A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

simple
feelings, frightening unknowns and the endless miasma of
confusion. Or some incorporeal demon crouched down on
every thought, crushing the life from it, choking off every
possible passage to awareness. Such assumptions, naturally,
are but suppositions, founded only on external observation:
the careful regard of seemingly blank eyes and stupid
smiles, repetitive behaviour and unfounded fears.
    Hold tight, then, this hand, on this momentary journey
into Chaur's mind.
    The world he was witness to was a place of objects,
some moving, some never moving, and some that were still
but could be moved if one so willed it. These three types
were not necessarily fixed, and he well knew that things
that seemed destined to immobility could suddenly come
awake, alive, in explosive motion. Within himself, Chaur
possessed apprehensions of all three, in ever shifting forms.
There was love, a deeply rooted object, from which came
warmth, and joy, and a sense of perfect well-being. It could,
on occasion, reach out to take in another – someone or
something on the outside – but, ultimately, that was not
necessary. The love was within him, its very own world,
and he could go there any time he liked. This was expressed
in a rather dreamy smile, an expression disengaged
with everything on the outside.
    Powerful as it was, love was vulnerable. It could be
wounded, jabbed into recoiling pain. When this happened,
another object was stirred awake. It could be called hate ,
but its surface was mottled with fear and anger. This object
was fixed as deeply in his soul as was love, and the two
needed each other even if their relationship was strained,
fraught. Prodded into life by love's pain, hate opened eyes
that could only look outward – never to oneself, never even
to the identity known as Chaur. Hate blazed in one direction
and one only – to the outer world with its objects,
some moving, some not, some that might do either, shifting
from one to the next and back again.
    Hate could, if it must, make use of Chaur's body. In
lashing out, in a frenzied reordering of the world. To bring
it back into the right shape, to force an end to whatever
caused love its pain.
    All of this depended upon observation, but such
observation did not rely overmuch on what he saw, or
heard, smelled, touched or tasted. Hate's secret vision
was much sharper – it saw colours that did not exist for
others, and those colours were, on an instinctive level,
encyclopedic. Seeing them, hate knew everything . Knew,
indeed, far beyond what a normal mind might achieve.
    Was this little more than a peculiar sensitivity to
nonverbal communication? Don't ask Chaur. He is, after
all, in his own world.
    His object called hate had a thing about blood. Its
hue, the way it flowed, the way it smelled and tasted, and
this was a bizarre truth: his hate loved blood. To see it,
to immerse oneself in it, was to feel joy and warmth and
contentment.
    The guards flanking Chaur, walking at ease and with
modest thoughts of their own, had no inkling of all that
swirled in the seemingly simple mind of their prisoner.
Who walked, limbs loose and swinging now that the
natural tension that had bound up the huge man's neck and
shoulders had eased away – clearly, the oaf had forgotten
all the trouble he was in, had forgotten that they were all
walking to a gaol, that soon Chaur would find himself
inside a cage of stolid black iron bars. All those thick walls
enclosing the simpleton's brain were clearly back in place.
    Not worth a second glance.
    And so there were none to see the hate-filled eyes
peering out through every crack, every murder hole,
every arrow slit – a thousand, ten thousand glittering
eyes, seeing everything, the frenzied flicking as immobile
objects were observed, gauged and then discarded; as
others were adjudged potentially useful as things that,
while unmoving, could be made to move. Seeing all, yes,
absorbing and processing at speeds that would stun one of
normal intelligence – because this was something different,
something alien, something almost perfect in its own way,
by its own rules, by all the forces it could assemble, harbour,
and then, when the time was appropriate, unleash upon a
most unsuspecting world.
    The simple ones aren't simple. The broken ones aren't
broken. They are rearranged. For better, for worse? Such
judgements are without relevance. After all, imagine
a world where virtually every mind is simpler than it
imagines itself to be, or is so