Deadhouse Gates (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #2)

by Steven Erikson

Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will.

When slaughter is flung back on the perpetrators, the thirst for blood is quickly quenched.

“The world’s harbingers of death are many and varied.”

Death shall be my bridge.

Yet he’d stayed, nailed to a single tree but only because he’d grown used to the scenery around it. It was amazing what could be endured when in the grip of inertia. He had reached a point where anything strange, unfamiliar, was cause for fear.

You will be an unpainted hide, Mappo. The future will offer its own script, writing and shaping your history anew.

“Strange how a land untraveled can look so familiar.”

“Stranger still how the mind’s eye can travel so far and so fast, yet return in an instant.”

“With that eye you might explore the entire world.” “With that eye you might escape it.”

She felt an exhaustion that was beyond physical. She could not stop herself lashing out, and every face she made turn her way became a mirror.

“You ever think that maybe what you are is what’s trapping you inside whatever it is you’re trapped inside?”

“Ah, Fist, it’s the curse of history that those who should read them, never do.

Duiker feared he had inadvertently become a harbinger, and the fate he promised was as chilling as the soulless howls of the camp dogs.

Nastiness grows like a cancer in any and every organization—human or otherwise, as you well know. And nastiness gets nastier. Whatever evil you let ride becomes commonplace, eventually. Problem is, it’s easier to get used to it than carve it out.”

Perhaps the bone feeds the warren in the sack somehow…or the handful of irritating people I’ve stuffed inside in my own fits of ill temper. Wonder where they all went…

Kalam feared insignificance, he feared the inability to produce an effect, to force a change upon the world beyond his flesh.

The historian, now witness, stumbling in the illusion that he will survive. Long enough to set the details down on parchment in the frail belief that truth is a worthwhile cause. That the tale will become a lesson heeded. Frail belief? Outright lie, a delusion of the worst sort. The lesson of history is that no one learns. Children were dying. He’d crouched, one hand on a mother’s shoulder, and watched with her as life ebbed from the baby in her arms. Like the light of an oil lamp, dimming, dimming, winking out. The moment when the struggle’s already lost, surrendered, and the tiny heart slows in its own realization, then stops in mute wonder. And never stirs again. It was then that pain filled the vast caverns within the living, destroying all it touched with its rage at inequity.

“That’s a succinct summary of humankind, I’d say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world hide in those three words.

Why do the survivors remain anonymous—as if cursed—while the dead are revered? Why do we cling to what we lose while we ignore what we still hold? Name none of the fallen, for they stood in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.

“Show me a mortal who is not pursued, and I’ll show you a corpse. Every hunter is hunted, every mind that knows itself has stalkers. We drive and are driven. The unknown pursues the ignorant, the truth assails every scholar wise enough to know his own ignorance, for that is the meaning of unknowable truths.”

It’s the ignorant who find a cause and cling to it, for within that is the illusion of significance. Faith, a king, queen or Emperor, or vengeance…all the bastion of fools.

All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we’re going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.”

“Destroyed…by your hand, Icarium. Yours is a blind rage…a rage unequaled. It burns fierce, so fierce all your memory of what you do is obliterated. I watch you—I have watched you stirring those cold ashes, ever seeking to discover who you are, yet there I stand, at your side, bound by a vow to prevent you ever committing such an act again. You have destroyed cities, entire peoples. Once you begin killing, you cannot stop, until all before you is…lifeless.”

How does a mortal make answer to what his or her kind are capable of? Does each of us, soldier or no, reach a point when all that we’ve seen, survived, changes us inside? Irrevocably changes us. What do we become, then? Less human, or more human? Human enough, or too human?”

“Pogroms need no reason, sir, none that can weather challenge, in any case. Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only one needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks—all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.”

This path’s a dire thing, the gate it leads to is like a corpse over which ten thousand nightmares bicker their fruitless claims.

The historian squeezed his eyes shut. It had become a day to hold in his arms broken figures. But who will hold me?

I saw the sun’s bolt arc an unerring path to the man’s forehead. As it struck, the crows converged like night drawing breath.

And so, the simple truth…the tracks we have walked in for so long become our lives, in themselves a prison—

We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again…

Laseen sent Tavore Rushing across the seas to clasp Coltaine’s hand And closing her fingers She held crow-picked bones.

“It’s our nature, isn’t it? Again and again, we cling to the foolish belief that simple solutions exist.

“A gift with words, you say. A gift for you, but it may well be a curse for her, one that has little to do with freedom. Some people invite awe whether they like it or not. Such people come to be very lonely. Lonely in themselves, Sha’ik.”