however , for all his intelligence and ruthless determination , there was one thing veig treth had neglected to nurture , deeming it irrelevant to his ravenous aspirations he had never quite decided whether the spirits to whom he owed his good fortune were real to him or not ; belief in them had always seemed secondary to believing in himself ; and by the time he was resting on his laurels , the essence of his vocation had become so unimportant to him that he inwardly scorned servants like his father , who sat around chanting nonsense and burning herbs and waiting for a response that never really came instead of using their craft to make their own lives and not some ignorant farmers better .