Original title: Dust of Dreams
Author(s): Steven Erikson
Release year: 2009
Publisher: Tor Books
Why in Database: We found turtle elements in eleven fragments of this book (from the Malazan Book of the Fallen series), we quote them all:
Sighing, Deadsmell untied the pack’s leather strings and began lifting out various small dead creatures. A flicker bird, a black-furred rat, an iguana, and a strange blue-skinned, big-eyed thing that might be a bat or a shell-less turtle—he’d found the fox-sized creature hanging by its three-tipped tail on a stall in the market. The old woman had cackled when he’d purchased it, a rather ominous reaction, as far as Deadsmell was concerned. Even so, he had a decent enough—
Deadsmell fixed his attention on the array of carcasses. The fox-sized bat turtle thing seemed to be staring up at him with one giant doe eye.
The blue bat-turtle had bitten off the iguana’s tail and that creature escaped in a slithering dash and was now butting at the window’s shutters as if desperate to get out.
The flicker bird was a mashed heap of feathers on the floor. The bat-turtle had fled through the hole in the door, possibly in pursuit of the wooden troop.
She stepped down on to the main deck. ‘Pretty, where did you get that nose?’
Her First Mate clumped over. ‘Snapper beak,’ he said, ‘stuffed with cotton to hold back on the drip, Captain. I bought it at the Tides Market.’
‘Undisciplined is what they seemed,’ said Yelk. ‘Squatter than I’d expected, and wearing armour that looks as if it’s made of turtle shells.
She stepped up to the warrior and slapped him on one shell-armoured shoulder.
The black water swirled past, oblivious to the maelstrom of his thoughts, carrying what it could down to the distant sea. Cold with the memories of snow and ice in the high mountains, slowing with the silts of overturned earth and stones worn down to dust. Huge turtles slid through the muck far below. Blood-drinking eels— little more than jaws and tail—slithered in the currents, seeking the soft bellies of massive carp and catfish. Silt blooms billowed and rolled over rounded stones and gravel banks. Bedded in muck, amphorae of fired clay, fragments of corroded metal—tools, fittings, weapons—and the smooth, vaguely furry long bones of countless animals—the floor of this river was crowded indeed, unfurled like a scroll, writing a history down to the sea.
– Wątpię, by królowa była zadowolona, gdyby jeden z jej nadwornych poruczników zrzucił z siebie ten strój, by nosić żółwie skorupy i tańczyć nago w świetle księżyca.9
‘Lickeet at,’ muttered Nep Furrow, his blotched brow wrinkling into folds that reminded her of turtle skin, ‘Dasgusting!’
As the horses were being readied, he’d spoken of the belief in convergence, and she had been impressed to discover that behind his white skull paint and turtleshelled armour, this barbarian knew of the world beyond his own tribe and his own people. The notion of power drawing power, however, did not seem to draw close to her sense of what was coming.
Crump was on his hands and knees, a clutch of sharpers set like black-turtle eggs in a shallow pit pushed into the stony floor of the trench.
