Toll the Hounds (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #8)

by Steven Erikson

Nowhere and anywhere are states of mind.

ah, Meese has brought us her finest goblets! A moment, whilst Kruppe sweeps out cobwebs, insect husks and other assorted proofs of said goblets’ treasured value – there, now, let us sit back and watch, with pleased eyes, as Meese fills our cups to brimming glory.

Most marriages involve mutual thoughts of murder on occasion.’

Was the ephemeral visage of civilization reason for fear? Or, perhaps, relief? That all victories were ultimately transitory in the face of patient nature might well be cause for optimism. No wound was too deep to heal. No outrage too horrendous to one day be irrelevant.

Sacrifice must be weighed by the pain of what is surrendered, and this alone was the true measure of a virtue’s worth.

What value peering at past errors in judgement, at mischance and carelessness, when the only reward after all that effort was regret?

Bedek and Gruntle talked about the old days, when they’d both worked the same caravans, and it seemed to Harllo that the past – a world he’d never seen because it was before the Rape – was a place of great deeds, a place thick with life where the sun was brighter, the sunsets were deeper, the stars blazed in a black sky and the moon was free of mists, and men stood taller and prouder and nobody had to talk about the past back then, because it was happening right now.

Now, invite me in, before I lose my temperature.’ ‘Temper, you mean.’ ‘No, temperature. It’s getting chilly.’

I could have made my list of warnings even longer, you know. We could have stood in our places for the rest of the night, you in that sodden pool, me standing here uttering dire details. And still, at long last, you would say “I must” and we would have wasted all that time. Me hoarse and you asleep on your feet.’ ‘You sound almost regretful, Priest.’ ‘Perhaps I am at that. It was a most poetic list.’ ‘Then by all means record it in full when you write your log of this fell night.’ ‘I like that notion. Thank you.

There is, as a legion of morose poets well know, nothing inconsequential about love. Nor all those peculiarities of related appetites often confused for love, for example lust, possession, amorous worship, appalling notions of abject surrender where one’s own will is bled out in sacrifice, obsessions of the fetishistic sort that might include earlobes or toenails or regurgitated foodstuffs, and indeed that adolescent competitiveness which in adults – adults who should of course know better but don’t – is manifested as insane jealousy.

Well, when you’re only good at one thing, then you stop doing it, what’s left but doing nothing?

Either way, she’d been right in saying he did not belong in this city, or any other. They were all cages, and the trick he’d never learned was how to be at peace living in a cage.

Romance was for fools, he now knew. No one valued the given heart, no one saw that sacrifice for the precious gift it was. No, just a thing to be grasped, twisted by uncaring hands, then wrung dry and discarded. Or a commodity and nothing more, never as desirable as the next one, the one in waiting, or the one held by someone else. Or, something far worse, a gift too precious to accept.

Creation demands destruction. Survival demands that something else fails to survive. No existence was truly benign.

The old possessed naught but the single virtue of surviving, and when nothing changed, it was indeed an empty virtue.

the thought of a walk, a long one, up rugged mountainsides beneath hard sunlight, no longer seemed so appetizing. Age did such things, feeding the desire then starving the will.

he views his paucity of words – in both thought and dialogue – as a virtue, sigil of rigid manhood. He has made brevity an obsession, an addiction, and in his endless paring down he strips away all hope of emotion and with it empathy. When language is lifeless what does it serve? When meaning is rendered down what veracity holds to the illusion of depth?

No tyrant could thrive where every subject said no.

Kill a love. What lies beyond? Emptiness, cold, drifting ashes, yet does it not prove fertile? A place where a new seed is planted, finding life, growing into itself? Is this how true death is, as well? From the dust, a new seed …

Paradise belonged to the innocent. Which was why it was and would ever remain … empty. And that is what makes it a paradise.

Life fears chaos. It was ever thus. We fear it more than anything else, because it is anathema. Order battles against dissolution. Order negotiates cooperation as a mechanism of survival, on every scale, from a patch of skin to an entire menagerie of interdependent creatures. That cooperation, of course, may not of essence be necessarily peaceful – a minute exchange of failures to ensure greater successes.

But lessons only became lessons when one has reached the state of humility required to heed them.

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within.

‘You are free to choose,’ the Redeemer replied. ‘Defend me, or step aside and see me fall.’ ‘That’s hardly a choice!’

People will grieve. For the dead, for the living. For the loss of innocence and for the surrender of innocence, which are two entirely different things. We will grieve, for choices made and not made, for the mistakes of the heart which can never be undone, for the severed nerve-endings of old scars and those to come.

‘Why, rumours—’ ‘Not a chance.’ ‘Then, er, a dying confession—’ ‘We’re about to hear one of those, yes.’

Darkness was ever the last thing to remain, in the final closing of eyelids, in the unlit depths of empty buildings, godless temples. When a people vanished, their every home, from the dishevelled hovel of the destitute to the palaces of kings and queens, became nothing but a sepulchre, a tomb host to nothing but memories, and even these quickly faded.

People don’t change to suit their god; they change their god to suit them.

We run from our place of wounding. No different from any other beast, we run from our place of wounding. Run, or crawl, crawl or drag, drag or reach.

‘I shall destroy what I can, but never shall I claim to own what I destroy. I will be the embodiment of progress, but emptied of greed. I shall be like nature’s fist: blind. And I shall prove that ownership is a lie. The land, the seas, the life to be found there. The mountains, the plains, the cities, the farms. Water, air. We own none of it. This is what I will prove, and by proving it will make it so.’

‘If we are to live,’ Rake went on, ‘we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail – should we fall – we will know that we have lived.’

For all its weakness The world cannot break What we make Of our hatred

THE SOUL KNOWS no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins in love and ends with grief.

Survivors do not mourn together. They each mourn alone, even when in the same place. Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.

The lie of wisdom is best hidden in monologue. Dialogue exposes it. Most people purporting to wisdom dare not engage in dialogue, lest they reveal the paucity of their assumptions and the frailty of their convictions. Better to say nothing, to nod and look thoughtful.

Long before he was Lord of the Fallen, he was Jaghut. Lords of the Last Stands, hah! Sentinels of the Sundered Keeps. Devourers of the Forlorn Hope. You, Elder, who stood time and again against the Tiste Andii, the Tiste Edur – you, who walked the ashes of Kharkanas itself – understand me. The dour Tiste Andii and the suicidal Edur, they are as nothing to the miserable madness of the Jaghut!’

He had told himself that it was an act of courage to let her go, to give her the final decision. Courage and sacrifice. He no longer believed that. There was no sacrifice made in being abandoned. There was no courage in doing nothing.

Pluck a flower from a field and it will not thrive. Take and beauty dies, and that which one possesses becomes worthless. I am a thief. I take but do not keep. All I gain I cast away. I take your wealth only because you value it.

At the threshold of a modest home and workshop, Tiserra stands facing the two loves of her life. And, for the briefest of moments, her imagination runs wild. She then recovers herself and, in a light tone, asks, ‘Breakfast?’ Torvald is momentarily startled. Rallick just smiles.