Memories of Ice

Cotillion/The Rope (the Assassin of High House Shadow) Dessembrae, Lord of Tragedy D'rek, the Worm of Autumn (sometimes the Queen of Disease, see Poliel) Fanderay, She-Wolf of Winter Fener, the Boar (see also Tennerock) Gedderone, Lady of Spring and Rebirth Great Ravens, ravens sustained by magic Hood (King of High House Death) Jhess, Queen of Weaving

Kallor, the High King

K'rul, Elder God

Mael, Elder God

Mowri, Lady of Beggars, Slaves and Serfs Nerruse, Lady of Calm Seas and Fair Wind Oponn, Twin Jesters of Chance Osserc, Lord of the Sky

Poliel, Mistress of Pestilence Queen of Dreams (Queen of High House Life) Shadowthrone/Ammanas (King of High House Shadow) Shedenul/Soliel, Lady of Health Soliel, Mistress of Healing Tennerock/Fener, the Boar of Five Tusks The Crippled God, King of Chains The Hounds (of High House Shadow) Togg (see Fanderay), the Wolf of Winter Trake/Treach, The Tiger of Summer and Battle Son of Darkness/Moon's Lord/Anomander Rake (Knight of High House Dark) Treach, First Hero

Steven Erikson's epic fantasy sequence

continues in House of Chains, now

available from Bantam Books.

Here is the Prologue as a taster …

Verge of the Nascent, the 943rd Day of the Search, 1139 Burn's Sleep Grey, bloated and pocked, the bodies lined the silt-laden shoreline for as far as the eye could see. Heaped like driftwood by the rising water, bobbing and rolling on the edges, the putrifying flesh seethed with black-shelled, ten-legged crabs. The coin-sized creatures had only begun to make inroads on the bounteous feast the warren's sundering had laid before them.

The sea mirrored the low sky's hue. 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 storms had passed, the waters were calm amidst the wreckage of a drowned world.

Short, squat had been the inhabitants. Flat-featured, pale-haired, the hair left long and loose. Their world had been a cold one, given the thick-padded clothing they had worn. But with the sundering, that had changed, cataclysmically. The air was sultry, damp and now foul with the reek of decay.

The sea had been born of a river on another realm. A massive, wide and likely continent-spanning artery of freshwater, heavy with a plain's silts, the murky depths home to huge catfish and wagon-wheel-sized spiders, its shallows crowded with the black-shelled, ten-legged crabs and carnivorous, rootless plants. The river had poured its torrential volume onto this vast, level landscape. Days, then weeks, then months.

Storms, conjured by the volatile clash of tropical air-streams with the resident temperate climate, had driven the flood on beneath shrieking winds, and before the inexorably rising waters came deadly plagues to take those who had not drowned.

Somehow, the rent had closed sometime in the night just past. The river from another realm had been returned to its original path.

The shoreline ahead probably did not deserve the word, but nothing else came to Trull Sengar's mind as he was dragged along its verge. The beach was nothing more than silt, heaped against a huge, cyclopean wall that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. The wall had withstood the flood, though water now streamed down it on the opposite side.

Bodies on his left, a sheer drop of seven, maybe eight man-heights to his right, the top of the wall itself slightly less than thirty paces across; that it held back an entire sea whispered of sorcery. The broad, flat stones underfoot were smeared with mud, but already drying in the heat, dun-coloured insects dancing on its surface, leaping from the path of Trull Sengar and his captors.

Trull still experienced difficulty comprehending that notion. Captors. A word he struggled with. They were his brothers, after all. Kin. Faces he had known all his life, faces he had seen smile, and laugh, and faces — at times — filled with a grief that had mirrored his own. He had stood at their sides through all that had happened, the glorious triumphs, the soul-wrenching losses.

Captors.

There were no smiles, now. No laughter. The expressions of those who held him were fixed and cold.

What we have come to.