After decades of warfare, the tribes of the Tiste Edur have at last united under the rule of the Warlock King. But peace has been exacted at a terrible price - a pact made with a hidden power whose motives are at best suspect, at worst deadly.

To the south, the expansionist kingdom of Lether has devoured all of its less-civilised neighbours with rapacious hunger. All save one - the Tiste Edur.

But Lether is approaching a long-prophesied renaissance that it will take it from a kingdom and lost colony to an empire reborn - and has fixed its gaze on the rich lands of the Tiste Edur. It would seem inevitable that the tribes will surrender, succumbing to the suffocating weight of gold, or to slaughter at the edge of a sword.

Or so Destiny has decreed.

A pivotal treaty between the two sides nears, but unknown ancient forces are awakening. For the impending struggle between these two peoples is but a pale reflection of an altogether more profound, primal battle - a confrontation driven by a still-raw betrayal and a craving for vengeance.

War and confrontation, magic and myth collide in this, the stunning fifth chapter in Steven Erikson's magnificent The Malazan Book of the Fallen - a series hailed as an epic of the imagination and a classic work of high fantasy.

Steven Erikson is a New York Times bestselling author renown for writing The Malazan Book of the Fallen, a ten-volume series that has sold millions of copies worldwide and is recognized as number two of the top 10 fantasy books by Fantasy Book Review and one of 30 best fantasy series of all time by Paste Magazine. He is a trained archaeologist and anthropologist who has published over twenty books, most of which explore notions of privilege, power hierarchies, and the rise and fall of civilizations, or take the piss out of the same. Erikson has been nominated for the Locus Award four times and the World Fantasy Award twice. His next novel Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart, is an SF First Contact story, due out in October, 2018. He lives in Victoria, B.C. with his lovely wife Clare.

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Each new novel moves from strength to strength...this series has already established itself as the most significant work of epic fantasy since Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant—SF SITE

The kind of epic narrative that will have you scrambling for more—STEPHEN R. DONALDSON

Erikson is a master of lost and forgotten epochs, a weaver of ancient epics...his books are fantasy for grown-ups, but his war-torn world of constant upheavals reminds one an awful lot of our own—SALON.COM

This is true myth in the making, a drawing upon fantasy to recreate histories and legends as rich as any found within our culture—INTERZONE