Reaper's Gate & Toll the Hounds - By Steven Erikson Page 0,90

your quarters, where the filth will be scrubbed from your body and hair—'

He got no further, as Karsa reached out, closed his hand on the guard's leather weapons harness, and with a single heave flung the Letherii into the air. Six or more paces to the left he sailed, colliding with three stevedores who had been watching the proceedings. All four went down.

Voicing an oath, the second guard tugged at his shortsword.

Karsa's punch rocked his head back and the man collapsed.

Hoarse shouts of alarm, more Letherii soldiers converging.

Samar Dev rushed forward. 'Hood take you, Toblakai – do you intend to war with the whole empire?'

Glaring at the half-circle of guards closing round him, Karsa grunted then crossed his arms. 'If you are to be my escort,' he said to them, 'then be civil, or I will break you all into pieces.' Then he swung about, pushing past Samar.

'Where is my horse?' he bellowed to the crew still on deck. 'Where is Havok! I grow tired of waiting!' Samar Dev considered returning to the ship, demanding that they sail out, back down the river, back into the Draconean Sea, then beyond. Leaving this unpredictable Toblakai to Letheras and all its hapless denizens.

Alas, even gods don't deserve that.

Bugg stood thirty paces from the grand entrance to the Hivanar Estate, one hand out as he leaned against a wall to steady himself. In some alley garden a short distance away, chickens screeched in wild clamour and flung themselves into the grille hatches in frenzied panic. Overhead, starlings still raced back and forth en masse.

He wiped beads of sweat from his brow, struggled to draw a deep breath.

A worthy reminder, he told himself. Everything was only a matter of time. What stretched would then contract. Events tumbled, forces closed to collision, and for all that, the measured pace seemed to remain unchanged, a current beneath all else. Yet, he knew, even that slowed, incrementally, from one age to the next. Death is written in birth – the words of a great sage. What was her name? When did she live? Ah, so much has whispered away from my mind, these memories, like sand between the fingers. Yet she could see what most cannot – not even the gods. Death and birth. Even in opposition the two forces are bound, and to define one is to define the other.

And now he had come. With his first step, delivering the weight of history. This land's. His own. Two forces in opposition, yet inextricably bound. Do you now feel as if you have come home, Icarium? I remember you, striding from the sea, a refugee from a realm you had laid to waste. Yet your father did not await you – he had gone, he had walked down the throat of an Azath. Icarium, he was Jaghut, and among the Jaghut no father reaches across to take his child's hand.

'Are you sick, old man?'

Blinking, Bugg looked across to see a servant from one of the nearby estates, returning from market with a basket of foodstuffs balanced on his head. Only with grief, dear mortal. He shook his head.

'It was the floods,' the servant went on. 'Shifting the clay.'

'Aye.'

'Scale House fell down – did you hear? Right into the street. Good thing it was empty, hey? Though I heard there was a fatality – in the street.' The man suddenly grinned. 'A cat!' Laughing, he resumed his journey.

Bugg stared after him; then, with a grunt, he set off for the gate.

* * *

He waited on the terrace, frowning down at the surprisingly deep trench the crew had managed to excavate into the bank, then outward, through the bedded silts of the river itself. The shoring was robust, and Bugg could see few leaks from between the sealed slats. Even so, two workers were on the pump, their bared backs slick with sweat.

Rautos Hivanar came to his side. 'Bugg, welcome. I imagine you wish to retrieve your crew.'

'No rush, sir,' Bugg replied. 'It is clear to me now that this project of yours is . . . ambitious. How much water is coming up from the floor of that pit?'

'Without constant pumping, the trench would overflow in a little under two bells.'

'I bring you a message from your servant, Venitt Sathad, who visited on his way out of the city. He came to observe our progress on the refurbishment of the inn you recently acquired, and was struck with something of a revelation upon seeing the mysterious mechanism we