Memories of Ice (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #3)

by Steven Erikson

The city’s harbour was little more than a narrow, crooked cut on the lee side of the cliff, a depthless fissure that opened a split nearly bisecting the city. It was a harbour without docks. The sheer faces of the sides had been carved into long piers, surmounted by causeways. At high tide level, mooring rings had been driven into the living stone. Broad sweeps of thick netting, twice the height of an ocean trader’s masts, spanned the entire breadth of water from the harbour’s mouth all the way to its apex. Where no tethered anchor could touch the fjord’s bottom, and where the shores themselves offered no strand, no shallows whatsoever, a ship’s anchors were drawn upward. The cat-men, as they were called - that strange, almost tribal collection of workers who lived with their wives and children in shacks on the netting and whose sole profession was the winching of anchors and the tethering of sway-lines – had made of the task artistry in motion.