The sea had been born of a river on another realm. The air was sultry, damp and now foul with the reek of decay. But with the sundering that had changed, cataclysmically.

Their world had been a cold one, given the thick-padded clothing they had worn. Flat-featured, the pale hair left long and loose. The storms had passed, the waters were calm amidst the wreckage of a drowned world. Dull, patched pewter above and below, broken only by the deeper grey of silts and, thirty strokes of the oar distant, the smeared ochre tones of the barely visible upper levels of a city's inundated buildings. The coin-sized creatures had scarcely begun to make inroads on the bounteous feast the warren's sundering had laid before them. Heaped like driftwood by the rising water, bobbing and rolling on the edges, the putrefying flesh seethed with black-shelled, ten-legged crabs. Prologue Verge of the Nascent, the 943rd Day of the Search 1159 Burn's Sleep Grey, bloated and pocked, the bodies lined the silt-laden shoreline for as far as the eye could see. And so begins this awesome new chapter in Steven Erikson's acclaimed Malazan Book of the Fallen. The seer's warlords are locked into a power struggle that threatens the very soul of the rebellion, while Sha'ik herself suffers, haunted by the knowledge of her nemesis: her own sister, Tavore.

New to command, she must hone twelve thousand soldiers, mostly raw recruits but for a handful of veterans of Coltaine's legendary march, into a force capable of challenging the massed hordes of Sha'ik's Whirlwind who lie in wait in the heart of the Holy Desert. Tavore, the Adjunct to the Empress, has arrived in the last remaining Malazan stronghold of Seven Cities. Some years later, it is the aftermath of the Chain of Dogs. Their intention is to wreak havoc amongst the despised lowlanders, but for the one named Karsa Orlong it marks the beginning of what will prove to be an extraordinary destiny. In Northern Genabackis, a raiding party of savage tribal warriors descends from the mountains into the southern flatlands.

Tor house of chains