.

Tor (USA)

      With the Lady’s pull, Bluepearl and Antsy had fared better in finding Saltoan wine and were even now back at K’rul’s. And here she was, twelve streets and two wall passages away with twenty or thirty thousand mad fools in between. Would her companions wait for her? Not a chance. Damn Blend and her addiction to Rhivi flatbread! That and her sprained ankle had conspired to force Picker out here on the first night of the fete – if that ankle truly was sprained, and she had her doubts since Mallet had just squinted down at the offending appendage, then shrugged.
      Mind you, that was about as much as anyone had come to expect from Mallet. He’d been miserable since the retirement, and the chance of the sun’s rising any time in the healer’s future was about as likely as Hood’s forgetting to tally the count. And it wasn’t as if he was alone in his misery, was it?
      But where was the value in feeding her ill temper with all these well- chewed thoughts? Well, it made her feel better, that’s what.
      Dester Thrin, wrapped tight in black cloak and hood, watched the big- arsed woman kicking her way through the rubbish at the other end of the alley. He’d picked her up coming out of the back door of K’rul’s Bar, the culmination of four nights positioned in the carefully chosen, darkness- shrouded vantage point from which he could observe that narrow postern.
      His clan- master had warned that the targets were all ex- soldiers, but Dester Thrin had seen little to suggest that any of them had kept .t and trim. They were old, sagging, rarely sober, and this one, well, she wore that huge, thick woollen cloak because she was getting heavy and it clearly made her self- conscious.
      Following her through the crowds had been relatively easy – she was a head taller than the average Gadrobi, and the route she took to this decrepit Rhivi market in Lakefront seemed to deliberately avoid the Daru streets, some strange affectation that would, in a very short time, prove fatal.
      Dester’s own Daru blood had permitted him a clear view of his target, pushing purposefully through the heaving press of celebrants.
      He set out to traverse the alley once his target exited at the far end. Swiftly padding at a hunter’s pace, he reached the alley mouth and edged out, in time to see the woman move into the passageway through Second Tier Wall, with the tunnel through Third just beyond.
      The Guild’s succession wars, following the disappearance of Vorcan, had finally been settled, with only a minimum amount of spilled blood. And Dester was more or less pleased with the new Grand Master, who was both vicious and clever where most of the other aspirants had been simply vicious. At last, an assassin of the Guild did not have to be a fool to feel some optimism regarding the future.
      This contract was a case in point. Straightforward, yet one sure to earn Dester and the others of his clan considerable prestige upon its summary completion.
      He brushed his gloved hands across the pommels of his daggers, the weapons slung on baldrics beneath his arms. Ever reassuring, those twin blades of Daru steel with their ferules filled with the thick, pasty poison of Moranth tralb.
      Poison was now the preferred insurance for a majority of the Guild’s street killers, and indeed for more than a few who scuttled Thieves’ Road across the rooftops. There’d been an assassin, close to Vorcan herself, who had, on a night of betrayal against his own clan, demonstrated the deadliness of fighting without magic. Using poison, the assassin had proved the superiority of such mundane substances in a single, now legendary night of blood.
      Dester had heard that some initiates in some clans had raised hidden shrines to honour Rallick Nom, creating a kind of cult whose adherents employed secret gestures of mutual recognition within the Guild. Of course, Seba Krafar, the new Grand Master, had in one of his very first pronouncements outlawed the cult, and there had been a cull of sorts, with five suspected cult leaders greeting the dawn with smiling throats.
      Still, Dester had since heard enough hints to suggest that the cult was far from dead. It had just burrowed deeper.
      In truth, no one knew which poisons Rallick Nom had used, but Dester believed it was Moranth tralb, since even the smallest amount in the bloodstream brought unconsciousness, then a deeper coma that usually led to death. Larger quantities simply speeded up the process and were a sure path through Hood’s Gate.
      The big- arsed woman lumbered on.
      Four streets from K’rul’s Bar – if she was taking the route he believed she was taking – there’d be a long, narrow alley to walk up, the inside face of Third Tier Wall Armoury on the left, and on the right the high wall of the bath- house thick and solid with but a few scattered, small windows on upper floors, making the unlit passage dark.
      He would kill her there.
      Perched on a corner post’s finial at one end of the high wall, Chillbais stared with stony eyes on the tattered wilds beyond. Behind him was an overgrown garden with a shallow pond recently rebuilt but already unkempt, and toppled columns scattered about, bearded in moss. Before him, twisted trees and straggly branches with crumpled dark leaves dangling like insect carcasses, the ground beneath rumpled and matted with greasy grasses; a snaking path of tilted pavestones leading up to a squat, brooding house bearing no architectural similarity to any other edifice in all of Darujhistan.
      Light was rare from the cracks between those knotted shutters, and when it did show it was dull, desultory. The door never opened.
      Among his kin, Chillbais was a giant. Heavy as a badger, with sculpted muscles beneath the prickly hide. His folded wings were very nearly too small to lift him skyward, and each sweep of those leathery fans forced a grunt from the demon’s throat.
      This time would be worse than most. It had been months since he’d last moved, hidden as he was from prying eyes in the gloom of an overhanging branch from the ash tree in the estate garden at his back. But when he saw that .ash of movement before him, that whispering flow of motion, out from the gnarled, black house and across the path, even as earth erupted in its wake to open a succession of hungry pits, even as roots writhed out seeking to ensnare this fugitive, Chillbais knew his vigil was at an end.
      The shadow slid out to crouch against the low wall of the Azath House, seemed to watch those roots snaking closer for a long moment, then rose and, .owing like liquid night over the stone wall, was gone.
      Grunting, Chillbais spread his creaking wings, shook the creases loose from the sheets of membrane between the rib- like fingers, then leapt forward, out from beneath the branch, catching what air he could, then flapping frenziedly – his grunts growing savage – until he slammed hard into the mulched ground.
      Spitting twigs and leaves, the demon scrambled back for the estate wall, hearing how those roots spun round, lashing out for him. Claws digging into mortar, Chillbais scrabbled back on to his original perch. Of course, there had been no real reason to fear. The roots never reached beyond the Azath’s own wall, and a glance back assured him- Squealing, Chillbais launched back into the air, this time out over the estate garden.
    &nbs
p; Oh, no one ever liked demons!
      Cool air above the overgrown fountain, then, wings thudding hard, heaving upward, up into the night.
      A word, yes, for his master. A most extraordinary word. So unexpected, so incendiary, so fraught!
      Chillbais thumped his wings as hard as he could, an obese demon in the darkness above the blue, blue city.

Goldmann (Germany)

      Zechan Throw and Giddyn the Quick had found the perfect place for the ambush. Twenty paces down a narrow street two recessed doorways faced each other. Four drunks had staggered past a few moments earlier, and none had seen the assassins standing motionless in the inky darkness. And now that they were past and the way was clear . . . a simple step forward and blood would flow.
      The two targets approached. Both carried clay jugs and were weaving slightly. They seemed to be arguing, but not in a language Zechan understood. Malazan, likely. A quick glance to the left. The four drunks were just leaving the far end, plunging into a motley crowd of revellers.
      Zechan and Giddyn had followed the two out from K’rul’s Bar, watching on as they found a wine merchant, haggled over what the woman demanded for the jugs of wine, settled on a price, then set out on their return leg of the journey.
      Somewhere along the way they must have pulled the stoppers on the jugs, for now they were loud in their argument, the slightly taller one, who walked pigeon- toed and was blue- skinned – Zechan could just make him out from where he stood – pausing to lean against a wall as if moments from losing his supper.
      He soon righted himself, and it seemed the argument was suddenly over. Straightening, the taller one joined the other and, from the sounds of their boots in the rubbish, set out by his side.
      Simply perfect.
      Nothing messy, nothing at all messy. Zechan lived for nights like this.
      Dester moved quickly, his moccasins noiseless on the cobbles, rushing for the woman striding oblivious ahead of him. Twelve paces, eight, four-
      She spun, cloak whirling out.
      A blurred sliver of blued steel, .ickering a slashing arc. Dester skidded, seeking to pull back from the path of that weapon – a longsword, Beru fend! – and something clipped his throat. He twisted and ducked down to his left, both daggers thrust out to damn her should she seek to close.
      A longsword!
      Heat was spilling down his neck, down his chest beneath his deerhide shirt. The alley seemed to waver before his eyes, darkness curling in. Dester Thrin staggered, flailing with his daggers. A boot or mailed fist slammed into the side of his head and there was more splashing on to the cobbles. He could no longer grip the daggers. He heard them skitter on stone.
      Blind, stunned, lying on the hard ground. It was cold.
      A strange lassitude filled his thoughts, spreading out, rising up, taking him away.
      Picker stood over the corpse. The red smear on the tip of her sword glistened, drawing her gaze, and she was reminded, oddly enough, of poppies after a rain. She grunted. The bastard had been quick, almost quick enough to evade her slash. Had he done so, she might have had some work to do. Still, unless the fool was skilled in throwing those puny daggers, she would have cut him down eventually.
      Pushing through Gadrobi crowds risked little more than cutpurses. As a people they were singularly gentle. In any case, it made such things as picking up someone trailing her that much easier – when that someone wasn’t Gadrobi, of course.
      The man dead at her feet was Daru. Might as well have worn a lantern on his hooded head, the way it bobbed above the crowd in her wake.
      Even so . . . she frowned down at him. You wasn’t no thug. Not with daggers like those.
      Hound’s Breath.
      Sheathing her sword and pulling her cloak about her once more, ensuring that it well hid the scabbarded weapon which, if discovered by a Watch, would see her in a cell with a damned huge fine to pay, Picker pushed the wrapped stack of flatbread tighter under her left arm, then set out once more.
      Blend, she decided, was in a lot of trouble.
      Zechan and Giddyn, in perfect unison, launched themselves out from the alcoves, daggers raised then thrusting down.
      A yelp from the taller one as Giddyn’s blades plunged deep. The Malazan’s knees buckled and vomit sprayed from his mouth as he sank down, the jug crashing to a rush of wine. Zechan’s own weapons punched through leather, edges grating along ribs. One for each lung. Tearing the daggers loose, the assassin stepped back to watch the red- haired one fall.
      A short sword plunged into the side of Zechan’s neck.
      He was dead before he hit the cobbles.
      Giddyn, looming over the kneeling Malazan, looked up.
      Two hands closed round his head. One clamped tight over his mouth, and all at once his lungs were full of water. He was drowning. The hand tightened, fingers pinching his nostrils shut. Darkness rose within him, and the world slowly went away.
      Antsy snorted as he tugged his weapon free, then added a kick to the assassin’s face to punctuate its frozen expression of surprise.
      Bluepearl grinned across at him. ‘See the way I made the puke spray out? If that ain’t genius I don’t know what-’
      ‘Shut up,’ Antsy snapped. ‘These weren’t muggers looking for a free drink, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
      Frowning, Bluepearl looked down at the body before him with the water leaking from its mouth and nose. The Napan ran a hand over his shaved pate. ‘Aye. But they was amateurs anyway. Hood, we saw those breath plumes from halfway down the street. Which stopped when those drunks crossed, telling us they wasn’t the target. Meaning-’
      ‘We were. Aye, and that’s my point.’
      ‘Let’s get back,’ Bluepearl said, suddenly nervous.
      Antsy tugged at his moustache, then nodded. ‘Work up that illusion again, Bluepearl. Us ten paces ahead.’
      ‘Easy, Sergeant-’
      ‘I ain’t no sergeant no more.’ ‘Yeah? Then why you still barking orders?’
      By the time Picker arrived within sight of the front entrance to K’rul’s Bar, her rage was incandescent. She paused, scanned the area. Spotted someone leaning in shadows across from the bar’s door. Hood drawn up, hands hidden.
      Picker set off towards the figure.
      She was noticed with ten paces between them, and she saw the man straighten, saw the growing unease betrayed by a shift of those covered arms, the cloak rippling. A half- dozen celebrants careened between them, and as they passed, Picker took the last stride needed to reach the man.
      What ever he had been expecting – perhaps her accosting him with some loud accusation – it was clear that he was unprepared for the savage kick she delivered between his legs. As he was going down she stepped closer and slapped her right hand against the back of his head, adding momentum to the man’s collapse. When his forehead cracked against the cobbles there was a sickly crunch. The body began to spasm where it lay.
      A passer- by paused, peered down at the twitching body.
      ‘You!’ Picker snarled. ‘What’s your damned problem?’
      Surprise, then a shrug. ‘Nothing, sweetie. Served ‘im right, standin’ there like that. Say, would y
ou marry me?’
      ‘Go away.’
      As the stranger ambled on, bemoaning his failure at love, Picker looked around, waiting to see if there was someone else . . . bolting from some hidden place nearby. If it had already happened, then she had missed it. More likely, the unseen eyes watching all of this were peering down from a rooftop somewhere.
      The man on the ground had stopped twitching.
      Spinning round, she headed for the entrance to K’rul’s Bar.

