Erikson, Steven - Malazan 01 by Erikson Steven

Author:Erikson, Steven
Language: eng
Format: epub

As much as he told his squad that she was as human as any of them, the doubts grew with every question about her that he could not answer. He knew almost nothing about her. The revelation that she could manage a fishing boat had come from seemingly nowhere. And here in Darujhistan she'd hardly acted like a girl raised in a fishing village. There was a natural poise about her, a measure of assurance more common to the higher, educated classes. No matter where she was, she carried herself as if she belonged there.

Did that sound like a seventeen-year-old girl? No, but it seemed to match Quick Ben's assertions, and that galled him. How else to match her, with that icy-cold woman torturing prisoners outside Nathilog? He could look at her and part of him would say:

'Young, not displeasing to the eye, a confidence that makes her magnetic.'

'While another part of his mind snapped shut. Young? He'd hear his own harsh, pained laugh. oh, no, not this lass. She's old. She walked under a blood-red moon in the dawn of time, did this one. Her face is the face of all that cannot be fathomed, and she's looking you in the eye, Wbiskeyjack, and you'll never know what she's thinking.

He could feel sweat drain down his face and neck. Nonsense. That part of his mind lost itself to its own terror. It took the unknown and fashioned, in blind desperation, a visage it could recognize. Despair, he told himself, always demands a direction, a focus.

Find the direction and the despair goes away.

Of course, it wasn't that easy. The despair he felt had no shape. It was not just Sorry, not just this endless war, not even the treachery from within the Empire. He had nowhere to look for answers, and he was tired of asking questions.

When he had looked upon Sorry at Greydog, the source of his horror lay in the unveiling of what he was becoming: a killer stripped of remorse, armoured in the cold iron of inhumanity, freed from the necessity to ask questions, to seek answers, to fashion a reasonable life like an island in a sea of slaughter.

In the empty eyes of this child, he'd seen the withering of his own soul.

The reflection had been unblemished, with no imperfections to challenge the truth of what he saw.

The sweat running down his back beneath the jerkin felt hot against the chill that gripped him. Whiskeyjack lifted a trembling hand to his forehead. In the days and nights ahead, people would die by his command. He'd been thinking of that as the fruition of his careful, precise planning - success measured by the ratio of the enemy's dead to his own losses. The city - its busy, jostling multitudes unceasing in their lives small and large, cowardly and brave - no more than a gameboard, ana the game played solely for the benefit of others. He'd made his plans ~$ it nqd~mS Qf himdf was at stake.

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