Tanith Lee

“Like most loners,” said Moddik, “you carry the seeds of violent authority. Loners need to be bossy. They quickly learn it’s the only method they have of shoving people off their backs.”

It was as easy to be alone with six kin as it is to be alone by yourself, and maybe easier.

What a son I’ve made. The midwives must have turned me in my labor so that I lay on your brain and crushed it.

What Is, is, what Was, was, but what is To Be, may be otherwise.

Who knew? If the illusion is quite perfect, who is to say it is not real?

The irony of her story is merely that her love became, in the end, her motive rather than her goal, the doorway rather than the house.

Kernik had stumbled on an immutable truth, a truth older than the world. Priests claimed the gods made men, but this was not so. Men made the gods. Firstly, by forming them in clay, by chipping them from stone. Secondly, and more importantly, by believing in them, believing in them utterly.

A day out from the bay of Saardos, Drokler honored the brass Rorn god in the prow with a pound of incense.

The blank god mask stared back at them through the pall of sweet blue smoke....It gazed in myopic stillness out over the long shock of the waves, ignoring their words, their presence, their costly offering.

“All my life,” I said, “knowledge has come to me for which I was not ready.”

“When will they fight?” I asked.

“Tomorrow. Daybreak. It is man’s work.”

I laughed. “I too have fought and killed, Kotta. It is the work of fools, not men.”

Vazkor had picked his creatures well—narrow, unintelligent men, good fighters, unafraid because they had no imagination, loyal because they responded to their own sense, and until now, there had always been enough food and wine, women and prestige; trustworthy in this last extremity because the old order had been good to them, and Vazkor seemed able to restore it.

I should have felt pity, but I felt only contempt. I knew had it been a girl she would have mourned less, and it angered me.