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

by Steven Erikson

Nature has but one enemy. And that is imbalance.

See what happens, my dear Teblor, when your tribe gets too big? Suddenly, the simplest things become ungainly, unmanageable. Confusion seeps in like fog, and everyone gropes blind and dumb.’

Hatred is a most pernicious weed, finding root in any kind of soil. It feeds on itself.’

Form an opinion, say it often enough and pretty soon everyone’s saying it right back at you, and then it becomes a conviction, fed by unreasoning anger and defended with weapons of fear. At which point, words become useless and you’re left with a fight to the death.’

I watched—we all watched—as Coltaine and his Seventh were cut down before our very eyes.

It was not, Strings had come to believe, a question of right and wrong. Some cultures were inward-looking. Others were aggressive. The former were rarely capable of mustering a defence against the latter, not without metamorphosing into some other thing, a thing twisted by the exigencies of desperation and violence.

‘Death is not an unkind fate,’ Darist said above him. ‘If she was a friend, you will miss her company, and that is the true source of your grief—your sorrow is for yourself. My words may displease you, but I speak from experience. I have felt the deaths of many of my kin, and I mourn the spaces in my life where they once stood. But such losses serve only to ease my own impending demise.’

Words, my friends. And words can wear false nobility. Disguising brutal truths.

‘A faith betrayed does not destroy the notion of faith itself,’ Strings retorted. ‘In fact, it does the very opposite—

They are human, after all, and it is human nature to transform loss into a virtue. So that it might be lived with, so that it might be justified.