The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen

by Steven Erikson

Terror twisted her once-beautiful features, the terror of Beginnings, the soul standing before oblivion. A place of such loneliness that despair seemed the only answer. Yet it was also the place where power was thought, and thought flickered through the Abyss bereft of Makers, born from flesh yet to exist—for only the mind could reach back into the past, only its thoughts could dwell there. She was in the time before the worlds, and now must stride forward.

She could imagine this Binadas, sharing a fire in the wilderness with Hull Beddict. In the course of an evening, a night and the following morning, perhaps a half-dozen words exchanged between them. And, she suspected, the forging of a vast, depthless friendship. These were the mysteries of men, so baffling to women. Where silences could become a conjoining of paths. Where a handful of inconsequential words could bind spirits in an ineffable understanding. Forces at play that she could sense, indeed witness, yet ever remaining outside them. Baffled and frustrated and half disbelieving.

None sought to call up the ravelled spirits from those water-crushed valleys that saw no light. They were not things to be bound, after all. Nor bargained with. Their hearts beat in the cycles of the moon, their voice was the heaving storm and their wings could spread from horizon to horizon, in towering white-veined sheets of water that swept all before them.

Drawn to the shoreline, as if among the host of unwritten truths in a mortal soul could be found a recognition of what it meant to stand on land’s edge, staring out into the depthless unknown that was the sea.

He saw the sea for what it was, the dissolved memories of the past witnessed in the present and fertile fuel for the future, the very face of time. He saw the tides in their immutable susurration, the vast swish like blood from the cold heart moon, a beat of time measured and therefore measurable. Tides one could not hope to hold back.

Koryk could save none of them. He could not give them the chant, for they would not know what it meant, and they had never spent a night in a coffin.

The reason for that, Iskaral Pust knew, was that the Man’s Language was gibberish, designed specifically to confound women. It’s a fact that men don’t need words, but women do. We have penises, after all. Who needs words when you have a penis? Whereas with women there are two breasts, which invites conversation, just as a good behind presents perfect punctuation, something every man knows. What’s wrong with the world? You ask a man and he says, ‘Don’t ask.’ Ask a woman and you’ll be dead of old age before she’s finished. Hah. Hah ha.

My faith in the gods is this: they are indifferent to my suffering.

in war the screams are loud and harsh and in peace the wail is so drawn-out we tell ourselves we hear nothing.

The world is of your making and one day, my friend, you will stand alone amidst a sea of dead, the purchasing of your words all about you and the wind will laugh you a new path into unending torment – the solitary deceit is its solitude, the lie is the lie standing alone, the threads and knots of the multitude tighten in righteous judgement with which you once so freely strangled every truthsayer, every voice of dissent.

‘Ah well, sailors have simple minds, friend. And pirates are failed sailors, mostly, taking simpledom to profound extremes—’

‘For a man or a woman to reach adulthood, they must first kill the child within them.’

You present the quaint and appalling argument that through wilful ignorance of the laws and rules of the universe you cannot suffer their influence.

They say it was some demon o’ the deep, pushed too close by dark magic out at sea – the same magic, my Queen, as could be well squirted Master at Arms west as they say. A demon, up unner the boat, an’ all drowned. Whisperin’ from the waters, my Queen, dark and well nigh black.’

excepting, oddly enough, the marines, who never seemed capable of thinking past the next meal or game of Troughs.

Soldiers being what they were, it wasn’t long before they were griping about something else, and this time the Adjunct’s aide could do nothing to give answer. Where in Hood’s name are we going? Are we still an army and if we are, who are we fighting for?

Remain a soldier, Lostara Yil told herself, a statement that whispered through her mind a hundred times a day. Remain a soldier, and all the rest will go away.

Ships draw in alongside berths, gangplanks clatter and thump to form momentous bridges from one world to the next.