Gardens of the Moon (Excerpt)

PROLOGUE

1154th Year of Burn’s Sleep
96th Year of the Malazan Empire
The Last Year of Emperor Kellanved’s Reign

Bantam Press (UK)

     THE STAINS OF RUST SEEMED TO MAP BLOOD SEAS ON THE BLACK, pocked surface of Mock’s Vane. A century old, it squatted on the point of an old pike that had been bolted to the outer top of the Hold’s wall. Monstrous and misshapen, it had been cold-hammered into the form of a winged demon, teeth bared in a leering grin, and was tugged and buffeted in squealing protest with every gust of wind.
     The winds were contrary the day columns of smoke rose over the Mouse Quarter of Malaz City. The Vane’s silence announced the sudden falling-off of the sea breeze that came clambering over the ragged walls of Mock’s Hold, then it creaked back into life as the hot, spark-scattered and smoke-filled breath of the Mouse Quarter reached across the city to sweep the promontory’s heights.
     Ganoes Stabro Paran of the House of Paran stood on tiptoe to see over the merlon. Behind him rose Mock’s Hold, once capital of the Empire but now, since the mainland had been conquered, relegated once more to a Fist’s holding. To his left rose the pike and its wayward trophy.
     For Ganoes, the ancient fortification overlooking the city was too familiar to be of interest. This visit was his third in as many years; he’d long ago explored the courtyard with its heaved cobblestones, the Old Keep-now a stable, its upper floor home to pigeons and swallows and bats-and the citadel where even now his father negotiated the island export tithe with the harbour officials. In the last instance, of course, a goodly portion was out of bounds, even for a son of a noble house; for it was in the citadel that the Fist had his residence, and in the inner chambers that such affairs of the Empire as concerned this island were conducted.
     Mock’s Hold forgotten behind him, Ganoes’ attention was on the tattered city below, and the riots that ran through its poorest quarter.

Tor (USA)

     Mock’s Hold stood atop a cliff. The higher land of the Pinnacle was reached by a switchback staircase carved into the limestone of the cliff wall. The drop to the city below was eighty armspans or more, with the Hold’s battered wall adding still another six. The Mouse was at the city’s inland edge, an uneven spreading of hovels and overgrown tiers cut in half by the silt-heavy river that crawled towards the harbour. With most of Malaz City between Ganoes’ position and the riots, it was hard to make out any detail, beyond the growing pillars of black smoke.
     It was midday, but the flash and thundering concussion of magery made the air seem dark and heavy.
     Armour clanking, a soldier appeared along the wall near him. The man leaned vambraced forearms on the battlement, the scabbard of his longsword scraping against the stones. ‘Glad for your pure blood, eh?’ he asked, grey eyes on the smouldering city below.
     The boy studied the soldier. He already knew the complete regimental accoutrements of the Imperial Army, and the man at his side was a commander in the Third-one of the Emperor’s own, an elite. On his dark grey shoulder-cloak was a silver brooch: a bridge of stone, lit by ruby flames. A Bridgeburner.
     High-ranking soldiers and officials of the Empire commonly passed through Mock’s Hold. The island of Malaz remained a vital port of call, especially now that the Korel wars to the south had begun. Ganoes had brushed shoulders with more than his share, here and in the capital, Unta.
     ’Is it true, then?’ Ganoes asked boldly.
     ’Is what true?’
     ’The First Sword of Empire. Dassem Ultor. We heard in the capital before we left. He’s dead. Is it true? Is Dassem dead?’

Subterranean Press (USA)

     The man seemed to flinch, his gaze unwavering on the Mouse. ‘Such is war,’ he muttered, under his breath, as if the words were not meant for anyone else’s ears.
     ’You’re with the Third. I thought the Third was with him, in Seven Cities. At Y’Ghatan-’
     ’Hood’s Breath, they’re still looking for his body in the still-hot rubble of that damned city, and here you, are, a merchant’s son three thousand leagues from Seven Cities with information only a few are supposed to possess.’ He still did not turn. ‘I know not your sources, but take my advice and keep what you know to yourself.’
     Ganoes shrugged. ‘It’s said he betrayed a god.’
     Finally the man faced him. His face was scarred, and something that might have been a burn marred his jaw and left cheek. For all that, he looked young for a commander. ‘Heed the lesson there, son.’
     ’What lesson?’
     ’Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don’t notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly.’
     ’I want to be a soldier. A hero.’
     ’You’ll grow out of it.’
     Mock’s Vane squealed as a wayward gust from the harbour cleared the grainy smoke. Ganoes could now smell rotting fish and the waterfront’s stink of humanity.
     Another Bridgeburner, this one with a broken, scorched fiddle strapped to his back, came up to the commander. He was wiry and if anything younger-only a few years older than Ganoes himself, who was twelve. Strange pockmarks covered his face and the backs of his hands, and his armour was a mixture of foreign accoutrements over a threadbare, stained uniform. A shortsword hung in a cracked wooden scabbard at his hip. He leaned against the merlon beside the other man with the ease of long familiarity.

Bantam Press (UK)

     ’It’s a bad smell when sorcerers panic,’ the newcomer said. ‘They’re losing control down there. Hardly the need for a whole cadre of mages, just to sniff out a few wax-witches.’
     The commander sighed. ‘Thought to wait to see if they’d rein themselves in.’
     The soldier grunted. ‘They are all new, untested. This could scar some of them for ever. Besides,’ he added, ‘more than a few down there are following someone else’s orders.’
     ’A suspicion, no more.’
     ’The proof’s right there,’ the other man said. ‘In the Mouse.’
     ’Perhaps.’
     ’You’re too protective,’ the man said. ‘Surly says it’s your greatest weakness.’
     ’Surly’s the Emperor’s concern, not mine.’
     A second grunt answered that. ‘Maybe all of us before too long.’
     The commander was silent, slowly turning to study his companion.
     The man shrugged. ‘Just a feeling. She’s taking a new name, you know. Laseen.’
     ’Laseen?’
     ’Napan word. Means-’
     ’I know what it means.’
     ’Hope the Emperor does, too.’
     Ganoes said, ‘It means Thronemaster.’
     The two looked down at him.
     The wind shifted again, making the iron demon groan on its perch-a smell of cool stone from the Hold itself. ‘My tutor’s Napan,’ Ganoes explained.
     A new voice spoke behind them, a woman’s, imperious and cold.
     ’Commander.’
     Both soldiers turned, but without haste. The commander said to his companion, ‘The new company needs help down there. Send Dujek and a wing, and get some sappers to contain the fires-wouldn’t do to have the whole city burn.’
     The soldier nodded, marched away, sparing the woman not a single glance.

Goldmann (Germany)

     She stood with two bodyguards near the portal in the citadel’s square tower. Her dusky blue skin marked her as Napan, but she was otherwise plain, wearing a saltstained grey robe, her mousy hair cut short like a soldier’s, her features thin and unmemorable. It was, however, her bodyguards that sent a shiver through Ganoes. They flanked her: tall, swathed in black, hands hidden in sleeves, hoods shadowing their faces. Ganoes had never seen a Claw before, but he instinctively knew these creatures to be acolytes of the cult. Which meant the woman was…
     The commander said, ‘It’s your mess, Surly. Seems I’ll have to clean it up.’
     Ganoes was shocked at the absence of fear-the near-contempt in the soldier’s voice. Surly had created the Claw, making it a power rivalled only by the Emperor himself.
     ’That is no longer my name, Commander.’
     The man grimaced. ‘So I’ve heard. You must be feeling confident in the Emperor’s absence. He’s not the only one who remembers you as nothing more than a serving-wench down in the Old Quarter. I take it the gratitude’s washed off long since.’
     The woman’s face betrayed no change of expression to mark if the man’s words had stung. ‘The command was a simple one,’ she said. ‘It seems your new officers are unable to cope with the task.’
     ’It’s got out of hand,’ the commander said. ‘They’re unseasoned-’
     ’Not my concern,’ she snapped. ‘Nor am I particularly disappointed. Loss of control delivers its own lessons to those who oppose us.’
     ’Oppose? A handful of minor witches selling their meagre talents-to what sinister end?’
     ’Finding the coraval schools on the shoals in the bay.’
     ’Hood’s Breath, woman, hardly a threat to the Empire.’
     ’Unsanctioned. Defiant of the new laws-’
     ’Your laws, Surly. They won’t work, and when the Emperor returns he’ll quash your prohibition of sorcery, you can be certain of that.’
     The woman smiled coldly. ‘You’ll be pleased to know that the Tower’s signalled the approach of the transports for your new recruits. We’ll not miss you or your restless, seditious soldiers, Commander.’
     Without another word, or a single glance spared for the boy standing beside the commander, she swung about and, flanked by her silent bodyguards, re-entered the citadel.
     Ganoes and the commander returned their attention to the riot in the Mouse. Flames were visible, climbing through the smoke.
     ’One day I’ll be a soldier,’ Ganoes said.
     The man grunted. ‘Only if you fail at all else, son. Taking up the sword is the last act of desperate men. Mark my words and find yourself a more worthy dream.’
     Ganoes scowled. ‘You’re not like the other soldiers I’ve talked to. You sound more like my father.’
     ’But I’m not your father,’ the man growled.
     ’The world,’ Ganoes said, ‘doesn’t need another Izrine merchant.’ The commander’s eyes narrowed, gauging. He opened his mouth to make the obvious reply, then shut it again.
     Ganoes Paran looked back down at the burning quarter, pleased with himself. Even a boy, Commander, can make a point.
     Mock’s Vane swung once more. Hot smoke rolled over the wall, engulfing them. A reek of burning cloth, scorched paint and stone, and now of something sweet. ‘An abattoir’s caught fire,’ Ganoes said. ‘Pigs.’
     The commander grimaced. After a long moment he sighed and leaned back down on the merlon. ‘As you say, boy, as you say.’

Deadhouse Gates (Excerpt)

PROLOGUE

          What see you in the horizon’s bruised smear
          That cannot be blotted out
          By your raised hand?
                                                       The Bridgeburners
                                                       Toc the Younger

1163rd Year of Burn’s Sleep
Ninth Year of the Rule of Empress Laseen
Year of the Cull

Bantam Press (UK)

     He came shambling into Judgement’s Round from the Avenue of Souls, a misshapen mass of flies. Seething lumps crawled on his body in mindless migration, black and glittering and occasionally falling away in frenzied clumps that exploded into fragmented flight as they struck the cobbles.
     The Thirsting Hour was coming to a close and the priest staggered in its wake, blind, deaf and silent. Honouring his god on this day, the servant of Hood, Lord of Death, had joined his companions in stripping naked and smearing himself in the blood of executed murderers, blood that was stored in giant amphorae lining the walls of the temple’s nave. The brothers had then moved in procession out onto the streets of Unta to greet the god’s sprites, enjoining the mortal dance that marked the Season of Rot’s last day.
     The guards lining the Round parted to let the priest pass, then parted further for the spinning, buzzing cloud that trailed him. The sky over Unta was still more grey than blue, as the flies that had swept at dawn into the capital of the Malazan Empire now rose, slowly winging out over the bay towards the salt marshes and sunken islands beyond the reef. Pestilence came with the Season of Rot, and the Season had come an unprecedented three times in the past ten years.
     The air of the Round still buzzed, was still speckled as if filled with flying grit. Somewhere in the streets beyond a dog yelped like a thing near death but not near enough, and close to the Round’s central fountain the abandoned mule that had collapsed earlier still kicked feebly in the air. Flies had crawled into the beast through every orifice and it was now bloated with gases. The animal, stubborn by its breed, was now over an hour in dying. As the priest staggered sightlessly past, flies rose from the mule in a swift curtain to join those already enshrouding him.
     It was clear to Felisin from where she and the others waited that the priest of Hood was striding directly towards her. His eyes were ten thousand eyes, but she was certain they were all fixed on her. Yet even this growing horror did little to stir the numbness that lay like a smothering blanket over her mind; she was aware of it rising inside but the awareness seemed more a memory of fear than fear now alive within her.
     She barely recalled the first Season of Rot she’d lived through, but had clear memories of the second one. Just under three years ago, she had witnessed this day secure in the family estate, in a solid house with its windows shuttered and cloth-sealed, with the braziers set outside the doors and on the courtyard’s high, broken-glass-rimmed walls billowing the acrid smoke of istaarl leaves. The last day of the Season and its Thirsting Hour had been a time of remote revulsion for her, irritating and inconvenient but nothing more. Then she’d given little thought to the city’s countless beggars and the stray animals bereft of shelter, or even to the poorer residents who were subsequently press-ganged into cleanup crews for days afterwards.
     The same city, but a different world.
     Felisin wondered if the guards would make any move towards the priest as he came closer to the Cull’s victims. She and the others in the line were the charges of the Empress now – Laseen’s responsibility – and the priest’s path could be seen as blind and random, the imminent collision one of chance rather than design, although in her bones Felisin knew differently. Would the helmed guards step forward, seek to guide the priest to one side, lead him safely through the Round?
     ’I think not,’ said the man squatting on her right. His half-closed eyes, buried deep in their sockets, flashed with something that might have been amusement. ‘Seen you flicking your gaze, guards to priest, priest to guards.’
     The big, silent man on her left slowly rose to his feet, pulling the chain with him. Felisin winced as the shackle yanked at her when the man folded his arms across his bare, scarred chest. He glared at the approaching priest but said nothing.
     ’What does he want with me?’ Felisin asked in a whisper. ‘What have I done to earn a priest of Hood’s attention?’
     The squatting man rocked back on his heels, tilting his face into the late afternoon sun. ‘Queen of Dreams, is this self-centred youth I hear from those full, sweet lips? Or just the usual stance of noble blood around which the universe revolves? Answer me, I pray, fickle Queen!’
     Felisin scowled. ‘I felt better when I thought you asleep – or dead.’
     ’Dead men do not squat, lass, they sprawl. Hood’s priest comes not for you but for me.’
     She faced him then, the chain rattling between them. He looked more of a sunken-eyed toad than a man. He was bald, his face webbed in tattooing, minute, black, square-etched symbols hidden within an overall pattern covering skin like a wrinkled scroll. He was naked but for a ragged loincloth, its dye a faded red. Flies crawled all over him; reluctant to leave they danced on – but not, Felisin realized, to Hood’s bleak orchestration. The tattooed pattern covered the man – the boar’s face overlying his own, the intricate maze of script-threaded, curled fur winding down his arms, covering his exposed thighs and shins, and the detailed hooves etched into the skin of his feet. Felisin had until now been too self-absorbed, too numb with shock to pay any attention to her companions in the chain line: this man was a priest of Fener, the Boar of Summer, and the flies seemed to know it, understand it enough to alter their frenzied motion. She watched with morbid fascination as they gathered at the stumps at the ends of the man’s wrists, the old scar tissue the only place on him unclaimed by Fener, but the paths the sprites took to those stumps touched not a single tattooed line. The flies danced a dance of avoidance – but for all that, they were eager to dance.
     The priest of Fener had been ankle-shackled last in the line. Everyone else had the narrow iron bands fastened around their wrists. His feet were wet with blood and the flies hovered there but did not land. She saw his eyes flick open as the sun’s light was suddenly blocked.
     Hood’s priest had arrived. Chain stirred as the man on Felisin’s left drew back as far as the links allowed. The wall at her back felt hot, the tiles – painted with scenes of imperial pageantry – now slick through the thin weave of her slave tunic. Felisin stared at the fly-shrouded creature standing wordless before the squatting priest of Fener. She could see no exposed flesh, nothing of the man himself – the flies had claimed all of him and beneath them he lived in darkness where even the sun’s heat could not touch him. The cloud around him spread out now and Felisin shrank back as countless cold insect legs touched her legs, crawling swiftly up her thighs – she pulled her tunic’s hem close around her, clamping her legs tight.
     The priest of Fener spoke, his wide face split into a humourless grin. ‘The Thirsting Hour’s well past, Acolyte. Go back to your temple.’
     Hood’s servant made no reply but it seemed the buzzing changed pitch, until the music of the wings vibrated in Felisin’s bones.
     The priest’s deep eyes narrowed and his tone shifted. ‘Ah, well now. Indeed I was once a servant of Fener but no longer, not for years – Fener’s touch cannot be scrubbed from my skin. Yet it seems that while the Boar of Summer has no love for me, he has even less for you.’

