A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

it truly
was: a mob of unruly, faintly ridiculous children. Watch
them grasp things when they think no one's looking.
Watch them break things, hurt things, steal. Listen to
their expostulations of innocence, their breathless list of
excuses, listen to how they repent and repent and repent
and then go and do the same damned things all over again.
Children.
    With all his godly powers, he would teach them about
consequences, that most terrible of lessons, the one resisted
the longest. He would teach them because he had
learned in the only way possible – with scars and broken
bones, with sickness in the soul tasting of fear, with all the
irreparable damage resulting from all his own thoughtless
decisions.
    There could be wonder and joy among children, too. Too
easy to see naught but gloom, wasn't it? Wonder and joy.
Naïve creations of beauty. He was not blind to such things,
and, like any god, he understood that such gifts were pleas
for mercy. An invitation to indulge that reprehensible host
of flaws. Art and genius, compassion and passion, they
were as islands assailed on all sides. But no island lived for
ever. The black, writhing, worm-filled seas ever rose higher.
And sooner or later, the hungry storms ate their fill.
    Nature might well struggle for balance. And perhaps
the egregious imbalance Ditch thought he perceived in his
kind was but an illusion, and redress waited, stretched out
to match the extremity. A fall as sudden and ferocious as
the rise.
    In his state of dreaming, it did not occur to him that his
dreams were not his own, that this harsh cant of judgement
belonged to a tyrant or even a god, or to one such as
himself if madness had taken hold. But he was not mad,
and nor was he a tyrant, and for all his natural inclination
(natural to almost everyone) to wish for true justice he was,
after all, wise enough to know the vulnerability of moral
notions, the ease with which they were corrupted. Was he
dreaming, then, the dreams of a god?
    Blind as Kadaspala was, he could sense far too much of
Ditch's visions – he could feel the incandescent rage in
the flicker of the man's eyelids, the heat of his breath,
the ripples of tautness washing over his face. Oh, this
unconscious wizard stalked an unseen world, filled with
outrage and fury, with the hunger for retribution.
    There were so many paths to godhood. Kadaspala was
certain of that. So many paths, so many paths. Refuse to
die, refuse to surrender, refuse to die and refuse to surrender
and that was one path, stumbled on to without true intent,
without even wanting it, and these gods were the bemused
ones, the reluctant ones. They were best left alone, for to
prod them awake was to risk apocalypse. Reluctant power
was the deadliest power of them all, for the anger behind it
was long stoked. Long stoked and stoked long and long, so
best leave them leave them leave them alone.
    Other gods were called into being and the nature of
that call took countless forms. A convulsion of natural
forces, until the very sludge awakens. Wherever discordant
elements clashed, the possibility was born. Life. Intent.
Desire and need. But these too were accidental things,
in as much as anything could be accidental when all the
particles necessary for creation abounded, as they surely
did. There were other ways of calling a god into being.
    Gather a host of words, a host of words. Gather a host
of words. Make them, make them, make them what?
Physical, yes, make them physical, from the empty ether
to the incision in clay, the stain on stone, the ink on skin.
Physical, because the physical created – by its very nature
before the eye (or the inner eye) – created and created patterns . And they could be played with played with played
with. In numbers and sigils, in astral proportions. They
could be coded inside codes inside codes until something is
rendered, something both beautiful and absolute. Beautiful
in its absoluteness. In its absolution, in its absolved essence,
a thing of beauty.
    Understand, won't you, the truth of patterns, how
pattern finds truth in the tension of juxtaposition, in the
game of meaning meaning the game which is the perfect
pattern of language in the guise of imperfection – but what
value any of this any of this any of this?
    The value is the body of text (hah, the body – the bodies )
that in its absoluteness becomes sacred, and in sacredness
becomes all that it portrays in its convivial ordering of
the essentially meaningless. Patterns where none