More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For every word we speak, are there not a thousand left unsaid?
Well, everyone had his secrets. And few are worth sharing. Unless you enjoy losing friends.
The eastern wastelands. A typical description for a place the name-givers found inhospitable or unconquerable. We can’t claim it so it is worthless, a wasted land, a wasteland. Hah, and you thought us without imaginations!
The Grey Swords had been cut to pieces. Slaughtered. Oh, they’d yielded their lives in blood enough to pay the Hound’s Toll, as the Gadrobi were wont to say.
Marching to war. Again. Seems the world wants me to be a soldier. Well, the world can go fuck itself.
The ghost of the Ceda spoke. ‘Errant, you think to challenge the Warrens? Do you not realize that, as the Tiles once had a Master, so too the Warrens?’ ‘Don’t be a fool,’ the Errant said. ‘There are no tiles describing these warrens—’ ‘Not Tiles. Cards. A Deck. And yes, there is a Master. Do you now choose to set yourself against him? To achieve what?’ The Errant made no reply, although his answer whispered in his skull. Usurpation. As a child before one such as myself. I might even pity him, as I wrest from him all power, every drop of blood, his very life.
And he heard her voice, filling his skull: ‘I am yours now. You are mine. Worshipper and worshipped, locked together in mutual hate. Oh, won’t that twist things, yes?
Samar Dev stopped listening, since she had heard Puddy’s boasts before, and held her gaze on the woman the Meckros warrior had called a Seguleh. First Empire word, that. The Anvil.
‘Like your friends in that stone sword of yours?’ The eyes that fixed on her were cold as ashes. ‘They have cheated death, Samar Dev. Such was my gift. Such was theirs, to turn away from peace. From oblivion. They live because the sword lives.’ ‘Yes, a warren within a weapon. Don’t imagine that as unique as you might want it to be.’
‘We left a debt in blood,’ she said, baring her teeth. ‘Malazan blood. And it seems they will not let that stand.’ They are here. On this shore. The Malazans are on our shore.
‘I’m making note of all this insubordination,’ Balm grumbled. Then tapped his head. ‘In here.’ ‘Well that’s a relief,’ Throatslitter said. He left the tavern.
‘Breathing is what winners do. Sighing is what losers do. Therefore, I win.’
The Letherii had known defeat. Many times. Their history on this land was bloody, rife with their betrayals, their lies, their heartless cruelties. All of which were now seen as triumphant and heroic.
You can heal wounds of the flesh well enough, but it’s the other ones that can bleed out a soul.
‘In the civil war on Theft, a warlord who captured a rival’s army then destroyed them – not by slaughter; no, he simply gave the order that each soldier’s weapon hand lose its index finger. The maimed soldiers were then sent back to the warlord’s rival. Twelve thousand useless men and women. To feed, to send home, to swallow the bitter taste of defeat.
“What awaits you in the dusk of the old world’s passing, shall go…unwitnessed.”
But to those words I say this, as your commander: we shall be our own witness, and that will be enough. It must be enough. It must ever be enough.’
Unwitnessed. There was crime in that notion. A profound injustice against which he railed. In silence. Like every other soldier in the Bonehunters. Maybe. No, I am not mistaken – I see something in their eyes. I can see it. We rail against injustice, yes. That what we do will be seen by no-one. Our fate unmeasured.
Welcome, Bonehunters, to the empire of Lether.
‘Any more complainin’ from any of you and I’ll cut off my left tit.’ A half-circle of faces ogled her. Good. She was pleased with the way that always worked.
Getting tied to the belt of this scary captain woman would probably turn out to be a bad idea. She reminded him of his mother, looks-wise, which should have killed quick any thoughts of the lustful kind. Should have, but didn’t, which he found a little disturbing if he thought about it, which he didn’t. Much.
She said that for me sorcery was the lone candle in the darkness. The lone candle in the darkness. She said my brain had put out all the other candles, so this one would shine brighter and brighter.
Join the Malazan Army, so I wouldn’t get beaten any more for being stupid. I was one year less than thirty when I did that, just like he told me to, and I haven’t been beaten since. Nobody likes me but they don’t hurt me. I didn’t know the army would be so lonely.’