Tor (USA)

     Felisin felt something shiver in her soul as the buzzing rapidly shifted, forming words that she could understand. ‘Secret… to show… now…’
     ’Go on then,’ the one-time servant of Fener growled,’show me.’
     Perhaps Fener acted then, the swatting hand of a furious god-Felisin would remember the moment and think on it often-or the secret was the mocking of immortals, a joke far beyond her understanding, but at that moment the rising tide of horror within her broke free, the numbness of her soul seared away as the flies exploded outward, dispersing in all directions to reveal… no-one.
     The former priest of Fener flinched as if struck, his eyes wide. From across the Round half a dozen guards cried out, wordless sounds punched from their throats. Chains snapped as others in the line jolted as if to flee. The iron loops set in the wall snatched taut, but the loops held as did the chains. The guards rushed forward and the line shrank back into submission.
     ’Now that,’ the tattooed man shakily muttered, ‘was uncalled for.’
     An hour passed, an hour in which the mystery, shock and horror of Hood’s priest sank down within Felisin to become but one more layer, the latest but not the last in what had become an unending nightmare. An acolyte of Hood… who was not there. The buzzing of wings that formed words. Was that Hood himself? Had the Lord of Death come to walk among mortals? And why stand before a once-priest of Fener – what was the message behind the revelation?
     But slowly the questions faded in her mind, the numbness seeping back, the return of cold despair. The Empress had culled the nobility, stripped the Houses and families of their wealth followed by a summary accusation and conviction of treason that had ended in chains. As for the ex-priest on her right and the huge, bestial man with all the makings of a common criminal on her left, clearly neither one could claim noble blood.
     She laughed softly, startling both men.
     ’Has Hood’s secret revealed itself to you, then, lass?’ the ex-priest asked.
     ’No.’
     ’What do you find so amusing?’
     She shook her head. I had expected to find myself in good company, how’s that for an upturned thought? There you have it, the very attitude the peasants hungered to tear down, the very same fuel the Empress has touched to flame-
     ’Child!’
     The voice was that of an aged woman, still haughty but with an air of desperate yearning. Felisin closed her eyes briefly, then straightened and looked along the line to the gaunt old woman beyond the thug. The woman was wearing her night-clothes, torn and smeared. With noble blood, no less. ‘Lady Gaesen.’
     The old woman reached out a shaking hand. ‘Yes! Wife to Lord Hilrac! I am Lady Gaesen…’ The words came as if she’d forgotten who she was, and now she frowned through the cracked make-up covering her wrinkles and her red-shot eyes fixed on Felisin. ‘I know you,’ she hissed. ‘House of Paran. Youngest daughter. Felisin!’
     Felisin went cold. She turned away and stared straight ahead, out into the compound where the guards stood leaning on pikes passing flasks of ale between them and waving away the last of the flies. A cart had arrived for the mule, four ash-smeared men clambering down from its bed with ropes and gaffs. Beyond the walls encircling the Round rose Unta’s painted spires and domes. She longed for the shadowed streets between them, longed for the pampered life of a week ago, Sebry barking harsh commands at her as she led her favourite mare through her paces. And she would look up as she guided the mare in a delicate, precise turn, to see the row of green-leafed leadwoods separating the riding ground from the family vineyards.
     Beside her the thug grunted. ‘Hood’s feet, the bitch has some sense of humour.’
     Which bitch? Felisin wondered, but she managed to hold her expression even as she lost the comfort of her memories.
     The ex-priest stirred. ‘Sisterly spat, is it?’ He paused, then dryly added, ‘Seems a bit extreme.’
     The thug grunted again and leaned forward, his shadow draping Felisin. ‘Defrocked priest, are you? Not like the Empress to do any temples a favour.’
     ’She didn’t. My loss of piety was long ago. I’m sure the Empress would rather I’d stayed in the cloister.’
     ’As if she’d care,’ the thug said derisively as he settled back into his pose.
     Lady Gaesen rattled, ‘You must speak with her, Felisin! An appeal! I have rich friends-
     The thug’s grunt turned into a bark. ‘Farther up the line, hag, that’s where you’ll find your rich friends!’
     Felisin just shook her head. Speak with her, it’s been months. Not even when Father died.
     A silence followed, dragging on, approaching the silence that had existed before this spate of babble, but then the ex-priest cleared his throat, spat and muttered, ‘Not worth looking for salvation in a woman who’s just following orders, Lady, never mind that one being this girl’s sister-’
     Felisin winced, then glared at the ex-priest. ‘You presume-
     ’He ain’t presuming nothing,’ growled the thug. ‘Forget what’s in the blood, what’s supposed to be in it by your slant on things. This is the work of the Empress. Maybe you think it’s personal, maybe you have to think that, being what you are…’
     ’What I am?’ Felisin laughed harshly. ‘What House claims you as kin?’
     The thug grinned. ‘The House of Shame. What of it? Yours ain’t looking any less shabby.’
     ’As I thought,’ Felisin said, ignoring the truth of his last observation with difficulty. She glowered at the guards. ‘What’s happening? Why are we just sitting here?”
     The ex-priest spat again. ‘The Thirsting Hour’s past. The mob outside needs organizing.’ He glanced up at her from under the shelf of his brows. ‘The peasants need to be roused. We’re the first, girl, and the example’s got to be established. What happens here in Unta is going to rattle every nobleborn in the Empire.’
     ’Nonsense!’ Lady Gaesen snapped. ‘We shall be well treated. The Empress shall have to treat us well-
     The thug grunted a third time – what passed for laughter, Felisin realized – and said, ‘If stupidity was a crime, lady, you would’ve been arrested years ago. The ogre’s right. Not many of us are going to make it to the slave ships. This parade down Colonnade Avenue is going to be one long bloodbath. Mind you,’ he added, eyes narrowing on the guards, ‘old Baudin ain’t going to be torn apart by any mob of peasants…”
     Felisin felt real fear stirring in her stomach. She fought off a shiver. ‘Mind if I stay in your shadow, Baudin?’
     The man looked down at her. ‘You’re a bit plump for my tastes.’ He turned away, then added, ‘But you do what you like.’
     The ex-priest leaned close. ‘Thinking on it, girl, this rivalry of yours ain’t in the league of tattle-tails and scratch-fights. Likely your sister wants to be sure you-’
     ’She’s Adjunct Tavore,’ Felisin cut in. ‘She’s not my sister any more. She renounced our House at the call of the Empress.’
     ’Even so, I’ve an inkling it’s
still personal.’
     Felisin scowled. ‘How would you know anything about it?’
     The man made a slight, ironic bow. ‘Thief once, then priest, now historian. I well know the tense position the nobility finds itself in.’
     Felisin’seyes slowly widened and she cursed herself for her stupidity. Even Baudin-who could not have helped overhearing – leaned forward for a searching stare. ‘Heboric,’ he said. ‘Heboric Light Touch.’
     Heboric raised his arms. ‘As light as ever.’
     ’You wrote that revised history,’ Felisin said. ‘Committed treason-’
     Heboric’s wiry brows rose in mock alarm. ‘Gods forbid! A philosophic divergence of opinions, nothing more! Duiker’s own words at the trial – in my defence, Fener bless him.’
     ’But the Empress wasn’t listening,’ Baudin said, grinning. ‘After all, you called her a murderer, and then had the gall to say she bungled the job!’
     ’Found an illicit copy, did you?’
     Baudin blinked.
     ’In any case,’ Heboric continued to Felisin, ‘it’s my guess your sister the Adjunct plans on your getting to the slave ships in one piece. Your brother disappearing on Genabackis took the life out of your father… so I’ve heard,’ he added, grinning. ‘But it was the rumours of treason that put spurs to your sister, wasn’t it? Clearing the family name and all that-
     ’You make it sound reasonable, Heboric,’ Felisin said, hearing the bitterness in her voice but not caring any more. ‘We differed in our opinions, Tavore and I, and now you see the result.’
     ’Your opinions of what, precisely?’

Bantam Press (UK)

     She did not reply.
     There was a sudden stirring in the line. The guards straightened and swung to face the Round’s West Gate. Felisin paled as she saw her sister – Adjunct Tavore now, heir to Lorn who’d died in Darujhistan – ride up on her stallion, a beast bred out of Paran stables, no less. Beside her was the ever-present T’amber, a beautiful young woman whose long, tawny mane gave substance to her name. Where she’d come from was anyone’s guess, but she was now Tavore’s personal aide. Behind these two rode a score of officers and a company of heavy cavalry, the soldiers looking exotic, foreign.
     ’Touch of irony,’ Heboric muttered, eyeing the horsesoldiers.
     Baudin jutted his head forward and spat. ‘Red Swords, the bloodless bastards.’
     The historian threw the man an amused glance. ‘Travelled well in your profession, Baudin? Seen the sea walls of Aren, have you?’
     The man shifted uneasily, then shrugged. ‘Stood a deck or two in my time, ogre. Besides,’ he added,’the rumour of them’s been in the city a week or more.’
     There was a stirring from the Red Sword troop, and Felisin saw mailed hands close on weapon grips, peaked helms turning as one towards the Adjunct. Sister Tavore, did our brother’s disappearance cut you so deep? How great his failing you must imagine, to seek this recompense… and then, to make your loyalty absolute, you chose between me and Mother for the symbolic sacrifice. Didn’t you realize that Hood stood on the side of both choices? At least Mother is with her beloved husband now… She watched as Tavore scanned her guard briefly, then said something to T’amber, who edged her own mount towards the East Gate.
     Baudin grunted one more time. ‘Look lively. The endless hour’s about to begin.’
     It was one thing to accuse the Empress of murder, it was quite another to predict her next move. If only they’d heeded my warning. Heboric winced as they shuffled forward, the shackles cutting hard against his ankles.
     People of civilized countenance made much of exposing the soft underbellies of their psyche – effete and sensitive were the brands of finer breeding. It was easy for them, safe, and that was the whole point, after all: a statement of coddled opulence that burned the throats of the poor more than any ostentatious show of wealth.
     Heboric had said as much in his treatise, and could now admit a bitter admiration for the Empress and for Adjunct Tavore, Laseen’s instrument in this. The excessive brutality of the midnight arrests – doors battered down, families dragged from their beds amidst wailing servants – provided the first layer of shock. Dazed by sleep deprivation, the nobles were trussed up and shackled, forced to stand before a drunken magistrate and a jury of beggars dragged in from the streets. It was a sour and obvious mockery of justice that stripped away the few remaining expectations of civil behaviour – stripped away civilization itself, leaving nothing but the chaos of savagery.
     Shock layered on shock, a rending of those fine underbellies. Tavore knew her own kind, knew their weaknesses and was ruthless in exploiting them. What could drive a person to such viciousness?
     The poor folk mobbed the streets when they heard the details, screaming adoration for their Empress. Carefully triggered riots, looting and slaughter followed, raging through the Noble District, hunting down those few selected highborns who hadn’t been arrested – enough of them to whet the mob’s bloodlust, give them faces to focus on with rage and hate. Then followed the reimposition of order, lest the city take flame.
     The Empress made few mistakes. She’d used the opportunity to round up malcontents and unaligned academics, to close the fist of military presence on the capital, drumming the need for more troops, more recruits, more protection against the treasonous scheming of the noble class. The seized assets paid for this martial expansion. An exquisite move even if forewarned, rippling out with the force of Imperial Decree through the Empire, the cruel rage now sweeping through each city.
     Bitter admiration. Heboric kept finding the need to spit, something he hadn’t done since his cut-purse days in the Mouse Quarter of Malaz City. He could see the shock written on most of the faces in the chain line. Faces above nightclothes mostly, grimy and filthy from the pits, leaving their wearers bereft of even the social armour of regular clothing. Dishevelled hair, stunned expressions, broken poses -everything the mob beyond the Round lusted to see, hungered to flail-
     Welcome to the streets, Heboric thought to himself as the guards prodded the line into motion, the Adjunct looking on, straight in her high saddle, her thin face drawn in until nothing but lines remained – the slit of her eyes, the brackets around her uncurved, almost lipless mouth – damn, but she wasn’t bom with much, was she? The looks went to her young sister, to the lass stumbling a step ahead of him.
     Heboric’s eyes fixed on Adjunct Tavore, curious, seeking something – a flicker of malicious pleasure, maybe – as her icy gaze swept the line and lingered for the briefest of moments on her sister. But the pause was all she revealed, a recognition acknowledged, nothing more. The gaze swept on.
     The guards opened the East Gate two hundred paces ahead, near the front of the chained line. A roar poured through that ancient arched passageway, a wave of sound that buffeted soldier and prisoner alike, bouncing off the high walls and rising up amidst an explosion of terrified pigeons from the upper eaves. The sound of flapping wings drifted down like polite applause, although to Heboric it seemed that he alone appreciated that ironic touch of the gods. Not to be denied a gesture, he managed a slight bow.
     Hood keep his damned secrets. Here, Fener you old sow, it’s that itch 1 could never scratch. Look on, now, closely, see what becomes of your wayward son.
     Some part of Felisin’s mind held on to sanity, held with a brutal grip in the face of a maelstrom. Soldiers lined Colonnade Avenue in ranks three deep, but again and again the mob seemed to find weak spots in that bristling line. She found herself observing, clinically, even as hands tore at her, fists pummelled her, blurred faces lunged at her with gobs of spit. And even as sanity held within her, so too a pair of steady arms encircled her-arms without hands, the ends scarred and suppurating, arms that pushed her forward, ever forward. No-one touched the priest. No-one dared. While ahead was Baudin – more horrifying than the mob itself.
     He killed effortlessly. He tossed bodies aside with contempt, roaring, gesturing, beckoning. Even the soldiers stared beneath their ridged helmets, heads turning at his taunts, hands tightening on pike or sword hilt.
     Baudin, laughing Baudin, his nose smashed by a well-flung brick, stones bouncing from him, his slave tunic in rags and soaked with blood and spit. Every body that darted within his reach he grasped, twisted, bent and broke. The only pause in his stride came when something happened ahead, some breach in the soldiery – or when Lady Gaesen faltered. He’d grasp her arms under the shoulders, none too gently, then propel her forward, swearing all the while.
     A wave of fear swept ahead of him, a touch of the terror inflicted turning back on the mob. The number of attackers diminished, although the bricks flew in a constant barrage, some hitting, most missing.
&nb
sp;    The march through the city continued. Felisin’s ears rang painfully. She heard everything through a daze of sound, but her eyes saw clearly, seeking and finding – all too often -images she would never forget.
     The gates were in sight when the most savage breach occurred. The soldiers seemed to melt away, and the tide of fierce hunger swept into the street, engulfing the prisoners.
     Felisin caught Heboric’s grunting words close behind her as he shoved hard: ‘This is the one, then.’
     Baudin roared. Bodies crowded in, hands tearing, nails clawing. Felisin’s last shreds of clothing were torn away. A hand closed on a fistful of her hair, yanked savagely, twisting her head around, seeking the crack of vertebrae. She heard screaming and realized it came from her own throat. A bestial snarl sounded behind her and she felt the hand clench spasmodically, then it was gone. More screaming filled her ears.
     A strong momentum caught them, pulling or pushing-she couldn’t tell – and Heboric’s face came into view, spitting bloody skin from his mouth. All at once a space cleared around Baudin. He crouched, a torrent of dock curses bellowing from his mashed lips. His right ear had been torn off, taking with it hair, skin and flesh. The bone of his temple glistened wetly. Broken bodies lay around him, few moving. At his feet was Lady Gaesen. Baudin held her by the hair, pulling her face into view. The moment seemed to freeze, the world closing in to this single place.

