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“We were giants, once,” he said. “Bigger than life. And now…” “Now we are tired old men,”
We were giants once.
But time did what it does best, didn’t it? It beat us up. It broke us down. We got old,
All he said, though, before walking out and tugging the door closed behind him, was “You’re a good man, Clay Cooper.” Simple words. Kind ones, even. Not the knife he’d been expecting. Not the piercing sword. They still hurt, though.
And just like that he cracked. Clamped his teeth shut on a sob that threatened to choke him, closed his eyes against the well of tears, too late.
But there were… measures of goodness, he figured. You could set one thing against another and find that one, if only by the weight of a feather, came out heavier. And that was just it, wasn’t it? To make a choice between the two – the right choice – was a burden few had the strength to shoulder.
Come home to me. Now that he would remember, right up to the end.
No king meant no law; no guards to keep the peace or discourage violence before it got out of hand. No taxes meant no one to clean gutters or lay down stone for roads,
By morning they were madly in love.
“The impenetrable armour of Jack the Reaver. No sword or spear can pierce it, they say, but syphilis got through all right. Poor Jack.”
The booker’s toothy grin withered like a cock in cold water.
I swear by the Winter Queen’s frozen tits —”
“Tits and Tiny Gods, how long has it been?”
“It is risky, though.”
“I have a —” Lastleaf paused, as if rummaging his archaic vocabulary in search of a suitable word “— request of my own.” “And that is?” asked Matrick wearily. Lastleaf spread his hands. His smile might have been charming were it not full of daggers. “Do nothing,” he said.
“We were giants. We still are.”
“Judge them for what they wished to be,” he begged the Father of Gods, “not what the world made of them.”
Which are you, the monster or the man?
The man, he’d said. Yeah? she’d asked, looking hopeful. Yeah. The world has enough monsters, I think.
He’d seen, reflected in Raff’s dying gaze, the monster staring back at him.
‘Suffer no Tyrants’
WHEN WE SEEK TO RULE ONLY OURSELVES, WE ARE EACH OF US KINGS.
I’ll be a troll’s new testicle,
And it was, of course – even more so for having been rendered in a lost tongue and given music by an instrument that was, very likely, the only one of its kind remaining in the world.
But then again, he supposed, a little embellishment was so often the difference between a good story and a great one.
The flat face of the blade was the bright blue of an alien sky, and as Gabriel lifted it to his shoulder Clay saw a wisp of cloud, a flock of birds in flight, and then a light so bright he turned his face away. When he looked back it was merely a sword, albeit one whose blue-green blade gave off the scent of wet earth and clean summer rain.
enemy or not, when you hit a man in the nuts with a magic hammer the least you could say was sorry.
A tiger, however fearsome, could be hunted into a corner. It fought alone, so it died alone. But to hunt a wolf was to constantly look over your shoulder, wondering if others were behind you in the dark.
Cannibals were a notoriously adventurous people, culinarily speaking.
the horror of an immortal gazing into the empty void of oblivion.
Clay considered offering up the fact that it wasn’t just Saga coming to her rescue, but a wine-swilling ghoul, an amnesiac daeva, and a half-blind ettin were along for the ride as well. Then again, if something sounded ridiculous in your head, then voicing it aloud rarely did it any favours.
And so the Cold Road took its toll.
She was, quite simply, the only reason he was still alive.
Gregor had been born a monster in a monstrous world, and had managed to find beauty in it nonetheless.
standing at heaven’s door without a hand to knock.
Dane, he saw through bleary eyes, had died as he’d lived: with a great big ugly smile on his face.
This is it, he thought, looking from face to face around the skyship’s deck. Each smile a fraction too wide, every laugh a little too loud. There was something unreal about this moment, something not quite right,
This is the end. And every one of us knows it.
“They’re only candles, Gabe, and you are the godsdamned sun.” He pointed to the pediment beside them. “Now get up there and shine.”
“Who will remember you?”
“What have you done?”
and Kit, who’d slipped through the arch sometime during Gabriel’s speech, was peering over the assembly as though committing the sight to memory.
Remain here and die in obscurity, or follow me now and live forever!”
For a while no one spoke, because in the roundabout course of thirty-some years they had said just about all there was to say to one another, until finally Clay could bear the silence no longer and cleared his throat. “I love you guys,” he said, and gods-be-damned if his voice didn’t sell him out at the end and crack like a boy of twelve summers.
Ganelon remained silent, but when the rest of them looked his way he rolled his eyes and loosed a sympathetic growl. “Okay, fine. You’re the last four people I’d ever kill.”
“For Rose,” he said.
The battle for Castia was about to begin.
A battle, as relayed by a poet, is a glorious thing, full of heroic stands, daring charges, and valiant sacrifice. But a battlefield, as experienced by some poor bastard mired in the thick of it, is something different altogether.
sometimes the fate of worlds was decided by something so arbitrary as sheer dumb luck.
“With me, then. One last time.”
