Gardens of the Moon (The Malazan Book of the Fallen, #1)

by Steven Erikson

As a friend, of course. Nothing serious, nothing frightening in the love for a friend.

He’d been someone else so many times that he saw a thousand faces, heard a thousand voices, all at war with his own.

That one’s own skull is too worthy a chamber for deception to reign – and yet Kruppe assures you from long experience that all deceit is born in the mind and there it is nurtured while virtues starve.’