======================
Notes:
This book was scanned by JASC
If you correct any minor errors, please change the version number below (and in the file name) to a slightly higher one e.g. from 1.0 to 1.1 or if major revisions, to v. 2.0 etc..
Current e-book version is 1.0 (formatting errors have been corrected(for the most part, was a good scan); semiproofed)
Comments, Questions, Requests(no promises): daytonascan4911@hotmail.com
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK OF YOU DO NOT OWN/POSSES THE PHYSICAL COPY. THAT IS STEALING FROM THE AUTHOR.
--------------------------------------------
Book Information:
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Author: Steven Erikson
Name: House of Chains
Series: A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen 4
======================


House of Chains
A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen 4
Steven Erikson

Verge of the Nascent, the 943rd Day of the Search 1139 Burn's Sleep
GREY, BLOATED AND POCKED, THE BODIES LINED THE SILT-LADEN shoreline for as far as the eye could see. Heaped like driftwood by the rising water, bobbing and rolling on the edges, the putrefying flesh seethed with black-shelled, ten-legged crabs. The coin-sized creatures had scarcely begun to make inroads on the bounteous feast the warren's sundering had laid before them.
The sea mirrored the low sky's hue. Dull, patched pewter above and below, broken only by the deeper grey of silts and, thirty strokes of the oar distant, the smeared ochre tones of the barely visible upper levels of a city's inundated buildings. The storms had passed, the waters were calm amidst the wreckage of a drowned world.
Short, squat had been the inhabitants. Flat-featured, the pale hair left long and loose. Their world had been a cold one, given the thick-padded clothing they had worn. But with the sundering that had changed, cataclysmically. The air was sultry, damp and now foul with the reek of decay.
The sea had been born of a river on another realm. A massive, wide and probably continent-spanning artery of fresh water, heavy with a plain's silts, the murky depths home to huge catfish and wagon-wheel-sized spiders, its shallows crowded with the crabs and carnivorous, rootless plants. The river had poured its torrential volume onto this vast, level landscape. Days, then weeks, then months.
Storms, conjured by the volatile clash of tropical air-streams with the resident temperate climate, had driven the flood on beneath shrieking winds, and before the inexorably rising waters came deadly plagues to take those who had not drowned.
Somehow, the rent had closed sometime in the night just past. The river from another realm had been returned to its original path.
The shoreline ahead probably did not deserve the word, but nothing else came to Trull Sengar's mind as he was dragged along its verge. The beach was nothing more than silt, heaped against a huge wall that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. The wall had withstood the flood, t...

Show full text: 1,782,204 characters