The Crippled God (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #10)

by Steven Erikson

‘I have explained to him that most of what we call courting boils down to just being there. Every time you turn, you see him, until his company feels perfectly natural to you. “Courting is the art of growing like mould on the one you want.”’

But I want him back. At my side. I swore my life to protecting him, sheltering him. How can that be taken away from me? Can you not hear the empty howl in my heart? This is a pit without light, and upon all the close walls surrounding me I can feel nothing but the gouges my claws have made.

‘Varandas, there must be a balance in the world. On one side a morsel of weighty wisdom, offsetting a gastric avalanche of brainless stupidity. Is that not the way of things?’ ‘But Bolirium, a drop of perfume cannot defeat a heap of shit.’ ‘That depends, Varandas, on where you put your nose.’

‘To the executioner’s axe there are those who kneel, head bowed, and await their fate. Then there are those who fight, who strain, who cry out their defiance even as the blade descends.’ He pointed a finger at Blistig. ‘Now you will speak true, Fist: which one is Adjunct Tavore?’

Did there not come to every child that moment when the mother, the father, loses that god-like status, that supreme competence in all things, when they are revealed to be as weak, as flawed and as lost as the child looking on? How that moment crushes! All at once the world becomes a threatening place, and in the unknown waits all manner of danger, and the child wonders if there is any place left in which to hide, to find refuge.

Those faces. Horrifying in their emptiness. Those soldiers: veterans of something far beyond battles, far beyond shields locked and swords bared, beyond even the screams of dying comrades and the desolation of loss. Veterans of a lifetime of impossible decisions, of all that is unbearable and all that is without reconciliation.

‘You can’t ask soldiers to open their hearts. If they did they’d never take another life.’ He faced her. ‘How can she not understand that? We need to harden ourselves – to all that we have to do. We need to make ourselves harder than our enemy. Instead, she wants us to go soft. To feel.’

In that Malazan Book of the Fallen, the historians will write of our suffering, and they will speak of it as the suffering of those who served the Crippled God. As something…fitting. And for our seeming fanaticism they will dismiss all that we were, and think only of what we achieved. Or failed to achieve. And in so doing, they will miss the whole fucking point. Fallen One, we are all your children.

Because the very nature of rule is itself an illusion, a conceit and the product of a grand conspiracy. To have a ruler one must choose to be ruled over, and that forces notions of inequity to the fore, until they become, well, formalized. Made central to education, made essential as a binding force in society, until everything exists to prop up those in power.

if nature must win in the end, then let the death of our kind be sweet and slow. So sweet, so slow, that we do not even notice. Let us fade and dwindle in our tyranny, from world to continent, from continent to country, from country to city, city to neighbourhood, to home, to the ground under our feet, and finally down to the pointless triumphs inside each of our skulls.’

Contradiction. In the rational realm, the word was a blistering condemnation. Proof of flawed logic. To expose it in an adversary’s position was akin to delivering a deathblow, and she well recalled the triumphant gleam in his eyes in the instant he struck. But, she wondered now, where was the crime in that most human of capacities: to carry in one’s heart a contradiction, to leave it unchallenged, immune to reconciliation; indeed, to be two people at once, each true to herself, and neither denying the presence of the other? What vast laws of cosmology were broken by this human talent? Did the universe split asunder? Did reality lose its way? No. In fact, it seemed that the only realm wherein contradiction had any power at all was the realm of rational argument.

Nostalgia was like a disease, one that crept in and stole the colour from the world and the time you lived in. Made for bitter people. Dangerous people, when they wanted back what never was.

The breathtaking ambition, the sheer verve of all that they had set in motion. But now we have finally arrived – it’s all cut loose, and so much – so much – is out of our hands.

Even if it killed us, he would teach us the value of pragmatism. Which is, as I am sure you well understand, nothing more than a cogent recognition of reality: its limits, its demands and its necessities.’

And therein lurks the cruellest truth of all. In the end, we are no different from every other cult, every other religion. Convincing ourselves of the righteousness of our path. Convincing ourselves that we alone hold to an immutable truth. Secure in the belief that everyone else is damned. But it was all a game, the sacred a playground for secular power struggles, venal ambition. What’s left to believe in?

‘Even a man who has lived a life of sorrows will ask for one more day.’

‘He cannot know compassion, from whom compassion has been taken. He cannot know love, with love denied him. But he will know pain, when pain is all that is given him.’

‘I stepped over corpses on the way here,’ the Toblakai said. ‘People no one cared about, dying alone. In my barbaric village this would never happen, but here in this city, this civilized jewel, it happens all the time.’ The ravaged face was turned upward, the last of the raindrops dripping away as he huddled beneath the cover Karsa provided. The mouth worked, but no sounds came forth. ‘What is your name?’ Karsa asked. ‘Munug.’ ‘Munug. This night – before I must rise and walk into the temple – I am a village. And you are here, in my arms. You will not die uncared for.’ ‘You – you would do this for me? A stranger?’ ‘In my village no one is a stranger – and this is what civilization has turned its back on. One day, Munug, I will make a world of villages, and the age of cities will be over. And slavery will be dead, and there shall be no chains – tell your god. Tonight, I am his knight.’

And the Emperor had almost twenty thousand of them at his command. He could have conquered the world. He could have delivered such slaughter as to break every kingdom, every empire in his path. But he barely used them at all. Kellanved – is it possible? Did even you quail at the carnage these creatures promised? Did you see for yourself how victory could destroy you, destroy the entire Malazan Empire? Gods below, I think you did. You took command of the T’lan Imass – to keep them off the field of battle, to keep them out of human wars. And now I see why.

‘It is not enough to wish for a better world for the children. It is not enough to shield them with ease and comfort. Lostara Yil, if we do not sacrifice our own ease, our own comfort, to make the future’s world a better one, then we curse our own children. We leave them a misery they do not deserve; we leave them a host of lessons unearned.

I will remember this. I will set out scrolls and burn upon them the names of these Fallen. I will make of this work a holy tome, and no other shall be needed. Hear them! They are humanity unfurled, laid out for all to see – if one would dare look! There shall be a Book and it shall be written by my hand. Wheel and seek the faces of a thousand gods! None can do what I can do! Not one can give voice to this holy creation! But this is not bravado. For this, my Book of the Fallen, the only god worthy of its telling is the crippled one. The broken one. And has it not always been thus? I never hid my hurts. I never disguised my dreams. And I never lost my way. And only the fallen can rise again.