‘When longing comes to you, friend, step not into its snare, for longing is the fatal bait – find yourself in its snare and you will be dragged, dragged through all the time allotted you, Barathol Mekhar, and nothing you grasp will remain, all torn from your fingers. All that you see will race past in a blur. All that you taste will be less than a droplet, quickly stripped away. Longing will drag you into the stalker’s bony arms, and you will have but a single, last look back, on to your life – a moment of clarity that can only be some unknown god’s most bitter gift – and you will understand, all at once, all that you have wasted, all that you let escape, all that you might have had. ‘Now ride, friend. And ’ware the traps of your mind.’

The soldier’s face was always the same once the mask fell away – a look of bemusement, the faint bewildered surprise to find oneself still alive, knowing all too well there was no good reason for it, nothing at all but the nudge of luck, the emptiness of chance and circumstance. And all the unfairness of the world made a bitter pool of the eyes.

Saw right into me, to the soul that was less than it should have been, to the will that was weak. I do not stand before a woman, do I? No, I fall into her arms. I change shape to fit each one, to make things snug, as if matching their dreams is the only path I know into their hearts. Maybe she was right to walk away.

Bliss on a sun-warmed sandy beach, on a remote island, proves tedious to souls habituated to stimulation and excitement.

In that context, Bottle reconsidered—with a dull spasm of anguish deep inside—maybe the exchange wasn’t that reasonable after all. Less a privilege than a burden, a curse. Seeing the faces in this crowd flashing past, a spinning, whirling cascade of masks—each a faintly stunning alternative to his own—he felt himself not simply pushed outside, but estranged. Leaving him bemused, even perturbed, as he witnessed their seemingly mindless, pointless activities, only to find himself envious of these shallow, undramatic lives—wherein the only need was satiation. Possessions, stuffed bellies, expanding heaps of coin. What do any of you know about life? he wanted to ask. Try stumbling through a burning city. Try cradling a dying friend with blood like tattered shrouds on all sides. Try glancing to an animated face beside you, only to glance a second time and find it empty, lifeless. A soldier knew what was real and what was ephemeral. A soldier understood how thin, how fragile, was the fabric of life. Could one feel envy when looking upon the protected, ignorant lives of others—those people whose cloistered faith saw strength in weakness, who found hope in the false assurance of routine? Yes, because once you become aware of that fragility, there is no going back. You lose a thousand masks and are left with but one, with its faint lines of contempt, its downturned mouth only a comment away from a sneer, its promise of cold indifference.

All the grand gestures of honour and faithful loyalty meant nothing when the only witnesses were grass, wind and empty sky. It seemed to Mappo that his nobler virtues had withered on the vine, and the garden of his soul, once so verdant, now rattled skeletal branches against stone walls. Where was his promise? What of the vows he had uttered, so sober and grim in youth, so shiny of portent, as befitted the broad-shouldered brave he had once been? Mappo could feel dread inside, hard as a fist-sized tumour in his chest. His ribs ached with the pressure of it, but it was an ache he had lived with for so long now, it had become a part of him, a scar far larger than the wound it covered.

‘We must fight to earn our right to all we would claim for ourselves. This is the struggle of all life. There are those who would deny us this right – they feel it belongs to them alone. Today, we shall assert otherwise.

He wondered at all those lives, the way few would meet the gazes of their fellows, as if crowds demanded wilful anonymity, when the truth was they were all in it together – all these people, facing much the same struggles, the same fears.

He knew which world he wanted to live in. But, people didn’t have that choice, did they? Not unless they killed the spark inside themselves first. With drink, with the oblivion of sweet smoke, but those were false dreams and made mockery of the ones truly lost – the ones whose lives had passed.

I never hid my hurts. I never disguised my dreams. And I never lost my way. And only the fallen can rise again.

He kneels, as all broken mortals kneel. Against the cruelty of this and every world, a mortal can do nothing but kneel. Even before a foreign god. And what of the love I possess? Perhaps there is nothing – but no, there is no such thing as foreign love. He closed his eyes, released his mind to this world. And found them waiting for him.

Korlat, he’s waiting for you. And if he has to, he’ll wait for ever.’

We were never what people could be. We were only what we were. Remember us.