Midnight Tides & The Bonehunters - By Steven Erikson Page 0,23

a small player in this game, Hull. Head of a merchant house conveniently placed in Trate, with considerable experience dealing with the Hiroth and Arapay.' And, through me, legitimate passage into Edur lands.

'Hannan Mosag will send his warriors after those ships,' Hull Beddict said. 'The queen's interest in those merchant houses is about to take a beating.'

'I expect she has anticipated the loss.'

The man beside her was not the naive youth he had once been. But he was long removed from the intricate schemes and deadly sleight of hand that was so much the lifeblood of the Letherii. She could sense him struggling with the multiplicity of layers of intent and design at work here. 'I begin to see the path she takes,' he said after a time, and the bleak despair in his voice was so raw that she looked away, blinking.

He went on, 'This is the curse, then, that we are so inclined to look ahead, ever ahead. As if the path before us should be any different from the one behind us.'

Aye, and it pays to remind me, every time I glance back.

1 really should stop doing that.

'Five wings will buy you a grovel,' Tehol Beddict muttered from his bed. 'Haven't you ever wondered how odd it is? Of course, every god should have a throne, but shouldn't it also follow that every throne built for a god is actually occupied? And if it isn't, who in their right mind decided that it was worthwhile to worship an empty throne?'

Seated on a low three-legged stool at the foot of the bed, Bugg paused in his knitting. He held out and examined the coarse wool shirt he was working on, one eye squeezing into a critical squint.

Tehol's gaze flicked down at his servant. 'I'm fairly certain my left arm is of a length close to, if not identical with, that of my right. Why do you persist in this conceit? You've no talent to speak of, in much of anything, come to think of it. Probably why I love you so dearly, Bugg.'

'Not half as much as you love yourself,' the old man replied, resuming his knitting.

'Well, I see no point in arguing that.' He sighed, wiggling his toes beneath the threadbare sheet. The wind was freshening, blessedly cool and only faintly reeking of the south shore's Stink Flats. Bed and stool were the only furniture on the roof of Tehol's house. Bugg still slept below, despite the sweltering heat, and only came up when his work demanded light enough to see. Saved on lamp oil, Tehol told himself, since oil was getting dreadfully expensive now that the whales were getting scarce.

He reached down to the half-dozen dried figs on the tarnished plate Bugg had set down beside him. 'Ah, more figs. Another humiliating trip to the public privies awaits me, then.' He chewed desultorily, watching the monkeylike clambering of the workers on the dome of the Eternal Domicile. Purely accidental, this exquisitely unobstructed view of the distant palace rising from the heart of Letheras, and all the more satisfying for that, particularly the way the nearby towers and Third Height bridges so neatly framed King Ezgara Diskanar's conceit. 'Eternal Domicile indeed. Eternally unfinished.'

The dome had proved so challenging to the royal architects that four of them had committed suicide in the course of its construction, and one had died tragically – if somewhat mysteriously – trapped inside a drainage pipe. 'Seventeen years and counting. Looks like they've given up entirely on that fifth wing. What do you think, Bugg? I value your expert opinion.'

Bugg's expertise amounted to rebuilding the hearth in the kitchen below. Twenty-two fired bricks stacked into a shape very nearly cubic, and indeed it would have been if three of the bricks had not come from a toppled mausoleum at the local cemetery. Grave masons held to peculiar notions of what a brick's dimensions should be, pious bastards that they were.

In response to Tehol's query, Bugg glanced up, squinting with both eyes.

Five wings to the palace, the dome rising from the centre. Four tiers to those wings, except for the shoreside one, where only two tiers had been built. Work had been suspended when it was discovered that the clay beneath the foundations tended to squeeze out to the sides, like closing a fist on a block of butter. The fifth wing was sinking.

'Gravel,' Bugg said, returning to his knitting.

'What?'

'Gravel,' the old man repeated. 'Drill deep wells down into the clay, every few paces