Best Served Cold

by Joe Abercrombie

“A man without discipline is no better than a dog. A soldier without discipline is no better than a corpse. Worse, in fact. A corpse is no threat to his comrades.”

“To have a good enemy, choose a friend: he knows where to strike” Diane de Poitiers

Enough pain makes a coward of anyone.

“One cannot grow without pain. One cannot improve without it. Suffering drives us to achieve great things.” The fingers of her good hand plucked and scrabbled uselessly at his fist. “Love is a fine cushion to rest upon, but only hate can make you a better person. There.”

Good steel bends, but never breaks. Good steel stays always sharp and ready. Good steel feels no pain, no pity and, above all, no remorse.

He’d come to Styria looking for honest work. But when the purse runs empty, dishonest work has to do.

You were a hero round these parts. That’s what they call you when you kill so many people the word murderer falls short.

The dead can forgive. The dead can be forgiven. The rest of us have better things to do.

“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees” Victor Hugo

Blades might be unsophisticated tools, but a sword through the guts killed clever men every bit as thoroughly as stupid ones.

No plague spreads quicker than panic, Stolicus wrote, or is more deadly.

“Nice, clean murders? I doubt it. You set your mind to killing, it’s hard to pick the number of the dead.”

The dead are past helping. Vengeance is for you.”

“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness” Joseph Conrad

“But for a man to change he needs the help of good friends, or, better yet, good enemies. My friends are all long dead, and my enemies, I am forced to admit… have better things to do.”

When God means to punish a man, the Kantic scriptures say, he sends him stupid friends, and clever enemies.

Paid soldiers can’t be too picky over their employers. You have to blow with the wind in this business. Loyalty on a mercenary is like armour on a swimmer.”

The people far prefer a leader who appears great, Bialoveld wrote, to one who is.

“That’s all any of us are doing, my friend. Every business is the same, and ours is no different. Soldiering, killing, whatever you want to call it. No one wants you when you get old.”

When faced with two dark paths, Farans wrote, a general should always find a third.

So it always is with mercenaries. Easily hired, even more easily discharged and never missed once they are gone.”

“War without fire is as worthless as sausages without mustard” Henry V

“I like a tight-lipped man. A man who says little to his friends will say less than nothing to his enemies.”

You start some trouble, it’s best to start it and finish it all at once. A bit of sharp violence can save you a lot worse down the line.

“When life is a cell, there is nothing more liberating than captivity.”

You are full of passion, but passion without discipline is no more than a child’s tantrum.”

“Revenge. If you could even get it, what good would it do you? All this expenditure of effort, pain, treasure, blood, for what? Who is ever left better off for it?” His sad eyes watched her slowly stand. “Not the avenged dead, certainly. They rot on, regardless. Not those who are avenged upon, of course. Corpses all. And what of the ones who take vengeance, what of them? Do they sleep easier, do you suppose, once they have heaped murder on murder? Sown the bloody seeds of a hundred other retributions?”

“Ah, what had to be done. The favourite excuse of unexamined evil echoes down the ages and slobbers from your twisted mouth.”

“For mercenaries are disunited, thirsty for power, undisciplined, and disloyal; they are brave among their friends and cowards before the enemy; they have no fear of God, they do not keep faith with their fellow men; they avoid defeat just as long as they avoid battle; in peacetime you are despoiled by them and in wartime by the enemy” Niccolò Machiavelli

“Today’s proud legions march over the last vestiges of yesterday’s fallen empire. So it always is with military splendour. Hubris made flesh.”

Words may hold more power than swords, as Juvens said, but I have discovered to my cost that there are times when there is no substitute for pointy metal.”

“Great tempests wash up strange companions.”

But she’d found there’s a problem with hiding a thing yourself. You always know where it is.

“That’s the only way they do change, ain’t it?” His one eye stayed on her. “If things change enough around ’em? Men are brittle, I reckon. They don’t bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.”

Strong leaders might like it when someone brings ’em a better idea, but weak ones never do.

It weren’t much of a joyous occasion for anyone, even on the winning side. There’s vengeance for you.

Mercenaries are cowards, on the whole, even more so than most people. Men who’ll kill because it’s the easiest way they’ve found to make a living. Mercenaries have no loyalty in them, on the whole, by definition. Not much to their leaders, even less to their employers.

You make yourself too hard, you make yourself brittle too. Crack once, crack all to pieces.

It seemed a little gold could cost a lot of blood.

I and your father have had our disagreements but I am, above all else, a mercenary. To let my personal feelings reduce the weight of my purse would be an act of criminal unprofessionalism.”

Vengeance brings no man a brighter tomorrow, and when placed on the scales of life, does not outweigh a single… scale.

‘Desperation bakes heroes from the most rotten flour,’ Farans wrote.”

‘War is but the pricking point of politics. Blades can kill men, but only words can move them, and good neighbours are the surest shelter in a storm.’

“Perhaps the time has come to lay him off. Mad dogs savage their owner more often than their owner’s enemies.”

‘Things aren’t what they used to be’ is the rallying cry of small minds. When men say things used to be better, they invariably mean they were better for them, because they were young, and had all their hopes intact. The world is bound to look a darker place as you slide into the grave.”

Strange, that however tough one’s skin becomes in later life, the wounds of youth never close.

That was the difference between a hero and a villain, a soldier and a murderer, a victory and a crime. Which side of a river you called home.

Maybe that was where she and these folk differed. Maybe they just liked corpses, so long as they weren’t theirs.

She was the spider they had to suffer in their larder to rid them of their flies. And once the flies are dealt with, who wants a spider in their salad?

“Men can have all manner of deeply held beliefs about the world in general that they find most inconvenient when called upon to apply to their own lives. Few people let morality get in the way of expediency. Or even convenience. A man who truly believes in a thing beyond the point where it costs him is a rare and dangerous thing.”