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

by K.J. Parker

what the people want is something that looks at first sight like real life, but which actually turns out to be a fairy tale with virtue triumphant, evil utterly vanquished, a positive, uplifting message, a gutsy, kick-ass female lead and, if at all possible, unicorns.

It’s so much easier to tolerate your deadly enemies if you never see them from one year’s end to the next.

“Hello, Mother,” I said. She gave me a sour look. “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.” “Keeping well?” “Like you give a damn.” You don’t stand talking in doorways in Paradise. “Can I come in?” I asked. “Why? What do you want?” She loves me really, but I’m a great disappointment to her.

There’s almost always a moment of dead silence, before all hell breaks loose. When you’ve been around as long as I have, you know what that moment is for. It’s the Invincible Sun giving you just enough time to choose: do I charge in and help and get involved, or do I discreetly turn round and walk away?

The house was easy to recognise, because some clown with an unfortunate money-to-taste ratio had thought twin gateposts in the form of winged horses was a good idea.

She didn’t say anything, but she gave me a look that nearly took all the skin off my face.

You know what? I rather like melodrama, as a genre. It’s easy to write and good fun to act, and it fills theatres even in the hot weather. But I don’t like it much in real life. And the way he’d said that, about my mother, could have been my father talking, when he was bullying someone.

The people at the back of the gallery can’t actually see your face, but they know if you’re smiling or not, just as they can tell if a girl’s pretty. I have no idea how, but they do.

Which is more important, doing it right or doing what you tell me to?”

It slowly dawned on me that it’s possible for the wise men who run your life for you to see disaster coming and not have a plan for dealing with it;

it’s possible to build a beautiful house on the lip of an active volcano, with all the hot water you could ever want, and restructure your mind so you don’t actually think about what you’re doing, or what will inevitably happen.

“You cow,” I said. “Where’s my money?”

she can do a whole three-act tragicomedy without saying a word, all by expressions.

She says or does something horrible and you forgive her instantly, because of that little didn’t-really-mean-it twist at the corner of her mouth.

I took a beat, then my cue. “If I’d known you could act, I’d have written a play for you.”

You never forget your first kiss, they say. Mine tasted of pig-fat and rouge.

There’s a very old saying: when you’re falling off a cliff, learn to fly.

What, after all, is belief but knowing something without actually being able to prove it?

If you can turn any place you find yourself in into the back streets of your home town, you’ll never be lost. And it makes it easier to plan ambushes.

There was once a king in a far-off land who said, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

And that’s what we in the trade call tragedy.

Most of the senior officials in the palace administration are eunuchs. It’s the only known cure for nepotism and it doesn’t really work; key jobs get handed out to idiot nephews instead of idiot sons.

“Officially, there’s not a problem. And wild speculation isn’t encouraged.”

“We all die,” I said. “Now you’d have thought an intelligent species like us, faced with something like that, we’d devote all our energy and our cleverness and all our money and spare time to finding a cure for death. But we don’t. We accept it. By the time we’re thirteen years old we just don’t think about it. We put it out of our minds and turn our attention to other things. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to function. And that’s what the Senate and the service have done.”

Humans are at their very best when they’re scared shitless.”

where they got a chicken from at such short notice I really don’t know but they did; a live one, upside down, clucking and not happy.

(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.)

Deep