A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

a burdensome world (and
all that), and his eyes are strangely blank and might be
shuttered too as he stares out on the huddled form of his
wife as she works some oddity in her vegetable patch.
    This one is terse. Existence is a most narrow aperture
indeed. His failing is not in being inarticulate through
some lack of intellect. No, this mind is most finely honed.
But he views his paucity of words – in both thought and
dialogue – as a virtue, sigil of rigid manhood. He has made
brevity an obsession, an addiction, and in his endless
paring down he strips away all hope of emotion and with
it empathy. When language is lifeless what does it serve?
When meaning is rendered down what veracity holds to
the illusion of depth?
    Bah! to such conceits! Such anal self-serving affectation!
Wax extravagant and let the world swirl thick and pungent
about you! Tell the tale of your life as you would live it!
    A delighted waggle of fingers now might signal mocking
cruelty when you are observing this fingerless man who
stands silent and expressionless as he studies his woman.
Decide as you will. His woman. Yes, the notion belongs to
him, artfully whittled from his world view (one of expectation
and fury at its perpetual failure). Possession has its
rules and she must behave within the limits those rules
prescribe. This was, to Gaz, self-evident, a detail that did
not survive his own manic editing.
    But what was Thordy doing with all those flat stones?
With that peculiar pattern she was building there in the
dark loamy soil? One could plant nothing beneath stone,
could one? No, she was sacrificing fertile ground, and for
what? He didn't know. And he knew that he might never
know. As an activity, however, Thordy's diligent pursuit
was a clear transgression of the rules, and he might have to
do something about that. Soon.
    Tonight he would beat a man to death. Exultation, yes,
but a cold kind. Flies buzzing in his head, the sound rising
like a wave, filling his skull with a hundred thousand icy
legs. He would do that, yes, and this meant he didn't have
to beat his wife – not yet, anyway; a few more days, maybe a
week or so – he would have to see how things went.
    Keep things simple, give the flies not much to land on,
that was the secret. The secret to staying sane.
    The wedges of his battered fingerless hands burned with
eager fire.
    But he wasn't thinking much of anything at all, was
he? Nothing to reach his face, his eyes, the flat line of his
mouth. Sigil of manhood, this blank façade, and when a
man has nothing else at least he could have that. And
he would prove it to himself again and again. Night after
night.
    Because this is what artists did.
    Thordy was thinking of many things, none of them
particularly relevant – or so she would have judged if
pressed to examination, although of course there was no
one who might voice such a challenge, which was just as
well. Here in her garden she could float, as aimless as a leaf
blown down on to a slow, lazy river.
    She was thinking about freedom. She was thinking
about how a mind could turn to stone, the patterns
solid and immovable in the face of seemingly unbearable
pressures, and the way dust trickled down faint as
whispers, unnoticed by any. And she was thinking of the
cool, polished surface of these slate slabs, the waxy feel
of them, and the way the sun reflected soft, milky white
and not at all painful to rest eyes upon. And she was
remembering the way her husband talked in his sleep, a
pouring forth of words as if whatever dam held them back
in his wakefulness was kicked down and out gushed tales
of gods and promises, invitations and bloodlust, the pain
of maimed hands and the pain of maiming that those
hands delivered.
    And she noted the butterflies dancing above the row
of greens just off to her left, almost within reach if she
stretched out a dirt-stained hand, but then those orange-winged
sprites would wing away though she posed them no
threat. Because life was uncertain and danger waited in the
guise of peaceful repose.
    And her knees ached and nowhere in her thoughts
could be found expectation – nowhere could be found such
hard-edged proof of reality as the framework of what waited
somewhere ahead. No hint at all, even as she laid down
stone after stone. It was all outside, you see, all outside.
    The clerk at the office of the Guild of Blacksmiths had
never once in his life wielded hammer and tongs. What he
did wield demanded no muscles, no weight of impetus