this makes a certain amount of sense, but also makes it a little difficult to understand what was going on earlier. Now, suddenly, his fate is an old wrong to be righted, and he’s actually somewhat sympathetic in the final sequence at the barrow. There’s also a bit of a tone shift here from earlier books, in which the Crippled God seemed to be fairly unambiguously evil. There’s some great stuff in there, but it doesn’t have an obvious connection to the rest of the action. I’m not entirely convinced that the Shake/ Tiste Andii plot fits well with the rest of the book, awesome though some of the fight scenes are. Or maybe it’s just Cotillion wanting to right the wrong he did to Apsalar way back when. It’s still kind of hard to fit the first book in with the rest, though. The bit in the Epilogue where they drop in to watch Crokus reunite with Apsalar, which is a callback to the very start of the books, seems to suggest that we’re supposed to see the whole thing as a coherent whole. It’s only later in the series that the overall plot becomes clear, and in the last volume, we see that they’ve been manipulating everyone to get to the ending. It does raise a question of timing, though– that is, in the first book or so, it seems like Shadowthrone and Cotillion (especially the latter) are just messing around with the Malazan Empire to keep their hand in, as it were. The war on the Pannions, the conquest of Lether, the mad quest to free the Crippled God– all of those are fundamentally about righting wrongs.

That’s kind of the core of the whole series: people associated with the Malazan Empire seeing things that offend their sense of right and wrong, and setting out to fix them.

Once they were gods, though, and saw how the world worked, they decided they didn’t like it, and set out to fix things. There’s a bit early in the book (too far back for me to find now) where somebody says of Shadowthrone and Cotillion that they became gods because it seemed like the next logical step after conquering a vast empire. If you haven’t read it, but think you might, save this post for reading after you’re done. OK, having spoken vaguely about The Crippled God, here’s a post for spoiler-y comments about the book and the series as a whole.

The crippled god book