Ethume, a corporal

Korbolo Dom, a renegade Napan

Kasanal, his hired assassin

OTHERS

Kalam Mekhar, an assassin

Trull Sengar, a Tiste Edur

Onrack, a T’lan Imass

Cutter, an assassin (also known as Crokus)

Apsalar, an assassin

Rellock, Apsalar’s father

Cotillion, Patron of Assassins

Traveller

Rood, a Hound of Shadow

Blind, a Hound of Shadow

Darist, a Tiste Andii

Ba’ienrok (Keeper), a hermit

Ibra Gholan, a T’lan Imass Clan Leader

Monok Ochem, a Bonecaster of the Logros T’lan Imass

Haran Epal, a T’lan Imass

Olar Shayn, a T’lan Imass

Greyfrog, a demon familiar

Apt, a matron demon (Aptorian) of Shadow

Azalan, a demon of Shadow

Panek, a child of Shadow

Mebra, a spy in Ehrlitan

Iskaral Pust, a priest of Shadow

Mogora, his D’ivers wife

Cynnigig, a Jaghut

Phyrlis, a Jaghut

Aramala, a Jaghut

Icarium, a Jhag

Mappo Runt, a Trell

Jorrude, a Tiste Liosan Seneschal

Malachar, a Tiste Liosan

Enias, a Tiste Liosan

Orenas, a Tiste Liosan

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. Heaped like driftwood by the rising water, bobbing and rolling on the edges, the putrefying flesh seethed with black-shelled, ten-legged crabs. The coin-sized creatures had scarcely 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, the pale 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 probably continent-spanning artery of fresh water, heavy with a plain’s silts, the murky depths home to huge catfish and wagon-wheel-sized spiders, its shallows crowded with the 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 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.