Goldmann (Germany)

     Baudin bared his teeth and laughed. ‘I’m no whimpering noble,’ he growled, facing the crowd. ‘What do want? You want the blood of a noblewoman?’
     The mob screamed, reaching out eager hands. Baudin laughed again. ‘We pass through, you hear me?’ He straightened, dragging Lady Gaesen’s head upward.
     Felisin couldn’t tell if the old woman was conscious. Her eyes were closed, the expression peaceful – almost youthful -beneath the smeared dirt and bruises. Perhaps she was dead. Felisin prayed that it was so. Something was about to happen, something to condense this nightmare into a single image. Tension held the air.
     ’She’s yours!’ Baudin screamed. With his other hand grasping the Lady’s chin, he twisted her head around. The neck snapped and the body sagged, twitching. Baudin wrapped a length of chain around her neck. He pulled it taut, then began sawing. Blood showed, making the chain look like a mangled scarf.
     Felisin stared in horror.
     ’Fener have mercy,’ Heboric breathed.
     The crowd was stunned silent, withdrawing even in their bloodlust, shrinking back. A soldier appeared, helmetless, his young face white, his eyes fixed on Baudin, his steps ceasing. Beyond him the glistening peaked helms and broad blades of the Red Swords flashed above the crowd as the horsemen slowly pushed their way towards the scene.
     No movement save the sawing chain. No breath save Baudin’s grunting snorts. Whatever riot continued to rage beyond this place, it seemed a thousand leagues away.
     Felisin watched the woman’s head jerk back and forth, a mockery of life’s animation. She remembered Lady Gaesen, haughty, imperious, beyond her years of beauty and seeking stature in its stead. What other choice? Many, but it didn’t matter now. Had she been a gentle, kindly grandmother, it would not have mattered, would not have changed the mind-numbing horror of this moment.
     The head came away with a sobbing sound. Baudin’s teeth glimmered as he stared at the crowd. ‘We had a deal,’ he grated. ‘Here’s what you want, something to remember this day by.’ He flung Lady Gaesen’s head into the mob, a whirl of hair and threads of blood. Screams answered its unseen landing.
     More soldiers appeared – backed by the Red Swords -moving slowly, pushing at the still-silent onlookers. Peace was being restored, all along the line – in all places but this one violently, without quarter. As people began to die under sword strokes, the rest fled.
     The prisoners who had filed out of the arena had numbered around three hundred. Felisin, looking up the line, had her first sight of what remained. Some shackles held only forearms, others were completely empty. Under a hundred prisoners remained on their feet. Many on the paving stones writhed, screaming in pain; the rest did not move at all.
     Baudin glared at the nearest knot of soldiers. ‘Likely timing, tin-heads.’
     Heboric spat heavily, his face twisting as he glared at the thug. ‘Imagined you’d buy your way out, did you, Baudin? Give them what they want. But it was wasted, wasn’t it? The soldiers were coming. She could have lived-’
     Baudin slowly turned, his face a sheet of blood. To what end, priest?’
     ’Was that your line of reasoning? She would’ve died in the hold anyway?’
     Baudin showed his teeth and said slowly, ‘I just hate making deals with bastards.’
     Felisin stared at the three-foot length of chain between herself and Baudin. A thousand thoughts could have followed, link by link – what she had been, what she was now; the prison she’d discovered, inside and out, merged as vivid memory – but all she thought, all she said, was this: ‘Don’t make any more deals, Baudin.’
     His eyes narrowed on her, her words and tone reaching him, somehow, some way.
     Heboric straightened, a hard look in his eyes as he studied her. Felisin turned away, half in defiance, half in shame.
     A moment later the soldiers – having cleared the line of the dead – pushed them along, out through the gate, onto the East Road towards the pier town called Luckless. Where Adjunct Tavore and her retinue waited, as did the slave ships of Aren.
     Farmers and peasants lined the road, displaying nothing of the frenzy that had gripped their cousins in the city. Felisin saw in their faces a dull sorrow, a passion born of different scars. She could not understand where it came from, and she knew that her ignorance was the difference between her and them. She also knew, in her bruises, scratches and helpless nakedness, that her lessons had begun.

Memories of Ice (Excerpt)

PROLOGUE

                    The ancient wars of the T’lan Imass and the Jaghut
                    saw the world torn asunder. Vast armies contended
                    on the ravaged lands, the dead piled high, their bone
                    the bones of hills, their spilled blood the blood of seas.
                    Sorceries raged until the sky itself was fire…
                                                        Ancient Histories, Vol. I
                                                        Kinicik Karbar’n

Bantam Press (UK)

I

Maeth’ki Im (Pogrom of the Rotted Flower), the 33rd Jaghut War
298,665 years before Burn’s Sleep

     SWALLOWS DARTED THROUGH THE CLOUDS OF MIDGES DANCING OVER the mudflats. The sky above the marsh remained grey, but it had lost its mercurial wintry gleam, and the warm wind sighing through the air above the ravaged land held the scent of healing.
     What had once been the inland freshwater sea the Imass called Jaghra Til – born from the shattering of the Jaghut ice-fields – was now in its own death-throes. The pallid overcast was reflected in dwindling pools and stretches of knee-deep water for as far south as the eye could scan, but none the less, newly birthed land dominated the vista.
     The breaking of the sorcery that had raised the glacial age returned to the region the old, natural seasons, but the memories of mountain-high ice lingered. The exposed bedrock to the north was gouged and scraped, its basins filled with boulders. The heavy silts that had been the floor of the inland sea still bubbled with escaping gases, as the land, freed of the enormous weight with the glaciers’ passing eight years past, continued its slow ascent.
     Jaghra Til’s life had been short, yet the silts that had settled on its bottom were thick. And treacherous.
     Pran Chole, Bonecaster of Cannig Tol’s clan among the Kron Imass, sat motionless atop a mostly buried boulder along an ancient beach ridge. The descent before him was snarled in low, wiry grasses and withered driftwood. Twelve paces beyond, the land dropped slightly, then stretched out into a broad basin of mud.
     Three ranag had become trapped in a boggy sinkhole twenty paces into the basin. A bull male, his mate and their calf, ranged in a pathetic defensive circle. Mired and vulnerable, they must have seemed easy kills for the pack of ay that found them.
     But the land was treacherous indeed. The large tundra wolves had succumbed to the same fate as the ranag. Pran Chole counted six ay, including a yearling. Tracks indicated that another yearling had circled the sinkhole dozens of times before wandering westward, doomed no doubt to die in solitude.
     How long ago had this drama occurred? There was no way to tell. The mud had hardened on ranag and ay alike, forming cloaks of clay latticed with cracks. Spots of bright green showed where windborn seeds had germinated, and the Bonecaster was reminded of his visions when spiritwalking – a host of mundane details twisted into something unreal. For the beasts, the struggle had become eternal, hunter and hunted locked together for all time.
     Someone padded to his side, crouched down beside him.
     Pran Chole’s tawny eyes remained fixed on the frozen tableau. The rhythm of footsteps told the Bonecaster the identity of his companion, and now came the warm-blooded smells that were as much a signature as resting eyes upon the man’s face.
     Cannig Tol spoke. ‘What lies beneath the clay, Bonecaster?’
     ’Only that which has shaped the clay itself, Clan Leader.’
     ’You see no omen in these beasts?’
     Pran Chole smiled. ‘Do you?’
     Cannig Tol considered for a time, then said, ‘Ranag are gone from these lands. So too the ay. We see before us an ancient battle. These statements have depth, for they stir my soul.’
     ’Mine as well,’ the Bonecaster conceded.
     ’We hunted the ranag until they were no more, and this brought starvation to the ay, for we had also hunted the tenag until they were no more as well. The agkor who walk with the bhederin would not share with the ay, and now the tundra is empty. From this, I conclude that we were wasteful and thoughtless in our hunting.’
     ’Yet the need to feed our own young…’
     ’The need for more young was great.’
     ’It remains so, Clan Leader.’
     Cannig Tol grunted. ‘The Jaghut were powerful in these lands, Bonecaster. They did not flee – not at first. You know the cost in Imass blood.’
     ’And the land yields its bounty to answer that cost.’
     ’To serve our war.’
     ’Thus, the depths are stirred.’
     The Clan Leader nodded and was silent.

