Toll the Hounds

Toll the Hounds
Series	Malazan Book of the Fallen
Publisher	Bantam (UK & Canada) Tor Books (USA)
Released	June 30, 2008 (Bantam) September 16, 2008 (Tor)
Pages	1,296 pp (UK paperback edition) 864 (Tor)
ISBN	ISBN 0-593-04638-2 (UK hardcover edition) ISBN 0-765-31008-2 (US hardcover edition)
Preceded by	Reaper's Gale
Followed by	Dust of Dreams

Toll the Hounds is the eighth novel in the Malazan Book of the Fallen epic fantasy series by Steven Erikson. It was first published in the UK and Canada on June 30, 2008, and in the US on September 16, 2008.

Publisher's Summary

In Darujhistan, the city of blue fire, it is said that love and death shall arrive dancing. It is summer and the heat is oppressive, but for the small round man in the faded red waistcoat, discomfiture is not just because of the sun. All is not well. Dire portents plague his nights and haunt the city streets like fiends of shadow. Assassins skulk in alleyways, but the quarry has turned and the hunters become the hunted.

Hidden hands pluck the strings of tyranny like a fell chorus. While the bards sing their tragic tales, somewhere in the distance can be heard the baying of Hounds... And in the distant city of Black Coral, where rules Anomander Rake, Son of Darkness, ancient crimes awaken, intent on revenge. It seems Love and Death are indeed about to arrive...hand in hand, dancing.

A thrilling, harrowing novel of war, intrigue and dark, uncontrollable magic, Toll the Hounds is the new chapter in Erikson's monumental series - epic fantasy at its most imaginative and storytelling at its most exciting.

Front matter

Dedication

This novel is dedicated to the memory of my father, R. S. Lundin, 1931-2007. You are missed.

Acknowledgements

Gratitude as always goes to my advance readers: Bowen, Rick, Mark and Chris, with special thanks to Bill and Hazel for their kind words and support over the course of what proved to be a difficult year. Appreciation also goes to the staff of the Black Stilt Café and the Pacific Union Café for their generous loan of office space.

Love to Clare and Bowen, for everything.

Maps

Darujhistan

Black Coral & environs

Editions

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Publisher	Format/Edition	First published	Pages	ISBN-10	ISBN-13	Notes
United Kingdom — Toll the Hounds
Bantam	Hard cover	2008	923	xxx	978-0593046371	First edition
Bantam	Trade paperback	2008	923	xxx	978-0593046388
Bantam	Mass market paperback	9 Apr 2009	1296	xxx	978-0553824469
United States — Toll the Hounds
Tor	Hard cover	2008	829	0765310082	978-0765310088	Cover by Todd Lockwood
Tor	Trade paperback	2008	829	0765316544	978-0765316547	Cover by Todd Lockwood
Tor	Hard cover, Science Fiction Book Club	xxx	xxx	xxx	xxx
Tor	Mass market paperback	xxx	xxx	xxx	xxx
Subterranean Press	Hard cover	Aug 2018	992	xxx	xxx	Limited numbered/lettered editions Illustrated by Marc Simonetti List of illustrations "The strength she kept hidden was unveiled suddenly..." Late Night Bridgeburners A New Guest At the Fire Darujhistan In Sight (lettered only) Sisters

Plot Summary

The following summaries contain spoilers
Please access individual chapter summaries via the Chapter infobox

Many of the characters from Gardens of the Moon and Memories of Ice, make a return in this novel.

Prologue

The prologue is divided into four separate scenes.

The first is in a "necropolis of sorts", where two people, who are revealed to be dead, witness a meeting between Hood, Edgewalker, Shadowthrone and Anomander Rake, though they are not privy to what is discussed.

The second is set in the realm of Dragnipur, where it is suggested that the Wagon is becoming very difficult to pull, as more souls keep dying, while on the horizon, Chaos steadily advances on the Gate of Kurald Galain.

The third scene plays out in a village, where two girls notice the departure of a dog, and decide to follow.

And the last scene is by a fire on an empty plain (likely in Kruppe's dream world), where Kruppe asks K'rul to witness him dance.

Genabackis

Darujhistan

The retired Bridgeburners are enjoying their retirement when Assassins from the Assassins' Guild suddenly come after them, though the assassins soon discover that the Bridgeburners aren't easy marks.

