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Her hand slid down and took hold of a fistful of her dress and pulled it up, took another fistful and pulled it up, until her skirts were all tangled around her waist and her bare, pale arse was sticking up at him. Well. He might have been a new man, but he was still a man. With each thrust her head tapped against the plaster, and his skin slapped against the backs of her thighs, and his trousers sagged further and further down his legs until his sword-hilt was scraping against the carpet. With each thrust the table made an outraged creaking, louder and louder every time, as though they were
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So often in life, moments that are long anticipated prove to be a profound disappointment. This was undoubtedly one of those occasions.
When they were done he pushed his wilting prick back inside his trousers, guilty, and ashamed, and miserable in the extreme. The sound of his belt-buckle clinking made him want to smash his face against the wall.
“I love you.” The words tasted like lies in his bloody mouth, but he had gone far too far now to turn back.
“I still love you.”
slattern
Occasionally the memory would wallow up, of course, unbidden and horribly surprising, like a bloated corpse bobbing to the surface of the pond while one enjoys a picnic on the shore,
But when it did so he would fix his grin, and see her smile at him, and soon enough he would be able to shove those unpleasant thoughts back down again, at least for now. Then he would congratulate himself on being a big enough man to
Ah, well. I would love to spend more time on philosophy, but I have officials to bribe, and noblemen to blackmail, and votes to rig, and secretaries to murder, and lovers to threaten. So many knives to juggle. And as one clatters to the filthy floor, another must go up, blade spinning razor sharp above our heads. It never gets any easier.
The heart thumps, the skin prickles with cold sweat. Excited. Scared, even. What might they want with me? People are not snatched from the street in order to be given promotions, or confections, or tender kisses, more’s the pity. I know why people are snatched from the street. Few better.
“A gentle kidnapping is still a kidnapping, though, don’t you find?” “Kidnapping is such an ugly word. Why don’t we think of it as an invitation difficult to resist? At least I let you keep your clothes, no?”
bastard and his two fat sons and his witch.” He frowned. “Though I could be persuaded to take my tongue to her. D’you follow me so far?” “I’m keeping up,” said Logen, but Dogman weren’t altogether sure that he was. “Just whistle if you drop behind and I’ll come right back for you.
Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes. And most of us would far rather have a king with no friends and no enemies, than a king with plenty of both. Most of us would rather have things stay as they are, than risk an uncertain future.
crumbling scree,
Jezal frowned. “I am not sure that I—” “Upon achieving power, one should immediately distance oneself from all allies. They will feel they own your victory, and no rewards will ever satisfy them. You should elevate your enemies instead. They will gush over small tokens, knowing they do not deserve them.
“That Shite-Eye Hansul down there?” jeered Black Dow at him. “Still sucking on Bethod’s cock, are you?” The old warrior grinned up at them. “Man’s got to feed his family somehow, don’t he, and one cock tastes pretty much like another, if you ask me! Don’t pretend like your mouths ain’t all tasted salty enough before!”
Wounds on other people you can get used to. Cuts out of your own flesh always have a horror to ’em.
“Good,” he said, and he showed his bloody smile. He was the Great Leveller. Man or woman, young or old, all were dealt with exactly alike. That was the brutal beauty of it, the awful symmetry of it, the perfect justice of it. There could be no escape and no excuses.
“Dance!” laughed the Bloody-Nine, and the sword reeled around him. He filled the air with blood, and broken weapons, and the parts of men, and these good things wrote secret letters, and described sacred patterns that only he could see and understand.
He was the storm in the High Places, his voice as terrible as the thunder, his arm as quick, as deadly, as pitiless as the lightning.
His eyes flickered to those waiting. Merchants and moneylenders, shopkeepers and shysters, traders and tricksters in long queues, or waiting nervously on hard chairs around the hard walls.
“They make a pretty picture, don’t they, hanging there? They say you can see all the beauty in the world in the way a hanged man swings.”
If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person? You have to be realistic. He’d played at being a different man, but it had all been lies. The hardest kind to see through. The kind you tell yourself.
You can have
enemies you never really meet, Logen had plenty. You can kill men you don’t know, he’d done it often. But you can’t truly hate a man without loving him first, and there’s always a trace of that love left over.
Now I begin throwing away the secrets I have hoarded for so long, I find I cannot stop. I feel like a miser on a spending spree. Horrified, yet liberated. Agonised, yet delighted. Something like cutting your own throat, I imagine—a glorious release, but one you can enjoy only once. And like cutting my own throat, it will very likely end in my ugly death.
mistaken. I chose glory and success. The box did not contain what was written on the lid.” “The world is full of tragic tales.”
Killing Gurkish was like eating honey. A little only left you craving more. Too much could become sickening. Corpses had always been a poor reward for all the effort it took to make them. But there was no stopping now.
a strange sensation washed over her. Like a cool breeze on a hot day, surprising, at first, then delightful. A shiver, not at all unpleasant, worked its way up her spine and made her breath catch.
all, and we both know how that goes, no? Why, there’s not a man of them I wouldn’t trust my mother to.” “Are you sure?” “She’s been dead these twenty years. What harm could they do her now?”
“Master Cosca has a habit of overstating the case.” “Especially when in love,” threw in the mercenary. “Especially then. When I fall in love, I fall hard, and, as a rule, I do it no more than once a day.”
“I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes.” Cosca stretched his chin up and scratched at his scabby neck. “The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”
A curse we all have to bear. Round and round in circles we go, clutching at successes that we never grasp, endlessly tripping over the same old failures. Truly, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
“Because you’re a ruthless, plotting, bitter, twisted, self-pitying villain?”
Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipice. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man’s efficiency.
hoar-frost.
“Once you set your mind on killing, it is hard to choose the number of the dead.”
entirely understand your feelings. Healing is for the young. As one gets older, one finds one has less and less patience with the wounded.” He raised his eyebrows as he turned back towards the horrible view. “I am very old.”
“People like to watch the pretty puppets, Superior. Even a glimpse of the puppeteer can be most upsetting for them. Why, they might even suddenly notice the strings around their own wrists.
“You cannot understand what it is to live as long as I have. To know all that I know. You people are dead in the blink of an eye, and have to be taught the same old lessons all over again. The same lessons that Juvens taught Stolicus a thousand years ago. It becomes extremely tiresome.”
Every man seems a child to me. When you reach my age you see that history moves in circles. So many times I have guided this nation back from the brink of destruction, and on to ever greater glory. And what do I ask in return? A few little sacrifices? If you only understood the sacrifices that I have made on behalf of you cattle!”
“I deal in the momentous. I cannot concern myself with the fate of every peasant.
“Government is tyranny. At its best it is dressed in pretty colours.”
“I have no notion… of what causes you to suppose… that you could speak to me in such a manner.
To me, the First of the Magi!”
“I knew that you would say so, because although I know that you are arrogant, ignorant, and ungrateful, I know this also… you are a coward. Remember that. I trust that this is one lesson you will not ignore.”
At the very slightest breath of violence against them… why, I would not wish you even to imagine the inhuman horror of my response.”
First it is done to us, then we do it to others, then we order it done. Such is the way of things.
West’s voice was fragile and jagged as broken glass. He made a weak effort at a smile.
Not tears of compassion, of course. Not tears of grief. I feel nothing, fear nothing, care for nothing. They cut away the parts of me that could weep in the Emperor’s prisons. This can only be salt water, and nothing more. Merely a broken reflex in a mutilated face. Farewell, brother. Farewell, my only friend. And farewell to the ghost of beautiful Sand dan Glokta, too. Nothing of him remains. All for the best, of course. A man in my position can afford no indulgences.
