After decades of internecine warfare, the tribes from the Tiste Edur have finally united beneath the Warlock King of the Hiroth. There is peace, but it continues to be exacted at a terrible price: a pact made with a hidden power whose motives are in best suspect, at worst deadly. To the south, the expansionist kingdom of Lether, wanting to accomplish its long-prophesied renaissance as an empire reborn, offers enslaved with rapacious hunger all its less civilized neighbors. All, that’s, save one – the Tiste Edur..LEARNING MUCH MORE about Midnight Tides And it must be only a matter of your time before they, too, fall – either beneath the suffocating excess weight of yellow metal or simply by slaughter at the advantage of a sword. Roughly destiny provides decreed. Yet simply because the two sides gather for the pivotal treaty neither really wants, ancient forces are awakening. For the impending struggle between these two peoples can be but a pale representation of a far more profound, primal fight – a confrontation charged with the still-raw wound of a vintage betrayal as well as the craving for revenge at its seething center. “Erikson ranks near the top of the epic illusion pantheon.” – Web publishers Weekly (starred review)