Midnight Tides (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #5)

by Steven Erikson

Bugg’s expertise amounted to rebuilding the hearth in the kitchen below. Twenty-two fired bricks stacked into a shape very nearly cubic, and indeed it would have been if three of the bricks had not come from a toppled mausoleum at the local cemetery. Grave masons held to peculiar notions of what a brick’s dimensions should be, pious bastards that they were.

‘A Beddict trait, dear sad minion of mine. You should see Brys, under all that armour. But even he looks scrawny when compared to Hull. As the middle son, I of course represent the perfect balance. Wit, physical prowess and a multitude of talents to match my natural grace. When combined with my extraordinary ability to waste it all, you see, standing before you, the exquisite culmination.’

Look at that stool you’re sitting on – it doesn’t really need all three legs, does it? When scrounging doesn’t pay, it’s time to improvise.

The problem with gold was the way it crawled. Where nothing else could. It seeped out from secrets, flowered in what should have been lifeless cracks. It strutted when it should have remained hidden, beneath notice. Brazen as any weed between the cobbles, and, if one was so inclined, one could track those roots all the way down.

Tehol rubbed at his eyes, only now realizing how tired he was. Thinking was proving a voracious feeder on his energies, leading him to admit he’d been out of practice. Not just thinking, of course. The brain did other things, as well, even more exhausting. The revisiting of siblings, of long-estranged relationships, saw old, burnished armour donned once more, weapons reached for, old stances once believed abandoned proving to have simply been lying dormant.

‘Clear a path through a forest and every beast will use it. Is this control? Of a sort, perhaps.’

‘Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.

‘Ah, you are clever indeed. Certainly more worthy of conversation with ourselves than this strutting fool whose nobility resides only in the fact of his crawling out from between a queen’s legs.

always believed freedom concerned the granted right to be different, without fear of repression.’ ‘A lofty notion, but you won’t find it in the real world. We have hammered freedom into a sword. And if you won’t be like us we will use that sword to kill you one by one, until your spirit is broken.’

‘You’re not Tehol,’ she said as Bugg arrived and sat down. ‘Where’s Tehol and his immodest trousers?’ ‘Not here, alas, Chief Investigator, but you can be certain that, wherever they are, they are together.’

‘Cat. Oh yes, of course. Well, I never liked cats anyway. All those hair balls.’ He drew the plate over and perused it to see what was left. ‘You have a fascination for feline genitalia? That’s disgusting, although I’ve heard worse. One of our minor catchers once tried to marry a rat. I myself possess peculiar interests, I freely admit.’