Tor (USA)

     Pran Chole waited. In their shared words they still tracked the skin of things. Revelation of the muscle and bone was yet to come. But Cannig Tol was no fool, and the wait was not long.
     ’We are as those beasts.’
     The Bonecaster’s eyes shifted to the south horizon, tightened.
     Cannig Tol continued, ‘We are the clay, and our endless war against the Jaghut is the struggling beast beneath. The surface is shaped by what lies beneath.’ He gestured with one hand. ‘And before us now, in these creatures slowly turning to stone, is the curse of eternity.’
     There was still more. Pran Chole said nothing.
     ’Ranag and ay,’ Cannig Tol resumed. ‘Almost gone from the mortal realm. Hunter and hunted both.’
     ’To the very bones,’ the Bonecaster whispered.
     ’Would that you had seen an omen,’ the Clan Leader muttered, rising.
     Pran Chole also straightened. ‘Would that I had,’ he agreed in a tone that only faintly echoed Cannig Tol’s wry, sardonic utterance.
     ’Are we close, Bonecaster?’
     Pran Chole glanced down at his shadow, studied the antlered silhouette, the figure hinted within furred cape, ragged hides and headdress. The sun’s angle made him seem tall – almost as tall as a Jaghut. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘They are weakening. A night of travel will weaken them yet more.’
     ’Good. Then the clan shall camp here tonight.’
     The Bonecaster listened as Cannig Tol made his way back down to where the others waited. With darkness, Pran Chole would spiritwalk. Into the whispering earth, seeking those of his own kind. While their quarry was weakening, Cannig Tol’s clan was yet weaker. Less than a dozen adults remained. When pursuing Jaghut, the distinction of hunter and hunted had little meaning.
     He lifted his head and sniffed the crepuscular air. Another Bonecaster wandered this land. The taint was unmistakable. He wondered who it was, wondered why it travelled alone, bereft of clan and kin. And, knowing that even as he had sensed its presence so it in turn had sensed his, he wondered why it had not yet sought them out.
     She pulled herself clear of the mud and dropped down onto the sandy bank, her breath coming in harsh, laboured gasps. Her son and daughter squirmed free of her leaden arms, crawled further onto the island’s modest hump.
     The Jaghut mother lowered her head until her brow rested against the cool, damp sand. Grit pressed into the skin of her forehead with raw insistence. The burns there were too recent to have healed, nor were they likely to – she was defeated, and death had only to await the arrival of her hunters.
     They were mercifully competent, at least. These Imass cared nothing for torture. A swift killing blow. For her, then for her children. And with them – with this meagre, tattered family – the last of the Jaghut would vanish from this continent. Mercy arrived in many guises. Had they not joined in chaining Raest, they would all – Imass and Jaghut both – have found themselves kneeling before that Tyrant. A temporary truce of expedience. She’d known enough to flee once the chaining was done; she’d known, even then, that the Imass clan would resume the pursuit.
     The mother felt no bitterness, but that made her no less desperate.
     Sensing a new presence on the small island, her head snapped up. Her children had frozen in place, staring up in terror at the Imass woman who now stood before them. The mother’s grey eyes narrowed. ‘Clever, Bonecaster. My senses were tuned only to those behind us. Very well, be done with it.’
     The young, black-haired woman smiled. ‘No bargains, Jaghut? You always seek bargains to spare the lives of your children. Have you broken the kin-threads with these two, then? They seem young for that.’
     ’Bargains are pointless. Your kind never agree to them.’
     ’No, yet still your kind try.’
     ’I shall not. Kill us, then. Swiftly.’
     The Imass was wearing the skin of a panther. Her eyes were as black and seemed to match its shimmer in the dying light. She looked well fed, her large, swollen breasts indicating she had recently birthed.
     The Jaghut mother could not read the woman’s expression, only that it lacked the typical grim certainty she usually associated with the strange, rounded faces of the Imass.
     The Bonecaster spoke. ‘I have enough Jaghut blood on my hands. I leave you to the Kron clan that will find you tomorrow.’
     ’To me,’ the mother growled, ‘it matters naught which of you kills us, only that you kill us.’
     The woman’s broad mouth quirked. ‘I can see your point.’
     Weariness threatened to overwhelm the Jaghut mother, but she managed to pull herself into a sitting position. ‘What,’ she asked between gasps,’do you want?’
     ’To offer you a bargain.’
     Breath catching, the Jaghut mother stared into the Bonecaster’s dark eyes, and saw nothing of mockery. Her gaze then dropped, for the briefest of moments, on her son and daughter, then back up to hold steady on the woman’s own.
     The Imass slowly nodded.
     The earth had cracked some time in the past, a wound of such depth as to birth a molten river wide enough to stretch from horizon to horizon. Vast and black, the river of stone and ash reached southwestward, down to the distant sea. Only the smallest of plants had managed to find purchase, and the Bonecaster’s passage – a Jaghut child in the crook of each arm – raised sultry clouds of dust that hung motionless in her wake.
     She judged the boy at perhaps five years of age; his sister perhaps four. Neither seemed entirely aware, and clearly neither had understood their mother when she’d hugged them goodbye. The long flight down the L’amath and across the Jagra Til had driven them both into shock. No doubt witnessing the ghastly death of their father had not helped matters.
     They clung to her with their small, grubby hands, grim reminders of the child she had but recently lost. Before long, both began suckling at her breasts, evincing desperate hunger. Some time later, the children slept.
     The lava flow thinned as she approached the coast. A range of hills rose into distant mountains on her right. A level plain stretched directly before her, ending at a ridge half a league distant. Though she could not see it, she knew that just the other side of the ridge, the land slumped down to the sea. The plain itself was marked by regular humps, and the Bonecaster paused to study them. The mounds were arrayed in concentric circles, and at the centre was a larger dome – all covered in a mantle of lava and ash. The rotted tooth of a ruined tower rose from the plain’s edge, at the base of the first line of hills. Those hills, as she had noted the first time she had visited this place, were themselves far too evenly spaced to be natural.
     The Bonecaster lifted her head. The mingled scents were unmistakable, one ancient and dead, the other… less so. The boy stirred in her clasp, but remained asleep.
     ’Ah,’ she murmured, ‘you sense it as well.’
     Skirting the plain, she walked towards the blackened tower.
 &n
bsp;   The warren’s gate was just beyond the ragged edifice, suspended in the air at about six times her height. She saw it as a red welt, a thing damaged, but no longer bleeding. She could not recognize the warren -the old damage obscured the portal’s characteristics. Unease rippled faintly through her.

Bantam Press (UK)

     The Bonecaster set the children down by the tower, then sat on a block of tumbled masonry. Her gaze fell to the two young Jaghut, still curled in sleep, lying on their beds of ash. ‘What choice?’ she whispered. ‘It must be Omtose Phellack. It certainly isn’t Tellann. Starvald Demelain? Unlikely.’ Her eyes were pulled to the plain, narrowing on the mound rings. ‘Who dwelt here? Who else was in the habit of build-mg in stone?’ She fell silent for a long moment, then swung her attention back to the ruin. ‘This tower is the final proof, for it is naught else but Jaghut, and such a structure would not be raised this close to an inimical warren. No, the gate is Omtose Phellack. It must be so.’
     Still, there were additional risks. An adult Jaghut in the warren beyond, coming upon two children not of its own blood, might as easily
     I kill them as adopt them. ‘Then their deaths stain another’s hands, a Jaghut’s.’ Scant comfort, that distinction. It matters naught which of you kills us, only that you kill us. The breath hissed between the woman’s teeth. ‘What choice?’ she asked again.
     She would let them sleep a little longer. Then, she would send them through the gate. A word to the boy – take care of your sister. The journey will not be long. And to them both – your mother waits beyond. A lie, but they would need courage. If she cannot find you, then one of her kin will. Go then, to safety, to salvation.
     After all, what could be worse than death?
     She rose as they approached. Pran Chole tested the air, frowned. The Jaghut had not unveiled her warren. Even more disconcerting, where were her children?
     ’She greets us with calm,’ Cannig Tol muttered.
     ’She does,’ the Bonecaster agreed.
     ’I've no trust in that – we should kill her immediately.’
     ’She would speak with us,’ Pran Chole said.
     ’A deadly risk, to appease her desire.’
     ’I cannot disagree, Clan Leader. Yet… what has she done with her children?’
     ”Can you not sense them?’
     Pran Chole shook his head. ‘Prepare your spearmen,’ he said, stepping forward.
     There was peace in her eyes, so clear an acceptance of her own imminent death that the Bonecaster was shaken. Pran Chole walked through shin-deep water, then stepped onto the island’s sandy bank to stand face to face with the Jaghut. ‘What have you done with them?’ he demanded.
     The mother smiled, lips peeling back to reveal her tusks. ‘Gone.’
     ’Where?’
     ’Beyond your reach, Bonecaster.’
     Pran Chole’s frown deepened. These are our lands. There is no place here that is beyond our reach. Have you slain them with your own hands, then?’
     The Jaghut cocked her head, studied the Imass. ‘I had always believed you were united in your hatred for our kind. I had always believed that such concepts as compassion and mercy were alien to your natures.’
     The Bonecaster stared at the woman for a long moment, then his gaze dropped away, past her, and scanned the soft clay ground. ‘An Imass has been here,’ he said. ‘A woman. The Bonecaster-’ the one I
     could not find in my spiritwalk. The one who chose not to be found. ‘What has she done?’
     ’She has explored this land,’ the Jaghut replied. ‘She has found a gate far to the south. It is Omtose Phellack.’
     ’I am glad,’ Pran Chole said, ‘I am not a mother.’ And you, woman, should be glad I am not cruel. He gestured. Heavy spears flashed past the Bonecaster. Six long, fluted heads of flint punched through the skin covering the Jaghut’s chest. She staggered, then folded to the ground in a clatter of shafts.
     Thus ended the thirty-third Jaghut War.
     Pran Chole whirled. ‘We’ve no time for a pyre. We must strike southward. Quickly.’
     Cannig Tol stepped forward as his warriors went to retrieve their weapons. The Clan Leader’s eyes narrowed on the Bonecaster. ‘What distresses you?’
     ’A renegade Bonecaster has taken the children.’
     ’South?’
     ’To Morn.’
     The Clan Leader’s brows knitted.
     ’The renegade would save this woman’s children. The renegade believes the Rent to be Omtose Phellack.’
     Pran Chole watched the blood leave Cannig Tol’s face. ‘Go to Morn, Bonecaster,’ the Clan Leader whispered. ‘We are not cruel. Go now.’
     Pran Chole bowed. The Tellann warren engulfed him.
     The faintest release of her power sent the two Jaghut children upward, into the gate’s maw. The girl cried out a moment before reaching it, a longing wail for her mother, who she imagined waited beyond. Then the two small figures vanished within.
     The Bonecaster sighed and continued to stare upward, seeking any evidence that the passage had gone awry. It seemed, however, that no wounds had reopened, no gush of wild power bled from the portal. Did it look different? She could not be sure. This was new land for her; she had nothing of the bone-bred sensitivity that she had known all her life among the lands of the Tarad clan, in the heart of the First Empire.
     The Tellann warren opened behind her. The woman spun round, moments from veering into her Soletaken form.
     An arctic fox bounded into view, slowed upon seeing her, then sembled back into its Imass form. She saw before her a young man, wearing the skin of his totem animal across his shoulders, and a battered antler headdress. His expression was twisted with fear, his eyes not on her, but on the portal beyond.
     The woman smiled. ‘I greet you, fellow Bonecaster. Yes, I have sent them through. They are beyond the reach of your vengeance, and this pleases me.’
     His tawny eyes fixed on her. ‘Who are you? What clan?’
     ’I have left my clan, but I was once counted among the Logros. I am named Kilava.’
     ’You should have let me find you last night,’ Pran Chole said. ‘I would then have been able to convince you that a swift death was the greater mercy for those children than what you have done here, Kilava.’
     ’They are young enough to be adopted-’
     ’You have come to the place called Morn,’ Pran Chole interjected, his voice cold. ‘To the ruins of an ancient city-’
     ’Jaghut-’

Goldmann (Germany)

     ’Not Jaghut! This tower, yes, but it was built long afterward, in the time between the city’s destruction and the T’ol Ara’d – this flow of lava which but buried something already dead.’ He raised a hand, pointed towards the suspended gate. ‘It was this – this wounding – that destroyed the city, Kilava. The warren beyond – do you not understand? It is not Omtose Phellack! Tell me this – how are such wounds sealed? You know the answer, Bonecaster!’
     The woman slowly turned, studied the Rent. ‘If a soul sealed that wound, then it should have been freed… when the children arrived-’
     ’Freed,’ Pran Chole hissed, ‘,”” exchanger
     Trembling, Kilava faced him again. ‘Then where is it? Why has it not appeared?’
     Pran Chole turned to study the central mound on the plain. ‘Oh,’ he whispered, ‘but it has.’ He glanced back at his fellow Bonecaster. ‘Tell me, will you in turn give up your life for those children? They are trapped now, in an eternal nightmare of pain. Does your compassion extend to sacrificing yourself in yet another exchange?’ He studied her, then sighed. ‘I thought not, so wipe away those tears, Kilava. Hypocrisy ill suits a Bonecaster.’
     ’What…’ the woman managed after a time, ‘what has been freed?’
     Pran Chole shook his head. He studied the central mound again. ‘I am not sure, but we shall have to do something about it, sooner or later. I suspect we have plenty of time. The creature must now free itself of its tomb, and that has been thoroughly warded. More, there is the T’ol Ara’d’s mantle of stone still clothing the barrow.’ After a moment, he added. ‘But time we shall have.’
     ’What do you mean?’
     ’The Gathering has been called. The Ritual of Tellann awaits us, Bonecaster.’
     She spat. ‘You are all insane. To choose immortality for the sake of a war – madness. I shall defy the call, Bonecaster.’
     He nodded. ‘Yet the Ritual shall be done. I have spiritwalked into the future, Kilava. I have seen my withered face of two hundred thousand and more years hence. We shall have our eternal war.’
     Bitterness filled Kilava’s voice. ‘My brother will be pleased.’
     ’Who is your brother?’
     ’Onos T’oolan, the First Sword.’
     Pran Chole turned at this. ‘You are the Defier. You slaughtered your clan – your kin-’
     ’To break the link and thus achieve freedom, yes. Alas, my eldest brother’s skills more than matched mine. Yet now we are both free, though what I celebrate Onos T’oolan curses.’ She wrapped her arms around herself, and Pran Chole saw upon her layers and layers of pain. Hers was a freedom he did not envy. She spoke again. ‘This city, then. Who built it.’
     ’K'Chain Che’Malle.’
     ’I know the name, but little else of them.’
     Pran Chole nodded. ‘We shall, I expect, learn.’
     

House of Chains (Excerpt)

Chapter One

Children from a dark house
choose shadowed paths.
—Nathii Folk Saying

Bantam Press (UK)

      The dog had savaged a woman, an old man and a child before the warriors drove it into an abandoned kiln at the edge of the village. The beast had never before displayed an uncertain loyalty. It had guarded the Uryd lands with fierce zeal, one with its kin in its harsh, but just, duties. There were no wounds on its body that might have festered and so allowed the spirit of madness into its veins. Nor was the dog possessed by the foaming sickness. Its position in the village pack had not been challenged. Indeed, there was nothing, nothing at all, to give cause to the sudden turn.
      The warriors pinned the animal to the rounded back wall of the clay kiln with spears, stabbing at the snapping, shrieking beast until it was dead. When they withdrew their spears they saw the shafts chewed and slick with spit and blood; they saw iron dented and scored.
      Madness, they knew, could remain hidden, buried far beneath the surface, a subtle flavour turning blood into something bitter. The shamans examined the three victims; two had already died of their wounds, but the child still clung to life.
      In solemn procession he was carried by his father to the Faces in the Rock, laid down in the glade before the Seven Gods of the Teblor, and left there.
      He died a short while later. Alone in his pain before the hard visages carved into the cliff-face.
      This was not an unexpected fate. The child, after all, had been too young to pray.
      Long before the Seven Gods opened their eyes.

