The Blade Itself (The First Law, #1)

by Joe Abercrombie

the ground must be a general’s best friend, or it becomes his worst enemy?”

“The smith must learn the ways of metals, the carpenter the ways of wood, or their work will be of but little worth. Base magic is wild and dangerous, for it comes from the Other Side, and to draw from the world below is fraught with peril. The Magus tempers magic with knowledge, and thus produces High Art, but like the smith or the carpenter, he should only seek to change that which he understands. With each thing he learns, his power is increased. So must the Magus strive to learn all, to understand the world entire. The tree is only as strong as its root, and knowledge is the root of power.”

The more you learn, the more you realise how little you know. Still, the struggle itself is worthwhile. Knowledge is the root of power, after all.”

“It is forbidden to touch the Other Side direct. The First Law must apply to all, without exception. As must the Second.” “Which is?” “It is forbidden to eat the flesh of men.” Logen raised an eyebrow. “You wizards get up to some strange stuff.”

“What is that?” asked Logen, reaching for his pipe. “Some spell? Some potion? Some great work of High Art?” “Tea.”

Vengeance can feel fine, but it’s a luxury. It doesn’t fill your belly, or keep the rain off. To fight my enemies I need friends behind me, and I’m clean out of friends. You have to be realistic. It’s been a while since my ambitions went beyond getting through each day alive.”

“Whatever it is you want from me I will try to do, but I don’t want to know until it’s time. I’m sick of making my own decisions. They’re never the right ones. Ignorance is the sweetest medicine, my father used to say. I don’t want to know.”

“Feared?” “Where’ve you been, under a mountain?” “More or less. What’s this Feared?” “I don’t know what he is.” Blacktoe leaned from his saddle and spat in the grass. “I heard he’s not a man at all. They say that bitch Caurib dug him out from under a hill. Who knows? Leastways, he’s Bethod’s new champion, and far nastier even than the last, no offence.”

“You’ve fucking killed me,” he whispered, staring open-mouthed at the wreckage of his hands. “I’m all done. I’ll never make it back, and even if I could, what for?” He gave a despairing laugh. “Bethod ain’t half so merciful as he used to be. Better you kill me now, before it starts to hurt. Better all round.” And he slumped back and lay in the road. Logen looked up at Bayaz, but there was no help there. “I’m not much at healing,” snapped the wizard, glancing round at the circle of blasted stumps. “I told you we tend to specialise.”

Logen stared down at Blacktoe’s headless corpse. “That was a good man. Better than me.” “History is littered with dead good men.”

Logen stared at the blade for a moment. It was clean, dull grey, just as it had always been. Unlike him, it showed not so much as a scratch from the hard use it had seen that day. He didn’t want it back. Not ever. But he took it anyway.

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse.” —Joseph Brodsky

He was no bandit, no escaped slave. What was he then? And why was he here? He must have come for her. He could be one of them. An Eater. Who else would wander the Badlands without a weapon?

Found the Second Law fanatics

Now, simply by standing still and smiling, he seemed to be saying, “You know less than you think. I know more.”

“They will catch you, and they will break your legs with hammers in the city square, so you can never run again. Then they will parade you through the streets of Shaffa, naked, sitting backwards on an ass, with your hair shaved off, while the people line the streets and shout insults at you.” She frowned at him, but Yulwei did not stop. “They will starve you to death in a cage before the palace, cooking in the hot sun, while the good people of Gurkhul taunt you and spit on you and throw dung at you through the bars. Perhaps they will give you piss to drink, if you are lucky. When you finally die they will let you rot, and the flies will eat you bit by bit, and all the other slaves will see what freedom looks like, and decide they are better off as they are.”

“And is vengeance all you think of, every minute of every day, your only desire?” “Yes.” “Hurting them? Killing them? Ending them?” “Yes!” “You want nothing for yourself?” She paused. “What?” “For yourself. What do you want?” She stared at the old man suspiciously, but no reply came to her. Yulwei shook his head sadly. “It seems to me, Ferro Maljinn, that you are as much a slave as you ever were. Or ever could be.”

The hate and the fury were gone, for the time being, but they had left a hole, and she had nothing else to fill it with. She felt empty and cold and sick and alone. She hugged herself, rocking slowly back and forth, and closed her eyes. But the darkness held no comfort.

“There’s nothing left of me. What am I?” She pressed one hand on her chest, but she barely felt it. “I have nothing inside.” “Well. It’s strange that you should say that.” Yulwei smiled up at the starry sky. “I was just starting to think there might be something in there worth saving.”

“Get him!” screamed Glokta. Frost sprang forward, lunged across the desk, caught hold of the flicking hem of Kault’s robe of office as the Magister spun round and hurled himself at the window. We have him! There was a sickening rip as the robe tore in Frost’s white fist. Kault seemed frozen in space for a moment as all that expensive glass shattered around him, shards and splinters glittering through the air, then he was gone. The rope snapped taut.

Cheap clothes and expensive windows. If the cloth had been stronger we would have got him. If the window had more lead, we would have got him. Lives hinge on such chances.

“Jezal,” he growled, “I’m your friend, so I’m asking you.” He stepped forward again, closer than ever. “And I’m her brother, so I’m warning you.

The great wage secret wars for power and wealth, and they call it government. Wars of words, and tricks, and guile, but no less bloody for that. The casualties are many.”

