Dust of Dreams (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #9)

by Steven Erikson

Intimately close with his enemy in the cramped trench, he saw the warrior open his mouth to cry out the alarm. Bakal’s back-slash with his knife ripped out the man’s throat, even as the dagger sank a second time, the blade snapping as it snagged between two ribs. Blood rushed up to fill Bakal’s throat and he fell against the dying warrior, coughing into the wool of the man’s cloak. He was feeling so very tired now, but there were things still to be done. Find her. Save her. He crawled from the trench. He was having trouble breathing. A memory that had been lost for decades returned to him suddenly: the last time he’d been near death – the Drowning Fever had struck him down, his lungs filling up with phlegm. The thick poultices encasing his chest, the eye-stinging smell of ground mustard seeds – his mother’s face, a blurred thing, hovering, dread hardening to resignation behind her eyes. Crypt walls. We all have them, there inside – you don’t go there often, do you? It’s where you keep your dead. Dead relatives, dead dreams, dead promises. Dead selves, so many of those, so many. When you loot, you only take the best things. The things you can use, the things you can sell. And when you seal it all up again, the darkness remains. It remains. Ah, Mother, it remains. My crypt. My crypt walls.