Midnight Tides (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #5)

by Steven Erikson

Our civilization thrives on stupidity. And it only took a sliver of cleverness to tap that idiot vein and drink deep of the riches.

‘A child’s sense of injustice is ever self-serving,

Do you see peace as little more than the absence of war? Perhaps, on a surface level, it is just that. But let me describe the characteristics of peace, my young friend. A pervasive dulling of the senses, a decadence afflicting the culture, evinced by a growing obsession with low entertainment. The virtues of extremity—honour, loyalty, sacrifice—are lifted high as shoddy icons, currency for the cheapest of labours. The longer peace lasts, the more those words are used, and the weaker they become. Sentimentality pervades daily life. All becomes a mockery of itself, and the spirit grows…restless.’

You can’t leave all these people behind. They’re outside the endless excitement and lust, the frenzied accumulation. They’re outside and can only look on with growing despair and envy. What happens when rage supplants helplessness?

Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. From you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge. ‘Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.’

‘I always believed freedom concerned the granted right to be different, without fear of repression.’

Down the street, carving through a rearguard of some sort. Udinaas stumbled over corpses, writhing, weeping figures. Blind with dying, men called for their mothers, and to these the slave reached down and touched a shoulder, or laid fingertips to slick foreheads, and murmured, ‘I’m here, my boy. It’s all right. You can go now.’

For from inequity derives the concept of value, whether measured by money or the countless other means of gauging human worth. Simply put, there resides in all of us the unchallenged belief that the poor and the starving are in some way deserving of their fate. In other words, there will always be poor people. A truism to grant structure to the continual task of comparison, the establishment through observation of not our mutual similarities, but our essential differences.

A truly successful leader is a reluctant leader. Not one whose every word is greeted with frenzied cheering either—after all, what happens to the mind of such a leader, after such scenes are repeated again and again? A growing certainty, a belief in one’s own infallibility, and onward goes the march into disaster.

Reminds me of our former president...

Trull Sengar picked his way across the killing field. The rain was turning the churned ground into a swamp. The bones of the sorcery had vanished. He paused, hearing piteous cries from somewhere off to his right. A dozen paces in that direction, and he came upon a demon. Four heavy quarrels had pierced it. The creature was lying on its side, its bestial face twisted with pain. Trull crouched near the demon’s mud-smeared head. ‘Can you understand me?’ Small blue eyes flickered behind the lids, fixed on his own eyes. ‘Arbiter of life. Denier of mercy. I shall die here.’ The voice was thin, strangely childlike. ‘I shall call a healer—’ ‘Why? To fight again? To relive terror and grief?’ ‘You were not a warrior in your world?’ ‘A caster of nets. Warm shoals, a yellow sky. We cast nets.’ ‘All of you?’ ‘What war is this? Why have I been killed? Why will I never see the river again? My mate, my children. Did we win?’

‘What war is this?’ ‘A pointless one.’ ‘They are all pointless, Denier. Subjugation and defeat breed resentment and hatred, and such things cannot be bribed away.’

But no, there was value in pain, if only to remind oneself that one still lived.

Tyrants and emperors rise and fall. Civilizations burgeon then die, but there are always casters of nets. And tillers of the soil, and herders in the pastures. We are where civilization begins, and when it ends, we are there to begin it again.’

Babies can’t focus past a nipple, you know.’ ‘No, I didn’t. But I fully understand the sentiment.’