Reaper's Gate & Toll the Hounds - By Steven Erikson Page 0,319

of both unfettered dreams and the fearless ambition needed to achieve them. As if those self-imposed limitations used to justify failure were virtues, to add to those of pious self-righteousness and the condescension of the flagellant.

Oh, but look at himself, here and now, look at what he was about to do. The city's ancient secrets made into things to be used, and used to achieve cruel ends. Yet was he not a god? Was this not his realm? If all that existed was not open to use and, indeed, abuse, then what was its purpose?

He walked through the ghostly walls, the submerged levels, acknowledging a vague awareness of hidden, mostly obscured patterns, structures, the array of things that held significance, although such comprehension was not for him, not for his cast of mind, but something alien, something long lost to the dead ages of the distant past.

No end to manifestations, however, few of which captured the awareness of the mortals he now walked among – walked unseen, less than a chill draught against the neck – and the Errant continued on, observing such details as snared his attention.

Finding the place he sought, he halted. Before him stood the walls of an estate. None other than the one that had belonged to the late Gerun Eberict. It stood abandoned, ownership mired in a legal tangle of claims that had stretched on and on. Gerun Eberict had, it seemed, taken all his wealth with him, a detail that amused the Errant no end.

The huge main building's footprint cut across the unremarked lines of an older structure that had once stood bordered on three sides by open water: two cut channels and a stream born of deep artesian wells filled with cold black water beneath a vast shelf of limestone that itself lay below a thick layer of silts, sand lenses and beds of clay. There had been significance to these channels, and to the fact that the fourth side had possessed, beneath what passed for a street seven thousand years ago, a buried tunnel of fire-hardened clay. In this tunnel, kept distinct from all other local sources, there had flowed water from the depths of the river. Thus, all four sides, the precious lifeblood of the Elder God who had been worshipped in the temple that had once squatted in this place.

Eberict should have been mindful of that detail, in which a hired seer might well have discerned Gerun's eventual demise at the blunt hands of a half-breed giant. It was no accident, after all, that those of Tarthenal blood were so drawn to Mael, even now – some whispering of instinct of that first alliance, forged on the water, between Imass and Tarthenal – or Toblakai, to use their true name. Before the Great Landings that brought the last of the giants who had chosen to remain pure of blood to this and other shores, where the first founders would become the vicious, spiteful gods of the Tarthenal.

But it was not just Gerun Eberict and the countless other citizens of Letheras who dwelt here who were unmindful – or, perhaps, forgetful – of the ancient significance of all that had been swept clean from the surface in this city.

The Errant moved forward. Through the estate's outer wall. Then down, through the cobbles of the compound, sliding ghostly past the rubble and sand of fill, down into the foul, motionless air of the clay-lined tunnel. Knee-deep in thick, soupy water.

He faced the inner sloping wall of the tunnel, gauging his position relative to whatever remnants of the old temple remained beyond. And strode forward.

Shattered stone, jammed and packed tight, stained black by the thick, airless clays now filling every space. Evidence of fire in the burst cracks of foundation blocks. Remnants of ore-laden paints still clinging to fragments of plaster. Ubiquitous pieces of pottery, shapeless clumps of green copper, the mangled black knuckles of silver, the defiant gleam of red-tinged gold – all that remained of past complexities of mortal life, reminders of hands that had once touched, shaped, pressed tips to indent and nails to incise, brushed glaze and paint and dust from chipped rims; hands that left nothing behind but these objects poignant with failure.

Disgusted, nauseated, the god pushed his way through the detritus, and clawed his way clear: a steeply angled space, created by the partially collapsed inner wall. Blue tesserae to paint an image of unbroken sea, but various pieces had fallen away, revealing grey plaster still bearing