The Devils (The Devils, #1)

by Joe Abercrombie

You have to treat people like oranges, Gal the Purse always said. Squeeze what you can from the bastards, then waste no regrets when you toss away their wrung-out skins. You have to treat people like stepping stones. Like rungs on your ladder. Or you’ll wake up one day with nothing but a set of bootprints on your own back. Alex

He had never had much patience for religion. What was it, really, but superstition with money?

“The Church is not that keen on God, in my experience,” said Baron Rikard. “They think of him much as a lawyer thinks of the law. Something to be got around.” “You’re a vampire,” snapped Brother Diaz. “Of course you hate the Church.” “On the contrary, I am a great admirer of the tenets of your religion. I merely find it a shame that the Saved are, as a rule, so little like their Saviour.”

“Don’t worry,” said Vigga, clapping him on the shoulder and making him stagger. “It was just a warning shot.” “What if it had hit me?” “Then … I guess … it’d just be a shot?”

I covered myself in glory and steeped myself in blood. And there, at the summit of a hill of corpses, I reached my destiny, and passed through it to the other side…” He slowly opened his aching fingers, and let his hand fall. “Where there was nothing. And I saw I’d never followed God’s plan, only the lies I told myself to justify my greed and my ambition.”