Night Of Knives: A Novel Of The Malazan Empire - Tapa dura

It gave the Empire its name, but the tiny island and city of Malaz is now a sleepy, seedy back-water port. However this night things are a little different. This night its residents are bustling about, barring doors and shuttering windows. Because this night a once-in-a-generation Shadow Moon is due and threatens the good citizens of Malaz with demon hounds and other, darker, beings... And it was also prophesied that on this night the Emperor Kellanved, missing for all these years, will return. As factions within the greater Empire battle over the imperial throne, the Shadow Moon summons a far more alien and ancient presence for an all-out assault upon the island. Indeed the cataclysmic events that happen this night will determine the fate of the Malaz and of the entire world beyond.

Waves twice the height of the masts rolled past, foaming with ice and rime. Then Murl saw it, a dazzling sapphire figure breaching the surface: helmed, armoured, a tall lance of jagged ice couched at the hip. Its mount seemed half beast and half roiling wave. He fancied it turned a dark inscrutable gaze his way through cheek-guards of frozen scale. Then, just as suddenly, the Rider dived, returning to the churning sea. Another broached the surface further out. Then another... ...The Riders cared nothing for them. They were here for another reason, answering some inhuman summons, heaving themselves northwards, an invading army throwing its might against the one thing that had confined them for so long to this narrow passage of water: the island of Malaz ...