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It was a sour and obvious mockery of justice that stripped away the few remaining expectations of civil behaviour – stripped away civilization itself, leaving nothing but the chaos of savagery.
Importance lies solely in the deeds done, the goals achieved. Time is preparation, nothing more. One prepares for as long as is required.
Wise words are like arrows flung at your forehead. What do you do? Why, you duck, of course.
Baruk’s Three Hundred and Twenty-first Treatise offers a succinct analysis for interested scholars . . .
There were no villagers present, and the lone barman’s attention seemed close to obsessive on the Malazan soldiers,
Too long underground, too long inactive and at the whim of a madman’s schemes. It was an effort to bend his mind to this mystery, and indeed he resented the assumption that it was worth doing at all.
The world outside is in flux – your love of ignorance is not worthy of these precipitous times. Attend this field, travellers, or remain lost at your peril.’
An endless succession of plans within plans. He imagined peeling through them one by one, right down to thumbprint schemes all awhirl in devious patterns. It’s quite possible that his very existence is nothing more than a collection of if-this and then-that suppositions. Hood’s Abyss, maybe that’s all we all are!
The lesson of history is that no-one learns.
We go to partake of death. And it is in these moments, before the blades are unsheathed, before blood wets the ground and screams fill the air, that the futility descends upon us all. Without our armour, we would all weep, I think. How else to answer the impending promise of incalculable loss?
We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on.
Assassins bow to the altar of efficiency, Icarium, and efficiency is brutal. It sacrifices mortal lives without a second thought, all for whatever is perceived as the greater need.
None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions!
Higher discipline was a ruthless master – of his own mind, his own body, his own soul.
The seemingly headlong plunge this journey had become was in truth but the smallest succession of steps, of no greater import than the struggles of a termite.
