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‘That’s ’cause you’re some kind of a bloody coward. Better to do it than live with the fear of it. Ain’t that what you always used to tell me?’
To be brave among friends was nothing. To have the world against you and pick your path regardless–there is courage.
The man’s left eye was made of metal, glimmering in the gloom of the benighted eatery, his face disfigured by a giant scar. The other eye held only a terrible willingness.
‘What a wild life, and what a fresh kind of existence! But, ah, the discomforts!’
Cosca chuckled. ‘My old commander Sazine once told me you should laugh every moment you live, for you’ll find it decidedly difficult afterward.
‘Followed by a long fall into water.’ ‘I been there,’ murmured Lamb, with a faraway look.
‘A man with a missing eye after a man with a missing finger. There’s a song in there somewhere, I reckon. He give a name?’ ‘Caul Shivers.’ Lamb’s scarred face twisted as though he’d bitten into something sour.
‘There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.’ Mark Twain
‘That damned snow. That treacherous bastard Black Calder. So many good men lost, eh, Temple? Like… well… I forget the names, but my point holds.’
‘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.’
Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.
‘As a young man I found happy endings cloying but, call me soppy, with age, I have come to appreciate them more and more.’
‘Say one thing for me… say I’m a survivor.’
Shivers looked down at Lamb’s hand, and the stump of the missing finger there, and he said, ‘You know my business, don’t you?’ Lamb just nodded, grim and level.
‘Long way home for me. Got to tell ’em that nine-fingered bastard is back to the mud. Don’t you think, Master Lamb?’ Lamb curled his left hand into a fist so the stump didn’t show, and swallowed. ‘Long dead and gone.’
‘Some men just ain’t stamped out for doing good.’ Shivers took a deep breath, and smiled. A strange thing to see on that ruined face. ‘But it feels all right, even so. To let go o’ something.’
