How to Rule an Empire and Get Away with It (The Siege #2)

by K.J. Parker

You’d have thought from all that intensity – we have no choice, disaster looms – that they’d be in a hurry to get on with it, whatever it might turn out to be, but apparently not. Still, it gave me time to reflect, get the horrors, overcome them, relapse into a quivering mass and gradually pull myself together again until I resembled something vaguely human. Also, my headache slowly subsided, though I was too busy scaring myself to death to feel the benefit.

I had a really bad feeling about the whole idea. It was the result of desperation, and that’s never good. When you get bounced into something by force of circumstance, you don’t have options, and it’s in choosing between alternatives that we get a chance to exercise wisdom, whatever the hell that is. It’s the difference between riding a horse with a bit and bridle and being tied on a galloping horse backwards.

If I hadn’t been a mediocre actor, I could’ve been a terrific lights man. Always been interested in what you can achieve, by way of light, shadow and the million degrees in between, with just candles, hoods and bits of coloured parchment. Take shadow, for example. You can stretch it, bend it, layer it, cast another shadow across it. Nobody ever notices it – why would you take any notice of what is, after all, basically only an absence – but it shapes and twists the way we perceive, you can mess with people’s heads with it. As for light, don’t get me started on light. You think you can trust it, but in the right hands there’s nothing trickier, believe me.

What, after all, is belief but knowing something without actually being able to prove it? Millions of people believe in the Invincible Sun. And anything believed by so many must be true; and if you disagree, it can only be because you don’t quite understand the subtleties of the true definition of truth. If it wasn’t true before, my dad used to say, when fifteen respectable householders swore on oath he’d been playing cards with them on the night that some unfortunate was stabbed to death in an alleyway on the other side of town, it’s true now.

And it’s what’s true now that matters, sure as eggs is eggs. Think about it logically. Unless you’re a bit wrong in the head, you can remember what happened one minute ago clear as day. But you’ll be forgiven for being a bit hazy about the details of something you did or said twenty years ago. So, if there’s a discrepancy, the minute-old truth is far more likely to be correct than an inconsistent version dating back twenty years.

When you’re drowning, you aren’t worried about whether someone else can swim.

Anyone in the business will tell you, once you’ve got the costume on, suddenly you aren’t you any more: you’re who you’re supposed to be.