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War kills the innocent first.
“Love only those worthy of your love. Love those who love themselves, and love all around them. Love the best—the best in arms, the first in the hall, the finest harpist, and the best chess player. Love no man for what he owns, but only for what he does.”
They want me to believe. Because my disbelief threatens their belief, and they need solace.
Some things are best left unexamined. He held the line at that memory, and felt his fear recede a little, like the first sign the tide is in ebb.
Men tire quickly when they are scared. A patrol in hostile terrain is the most tiring thing a soldier can do short of violence.
am the world’s expert at overcoming fear. Cowardice is the best school for courage, I find.”
“Like all beautiful women, you seek to make an insult of my flattery,”
In an instant, Thorn knew that something had gone wrong. He’d drained himself by calling even the smallest stones from the heavens. It was a showy, inaccurate and inefficient working, but it had spectacular results when it worked. And he loved to cast it, the way a strong man loves to show his strength.
“Your only stealth will be speed.”
Bad Tom took a deep breath and stepped back. “Beg your pardon, Captain,” he said. He said it with as much assurance as he’d suggested everything else. “Overstepped, I expect.” The captain swallowed bile. “Are my eyes glowing?” he asked. “Little bit,” Tom said.
“You know what’s wrong with you, Captain?” The captain leaned on the table, the burst of rage dying away and leaving fatigue and a headache of Archaic proportions. “Many things.” “You’re a freak, just like me. You ain’t like them. Me—I take what I want and let the rest go. You want them to love you.” Tom shook his head. “They don’t love the likes of us, Captain. Even when I kill their enemies, they don’t love me.
Tom was far away, in memory. The captain had never seen him that way before. It was odd, and a little scary, to be intimate with Bad Tom. “We’re sin-eaters, every one of us,” Tom said. “You and me, sure—but Long Paw an’ Wilful Murder and Ser Hugo and Ser Milus and all the rest. Sauce too. Even that boy. We eat their sin. We kill their enemies, and then they send us away.”
Young magi have energy and old ones have skill.
“That’s where you are wrong, Jehan. He is one of us. He is a broken man, a lost soul, whatever crap you want to call us. He has everything to prove, and he values us.
A horse length from the Magus, Random stood with Old Bob. The last exchange of phantasm happened incredibly quickly. Random had watched it. In the distance, something screamed. A cruel smile spread across Harmodius’s lips. Random glanced at Old Bob, who was looking at him. “That was—” Old Bob shook his head. “Legendary,” he said.
“Listen up, then. Evil is a choice. It is a choice. Doing the wicked thing is the easy way out, and it is habit forming. I’ve done it. Any criminal can use force. Any wicked person can steal. Some people don’t steal because they are afraid of being caught. Others don’t steal because it is wrong. Because stealing is the destruction of another person’s work. Rape is a violence against another person. Using violence to solve every quarrel—” The captain paused in his moralizing lecture, because, of course, as a company of mercenaries, they tended to use violence to solve every quarrel—he laughed
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The thing the two king’s messengers found hardest to understand was the silence. The Knights of St. Thomas never spoke. They rode in silence, and their horses were equally silent.
Bad Tom roared, “Eat me, you son of a bitch!” at his side and was gone into the green-tinged darkness. Tom was a legend for temper, for ill manners, for lechery and crime. But to see him on a fire-lit battlefield was to see war brought to earth in a single avatar, and as his knights swept past him, the captain watched as Tom’s lance, unshivered, swept through the trolls. “Lachlan for Aa!” he roared.
“You are just some parvenu merchant’s son trying to ape the manners of his betters.”
cool word
But then, you are scarcely a man. Why do you cleave to them?
“Victory and defeat are for amateurs,” Tom said. “For us, there is only life and death.”
You make them love you, and then you tire of the energy they demand,
“Man and the Wild are merely concepts. Philosophical constructs. If they were created to represent—to symbolize—opposition, then could they ever be reconciled? Can alpha and omega switch places in the alphabet?”
“Nothing about a coin is separate,” the Wyrm said. “Nothing about a coin is separate,” said the Wyrm.
“May I leave you with some genuine wisdom, in place of all the humdrum claptrap? Do well. Act with honour and dignity. Not because there is some promised reward, but because it is the only way to live. And that is as true for my kind as for yours.”
