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

by Steven Erikson

The Down Markets opened out onto it from three sides; a more decrepit collection of useless items for sale Tehol had yet to see. And the people bought in a frenzy, day after blessed day. Our civilization thrives on stupidity. And it only took a sliver of cleverness to tap that idiot vein and drink deep of the riches. Comforting, if slightly depressing. The way of most grim truths.

Every city had its darkness, its denizens who prowled only at night in their own game of predator and prey.

Grown-ups should work. It helps fill their minds. Empty minds are bad. Dangerous. They fill themselves up. With bad things. Nobody’s happy.’

How much could be stripped from a people before they began stripping away themselves? The steep slope of dissolution began with a skid, only to become a headlong run.

We live in an inimical time. But then, they are all inimical times

Opposing views sang with the clash of swords.

‘When one does not know what one seeks, caution is the surest armour.’

‘There is always war, brother,’ Fear replied. ‘Faiths, words and swords: history resounds with their interminable clash.’

Risk and opportunity; the two were synonymous for the Letherii.

‘Even in the noblest of ventures, there’s the occasional stumble.’

‘What value assembling a list of flaws when the subject is already dead?’ ‘Morbid curiosity, I imagine. Or curious morbidity.’

Her people seemed particularly well suited to surrender. Freedom was an altar supplicants struggled to reach all their lives, clawing the smooth floor until blood spattered the gleaming, flawless stone, yet the truth was it remained for ever beyond the grasp of mortals. Even as any sacrifice was justified in its gloried name. For all that, she knew that blasphemy was a hollow crime. Freedom was no god, and if it was, and if it had a face turned upon its worshippers, its expression was mocking. A slave’s chains stole something he or she had never owned.

The loss of a brother. The face that would never again smile, the voice that Trull would never again hear. There seemed no end to the layers of loss settling dire and heavy upon him.

‘It is done,’ Fear murmured. ‘Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal’s shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched behind one now stretches before him.’

The Crippled God spread his hands. ‘Peace, my young warrior, is born of relief, endured in exhaustion, and dies with false remembrance. False? Ah, perhaps I am too cynical. Too old, witness to far too much. Do honour, loyalty and sacrifice truly exist? Are such virtues born only from extremity? What transforms them into empty words, words devalued by their overuse? What are the rules of the economy of the spirit, that civilization repeatedly twists and mocks?’

‘Does it ever strike you, Finadd, that peace leads to an indulgence in strife?’

Stress lay in the cast of the mind, as far as Brys was concerned. Born of perspective and the hue through which one saw the world, and such things were shaped by both nature and nurture. Perhaps on some most basic level the struggle to live yielded a certain stress, but that was not the same as the strife conjured by an active mind, its myriad storms of desires, emotions, worries and terrors, its relentless dialogue with death.

‘Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.’

‘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.

the question of what is deserved should rarely, if ever, be asked. Asking it leads to deadly judgement, and acts of unmitigated evil. Atrocity revisited in the name of justice breeds its own atrocity.

‘What war is this?’ ‘A pointless one.’ ‘They are all pointless, Denier. Subjugation and defeat breed resentment and hatred, and such things cannot be bribed away.’

Suspicion had come in the wake of success, as it always did.

‘The Letherii motive was, is and shall ever be but one thing. Wealth. Conquest as opportunity. Opportunity as invitation. Invitation as righteous claim. Righteous claim as preordained, as destiny.’

Release gets addictive, you see. It becomes a fixed behaviour, as destructive as any other. Keep repeating the exercise of grief and it loses meaning, it becomes rote, false, a game of self-delusion, self-indulgence. A way of never getting over anything, ever.’