Urugal the Woven’s Year
Burn’s Sleep

Tor (USA)

      They were glorious tales. Farms in flames, children dragged behind horses for leagues. The trophies of that day, so long ago, cluttered the low walls of his grandfather’s longhouse. Scarred skull-pates, frail-looking mandibles. Odd fragments of clothing made of some unknown material, now smoke-blackened and tattered. Small ears nailed to every wooden post that reached up to the thatched roof.
      Evidence that Silver Lake was real, that it existed in truth, beyond the forest-clad mountains, down through hidden passes, a week – perhaps two – distant from the lands of the Uryd clan. The way itself was fraught, passing through territories held by the Sunyd and Rathyd clans, a journey that was itself a tale of legendary proportions. Moving silent and unseen through enemy camps, shifting the hearthstones to deliver deepest insult, eluding the hunters and trackers day and night until the borderlands were reached, then crossed – the vista ahead unknown, its riches not even yet dreamed of.
      Karsa Orlong lived and breathed his grandfather’s tales. They stood like a legion, defiant and fierce, before the pallid, empty legacy of Synyg – Pahlk’s son and Karsa’s father. Synyg, who had done nothing in his life, who tended his horses in his valley and had not once ventured into hostile lands. Synyg, who was both his father’s and his son’s greatest shame.
      True, Synyg had more than once defended his herd of horses from raiders from other clans, and defended well, with honourable ferocity and admirable skill. But this was only to be expected from those of Uryd blood. Urugal the Woven was the clan’s Face in the Rock, and Urugal was counted among the fiercest of the seven gods. The other clans had reason to fear the Uryd.

Bantam Press (UK)

      Nor had Synyg not proved masterful in training his only son in the Fighting Dances. Karsa’s skill with the bloodwood blade far surpassed his years. He was counted among the finest warriors of the clan. While the Uryd disdained use of the bow, they excelled with spear and atlatl, with the toothed-disc and the black-rope, and Synyg had taught his son an impressive efficiency with these weapons as well.
      None the less, such training was to be expected from any father in the Uryd clan. Karsa could find no reason for pride in such things. The Fighting Dances were but preparation, after all. Glory was found in all that followed, in the contests, the raids, in the vicious perpetuation of feuds.
      Karsa would not do as his father had done. He would not do . . . nothing. No, he would walk his grandfather’s path. More closely than anyone might imagine. Too much of the clan’s reputation lived only in the past. The Uryd had grown complacent in their position of pre-eminence among the Teblor. Pahlk had muttered that truth more than once, the nights when his bones ached from old wounds and the shame that was his son burned deepest.
      A return to the old ways. And I, Karsa Orlong, shall lead. Delum Thord is with me. As is Bairoth Gild. All in our first year of scarring. We have counted coup. We have slain enemies. Stolen horses. Shifted the hearthstones of the Kellyd and the Buryd.
      And now, with the new moon and in the year of your naming, Urugal, we shall weave our way to Silver Lake. To slay the children who dwell there.
      He remained on his knees in the glade, head bowed beneath the Faces in the Rock, knowing that Urugal’s visage, high on the cliff-face, mirrored his own savage desire; and that those of the other gods, all with their own clans barring ‘Siballe, who was the Unfound, glared down upon Karsa with envy and hate. None of their children knelt before them, after all, to voice such bold vows.

Goldmann (Germany)

      Complacency plagued all the clans of the Teblor, Karsa suspected. The world beyond the mountains dared not encroach, had not attempted to do so in decades. No visitors ventured into Teblor lands. Nor had the Teblor themselves gazed out beyond the borderlands with dark hunger, as they had often done generations past. The last man to have led a raid into foreign territory had been his grandfather. To the shores of Silver Lake, where farms squatted like rotted mushrooms and children scurried like mice. Back then, there had been two farms, a half-dozen outbuildings. Now, Karsa believed, there would be more. Three, even four farms. Even Pahlk’s day of slaughter would pale to that delivered by Karsa, Delum and Bairoth.
      So I vow, beloved Urugal. And I shall deliver unto you a feast of trophies such as never before blackened the soil of this glade. Enough, perhaps, to free you from the stone itself, so that once more you will stride in our midst, a deliverer of death upon all our enemies.
      I, Karsa Orlong, grandson of Pahlk Orlong, so swear. And, should you doubt, Urugal, know that we leave this very night. The journey begins with the descent of this very sun. And, as each day’s sun births the sun of the next day, so shall it look down upon three warriors of the Uryd clan, leading their destriers through the passes, down into the unknown lands. And Silver Lake shall, after more than four centuries, once again tremble to the coming of the Teblor.
      Karsa slowly lifted his head, eyes travelling up the battered cliff-face, to find the harsh, bestial face of Urugal, there, among its kin. The pitted gaze seemed fixed upon him and Karsa thought he saw avid pleasure in those dark pools. Indeed, he was certain of it, and would describe it as truth to Delum and Bairoth, and to Dayliss, so that she might voice her blessing, for he so wished her blessing, her cold words . . . I, Dayliss, yet to find a family’s name, bless you, Karsa Orlong, on your dire raid. May you slay a legion of children. May their cries feed your dreams. May their blood give you thirst for more. May flames haunt the path of your life. May you return to me, a thousand deaths upon your soul, and take me as your wife.

Midnight Tides (Excerpt)

Chapter One

Listen! The seas whisper
and dream of breaking truths
in the crumbling of stone
—Hantallit of Miner Sluice

Year of the Late Frost
One year before the Letherii Seventh Closure
The Ascension of the Empty Hold

Bantam Press (UK)

      Here, then, is the tale. between the swish of the tides,when giants knelt down and became mountains. When they fell scattered on the land like the ballast stones of the sky, yet could not hold fast against the rising dawn. Between the swish of the tides, we will speak of one such giant. Because the tale hides with his own.
      And because it amuses.
      Thus.
      In darkness he closed his eyes. Only by day did he elect to open them, for he reasoned in this manner: night defies vision and so, if little can be seen, what value seeking to pierce the gloom?
      Witness as well, this. He came to the edge of the land and discovered the sea, and was fascinated by the mysterious fluid. A fascination that became a singular obsession through the course of that fated day. He could see how the waves moved, up and down along the entire shore, a ceaseless motion that ever threatened to engulf all the land, yet ever failed to do so. He watched the sea through the afternoon’s high winds, witness to its wild thrashing far up along the sloping strand, and sometimes it did indeed reach far, but always it would sullenly retreat once more.
      When night arrived, he closed his eyes and lay down to sleep. Tomorrow, he decided, he would look once more upon this sea.
      In darkness he closed his eyes.
      The tides came with the night, swirling up round the giant. The tides came and drowned him as he slept. And the water seeped minerals into his flesh, until he became as rock, a gnarled ridge on the strand. Then, each night for thousands of years, the tides came to wear away at his form. Stealing his shape.
      But not entirely. To see him true, even to this day, one must look in darkness. Or close one’s eyes to slits in brightest sunlight. Glance askance, or focus on all but the stone itself.
      Of all the gifts Father Shadow has given his children, this one talent stands tallest. Look away to see. Trust in it, and you will be led into Shadow. Where all truths hide.
      Look away to see.
      Now, look away.

Tor (USA)

      The mice scattered as the deeper shadow flowed across snow brushed blue by dusk. They scampered in wild panic, but, among them, one’s fate was already sealed. A lone tufted, taloned foot snapped down, piercing furry flesh and crushing minute bones.
      At the clearing’s edge, the owl had dropped silently from its branch, sailing out over the hard-packed snow and its litter of seeds, and the arc of its flight, momentarily punctuated by plucking the mouse from the ground, rose up once more, this time in a heavy flapping of wings, towards a nearby tree. It landed one-legged, and a moment later it began to feed.
      The figure who jogged across the glade a dozen heartbeats later saw nothing untoward. The mice were all gone, the snow solid enough to leave no signs of their passing, and the owl froze motionless in its hollow amidst the branches of the spruce tree, eyes wide as they followed the figure’s progress across the clearing. Once it had passed, the owl resumed feeding.
      Dusk belonged to the hunters, and the raptor was not yet done this night.
      As he weaved through the frost-rimed humus of the trail, Trull Sengar’s thoughts were distant, making him heedless of the forest surrounding him, uncharacteristically distracted from all the signs and details it offered. He had not even paused to make propitiation to Sheltatha Lore, Daughter Dusk, the most cherished of the Three Daughters of Father Shadow – although he would make recompense at tomorrow’s sunset – and, earlier, he had moved unmindful through the patches of lingering light that blotted the trail, risking the attention of fickle Sukul Ankhadu, the Daughter of Deceit, also known as Dapple.
      The Calach breeding beds swarmed with seals. They’d come early, surprising Trull in his collecting of raw jade above the shoreline. Alone, the arrival of the seals would engender only excitement in the young Tiste Edur, but there had been other arrivals, in ships ringing the bay, and the harvest had been well under way.
      Letherii, the white-skinned peoples from the south.

Bantam Press (UK)

      He could imagine the anger of those in the village he now approached, once he delivered the news of his discovery – an anger he shared. This encroachment on Edur territories was brazen, the theft of seals that rightly belonged to his people an arrogant defiance of the old agreements.
      There were fools among the Letherii, just as there were fools among the Edur. Trull could not imagine this broaching being anything but unsanctioned. The Great Meeting was only two cycles of the moon away. It served neither side’s purpose to spill blood now. No matter
      that the Edur would be right in attacking and destroying the intruder ships; the Letherii delegation would be outraged at the slaughter of its citizens, even citizens contravening the laws. The chances of agreeing upon a new treaty had just become minuscule.
      And this disturbed Trull Sengar. One long and vicious war had just ended for the Edur: the thought of another beginning was too hard to bear.
      He had not embarrassed his brothers during the wars of subjugation; on his wide belt was a row of twenty-one red-stained rivets, each one marking a coup, and among those seven were ringed in white paint, to signify actual kills. Only his elder brother’s belt sported more trophies among the male children of Tomad Sengar, and that was right and proper, given Fear Sengar’s eminence among the warriors of the Hiroth tribe.
      Of course, battles against the five other tribes of the Edur were strictly bound in rules and prohibitions, and even vast, protracted battles had yielded only a handful of actual deaths. Even so, the conquests had been exhausting. Against the Letherii, there were no rules to constrain the Edur warriors. No counting coup. Just killing. Nor did the enemy need a weapon in hand – even the helpless and the innocent would know the sword’s bite. Such slaughter stained warrior and victim alike.

Goldmann (Germany)

      But Trull well knew that, though he might decry the killing that was to come, he would do so only to himself, and he would stride alongside his brothers, sword in hand, to deliver the Edur judgement upon the trespassers. There was no choice. Turn away from this crime and more would follow, in waves unending.
      His steady jog brought him past the tanneries, with their troughs and stone-lined pits, to the forest edge. A few Letherii slaves glanced his way, quickly bowing in deference until he was past. The towering cedar logs of the village wall rose from the clearing ahead, over which woodsmoke hung in stretched streams. Fields of rich black soil spread out to either side of the narrow, raised track leading to the distant gate. Winter had only just begun to release its grip on the earth, and the first planting of the season was still weeks away. By midsummer, close to thirty different types of plants would fill these fields, providing food, medicine, fibres and feed for the livestock, many among the thirty of a flowering variety, drawing the bees from which honey and wax were procured. The tribe’s women oversaw the slaves in such harvesting. The men would leave in small groups to journey into the forest, to cut timber or hunt, whilst others set out in the Knarri ships to harvest from the seas and shoals.
      Or so it should be, when peace ruled the tribes. The past dozen years had seen more war-parties setting out than any other kind, and so the people had on occasion suffered. Until the war, hunger had never threatened the Edur. Trull wanted an end to such depredations. Hannan Mosag, Warlock King of the Hiroth, was now overlord to all the Edur tribes. From a host of warring peoples, a confederacy had been wrought, although Trull well knew that it was a confederacy in name only. Hannan Mosag held as hostage the firstborn sons of the subjugated chiefs – his K’risnan Cadre – and ruled as dictator. Peace, then, at the point of a sword, but peace none the less.
      A recognizable figure was striding from the palisade gate, approaching the fork in the trail where Trull now halted. ‘I greet you, Binadas,’ he said.

