Wherever she had gone – assuming she still lived – he would find her.

The three distant figures unveiled warrens, each vanishing into their Elder realms.

The beast elected to follow none of them. They were young entities as far as he and his mate were concerned, and the warren she might have fled to was, in comparison to those of the Elder Gods, ancient.

The path that awaited him was perilous, and he knew fear in his labouring heart.

The portal that opened before him revealed a grey-streaked, swirling storm of power. The beast hesitated, then strode into it.

And was gone.

BOOK ONE - THE SPARK AND THE ASHES

Five mages, an Adjunct, countless Imperial Demons, and the debacle that was Darujhistan, all served to publicly justify the outlawry proclaimed by the Empress on Dujek Onearm and his battered legions. That this freed Onearm and his Host to launch a new campaign, this time as an independent military force, to fashion his own unholy alliances which were destined to result in a continuation of the dreadful Sorcery Enfilade on Genabackis, is, one might argue, incidental. Granted, the countless victims of that devastating time might, should Hood grant them the privilege, voice an entirely different opinion. Perhaps the most poetic detail of what would come to be called the Pannion Wars was in fact a precursor to the entire campaign: the casual, indifferent destruction of a lone, stone bridge, by the Jaghut Tyrant on his ill-fated march to Darujhistan . . .

Imperial Campaigns (The Pannion War)

1194–1195, Volume N, Genabackis

Imrygyn Tallobant (b. 1151)

CHAPTER ONE

Memories are woven tapestries hiding hard walls—tell me, my friends, what hue your favoured thread, and I in turn, will tell the cast of your soul . . .

Life of Dreams

Ilbares the Hag

1164th Year of Burn’s Sleep (two months after the Darujhistan Fete)

4th Year of the Pannion Domin

Tellann Year of the Second Gathering

The bridge’s Gadrobi limestone blocks lay scattered, scorched and broken in the bank’s churned mud, as if a god’s hand had swept down to shatter the stone span in a single, petty gesture of contempt. And that, Gruntle suspected, was but a half-step from the truth.

The news had trickled back into Darujhistan less than a week after the destruction, as the first eastward-bound caravans this side of the river reached the crossing, to find that where once stood a serviceable bridge was now nothing but rubble. Rumours whispered of an ancient demon, unleashed by agents of the Malazan Empire, striding down out of the Gadrobi Hills bent on the annihilation of Darujhistan itself.

Gruntle spat into the blackened grasses beside the carriage. He had his doubts about that tale. Granted, there’d been strange goings on the night of the city’s Fete two months back – not that he’d been sober enough to notice much of anything – and sufficient witnesses to give credence to the sightings of dragons, demons and the terrifying descent of Moon’s Spawn, but any conjuring with the power to lay waste to an entire countryside would have reached Darujhistan. And, since the city was not a smouldering heap – or no more than was usual after a city-wide celebration – clearly nothing did.