Spite and her companions arrive in Darujhistan, and go their separate ways. Crokus, who is Cutter, is anxious at the thought of being reunited with his old friends of the Phoenix Inn, while Barathol seeks anonymity in the city.

Mappo Runt is anxious to find Icarium, who is on the Letheri continent. He hires the Trygalle Trade Guild to take him to that distant continent and is accompanied by Gruntle, who does this because he is irritated by all the attention from the acolytes and priestess of Trake, the new God of War.

Black Coral

Itkovian's sacrifice (in Memories of Ice) gave birth to a new cult (the cult of the Redeemer), propelling him to godhood. But another god is out there to bend and corrupt the cult. And only a former Seerdomin appears to stand in that god's path.

Anomander Rake, the Son of Darkness, asks Endest Silann, the broken High Mage of Moon's Spawn, and Spinnock Durav, the wandering Tiste Andii warrior, to do what must be done, as he senses many things coming.

Lamatath Plain

Karsa, Traveller and Samar Dev by Marc Simonetti (Official Image)

As Karsa Orlong and Samar Dev traverse the Lamatath Plain, they encounter Traveller. Someone, Karsa realizes, not even he can cross.

Nimander & Companions and Kallor

Clip leads Nimander Golit and the others toward Black Coral, where his confrontation with the Son of Darkness awaits. They encounter Kallor, and he joins them on their journey.

The Realm of Dragnipur

Within the realm of Dragnipur, more and more souls are dying, and the ones left standing are more than aware that Chaos is on the verge of overtaking the wagon. And when that occurs, Draconus, the elder god who forged Dragnipur, is aware that all the realms could be destroyed. He has a desperate plan to face what seems inevitable, but little does he know that a blind Tiste Andii has an agenda of his own.

Epigraphs

Book One: Vow to the Sun

Epigraph

This creature of words cuts To the quick and gasp, dart away The spray of red rain Beneath a clear blue sky Shock at all that is revealed What use now this armour When words so easy slant between? This god of promises laughs At the wrong things, wrongly timed Unmaking all these sacrifices In deliberate malice Recoil like a soldier routed Even as retreat is denied Before corpses heaped high in walls You knew this would come At last and feign nothing, no surprise To find this cup filled With someone else's pain It's never as bad as it seems The taste sweeter than expected When you squat in a fool's dream So take this belligerence Where you will, the dogged cur Is the charge of my soul To the center of the street Spinning round all fangs bared Snapping at thirsty spears Thrust cold and purged of your hands Hunting Words Brathos of Black Coral

Book Two: Cold-Eyed Virtues

Epigraph

From her ribs and from the hair of women Seen swimming sun-warmed rivers in summer's light, From untroubled brows and eyes clear and driven Gazing out from tower windows when falls the night From hands cupped round pipe bowls alabaster carved When veiled invitations coy as blossoms under shade Invite a virgin's dance a rose-dappled loved so starved Where seen a coarse matron not yet ready to fade and the tall bones of legs 'neath rounded vessels perched Swaying lusty as a tropical storm above white coral sands Where in all these gathered recollections I have searched To fashion this love anew from soil worked well by hands And into the bower garland-woven petals fluttering down Hovers the newfound woman's familiar unknown face For on this earth no solitude is welcomed when found And she who is gone must be in turn replaced And by the look in her eye I am a composite man Assembled alike from stone, twig and stirred sediment Lovers lost and all those who might have been we neither should rail nor stroke searing resentments For all the rivers this world over do flow in but one Direction Love of the Broken Breneth

Book Three: To Die in the Now

Epigraph

Push it on to the next moment Don't think now, save it For later when thinking will show It's useless face When it's too late and worry is wasted In the rush for cover Push it past into that pocket So that it relents its gnawing presence And nothing is worth doing In pointless grace When all the valid suppositions Smother your cries Push it over into the deep hole You don't want to know In case it breaks and makes you feel Cruel reminders When all you could have done is now past No don't bother Push it well into the corner It's no use, so spare me the grief You didn't like the cost so bright, so high The bloodiest cut When all you sought was sweet pleasure To the end of your days Push it on until it pushes back Shout your shock, shout it You never imagined you never knew what Turning away would do Now wail out your dread in wave of disbelief It's done it's dead Push your way to the front Clawing the eyes of screaming kin No legacy awaits your shining children It's Killed, killed Gone the future all to feed some holy glory The World is Over. Over. Siban's Dying Confession Siban of Aren

