After decades of internecine warfare, the tribes of the Tiste Edur have at last united under the Warlock King of the Hiroth, There is peace--but it has been exacted at a terrible price: a pact made with a hidden power whose motives are the best suspect, at worst, deadly.
To the south, the expansionist kingdom of Lether, eager to fulfill its long-prophesized renaissance as an Empire reborn, has enslved all its less-civilized neighbors with rapacious hunger. All, that is, save one--the Tiste Edur. And it must be only a matter of time before they too fall--either beneath the suffocating weight of gold, or by slaughter at the edge of a sword. Or so destiny has decreed.
Yet as the two sides gather for a pivotal treaty neither truly wants, ancient forces are awakening. For the impending struggle between these two peoples is but a pale reflection of a far more profound, primal battle--a confrontation with the still-raw wound of an old betrayal and the craving for revenge at its seething heart.

Steven Erikson is a New York Times bestselling author renown for writing The Malazan Book of the Fallen, a ten-volume series that has sold millions of copies worldwide and is recognized as number two of the top 10 fantasy books by Fantasy Book Review and one of 30 best fantasy series of all time by Paste Magazine. He is a trained archaeologist and anthropologist who has published over twenty books, most of which explore notions of privilege, power hierarchies, and the rise and fall of civilizations, or take the piss out of the same. Erikson has been nominated for the Locus Award four times and the World Fantasy Award twice. His next novel Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart, is an SF First Contact story, due out in October, 2018. He lives in Victoria, B.C. with his lovely wife Clare.

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“The series has clearly established itself as a the most significant work of epic fantasy since Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.” —SF Site
“Extraordinarily enjoyable . . . Erikson is a master of lost and forgotten epochs, a weaver of ancient epics.” —Salon.com