A Practical Guide to Conquering the World (The Siege, #3)

by K.J. Parker

garret

Good word

periphrasis.

Good word

I’m prepared to engage with the world – at any moment my head might get bitten off by it, but that’s the risk you have to take – in order to extract a minuscule shred of something worth having. The alternative would be to curl up in a ball and never speak. That has its attractions, believe me, but I’m not quite ready for it yet. Tomorrow, maybe.

Comedy to observers, tragedy to participants; I consider myself an observer. I fly over my life like a migrating bird, and I only ever play for beans or counters, never for real money. I’m an accredited diplomat assigned to my own country, reporting back to Infinity; my embassy is a tiny patch of home soil in the middle of the alien nation where I happen to have been born and spent my entire life.

The hell with it. They can’t hurt you unless you care, and I don’t.

HA facts

garderobe

Good word

piker.

Good word

precentor

Good word

The idea that you can make life bearable merely by living it in a different place has always struck me as bizarre. I base this view on experience. Wherever I’ve gone, I’ve always still been me, and some obstacles are too much even for geography to overcome.

Most people don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between movement and amelioration. They believe in the Promised Land. They also can’t get past the misconception that if you move away from something bad, inevitably you’re moving towards something better. This is just bad geometry, a total failure to understand the properties of a straight line, but never mind. Simply because something is factually wrong doesn’t make it untrue.

But there’s a difference between you hating your sister and somebody else hating her. Inside the family, it’s fine and perfectly natural. When it’s an outsider, it’s different.

Strange things start happening inside your head when people like you. At first you feel smug and a tiny bit guilty. Then, without realising it, you begin to believe.

I don’t like being involved if I can help it. If you’re not involved, you can’t screw up.

Things that interest me don’t interest other people, and vice versa, so I’ll spare you the technical details of the bow-building project.

I think half of the trauma of pain and injury is the fear; am I going to die, am I going to be left paralysed, how much permanent damage will there be? If you know it’s that time and the damage won’t matter, all that leaves is the pain. Regarding which, you can either fight it or scream. I’ve always found that screaming helps you cope.

The trick when fabricating doctrine is to keep it simple. You don’t want complex theological issues such as transubstantiation or the dual procession of the holy spirit. That can come later, when you’ve got ten thousand full-time monks looking for something to do. I’d looted the Permian stuff first because they wouldn’t know about it, second because Permian religion is so vague and open-ended, practically anybody can bend it to fit their existing beliefs, even atheists. A simple creation myth, then straight into the dos and don’ts. Love God with all your heart and soul and your neighbour as yourself; be nice to strangers and foreigners (guess why I put that in) because you yourself were once a slave in Echmen; no murder, rape, stealing or antisocial behaviour; I thought about forbidding them to eat insects and fermented food, mostly because I loathe sauerkraut, but then I thought, no, let’s keep it simple. Honour the black men, because they’re holy; make them your priests. That’s about it, really.

Old Echmen proverb: when falling off a high tower, try to fly. You never know your luck and what’ve you got to lose?

As a wise man once said, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

The truth is utterly selfish and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else. Serving the truth is like serving the empire. Nobody thanks you for it and you die poor.

All the books would tell it that way, and in a thousand years’ time it will be the truth, just as what was once the bottom of the sea is now a mountaintop. Ask the wise men at the university what truth is and they’ll tell you it’s the consensus of informed and qualified scholars, based on the best evidence available. Availability is governed by what gets burned in the meanwhile, but I see no real problem with that. All living things change or else they die, and why should the truth be any different?

He didn’t say anything and I let well alone. Once you’ve planted an idea, you don’t want to kill it by overwatering.

verdigris

Interesting

I use words carefully, and between translation and interpretation there’s a sliver of difference, as thin as a knife blade. Very thin, but it’s amazing the difference a knife can make. All the intended consequences in my life have turned to shit and all the unintended ones have turned to gold. Everything I’ve touched I’ve translated, into one thing or the other.