Exaggerating, but for some weird reason there’s a passage toward the end of “Blood Follows” (the first Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novella) that I just love and kept reciting to myself (the same with some sentences of Iskaral Pust in DG, I had to recite them aloud instead of merely reading them).
Context is: there’s a sergeant of the City Watch who’s investigating on a series of murders and who’s now going to interrogate two weird guys. These two are camping atop a grassy barrow, dressed in rags and cooking some ratmeat on a skewer, with some good wine nearby, since you can’t really appreciate the ratmeat without a good wine.
One of the two sees the sergeant approaching and addresses him as a ‘lowborn’, and the sergeant answers asking what’s so special about them two instead.
This the reply:
‘Singular intent, poor sergeant, is the most cleansing of endeavours. Witness here before you amiable myself and, at my side, himself. We two are most singular.’
There. I love it.
On the other side I officially have a problem with Erikson’s endings. Thought the ending of GotM wasn’t fully realized, didn’t like the one of DG, now even Blood Follows didn’t end in a way that I considered satisfactory (I kept waiting for a plot twist that didn’t arrive). Loved the novel, but it needed something at the end.
Now onto “The Lees of Laughter’s End”.