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

by K.J. Parker

Lots of things, according to my mother, ruined your health. Staying indoors gave you consumption, the fresh air gave you pneumonia. Wearing too many clothes stunted your growth, too few and you’d catch a chill and die. Carrots, she maintained to her dying day, addle your brains, and pork causes rabies. If you went barefoot, worms would get inside you through the soles of your feet, wrap themselves round your spine and paralyse you; tight-fitting shoes restricted the flow of blood and made you stupid. Music, even hymns, inflamed the passions and was responsible for most murders and all rapes. Writing gave you rheumatism, archery warped your bones and would turn you into a shambling, knuckle-dragging ape by the age of thirty. Country walks involved fresh air (see above) and you shouldn’t go out in the city streets without a scarf over your face in case you breathed in a demon and went mad. Wheat flour was just a synonym for poison, running on a full stomach was so inherently lethal that nobody had ever done it and lived to tell the tale, toothache was almost certainly imaginary, the result of a guilty conscience, and washing your hands more than once a day leached all the protective oils out of your skin and left you prey to malaria and leprosy. It wasn’t all negative, though. If you coated yourself with sheep’s wool grease morning and evening you were safe from nearly everything, and eating beetroot until your pee goes the colour of blood would guarantee that you live pract...

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.

One thing I wasn’t expecting was to find the streets of the capital thronged with crowds of fanatical disciples of a new religion, which turned out to be the one I’d made up.