This is my city. Darujhistan. Of the Blue Fires. It does not deserve this.
No, he did not fear the Hounds of Shadow. But he now despised them. The devastation they were delivering was senseless, a pointless unleashing of destruc-tion. He did not think Cotillion had anything at all to do with that. This stank of Shadowthrone, the fickleness, the cruel indifference. He had freed his beasts to play. In blood and snapped bones. In flames and collapsed tenements. All this fear, all this misery… For nothing.
Awkward or not, the lance felt reassuring in his hand. Now, if only Shad-owthrone would show himself, why, he’d find a place to plant the damned thing.
There, within its tiny, perfect world, the moon shone pure, unsullied. There had been a time, she realized, when she too had been like that. Free of stains, not yet bowed to sordid compromise, feeling no need to shed this tattered skin, these glazed eyes.
Women and men were no different in the important things. They arrived with talents, with predispositions, with faces and bodies either attractive to others or not. And they all made do, in all the flavours of living, with whatever they possessed. And there were choices, for each and every one of them. For some, a few of those choices were easier than others, when the lure of being desirable was not a conceit, when it reached out an inviting hand and all at once it seemed to offer the simplest path. So little effort was involved, merely a smile and thighs that did not resist parting.
But there was no going back. These stains didn’t wash off. The moon shone pure and beautiful, but it remained for ever trapped.
She stared up into the sky, watched how fragments spun out from a fast-darkening core. The momentum seemed to have slowed, and indeed, she thought she could see pieces falling back, inward, whilst dust flattened out, as if trans-formed into a spear that pierced all that was left of the moon.
The dust dreams of the world it had once been.
But the dust, alas, does not command the wind.
Cutter knew now that he had-since her-taken into his arms two women as if they were capable of punishing him, each in turn. Only one had succeeded, and he rode towards her now, to stand before her and tell her that he had murdered her husband. Not because she had asked hint to, because, in truth, she did not have that sort of hold over him, and never would. No, Gorlas Vidikas was dead for other reasons, the specifics of which were not relevant.
She was free, he would say. To do as she pleased. But whatever that would he, he would tell her, her future would not-could never-include him.