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

by K.J. Parker

fastidious

Good word

Because my dad was so good at his job he didn’t have to do it very often.

I’m all for a quiet life, and, generally speaking, if there’s bad news I’d far rather not know about it. Worrying just makes things worse, I always say, specially if there’s nothing constructive you can do to improve matters.

But uncertainty; when things could go either way, wonderfully good or catastrophically bad, and you have no idea which, and there’s nothing whatsoever you can do to influence the outcome – I hate that.

All my life I’ve found it useful to pretend to be slightly more stupid than I am.

(The world is full of idiots, and always has been. But sometimes I wonder why such a disproportionate quantity of them end up running other people’s lives.)

I didn’t order the soldiers to slaughter unarmed civilians. Then again, I didn’t order them not to, and you know what soldiers are like, apt to get carried away, like a fox in a hen coop. These things happen in war, so they tell me. I wouldn’t know. Also they told me that it was necessary, in order to strike terror into the enemy, which had been my idea. Define enemy; seven years ago, they were our friends, they were us. But there; identities change, don’t they, and we aren’t necessarily the same people we were seven years ago, or seven weeks, even. Seven weeks or thereabouts (I lost track of time as soon as I set foot in this bloody palace) I was someone completely different. We evolve (I think that’s the word), like caterpillars turning into butterflies, and the truth evolves with us. And, as the dear old saying goes, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Good writing This is a good example of character voice. Stronger voice than most books.

Why hurt your hand, maybe risk skinning a knuckle, when you can do so much more damage with a word and a look? Also, what you need to bear in mind is, the actual words are just the arrowhead. The arrow is how she says them.

Personally, I always feel that survival is cheap at any price and it puzzles me that so many men in authority don’t seem to see it that way.

Nothing changes more often, more rapidly or more radically than the past. Yesterday’s heroes are today’s villains. Yesterday’s eternal truths are today’s exploded myths. Yesterday’s right is today’s wrong, yesterday’s good is today’s evil. And tomorrow it’ll all be one hundred and eighty degrees different, on that you can rely.

But that was two hundred years ago, history, the past; and, as we’ve seen, nothing changes like the past. Take your eye off it for a split second and it’s unrecognisably different. You can set too much store by precedent, if you ask me.

“Didn’t someone say once, the punishment for wanting something too much is getting it?”