Reaper's Gate & Toll the Hounds - By Steven Erikson Page 0,876

risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail – should we fall – we will know that we have lived.'

Endest nodded, unable to speak. There should be tears streaming down his face, but he was dry inside – his skull, behind his eyes, all . . . dry. Despair was a furnace where everything had burned up, where everything was ashes, but the heat remained, scalding, brittle and fractious.

'The day has begun.' Rake withdrew his hand and pulled on his gauntlets. 'This walk, along this path . . . I will take pleasure in it, my friend. Knowing that you stand here to see me off.'

And the Son of Darkness set out.

Endest Silann watched. The warrior with his long silver hair flowing, his leather cloak flaring out. Dragnipur a scabbarded slash.

Blue seeped into the sky, shadows in retreat along the slope. Gold painted the tops of the tree line where the road slipped in. At the very edge, Anomander Rake paused, turned about and raised one hand high.

Endest Silann did the same, but the gesture was so weak it made him gasp, and his arm faltered.

And then the distant figure swung round.

And vanished beneath the trees.

BOOK FOUR

TOLL THE HOUNDS

Like broken slate

We take our hatred

And pile it high

Rolling with the hills

A ragged line to map

Our rise and fall

And I saw suffused

With the dawn

Crows aligned in rows

Along the crooked wall

Come to feed

Bones lie scattered

At the stone's foot

The heaped ruin

Of past assaults

The crows face each way

To eye the pickings

On both sides

For all its weakness

The world cannot break

What we make

Of our hatred

I watched the workers

Carry each grey rock

They laboured

Blind and stepped

Unerringly modest paths

Piece by sheared piece

They built a slaughter

Of innocent others

While muttering as they might

Of waves of weather

And goodly deeds

We the Builders

Hanasp Tular

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Pray you never hear an imprecise breath

Caught in its rough web

Every god turns away at the end

And not a whisper sounds

Do not waste a lifetime awaiting death

Caught in its rough web

It hovers in the next moment you must attend

As your last whisper sounds

Pray you never hear an imprecise breath

Rough Web

Fisher

The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins in love and ends with grief.

Time unravels now. Event clashes upon event. So much to recount, pray this sad-eyed round man does not falter, does not grow too breathless. History has its moments. To dwell within one is to understand nothing.

We are rocked in the tumult, and the awareness of one's own ignorance is a smothering cloak that proves poor armour. You will flinch with the wounds. We shall all flinch.

As might a crow or an owl, or indeed a winged eel, hover now a moment above this fair city, its smoke haze, the scurrying figures in the streets and lanes, the impenetrable dark cracks of narrow alleyways. Thieves' Road spreads a tangled web between buildings. Animals bawl and wives berate husbands and husbands bellow back, night buckets gush from windows down into the guttered alleys and – in some poorer areas of the Gadrobi District – into streets where pedestrians duck and dodge in the morning ritual of their treacherous journeys to work, or home. Clouds of flies are stirred awake with the dawn's light. Pigeons revive their hopeless struggle to walk straight lines. Rats creep back into their closed-in refuges after yet another night of seeing far too much. The night's damp smells are burned off and new stinks arise in pungent vapours.

And on the road, where it passes through the leper colony west of the city, a weary ox and a tired old man escort a burdened cart on which lies a canvas-wrapped figure, worn riding boots visible.

Ahead awaits Two-Ox Gate.

Hover no longer. Plummet both wings and spirit down to the buzzing flies, the animal heat sweet and acrid, the musty closeness of the stained burlap. The old man pausing to wipe sweat from his lined brow with its array of warts and moles, and his knees ache and there is dull pain in his chest.

Of late, he has been carting corpses round day and night, or so it seems. Each one made him feel older, and the glances he has been casting at the ox are tainted with an irrational dislike, wavering in its intensity, as if the beast was to blame for . . . for something, though he knows not what.

The two guards at the gate were leaning against a wall, staying cool in the shade