Book Four: Toll the Hounds

Epigraph

Like broke slate We take our hatred And pile it high A ragged line to map Our rise and fall And I saw suffused With the dawn Crows aligned in rows Along the crooked wall Come to feed Bones lie scattered At the stone's foot The heaped ruin Of past assaults The crows face each way To eye the pickings On both sides For all its weakness The world cannot break What we make Of our hatred I watched the workers Carry each gray rock They laboured Blind and stepped Unerringly modest paths Piece by sheared piece They built a slaughter Of innocent others While muttering as they might Of waves of weather And goodly deeds We the Builders Hanasp Tular

Trivia

• Toll the Hounds is the first volume in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series not to contain a glossary of terms at the end of the novel. Glossaries are also not included in the series' final two volumes.
• Of all the Malazan books, Toll the Hounds had the greatest impact on Erikson while writing. His own father was dying at the time, and the novel involved "delving into the nature of grief and working through that grief." Erikson says the book also served as a "cipher for the series" because it is the only book in the series where the reader knows the identity of the voice driving the narrative. "So it's a kind of self conscious narrator, so it's meta fictional, and that is actually the cipher to an alternate reading of the entire series." See Erikson discuss more about what he means by the "cipher" here.
• Although Erikson says "grief is obviously...one of the things that is spinning around in this novel...the core that I see is not grief, and it's not absolution, and it's not redemption. It's love. And you cannot have grief without love. And you cannot have love without the inevitability of grief. You cannot have redemption without love. You cannot have absolution without love. So, if love is at the core of this novel, that in a sense answers why it has to be Kruppe telling the story, because of all the characters in the Malazan world there is nobody who loves that world more than Kruppe. And so his whole personality is a kind of exuberant expression of that love...Kruppe had to be my filter because I was going to be translating some very real world personal feelings and experiences that I was going through at the time. And I needed Kruppe as much as, I think, the reader ends up needing Kruppe...I think that was my defense mechanism. And instinctively, I guess, I landed on Kruppe to tell the story."
• Writing the Endest Silann scenes that took the reader back to Kharkanas interested Erikson enough that he decided to follow up the Malazan Book of the Fallen with the Kharkanas Trilogy. He says those scenes "opened the door to the Kharkanas Trilogy...That's where I really started thinking about post-Crippled God...and thinking about what I would approach next. And I think I just got so caught up and interested in the Kharkanas stuff, that I ended up putting a lot of things in place that I was going to deal with...and open up a whole new series on."
• Erikson says many of this novel's storylines included intentional callbacks to Gardens of the Moon.
• The appearance of a cat in the hallway after Torvald Nom's amorous encounter in Chapter 5 is a nod to Ernest Hemingway's short story, Cat in the Rain and is intended to reference a subtext of seduction.
• Erikson also says he was aware he was going to be writing the Witness Trilogy during the writing of Toll the Hounds and so "there is foreshadowing already present" in the book for that series.
• When asked to name his favourite of Erikson's books, Ian C. Esslemont says he has a "warm spot" for Gardens of the Moon by Erikson because so much of it came from their gaming and the screenplay they did together. But he also cites Toll the Hounds as a favourite because "it sort of has everything in it, all of the different aspects of the world are together."

Cover gallery

US cover art

Bulgarian cover art

Subterranean press cover by Marc Simonetti

Spanish cover by Alejandro Colucci

German cover art - Part 1

German cover art - Part 2

French cover by Marc Simonetti

External links

• Toll the Hounds Q&A at Tor.com
• Spoiler Chat: Toll the Hounds - Part 3 with Dr. Philip Chase and Steven Erikson - A Critical Dragon
• Critical Conversations 10: Humour, Sex, and Power Dynamics in Toll the Hounds Chapter Five - A Critical Dragon - Discussion with Steven Erikson
• Spoiler Chat: Toll the Hounds - The Cipher for the Malazan Book of the Fallen - A Critical Dragon
• Ten Very Big Books podcast - Toll the Hounds - Conversation with Steven Erikson

Notes and references

List of abbreviations • Paginations • How to reference an article