The Devils

“Only madmen make promises here.”

This quote contextualizes the Holy City as a place where promises, like the religious ideals they’re supposed to uphold, are not just unreliable but irrational. Anyone foolish enough to make one is either lying, deluded, or doomed to fail. It’s also reflective of Brother Diaz himself. It’s a satire of institutional religion and bureaucratic rot, where personal virtue is lost in the systemic failure of the very place meant to embody the sacred.

“She’d been called a scammer, a fleecer, a cheat, a thief, a bitch, a thieving bitch, a ferrety fuck, a lying weasel, and those were only the ones she’d taken as compliments. She’d never, far as she could remember, been called a princess.”

Abercrombie uses this moment to play with the tropes of classic fantasy. Alex could be a traditional “lost princess” archetype, but he subverts the expectations that come with it by making her appear aggressively against type. She is a foul-mouthed swindler deep in debt and knows exactly the position she holds in the world—character development highlighted by the breathless tone of the list she offers.

“To fight fire, one must be prepared to use fire.”

While the phrase “fight fire with fire” is a cliché, Abercrombie uses it effectively to support the novel’s cynical take on moral absolutism and institutional virtue into a tidy justification for compromise, violence, and moral rot.