I remember the feeling. Whenever my father got so absorbed in a book that we might have been in visible I felt like taking a pair of scissors and cutting it up.

And there stood Basta with his foot already on another dead body, smiling. Why not? He had hit his target, and it was the target he had been aiming for all along: Dustfinger’s heart, his stupid heart. It broke in two as he held Farid in his arms, it simply broke in two, although he had taken such good care of it all these years.

It's a cruel world, don't you think?

In love - it sounded like a sickness without any cure, and wasn't that just how it sometimes felt?

Ten minutes can be a long time when you're waiting with a beating heart for something you don't understand, something you don't really want to know.

Where did the love come from? What was it made of?

I'm perfectly happy to know the world at secondhand. It's a lot safer.