The Bonehunters (Excerpt)

Chapter One

Bantam Press (UK)

      Wayward winds had stirred the dust into the air earlier that day, and all who came into Ehrlitan’s eastern inland gate were coated, clothes and skin, with the colour of the red sandstone hills. Merchants, pilgrims, drovers and travellers appeared before the guards as if conjured, one after another, from the swirling haze, heads bent as they trudged into the gate’s lee, eyes slitted behind folds of stained linen. Rust-sheathed goats stumbled after the drovers, horses and oxen arrived with drooped heads and rings of gritty crust around their nostrils and eyes, wagons hissed as sand sifted down between weathered boards in the beds. The guards watched on, thinking only of the end of their watch, and the baths, meals and warm bodies that would follow as proper reward for duties upheld.
      The woman who came in on foot was noted, but for all the wrong reasons. Sheathed in tight silks, head wrapped and face hidden beneath a scarf, she was nonetheless worth a second glance, if only for the grace of her stride and the sway of her hips. The guards, being men and slavish to their imaginations, provided the rest.
      She noted their momentary attention and understood it well enough to be unconcerned. More problematic had one or both of the guards been female. They might well have wondered that she was entering the city by this particular gate, having come down, on foot, this particular road, which wound league upon league through parched, virtually lifeless hills, then ran parallel to a mostly uninhabited scrub forest for yet more leagues. An arrival, then, made still more unusual since she was carrying no supplies, and the supple leather of her moccasins was barely worn. Had the guards been female, they would have accosted her, and she would have faced some hard questions, none of which she was prepared to answer truthfully.
      Fortunate for the guards, then, that they had been male. Fortunate, too, the delicious lure of a man’s imagination as those gazes followed her into the street, empty of suspicion yet feverishly disrobing her curved form with every swing of her hips, a motion she only marginally exaggerated.
      Coming to an intersection she turned left and moments later was past their lines of sight. The wind was blunted here in the city, although fine dust continued to drift down to coat all in a monochrome powder. The woman continued through the crowds, her route a gradual, inward spiral towards the Jen’rahb, Ehrlitan’s central tel, the vast multilayered ruin inhabited by little more than vermin, of both the four-legged and two-legged kind. Arriving at last within sight of the collapsed buildings, she found a nearby inn, modest in presentation and without ambition to be other than a local establishment housing a few whores in the second-floor rooms and a dozen or so regulars in the ground-floor tavern.
      Beside the tavern’s entrance was an arched passage leading into a small garden. The woman stepped into that passage to brush the dust from her clothing, then walked on to the shallow basin of silty water beneath a desultorily trickling fountain, where she unwound the scarf and splashed her face, sufficient to take the sting from her eyes.
      Returning through the passage, the woman then entered the tavern.

Tor (USA)

      Gloomy, the smoke from fires, oil lanterns, durhang, itralbe and rustleaf drifting beneath the low plaster ceiling, three-quarters full and all of the tables occupied. A youth had preceded her by a few moments, and was now breathlessly expounding on some adventure barely survived. Noting this as she walked past the young man and his listeners, the woman allowed herself a faint smile that was, perhaps, sadder than she had intended.
      She found a place at the bar and beckoned the tender over. He stopped opposite and studied her intently while she ordered, in unaccented Ehrlii, a bottle of rice wine.
      At her request he reached under the counter and she heard the clink of bottles as he said, in Malazan, ‘Hope you’re not expecting anything worth the name, lass.’ He straightened, brushing dust from a clay bottle then peering at the stopper. ‘This one’s at least still sealed.’
      ‘That will do,’ she said, still speaking the local dialect, laying out on the bar-top three silver crescents.
      ‘Plan on drinking all of it?’
      ‘I’d need a room upstairs to crawl into,’ she replied, tugging the stopper free as the barman set down a tin goblet. ‘One with a lock,’ she added.
      ‘Then Oponn’s smiling on you,’ he said. ‘One’s just become available.’
      ‘Good.’
      ‘You attached to Dujek’s army?’ the man asked.
      She poured out a full draught of the amber, somewhat cloudy wine. ‘No. Why, is it here?’
      ‘Tail ends,’ he replied. ‘The main body marched out six days ago. Left a garrison, of course. That’s why I was wondering—’
      ‘I belong to no army.’
      Her tone, strangely cold and flat, silenced him. Moments later, he drifted away to attend to another customer.
      She drank. Steadily working through the bottle as the light faded outside, and the tavern grew yet more crowded, voices getting louder, elbows and shoulders jostling against her more often than was entirely necessary. She ignored the casual groping, eyes on the liquid in the goblet before her.
      At last she was done, and so she turned about and threaded her way, unsteadily, through the press of bodies to arrive finally at the stairs. She made her ascent cautiously, one hand on the flimsy railing, vaguely aware that someone was, unsurprisingly, following her.
      At the landing she set her back against a wall.
      The stranger arrived, still wearing a stupid grin—that froze on his face as the point of a knife pressed the skin beneath his left eye.
      ‘Go back downstairs,’ the woman said.
      A tear of blood trickled down the man’s cheek, gathered thick along the ridge of his jaw. He was trembling, wincing as the point slipped in ever deeper. ‘Please,’ he whispered.
      She reeled slightly, inadvertently slicing open the man’s cheek, fortunately downward rather than up into his eye. He cried out and staggered back, hands up in an effort to stop the flow of blood, then stumbled his way down the stairs.
      Shouts from below, then a harsh laugh.
      The woman studied the knife in her hand, wondering where it had come from, and whose blood now gleamed from it.
      No matter.
      She went in search of her room, and, eventually, found it.

     *     *     *     *     *
      The vast dust storm was natural, born out on the Jhag Odhan and cycling widdershins into the heart of the Seven Cities subcontinent. The winds swept northward along the east side of the hills, crags and old mountains ringing the Holy Desert of Raraku—a desert that was now a sea—and were drawn into a war of lightning along the ridge’s breadth, visible from the cities of Pan’potsun and G’danisban. Wheeling westward, the storm spun out writhing arms, one of these striking Ehrlitan before blowing out above the Ehrlitan Sea, another reaching to the city of Pur Atrii. As the main body of the storm curled back inland, it gathered energy once more, battering the north side of the Thalas Mountains, engulfing the cities of Hatra and Y’Ghatan before turning southward one last time. A natural storm, one final gift, perhaps, from the old spirits of Raraku.

Bantam Press (UK)

      The fleeing army of Leoman of the Flails had embraced that gift, riding into that relentless wind for days on end, the days stretching into weeks, the world beyond reduced to a wall of suspended sand all the more bitter for what it reminded the survivors of—their beloved Whirlwind, the hammer of Sha’ik and Dryjhna the Apocalyptic. Yet, even in bitterness, there was life, there was salvation.
      Tavore’s Malazan army still pursued, not in haste, not with the reckless stupidity shown immediately following the death of Sha’ik and the shattering of the rebellion. Now, the hunt was a measured thing, a tactical stalking of the last organized force opposed to the empire. A force believed to be in possession of the Holy Book of Dryjhna, the lone artifact of hope for the embattled rebels of Seven Cities.
      Though he possessed it not, Leoman of the Flails cursed that book daily. With almost religious zeal and appalling imagination, he growled out his curses, the rasping wind thankfully stripping the words away so that only Corabb Bhilan Thenu’alas, riding close alongside his commander, could hear. When tiring of that tirade, Leoman would concoct elaborate schemes to destroy the tome once it came into his hands. Fire, horse piss, bile, Moranth incendiaries, the belly of a dragon . . . until Corabb, exhausted, pulled away to ride in the more reasonable company of his fellow rebels.
      Who would then ply him with fearful questions, casting uneasy glances Leoman’s way. What was he saying?
      Prayers, Corabb would answer. Our commander prays to Dryjhna all day. Leoman of the Flails, he told them, is a pious man.
      About as pious as could be expected. The rebellion was collapsing, whipped away on the winds. Cities had capitulated, one after another, upon the appearance of imperial armies and ships. Citizens turned on neighbours in their zeal to present criminals to answer for the multitude of atrocities committed during the uprising. Once-heroes and petty tyrants alike were paraded before the reoccupiers, and bloodlust was high. Such grim news reached them from caravans they intercepted as they fled ever onward. And with each tatter of news, Leoman’s expression darkened yet further, as if it was all he could do to bind taut the rage within him.
      It was disappointment, Corabb told himself, punctuating the thought each time with a long sigh. The people of Seven Cities so quickly relinquished the freedom won at the cost of so many lives, and this was indeed a bitter truth, a most sordid comment on human nature. Had it all been for nothing, then? How could a pious warrior not experience soul-burning disappointment? How many tens of thousands of people had died? For what?
      And so Corabb told himself he understood his commander. Understood that Leoman could not let go, not yet, perhaps never. Holding fast to the dream gave meaning to all that had gone before.
      Complicated thoughts. It had taken Corabb many hours of frowning regard to reach them, to make that extraordinary leap into the mind of another man, to see through his eyes, if only for a moment, before reeling back in humble confusion. He had caught a glimpse, then, of what made great leaders, in battle, in matters of state. The facility of their intelligence in shifting perspectives, in seeing things from all sides. When, for Corabb, it was all he could manage, truth be told, to cling to a single vision—his own—in the midst of so much discord as the world was wont to rear up before him.
      If not for his commander, Corabb well knew, he would be lost.
      A gloved hand, gesturing, and Corabb kicked his mount forward until he was at Leoman’s side.
      The hooded, cloth-wrapped face swung close, leather-clad fingers tugging the stained silk away from the mouth, and words shouted so that Corabb could hear them: ‘Where in Hood’s name are we?’
      Corabb stared, squinted, then sighed.
     
      Her finger provided the drama, ploughing a traumatic furrow across the well-worn path. The ants scurried in confusion, and Samar Dev watched them scrabbling fierce with the insult, the soldiers with their heads lifted and mandibles opened wide as if they would challenge the gods. Or, in this case, a woman slowly dying of thirst.

Goldmann (Germany)

      She was lying on her side in the shade of the wagon. It was just past midday, and the air was still. The heat had stolen all strength from her limbs. It was unlikely she could continue her assault on the ants, and the realization gave her a moment of regret. The deliverance of discord into otherwise predictable, truncated and sordid lives seemed a worthwhile thing. Well, perhaps not worthwhile, but certainly interesting. God-like thoughts, then, to mark her last day among the living.
      Motion caught her attention. The dust of the road, shivering, and now she could hear a growing thunder, reverberating like earthen drums. The track she was on was not a well-traversed one here on the Ugarat Odhan. It belonged to an age long past, when the caravans plied the scores of routes between the dozen or more great cities of which ancient Ugarat was the hub, and all those cities, barring Kayhum on the banks of the river and Ugarat itself, were dead a thousand years or more.
      Still, a lone rider could as easily be one too many as her salvation, for she was a woman with ample womanly charms, and she was alone. Sometimes, it was said, bandits and raiders used these mostly forgotten tracks as they made their way between caravan routes. Bandits were notoriously ungenerous.
      The hoofs approached, ever louder, then the creature slowed, and a moment later a sultry cloud of dust rolled over Samar Dev. The horse snorted, a strangely vicious sound, and there was a softer thud as the rider slipped down. Faint footfalls drew nearer.
      What was this? A child? A woman?
      A shadow slid into view beyond that cast by the wagon, and Samar Dev rolled her head, watching as the figure strode round the wagon and looked down on her.
      No, neither child nor woman. Perhaps, she considered, not even a man. An apparition, tattered white fur riding the impossibly broad shoulders. A sword of flaked flint strapped to his back, the grip wrapped in hide. She blinked hard, seeking more details, but the bright sky behind him defeated her. A giant of a man who walked quiet as a desert cat, a nightmare vision, a hallucination.
      And then he spoke, but not, it was clear, to her. ‘You shall have to wait for your meal, Havok. This one still lives.’
      ‘Havok eats dead women?’ Samar asked, her voice ragged. ‘Who do you ride with?’
      ‘Not with,’ the giant replied. ‘On.’ He moved closer and crouched down beside her. There was something in his hands—a waterskin—but she found she could not pull her gaze from his face. Even, hard-edged features, broken and crazed by a tattoo of shattered glass, the mark of an escaped slave. ‘I see your wagon,’ he said, speaking the language of the desert tribes yet oddly accented, ‘but where is the beast that pulled it?’
      ‘In the bed,’ she replied.
      He set the skin at her side and straightened, walked over and leaned in for a look. ‘There’s a dead man in there.’
      ‘Yes, that’s him. He’s broken down.’
      ‘He was pulling this wagon? No wonder he’s dead.’
      She reached over and managed to close both hands around the waterskin’s neck. Tugged the stopper free and tilted it over her mouth. Warm, delicious water. ‘Do you see those double levers beside him?’ she asked. ‘Work those and the wagon moves. It’s my own invention.’
      ‘Is it hard work? Then why hire an old man to do it?’
      ‘He was a potential investor. Wanted to see how it would work for himself.’
      The giant grunted, and she saw him studying her. ‘We were doing fine,’ she said. ‘At first. But then it broke. The linkage. We were only planning half a day, but he’d taken us too far out before dropping dead. I thought to walk, but then I broke my foot—’
      ‘How?’
      ‘Kicking the wheel. Anyway, I can’t walk.’
      He continued staring down at her, like a wolf eyeing a lame hare. She sipped more water. ‘Are you planning on being unpleasant?’ she asked.
      ‘It is blood-oil that drives a Teblor warrior to rape. I have none. I have not taken a woman by force in years. You are from Ugarat?’
      ‘Yes.’
      ‘I must enter that city for supplies. I want no trouble.’
      ‘I can help with that.’
      ‘I want to remain beneath notice.’
      ‘I’m not sure that’s possible,’ she said.
      ‘Make it possible and I will take you with me.’
      ‘Well, that’s not fair. You are half again taller than a normal man. You are tattooed. You have a horse that eats people—assuming it is a horse and not an enkar’al. And you seem to be wearing the skin of a white-furred bear.’
      He turned away from the wagon.
      ‘All right!’ she said hastily. ‘I’ll think of something.’
      He came close again, collected the waterskin, slung it over a shoulder, and then picked her up by the belt, one-handed. Pain ripped through her right leg as the broken foot dangled. ‘Seven Hounds!’ she hissed. ‘How undignified do you have to make this?’
      Saying nothing, the warrior carried her over to his waiting horse. Not an enkar’al, she saw, but not quite a horse either. Tall, lean and pallid, silver mane and tail, with eyes red as blood. A single rein, no saddle or stirrups. ‘Stand on your good leg,’ he said, lifting her straight. Then he picked up a loop of rope and vaulted onto the horse.
      Gasping, leaning against the horse, Samar Dev tracked the double strands of the rope the man held, and saw that he had been dragging something while he rode. Two huge rotted heads. Dogs or bears, as oversized as the man himself.
      The warrior reached down and unceremoniously pulled her up until she was settled behind him. More waves of pain, darkness threatening.
      ‘Beneath notice,’ he said again.
      Samar Dev glanced back at those two severed heads. ‘That goes without saying,’ she said.

