Best Served Cold

by Joe Abercrombie

There is a brief spell after a new leader comes to power, however it is achieved, during which they can do no wrong. A golden period in which people are blinded by their own hopes for something better. Nothing lasts forever, of course. In time, and usually with alarming speed, the leader’s flawless image grows tarnished with their subjects’ own petty disappointments, failures, frustrations. Soon they can do no right. The people clamour for a new leader, that they might consider themselves reborn. Again.

“Unhappy times are the best for levity. You don’t light candles in the middle of the day, do you?”

“‘Bravery is the dead man’s virtue,’” Monza muttered. “‘The wise commander never trusts it.’ ”

The only good way to fight is the one that kills your enemy and leaves you with the breath to laugh. If science can simplify the process, well, so much the better. Everything else is flimflam.

You can be as great a man as you please while you’re alive. Makes not a straw of difference once you go back to the mud. And it only takes a little thing. Might happen in a silly moment.

Loyalty, duty, pride—fleeting motivations on the whole, which kept men smugly happy in good weather but soon washed away when the storm came. Greed, though? On greed you can always rely.

Every war carries within it the seeds of the next, and she planned to be good and ready for the harvest.

Get out your plough, by all means, Farans wrote, but keep a dagger handy, just in case.

“But chaos is the natural state of things, for men pull always in their own directions. It is those who want the world to march all the same way that give themselves the challenge.”