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

by K.J. Parker

They don’t read or write – don’t rather than can’t, please note; there’s all sorts of things we do and they don’t, which is why we tend to write them off as half-human savages.

Another apology for my collection.

Death is prepared to wait. It’s always there for you, like your mother.

I don’t suppose you’re remotely interested, so I won’t bore you with the details. No, actually, I will. However, I won’t be offended if you skip the next inch or so.

I had it made for me by the third best bowyer in the City, after I got an unexpected legacy when I was nineteen. He told me when I went to pick it up that he’d never had a more demanding, irritating, nit-picking customer in thirty years in the trade. I took that as a compliment.

Being a ghost is a pretty miserable existence, but a ghost with the Echmen Imperial library at his disposal would probably resent the time he’d wasted on being alive.

The Sashan express affection the same way cats do, by scratching; snide and inappropriate remarks, finding your weak spot and never letting it alone.

Luck, according to Saloninus, is like a cart full of diamonds perched on the very edge of a cliff. Best if you don’t push it.

I joined a Blue regiment, so I’m Blue, till I die.

It was a long time before I was able to get away, and then I had to find Oio; but the selfish, inconsiderate bastard was out of his office, doing the work he was supposed to be doing instead of being there to bend the rules for me.

One of the books I read – it was a real devil to find, and then it was only the Echmen translation of the Sashan translation of a book of Vesani travellers’ tales quoting a Carchedonian source taken from a Mezentine encyclopaedia – had quite a bit to say about the Dejauzi Queen of Heaven.

Strange things start happening inside your head when people like you. At first you feel smug and a tiny bit guilty.

Not having good material led to a better product; our poverty made us stronger.

My life has been so universally shitty that either I lose it or improve it, I’m not really bothered which, just so long as it doesn’t carry on the way it’s been so far.

It was a typical Notker farce, I don’t recall which one; it was some pot-boiler, garbage.

So, because I assume everything and everybody is hostile, I spend my life behind a screen of floating ink. Of course, the danger I’m most afraid of is the one I carry around inside my head. And sometimes the screen is so thick I can’t see a damn thing through it.

The ‘or else’ was silent, like the P in psalm.

“You want to rule the world.” It was like a slap in the face. “I suppose so,” I said. “Like they say. If you want something done properly, do it yourself. And from what I’ve seen, nobody else is fit to be trusted with it.”

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

There was a lot about change we can believe in and draining the swamp and yes we can, and the messengers trotted away looking cheerful, having met someone they felt they could do business with.

The thing about people who believe defeat is unthinkable is that they tend not to think. My kind of enemy.

We believe something because people we think are really cool tell us it’s true.

Narratives such as those attributed to Orhan, Notker and Felix must, therefore, be inherently suspect, and current opinion prefers to see these strange and discordant works as either the apologist self-justifications of the current elite projected backwards in time or mere fictions, designed only to amuse.