Reaper’s Gale (Excerpt)

Prologue

The Elder Warren Of Kurald Emurlahn,
The Age Of Sundering

Bantam Press (UK)

      In a landscape torn with grief, the carcasses of six dragons lay strewn in a ragged row reaching a thousand or more paces across the plain, flesh split apart, broken bones jutting, jaws gaping and eyes brittle-dry. Where their blood had spilled out onto the ground wraiths had gathered like flies to sap and were now ensnared, the ghosts writhing and voicing hollow cries of despair, as the blood darkened, fusing with the lifeless soil; and, when at last the substance grew indurate, hardening into glassy stone, those ghosts were doomed to an eternity trapped within that murky prison.
      The naked creature that traversed the rough path formed by the fallen dragons was a match to their mass, yet bound to the earth, and it walked on two bowed legs, the thighs thick as thousand-year-old trees. The width of its shoulders was equal to the length of a Tartheno Toblakai’s height; from a thick neck hidden beneath a mane of glossy black hair, the frontal portion of the head was thrust forward – brow, cheekbones and jaw, and its deep-set eyes revealing black pupils surrounded in opalescent white. The huge arms were disproportionately long, the enormous hands almost scraping the ground. Its breasts were large, pendulous and pale. As it strode past the battered, rotting carcasses, the motion of its gait was strangely fluid, not at all lumbering, and each limb was revealed to possess extra joints.
      Skin the hue of sun-bleached bone, darkening to veined red at the ends of the creature’s arms, bruises surrounding the knuckles, a latticework of cracked flesh exposing the bone here and there. The hands had seen damage, the result of delivering devastating blows.
      It paused to tilt its head, upward, and watched as three dragons sailed the air high amidst the roiling clouds, appearing then disappearing in the smoke of the dying realm.
      The earthbound creature’s hands twitched, and a low growl emerged from deep in its throat.
      After a long moment, it resumed its journey.
      Beyond the last of the dead dragons, to a place where rose a ridge of hills, the largest of these cleft through as if a giant claw had gouged out the heart of the rise, and in that crevasse raged a rent, a tear in space that bled power in nacreous streams. The malice of that energy was evident in the manner in which it devoured the sides of the fissure, eating like acid into the rocks and boulders of the ancient berm.
      The rent would soon close, and the one who had last passed through had sought to seal the gate behind him. But such healing could never be done in haste, and this wound bled anew.
      Ignoring the virulence pouring from the rent, the creature strode closer. At the threshold it paused again and turned to look back the way it had come.
      Draconean blood hardening into stone, horizontal sheets of the substance, already beginning to separate from the surrounding earth, to lift up on edge, forming strange, disarticulated walls. Some then began sinking, vanishing from this realm. Falling through world after world. To reappear, finally, solid and impermeable, in other realms, depending on the blood’s aspect, and these were laws that could not be challenged. Starvald Demelain, the blood of dragons and the death of blood.
      In the distance behind the creature, Kurald Emurlahn, the Realm of Shadows, the first realm born of the conjoining of Dark and Light, convulsed in its death-throes. Far away, the civil wars still raged on, whilst in other areas the fragmenting had already begun, vast sections of this world’s fabric torn away, disconnected and lost and abandoned – to either heal round themselves, or die. Yet interlopers still arrived here, like scavengers gathered round a fallen leviathan, eagerly tearing free their own private pieces of the realm. Destroying each other in fierce battles over the scraps.
      It had not been imagined – by anyone – that an entire realm could die in such a manner. That the vicious acts of its inhabitants could destroy . . . everything. Worlds live on, had been the belief – the assumption – regardless of the activities of those who dwelt upon them. Torn flesh heals, the sky clears, and something new crawls from the briny muck.
      But not this time.
      Too many powers, too many betrayals, too vast and all-consuming the crimes.
      The creature faced the gate once more.
      Then Kilmandaros, the Elder Goddess, strode through.

The ruined K’Chain Che’Malle demesne
after the fall of Silchas Ruin

Tor (USA)

      Trees were exploding in the bitter cold that descended like a shroud, invisible yet palpable, upon this racked, devastated forest.
      Gothos had no difficulty following the path of the battle, the successive clashes of two Elder Gods warring with the Soletaken dragon, and as the Jaghut traversed its mangled length he brought with him the brutal chill of Omtose Phellack, the Warren of Ice. Sealing the deal, as you asked of me, Mael. Locking the truth in place, to make it more than memory. Until the day that witnesses the shattering of Omtose Phellack itself. Gothos wondered, idly, if there had ever been a time when he believed that such a shattering would not come to pass. That the Jaghut, in all their perfected brilliance, were unique, triumphant in eternal domination. A civilization immortal, when all others were doomed.
      Well, it was possible. He had once believed that all of existence was under the benign control of a caring omnipotence, after all. And crickets exist to sing us to sleep, too. There was no telling what other foolishness might have crept into his young, naive brain all those millennia ago.
      No longer, of course. Things end. Species die out. Faith in anything else was a conceit, the product of unchained ego, the curse of supreme self-importance.
      So what do I now believe?
      He would not permit himself a melodramatic laugh in answer to that question. What was the point? There was no-one nearby who might appreciate it. Including himself. Yes, I am cursed to live with my own company.
      It’s a private curse.
      The best kind.
      He ascended a broken, fractured rise, some violent uplift of bedrock, where a vast fissure had opened, its vertical sides already glistening with frost when Gothos came to the edge and looked down. Somewhere in the darkness below, two voices were raised in argument.
      Gothos smiled.
      He opened his warren, made use of a sliver of power to fashion a slow, controlled descent towards the gloomy base of the crevasse.
      As Gothos neared, the two voices ceased, leaving only a rasping, hissing sound, pulsating – the drawing of breath on waves of pain – and the Jaghut heard the slithering of scales on stone, slightly off to one side.
      He alighted atop broken shards of rock, a few paces from where stood Mael, and, ten paces beyond him, the huge form of Kilmandaros, her skin vaguely luminescent – in a sickly sort of way – standing with hands closed into fists, a belligerent cast to her brutal mien.
      Scabandari, the Soletaken dragon, had been driven into a hollow in the cliff-side and now crouched, splintered ribs no doubt making every breath an ordeal of agony. One wing was shattered, half torn away. A hind limb was clearly broken, bones punched through flesh. Its flight was at an end.
      The two Elders were now eyeing Gothos, who strode forward, then spoke. ‘I am always delighted,’ he said, ‘when a betrayer is in turn betrayed. In this instance, betrayed by his own stupidity. Which is even more delightful.’
      Mael, Elder God of the Seas, asked, ‘The Ritual . . . are you done, Gothos?’
      ‘More or less.’ The Jaghut fixed his gaze on Kilmandaros. ‘Elder Goddess. Your children in this realm have lost their way.’
      The huge bestial woman shrugged, and said in a faint, melodic voice, ‘They’re always losing their way, Jaghut.’
      ‘Well, why don’t you do something about it?’
      ‘Why don’t you?’
      One thin brow lifted, then Gothos bared his tusks in a smile. ‘Is that an invitation, Kilmandaros?’
      She looked over at the dragon. ‘I have no time for this. I need to return to Kurald Emurlahn. I will kill him now—’ and she stepped closer.
      ‘You must not,’ Mael said.
      Kilmandaros faced him, huge hands opening then closing again into fists. ‘So you keep saying, you boiled crab.’
      Shrugging, Mael turned to Gothos. ‘Explain it to her, please.’
      ‘How many debts do you wish to owe me?’ the Jaghut asked him.
      ‘Oh now really, Gothos!’
      ‘Very well. Kilmandaros. Within the Ritual that now descends upon this land, upon the battlefields and these ugly forests, death itself is denied. Should you kill the Tiste Edur here, his soul will be unleashed from his flesh, but it will remain, only marginally reduced in power.’
      ‘I mean to kill him,’ Kilmandaros said in her soft voice.
      ‘Then,’ Gothos’s smile broadened, ‘you will need me.’
      Mael snorted.
      ‘Why do I need you?’ Kilmandaros asked the Jaghut.
      He shrugged. ‘A Finnest must be prepared. To house, to imprison, this Soletaken’s soul.’
      ‘Very well, then make one.’
      ‘As a favour to you both? I think not, Elder Goddess. No, alas, as with Mael here, you must acknowledge a debt. To me.’
      ‘I have a better idea,’ Kilmandaros said. ‘I crush your skull between a finger and thumb, then I push your carcass down Scabandari’s throat, so that he suffocates on your pompous self. This seems a fitting demise for the both of you.’
      ‘Goddess, you have grown bitter and crabby in your old age,’ Gothos said.
      ‘It is no surprise,’ she replied. ‘I made the mistake of trying to save Kurald Emurlahn.’
      ‘Why bother?’ Mael asked her.

Goldmann (Germany)

      Kilmandaros bared jagged teeth. ‘The precedent is . . . unwelcome. You go bury your head in the sands again, Mael, but I warn you, the death of one realm is a promise to every other realm.’
      ‘As you say,’ the Elder God said after a moment. ‘And I do concede that possibility. In any case, Gothos demands recompense.’
      The fists unclenched, then clenched again. ‘Very well. Now, Jaghut, fashion a Finnest.’
      ‘This will do,’ Gothos said, drawing an object into view from a tear in his ragged shirt.
      The two Elders stared at it for a time, then Mael grunted. ‘Yes, I see, now. Rather curious choice, Gothos.’
      ‘The only kind I make,’ the Jaghut replied. ‘Go on, then, Kilmandaros, proceed with your subtle conclusion to the Soletaken’s pathetic existence.’
      The dragon hissed, screamed in rage and fear as the Elder Goddess advanced.
      When she drove a fist into Scabandari’s skull, centred on the ridge between and above the draconic eyes, the crack of the thick bone rang like a dirge down the length of the crevasse, and with the impact blood spurted from the Goddess’s knuckles.
      The dragon’s broken head thumped heavily onto the broken bedrock, fluids spilling out from beneath the sagging body.
      Kilmandaros wheeled to face Gothos.
      He nodded. ‘I have the poor bastard.’
      Mael stepped towards the Jaghut, holding out a hand. ‘I will take the Finnest then—’
      ‘No.’
      Both Elders now faced Gothos, who smiled once more. ‘Repayment of the debt. For each of you. I claim the Finnest, the soul of Scabandari, for myself. Nothing remains between us, now. Are you not pleased?’
      ‘What do you intend to do with it?’ Mael demanded.
      ‘I have not yet decided, but I assure you, it will be most curiously unpleasant.’
      Kilmandaros made fists again with her hands and half raised them. ‘I am tempted, Jaghut, to send my children after you.’
      ‘Too bad they’ve lost their way, then.’
      Neither Elder said another word as Gothos departed from the fissure. It always pleased him, outwitting doddering old wrecks and all their hoary, brutal power. Well, a momentary pleasure, in any case.
      The best kind.
      Upon her return to the rent, Kilmandaros found another figure standing before it. Black-cloaked, white-haired. An expression of arched contemplation, fixed upon the torn fissure.
      About to enter the gate, or waiting for her? The Elder Goddess scowled. ‘You are not welcome in Kurald Emurlahn,’ she said.
      Anomandaris Purake settled cool eyes upon the monstrous creature. ‘Do you imagine I contemplate claiming the throne for myself ?’
      ‘You would not be the first.’
      He faced the rent again. ‘You are besieged, Kilmandaros, and Edgewalker is committed elsewhere. I offer you my help.’
      ‘With you, Tiste Andii, my trust is not easily earned.’
      ‘Unjustified,’ he replied. ‘Unlike many others of my kind, I accept that the rewards of betrayal are never sufficient to overwhelm the cost. There are Soletaken now, in addition to feral dragons, warring in Kurald Emurlahn.’
      ‘Where is Osserc?’ the Elder Goddess asked. ‘Mael informed me that he—’
      ‘Was planning to get in my way again? Osserc imagined I would take part in slaying Scabandari. Why should I? You and Mael were more than enough.’ He grunted then. ‘I can picture Osserc, circling round and round. Looking for me. Idiot.’
      ‘And Scabandari’s betrayal of your brother? You have no desire to avenge that?’
      Anomandaris glanced at her, then gave her a faint smile. ‘The rewards of betrayal. The cost to Scabandari proved high, didn’t it? As for Silchas, well, even the Azath do not last for ever. I almost envy him his new-found isolation from all that will afflict us in the millennia to come.’
      ‘Indeed. Do you wish to join him in a similar barrow?’
      ‘I think not.’
      ‘Then I imagine that Silchas Ruin will not be inclined to forgive you your indifference, the day he is freed.’
      ‘You might be surprised, Kilmandaros.’
      ‘You and your kind are mysteries to me, Anomandaris Purake.’
      ‘I know. So, Goddess, have we a pact?’
      She cocked her head. ‘I mean to drive the pretenders from the realm – if Kurald Emurlahn must die, then let it do so on its own.’
      ‘In other words, you want to leave the Throne of Shadow unoccupied.’
     ’Yes.’
     He thought for a time, then he nodded. ‘Agreed.’
     ’Do not wrong me, Soletaken.’
     ’I shall not. Are you ready, Kilmandaros?’
     ’They will forge alliances,’ she said. ‘They will all war against us.’
     Anomandaris shrugged. ‘I have nothing better to do today.’
     The two Ascendants then walked through the gate, and, together, they closed the rent behind them. There were other paths, after all, to this realm. Paths that were not wounds.
     Arriving within Kurald Emurlahn, they looked upon a ravaged world.
     Then set about cleansing what was left of it.