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

by K.J. Parker

For a count of five, dead silence. “Why are you doing this?” she asked. I knew it was coming, sooner or later; like the Echmen, only harder to deal with. “Because it’s what you want,” I told her. “What you really want, deep down. What you deserve.” “Fine,” she said. “Don’t tell me, see if I care. I’ll just have to guess. You’re doing this because you want to be the king of whole world.” I smiled at her. See above under muscle memory. “Really.” “I know,” she said, “it sounds crazy. It’s such a totally crazy thing to want. But I think you want it.” She was shredding a scrap of linen offcut in her broad, stubby fingers. “Otherwise I can’t think of a reason why you’ve done all this. I’m guessing it’s all to do with your people being wiped out, the almighty Robur empire, so much better than everybody else that God even made them a different colour, so there’d be no excuse for not knowing. I think that really got to you.” “I’m not denying that,” I said. “So,” she went on, “you figured it something like this. The world belongs to the Robur. I’m the only Robur left. Therefore the world belongs to me.” “That’s a syllogism,” I said. “I didn’t know you’d learned logic.” “I read a book about it,” she said. “It was all bullshit.” “You mean you couldn’t understand it.”