Toll the Hounds (The Malazan Book of the Fallen, #8)

Darujhistan swelters in the summer heat and seethes with dire portents, unsettling rumours and insidious whispers. Strangers have arrived, a murderer is at work, and past tyrannies might be reawakening. The retired Bridgeburners of K’rul’s Bar have been singled out by the city's assassins with deadly consequences, and a small, rotund, red-waistcoat-clad man, while dismayed by his expanding girth, knows that this is the very least of his worries. For somewhere in the distance can be heard the baying of hounds.

And far away in Black Coral, the Tiste Andii rule with seeming indifference. At a massive barrow outside the city, thousands gather – adherents to the cult of the Redeemer, a once-mortal man whose virtue and honour seem defenceless against the twisted ambitions of his followers.

So, as Hood stands at the beginning of a conspiracy that will shake the cosmos, at its end, there waits another. For Anomander Rake, Son of Darkness, the time has come to right an ancient and terrible wrong…