More people than can be counted—living, dying, working, breeding, climbing one upon the other. Welcome,” and Bayaz spread his arms wide to encompass the monstrous, the beautiful, the endless city, “to civilisation!”

there were people on every side, pushing, jostling, shouting. Hundreds of them! Thousands! Hundreds of thousands! Could they really all be people? People like him with thoughts and moods and dreams? Faces loomed up and flashed by—surly, anxious, frowning, gone in a sickening whirl of colour. Logen swallowed, blinked. His throat was painfully dry. His head spun. Surely this was hell. He knew he deserved to be here, but he didn’t remember dying.

The people here were different. Their clothes were bright and gaudy, cut in strange styles that served no purpose. The women hardly seemed like people at all—pale and bony, swaddled in shining fabric, flapping at themselves in the hot sun with pieces of cloth stretched over sticks.

“Stories?” Logen poked at a wooden sword. “Some people have too much time on their hands.”

His eyes were fixed on the sparkling, lapping water in the moat, and his mind was elsewhere. Ardee. Where else was it ever? He had supposed, after that day when West had warned him off, after he had stopped seeing her, that his thoughts would soon return to other matters, and other women. He had applied himself to his fencing with a will, attempted to show an interest in his duties as an officer, but he found himself unable to concentrate, and other women seemed now pale, flat, tedious creatures.

His attention would inevitably slip, and then she would be there.

It was hardly as though he had nothing else to think about. The Contest was close now, very close. Soon he would fight before the cheering crowds, his family and friends among them. It might make his reputation… or sink it. He should have been lying awake at night, tense and sweating, worrying endlessly about forms, and training, and steels. And yet somehow that wasn’t what he thought about in bed.

His face was like a whipped back, criss-crossed with ragged scars. His nose was bent, pointing off a little sideways. One ear had a big notch out of it, one eye seemed a touch higher than the other, surrounded by a crescent-shaped wound. His whole face, in fact, was slightly beaten, broken, lop-sided, like that of a prize fighter who has fought a few bouts too many.

“You… must… leave… your… weapons… here!” he shouted, speaking as slowly and clearly as possible. “Happy to.” The Northman pulled the sword from his belt and held it out. It weighed heavily in Jezal’s hands: a big, plain, brutal-looking weapon. He followed it with a long knife, then knelt and pulled another from his boot. He took a third from the small of his back, and then produced a thin blade from inside his sleeve, heaping them into Jezal’s outstretched arms. The Northman smiled broadly.

You can never have too many knives…

The truly thirsty will drink piss, or salt water, or oil, however bad for them, so great is their need to drink.

It was never properly dark here, never properly quiet. It was too hot, too close, too stinking. Enemies might be terrifying, but enemies could be fought, and put an end to. Logen could understand their hatred. There was no fighting the faceless, careless, rumbling city. It hated everything.

The carvings marched on down either side of the avenue. Kings of the Union, Logen guessed, stood in line on the left. Some carried swords, some scrolls or tiny ships. One had a dog at his feet, another a sheaf of wheat under his arm, but otherwise there wasn’t much to tell them apart. They all had the same tall crowns and the same stern frowns. You wouldn’t have thought to look at them that they’d ever said a stupid word, or done a stupid thing, or had to take a shit in all their lives.

“You do look a little dangerous.” “Hideous is the word you’re looking for.” “I usually find the words I’m looking for, and I say dangerous.”

Logen woke with a painful start, blinked and stared wildly about him. Dark. Not quite entirely dark, of course, there was still the ever-present glow of the city. He thought he’d heard something, but there was nothing now.

Wild guess: Practicals! Ninefingers Vs Frost PLEASE.

But that was civilisation, so far as Logen could tell. People with nothing better to do, dreaming up ways to make easy things difficult.

Not the eyes of an idiot. He may look an ape, but he doesn’t talk like one. He thinks before he speaks, then says no more than he has to. This is a dangerous man.

“I should have killed that bastard long ago, but I was young then, and stupid. Now I doubt I’ll get another chance, but that’s the way of things. You have to be… what’s the word for it?” “Realistic,” said Quai.

the conversation of the drunk is only interesting to the drunk. A few glasses of wine can be the difference between finding a man a hilarious companion or an insufferable moron.

He badly needed some intelligent company, but where could he find it at this time of night?

A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time, and had never got anywhere.

It wouldn’t hurt his reputation any, of course, but hers would be ruined. Ruined. His flesh crept at the thought. She didn’t deserve that, surely. It wasn’t good enough to say it was her problem. Not good enough. Just so he could have a little fun? The selfishness of it. He was amazed that it had never occurred to him before.

Who’d want to burn out folks as poor as this? Who’d want to steal this stubborn patch of land? Some men just like to burn, he reckoned.

“It’s the Dogman,” said Grim, barely looking up from his arrows. There was no understanding that man. He spoke nothing at all for days on end, then when he did speak it was to say what they could all see already.

You fight with a man for long enough, you get an understanding. You learn how he thinks and you come to think the same way.

Once you choose to go, or your chief chooses for you, you go all the way, and never look back ’til the task’s done. The time you spend thinking is the time you’ll get killed in.

There was blood on Dogman’s hands, but that was the work and couldn’t be helped.

Sounded like things had changed while they were gone, and he’d never yet seen a change for the better.

“Let me up, bastard!” shouted the Mire, struggling at his ropes. “You’re no better’n me, Black Dow! You’ve killed more folk than the plague! Let me up and give me a blade! Come on! You scared to fight me, you coward? Scared to give a fair chance are yer?” “Call me coward, would you?” growled Dow. “You who’s killed children for the sport of it? You had a blade and you let it drop. That was your chance and you should have took it. The likes o’ you don’t deserve another.