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

by Steven Erikson

Nodding, Duiker found himself watching a dung beetle struggle heroically to push aside a fragment of palm bark. He sensed something profound in what he watched, but was too weary to pursue it.

Hood grants every living thing awareness at the very end. What mercy is that?

The Wickans know that the gift of power is never free. They know enough not to envy the chosen among them, for power is never a game, nor a glittering standards raised to glory and wealth. They disguise nothing in trappings, and so we all see what we’d rather not, that power is cruel, hard as iron and bone, and it thrives on destruction.

“Aye, I’ve learned one. There are no truths. You’ll understand that yourself, years from now, when Hood’s shadow stretches your way.”

You dream that with memories will come knowledge, and from knowledge, understanding. But for every answer you find, a thousand new questions arise. 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.”

hear Seven Cities natives grow fruit just so they can cat the larvae in them. Gobble the worm and toss the apple, hey? If you want to know how you folk see the world, it’s all there in that one custom.

Humans were but one tiny, frail leaf on a tree too massive even to comprehend. The shock of that unmanned him, mocking his audacity with an endless echo of ages and realms trapped within this mad, riotous prison.

Horror knew no sides, played no favorites. It spread like a stain outward, from tribe to tribe, from one city to the next.

I could in mercy awaken the lad, yet the power for knowledge has mastered me. Cruelty comes easy these days.

“All those tomes you’ve read, those other thoughts from other men, other women. Other times. 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?”

“Each of us has his own threshold, friend. Soldier or no, we can only take so much before we cross over…into something else. As if the world has shifted around us, though it’s only our way of looking at it. A change of perspective, but there’s no intelligence to it—you see but do not feel, or you weep yet look upon your own anguish as if from somewhere else, somewhere outside. It’s not a place for answers, Lull, for every question has burned away. More human or less human—that’s for you to decide.”

My tribe—the shoulder-women—would not betray me. What weight can be placed on Icarium’s dreams? The Jhag remembers nothing. Nothing real. His equanimity softens truth, blurs the edges…smears every color, until the memory is daubed anew. Thus. It is Icarium’s kindness that has snared me…

“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.”

He could only nod as he tucked the scrap in his belt. He looked at the three figures before him, wishing Bult and List had been present for this, but there would be no staged goodbyes, no comfort of roles to step into. Like everything else, the moment was messy, awkward and incomplete.

Thirty paces from the gate and with the array of guards standing in the gap watching him, Duiker wheeled his horse around one final time. He stared northward, first to the dust cloud now ascending the last, largest barrow, then beyond it, to the glittering spear that was the Whirlwind. His mind’s eye took him farther still, north and east, across rivers, across plains and steppes, to a city on a different coast. Yet the effort availed him little. Too much to comprehend, too swift, too immediate this end to that extraordinary, soul-scarring journey. A chain of corpses, hundreds of leagues long. No, it is all beyond me, beyond, I now believe, any of us…

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

How can friendship defeat such an opportunity? How can the comfort of familiarity rise up like a god, as if change itself had become something demonic? I am a coward—the offer of freedom, the sighing end to a lifetime’s vow, proved the greatest terror of all. And so, the simple truth…the tracks we have walked in for so long become our lives, in themselves a prison—

The worlds live on, beyond us, countless unravelling tales. In his mind’s eye he saw his horizons stretch out on all sides, and as they grew ever vaster he in turn saw himself as ever smaller, ever more insignificant. 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…

The High Fist’s corpse, Duiker saw, rode in the saddle with a grace not matched in life, weaving this way and that before hands reached

up to slow the frightened horse, and Pormqual’s body slid to one side, falling into waiting arms. It may have been his imagination, but Duiker thought he could hear the harsh laughter of a god.

“It’s our nature, isn’t it? Again and again, we cling to the foolish belief that simple solutions exist. Aye, I anticipated a dramatic, satisfying confrontation—the flash of sorcery, the spray of blood. I wanted a sworn enemy dead by my hand. Instead—” he rumbled a laugh—“I had an audience with a mortal woman, more or less…”