House of Chains (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #4)

by Steven Erikson

Smiling, Synyg sat in the other chair. ‘Tell me a tale, Father, as you once did. Those days following your triumph. Tell me again of the children you killed. Of the women you cut down. Tell me of the burning homesteads, the screams of the cattle and sheep trapped in the flames. I would see those fires once more, rekindled in your eyes. Stir the ashes, Father.’ ‘When you speak these days, son, all I hear is that damned woman.’ ‘Eat, Father, lest you insult me and my home.’ ‘I shall.’ ‘You were ever a mindful guest.’ ‘True.’

The gods not only look down on Darujhistan with a protective eye, they probably drink in its taverns.

Showing off

Subtlety had been a venomed serpent slithering unseen through his life. Its fangs had sunk deep many times, yet not once had he become aware of their origin; not once had he even understood the source of the pain. The poison itself had coursed deep within him, and the only answer he gave—when he gave one at all—was of violence, often misdirected, a lashing out on all sides.

A natural born tyrant, she was, both in public and in private amidst the bedrolls in the half-ruined hovel they shared. And oddly enough, he’d found he was not averse to tyranny.

Regret? Yes. Many, many regrets. One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.’

It is the horror of war that, with each newly arrived generation, the nightmare is reprised by innocents.

From the gate a messenger arrived on horseback. He had been riding hard, and drew up sharply upon seeing the Adjunct. Gamet watched the man dismount and approach. Gods, not bad news…not now… ‘Report,’ the Adjunct demanded. ‘Three ships, Adjunct,’ the messenger gasped. ‘Just limped into harbour.’ ‘Go on.’ ‘Volunteers! Warriors! Horses and wardogs! It’s chaos at the docks!’ ‘How many?’ Gamet demanded. ‘Three hundred, Fist.’ ‘Where in Hood’s name are they from?’ The messenger’s gaze snapped away from them—over to where Nil and Nether stood. ‘Wickans.’ He met Tavore’s gaze once more. ‘Adjunct! Clan of the Crow. The Crow! Coltaine’s own!’

‘The stone has been shaped to encompass them, Trull Sengar. No-one asks the spirit or the god, when the icon is fashioned, if it wishes entrapment. Do they? The need to make such vessels is a mortal’s need. That one can rest eyes on the thing one worships is an assertion of control at worst, or at best the illusion that one can negotiate over one’s own fate.’

He had found this glade seeking solitude, and it had been solitude that had inspired his artistic creations. Yet now that he was done, he no longer felt alone here. He had brought his own life to this place, the legacies of his deeds. It had ceased to be a refuge, and the need to visit was born now from the lure of his efforts, drawing him back again and again. To walk among the snakes that came to greet him, to listen to the hiss of sands skittering on the moaning desert wind, the sands that arrived in the glade to caress the trees and the faces of stone with their bloodless touch.

‘The Apocalyptic, Toblakai. Disintegration. Annihilation. Everything. Every human…lowlander. With our twisted horrors—all that we commit upon each other. The depredations, the cruelties. For every gesture of kindness and compassion, there are ten thousand acts of brutality. Loyalty? Aye, I have none. Not for my kind, and the sooner we obliterate ourselves the better this world will be.’

Death’s precipice, whether first glimpsed from afar or discovered with the next step, was ever a surprise. A promise of the sudden cessation of questions, yet there were no answers waiting beyond. Cessation would have to be enough. And so it must be for every mortal. Even as we hunger for resolution. Or, even more delusional: redemption.

And if mortals grieved for him, it was only because by dying he had shaken them from the illusion of unity that comforted life’s journey. One less on the path.

The notion of a life spent tilling fields was repellent to the Teblor warrior. The rewards seemed to be exclusive to the highborn landowners, whilst the labourers themselves had only a minimal existence, prematurely aged and worn down by the ceaseless toil. And the distinction between high and low status was born from farming itself—or so it appeared to Karsa. Wealth was measured in control over other people, and the grip of that control could never be permitted to loosen. Odd, then, that this rebellion had had nothing to do with such inequities, that in truth it had been little more than a struggle between those who would be in charge.

‘Prepare for the telling of your tale, Trull Sengar. If instruction can be found within it, recognition is the responsibility of those to whom the tale is told. You are absolved of the necessity.’

‘Pressures and forces are ever in opposition,’ the Edur was saying as he rotated the spitted hare over the flames. ‘And the striving is ever towards a balance. This is beyond the gods, of course—it is the current of existence—but no, beyond even that, for existence itself is opposed by oblivion. It is a struggle that encompasses all, that defines every island in the Abyss. Or so I now believe. Life is answered by death. Dark by light. Overwhelming success by catastrophic failure. Horrific curse by breathtaking blessing. It seems the inclination of all people to lose sight of that truth, particularly when blinded by triumph upon triumph. See before me, if you will, this small fire. A modest victory…but if I feed it, my own eager delight is answered, until this entire plain is aflame, then the forest, then the world itself. Thus, an assertion of wisdom here…in the quenching of these flames once this meat is cooked. After all, igniting this entire world will also kill everything in it, if not in flames then in subsequent starvation.