Red Country

by Joe Abercrombie

‘What a wild life, and what a fresh kind of existence! But, ah, the discomforts!’

‘Never leave to God what you can do yourself!’

‘My old commander Sazine once told me you should laugh every moment you live, for you’ll find it decidedly difficult afterward.

‘Ain’t none of my affair to go picking at other folks’ stitches. Their business is their business.’

‘Summers past love company,’

Before, the future had always looked like the past. Now he knew the past was a better place, and the future full of fear and death.

If you really wish to go, no one will stop you. But it is a long, hard way, and to what? The world out there is a red country, without justice, without meaning.’

‘And clearly they die.’ Brachio shrugged. ‘Everyone bleeds. Everyone dies.’ ‘Life’s one certainty,’ rumbled Jubair, rolling his eyes towards the heavens.

Folk she’d known to be big on religion had tended to use it as an excuse for doing wrong rather’n a reason not to.

‘Way I see it, we’ve got two choices. Try and use these bastards, or kill ’em all. Hard words have never won a battle yet, but they’ve lost a few. You mean to kill a man, telling him so don’t help.’ Lamb

Out here, death is a little thing. A man who expects more than one chance is a fool.’

‘The further I go into the unmapped extremes of this country, the more I become convinced these are the end times.’

‘All times are end times for someone.’

‘He won’t stop me.’ Lamb gave his sword another grinding lick. ‘He’s had a thousand chances and never took a one.’ ‘Do you think death fears you?’ ‘Death loves me.’ Lamb smiled, black-eyed, wet-eyed, and the smile was worse even than the snarl had been. All the work I done for him? The crowds I’ve sent his way? He knows he ain’t got no better friends.’

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods.

If there was a God, the world seemed exactly the way it would be if there wasn’t one.