Gardens Of The Moon

Have any of these thoughts been my own? Look at me—my every move seems a desperate search for someone to blame, always someone else. I’ve made being a tool of a god an excuse, a justification for not thinking, for simply reacting. And others have died for it.

“The Empress expects obedience of her servants, and demands loyalty.”

“Any reasonable ruler would have the expectation and the demand the other way round.”

I look at you and I see a man because that’s what men are capable of—I don’t hunt for excuses because I don’t like to think that that’s how nasty we can get. We look at Sorry and we see reflections of ourselves. Hood take it, if we don’t like what we see.

The power he commanded insisted upon subjects. Strength was ever relative, and he could not dominate without the company of the dominated.

Through the gamut of life we struggled for control, for a means to fashion the world around us, an eternal, hopeless hunt for the privilege of being able to predict the shape of our lives.

As with most unwitting servants of the gods, once the game was done so was the servant’s life.

“An item,” he said softly, his eyes on the disc, “that passes without provenance, pursued by many who thirst for its cold kiss, on which life and all that lay within life is often gambled. Alone, a beggar’s crown. In great numbers, a king’s folly. Weighted with ruin, yet blood washes from it beneath the lightest rain, and to the next no hint of its cost. It is as it is, says Kruppe, worthless but for those who insist otherwise.”

Kallor said: “I walked this land when the T’lan Imass were but children. I have commanded armies a hundred thousand strong. I have spread the fire of my wrath across entire continents, and sat alone upon tall thrones. Do you grasp the meaning of this?”

“Yes,” said Caladan Brood, “you never learn.”

Your guest is mundane, a restless personage whose thoughts are thick with greed and treachery. A demon crouches on his shoulder, named Ambition.

“What do you mean by a tyrant?”

“One whose blood was poisoned by the ambition to rule over others.”

The only death I fear is dying ignorant.

Do I want you to talk to me, old friend? Do I need your reminders, your wry confirmation that faith is for fools?

“Since when is speaking the truth presumptuous?”

“You are young, aren’t you?”

Play on, mortal. Every god falls at a mortal’s hands. Such is the only end to immortality.

Hunger for vengeance poisoned the soul.

He who would dominate must learn early that those resisting his command should be destroyed.

Nor would he recognize hope if it came to him. Too much a stranger, too long a ghost.

Prediction had become a privilege now lost to her. Never mind the outside world, she could not even guess her own actions, or the course of her thoughts.

Was this the true nature of emotion? she wondered. The great defier of logic, of control—the whims of being human. What lay ahead?

“Tell me, Tool, what dominates your thoughts?”

The Imass shrugged before replying. “I think of futility, Adjunct.”

“Do all Imass think about futility?”

“No. Few think at all.”

“Why is that?”

The Imass leaned his head to one side and regarded her. “Because, Adjunct, it is futile.”

As for presumption, I honestly couldn’t care less. Truth can’t be danced around, not out here, not now, not ever again.

Celebrating Gedderone’s Rite of Spring shouldn’t be an excuse to avoid the pressures of reality. It wasn’t just a harmless escape: it was a means of delaying the probable and making it inevitable.

Should you ever outrun the guilt within your past, Sorceress, you will have outrun your soul. When it finds you again it will kill you.

“Heed the lesson there, son.”

“What lesson?”

“Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don’t notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly.”

“I want to be a soldier. A hero.”

“You’ll grow out of it.”