Dust of Dreams (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #9)

by Steven Erikson

Later in the afternoon, during the worst of the heat, they spied a greyish cloud on the horizon ahead. The ribbers began howling, dancing in terror, and as the cloud rushed closer, the dogs finally fled. What looked like rain wasn’t rain. What looked like a cloud wasn’t a cloud. These were locusts, but not the normal kind of locusts. Wings glittering, the swarm filling half the sky, and then all the sky, the sound a clicking roar—the rasp of wings, the snapping open of jaws—each creature a finger long. Out from within the cloud, as it engulfed the column, lunged buzzing knots where the insects massed almost solid. When one of these hammered into a huddle of children, shrieks of pain and horror erupted—the flash of red meat, and then bone—and then the horde swept on, leaving behind clumps of hair and heaps of gleaming bone. These locusts ate meat. This was the first day of the Shards.