We are here. Find us, if you dare. But be assured, in time we will find you.
Just a man with a brain that, every now and then, actually works. Yes, I work it, because I find no comfort in being stupid. Unlike, I think, most people.
If not for that ex-Red Blade driving open the gates and so opening a path of escape, there would have been no survivors at all. None.
‘Having a reason to be miserable is always worse than having no reason but being miserable anyway.
Layer on layer, ghosts tangled in every root, squirming restlessly under every stone. Owls can see them, you know. Poor things.’
enough. To conjure the word was to awaken the possibility, like making the scratch to invite the fester.
Reel back you tottering forests this night the black waves crash on the black shore to steal the flesh from your bony roots death comes, shouldering aside in cold legion in a marching wind this dread this blood this reaper’s gale
‘Perhaps,’ said Icarium, ‘I must speak to him after all.’ ‘He’ll run away.’ ‘In the compound, then—’ ‘Where you can corner him?’ The Jhag smiled. ‘Proof of my omnipotence.
And the smallest pool was filled with the promise of an ocean, a score of oceans – all their power could be held in a single drop of water. Such was Denaeth Rusen, such was Ruse, the warren where life was first born. And there, in that promise of life itself, will I find what I need. Of empathy.
Every field of battle holds every cry uttered Threaded like roots between stones and broken armour, shattered weapons, leather clasps rotting into the earth. Centuries are as nothing to those voices, those aggrieved souls. They die in the now And the now is for ever.
There had been no civil war – the Adjunct had seen to that – yet the enfilade at Malaz City might well have driven the final spike into the labouring heart of Laseen’s rule. The Claw had been decimated, perhaps so much so that no-one could use it for years to come.
Such unpleasant thoughts were in the habit of wandering into his mind when the sun had long fled the sky, when he should have been asleep – plummeted into the drunken stupor of oblivion here in the decrepit room he had rented opposite the Harridict Tavern on this damned island.
Now, will you two leave? I have more brooding to do and half the night’s gone.’
Uprising, grand failure, then plague: how many scars could a young soul carry? Before it twisted into something unrecognizable, something barely human?
He felt the beast lift beneath him, sail through the air – and for that one moment all was still, all was smooth, and in that one moment Toc twisted at the hips, knees hard against the animal’s shoulders, drew the bow back, aimed – damning this flat, one-eyed world that was all he had left – then loosed the stone-tipped arrow.
High overhead, night and its audience of unblinking stars had seen enough, and the sky paled, as if washed of all blood, as if drained of the last
‘No rafts, Hellian.’ ‘Good. If’n I never see another sea I’m going to die happy.’ She would, too, Beak knew. Die happy. She had that going for her.
‘Aye, I paint pretty pictures of what could be, since what is always turns out so damned bad.’
‘My guess is whoever was in command, Fid, is now Rannalled in tree branches.’
Gesler ain’t convinced, so the truth is, no-one knows the truth. About Aren. Just like, I suppose, pretty soon no-one will know the truth about Coltaine and the Chain of Dogs, or – spirits below – the Adjunct and the Bonehunters at Y’Ghatan, and at Malaz City.
She eyed the Adjunct, who never seemed to want to actually sit down; and although she stood behind the chair she had claimed at one end of the long, scarred table, hands resting on its back, she revealed none of the restlessness one might expect from someone for whom sitting felt like a sentence in a stock in the village square.
damned logistics, always getting in the way of my dreams.
And why the Shore? Because that’s where newborn K’Chain Che’Malle came from, isn’t it? The ones not claimed by a Matron, that
That worm of unease was, however, reluctant to cease its gnawing deep inside him.
Karos Invictad leaned far forward, seeking an imposing, threatening posture that, alas, failed. The man was, simply put, too small.
Yet was he not a god? Was this not his realm? If all that existed was not open to use and, indeed, abuse, then what was its purpose?
All of civilization is, in essence, a collection of contracts. Why, the very nature of society is founded upon mutually agreed measures of value.’
