by K. J. Parker
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BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW, so allow me to introduce myself: I’m the Devil. Or at least, I’m his duly accredited proxy and representative, part of his organization, part of him in a deeply spiritual sense, flesh of his incorporeal flesh, spirit of his profoundly antisocial spirit. I do little jobs for him (actually, properly speaking, for them; he’s a body corporate, like a swarm of flies—see under “My name is Legion: for we are many”), such as occasional tempting, a bit of general legwork, but mostly bread-and-butter demonic possession. In that capacity, I’m your worst nightmare, the most horrible thing that can possibly happen to you in this world or the next. You couldn’t bear to look me in the face, something the sun and I have in common, but let’s not go there quite yet. You really don’t want me inside your head; trust me on this if on nothing else. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to you to learn that I’m basically on your side, or at least that we’re ultimately singing from the same hymn sheet, you and I.
Suppose the hand dislikes the ear, and the ankle despises the shoulder blade, and the appendix thinks the colon is full of it. Would it matter, so long as they all obey the brain and believe in what it’s trying to do? Maybe the rain hates the sea—I don’t know. They all have something in common. We all do, even you and me. I like to think that what we have in common is what’s right.
Other people, however, don’t necessarily share our view.
* * *
My current assignment is about as far down the prestige list as you can get without dropping off the bottom of the page, but it suits me just fine. Actually, it’s difficult, demanding work, calling for intelligence, patience, resourcefulness, and—how shall I put it?—a certain refinement and sensitivity that many of my colleagues, admirable officers in so many respects, lack.
I do liturgical compliance at the Third Horn monastery. Nice place; I like it there. I particularly love the west cloister. It’s got an exquisite herb garden in the middle, with a small fountain that catches the midday sun. The chapel, which is bigger than most cathedrals, is early Reformed Mannerist, with a stunning rose window as you come in the south door and a forest of dead straight red marble pillars shooting up fifty feet and then blossoming into the most amazing traceries, like fingers spread to support a gossamer sky. Maybe the Brothers were a bit too lavish with the gold leaf here and there—in ecclesiastical interior design, there’s a wafer-thin no-man’s-land between pious zeal and vulgarity, but they neglected to tell the Mannerists that; the overall effect is nevertheless pleasing to the metaphorical eye and soothing to the nerves. In the Third Horn chapel, I feel at home. I feel safe.
Liturgical compliance monitoring—LitComMon as they call it at Divisional HQ, though I really wish they wouldn’t—is more of an art than a skill, if you ask me. A thousand years ago, the Third Horn was endowed by Duke Sighvat III to sing masses for his soul in perpetuity, in shifts, round the clock; the idea being that if you can afford to pay Holy Mother Church a very large sum of money, then once you’re dead, a continuous, unbroken chorus of prayer will rise up from the exceptionally pious monks of the Third Horn, imploring divine mercy for your soul for ever and ever. The logic is irresistible. No matter that when you were alive, you were as evil as a barrel full of rats and that you died in your sins, entirely unrepentant. The Third Horn monks, the very best saints that money can buy, are men of such irreproachable sanctity that He can deny them nothing; therefore, you are forgiven for their sakes, not your own. It’s a sweet deal at a sensible price. Say I sent you.
Which is where I come in; that is, me or someone else pulling light duty on account of fragility, incompetence, or being someone’s metaphorical brother-in-law. The monks offer up prayers for the dead twenty-four seven, using precisely calculated forms of liturgy of known and proven effectiveness, the same formulae over and over again, like lawyers conveying a freehold, while unending ages run. My job is to sidle up to a choir monk in full flow; slip in through his ear, eye socket, or open mouth; and distract him, insinuating into his mind an irrelevant, mundane thought, sapping his concentration so that he mumbles, lets the stress fall on the wrong syllable, gets a word wrong or in the wrong order, maybe misses out a whole phrase. That, naturally, invalidates the whole prayer—those who live by the letter of the law die by the letter of the law, and you can’t have it both ways—and the soul of some evil rich bastard has a nasty five minutes in the blissful Hereafter, until the next cycle of prayer starts and he’s safely enveloped once again in protective intercession.
There’s more to it, actually, than meets the metaphorical eye. The Third Horn boys are hardened professionals, carefully selected and highly trained. You can forget trying to interest them in images of naked women and wild debauchery, or anything so crude as that. Your rustic provincial monk can usually be distracted by resentful thoughts about his colleagues—why does he always get to carry the thurible at vespers on the third Tuesday in Annunciation, it’s so unfair—but try that on a Third Horner, and he’ll laugh in your metaphorical face. The usual approach adopted by my colleagues, and standard operating procedure in the field operations manual, is to seek to undermine the citadel of faith with the saps and petards of doubt—as the Brother repeats the same mantra for the twentieth time that morning, you whisper in his ear, What does this actually mean? Does it mean anything? Come on, admit it—you’re wasting your time, and all of this is futile.
We have our established procedures, time-honored and enshrined in the Book of Rules. They don’t work, but we have them and we carry on trying them, because our orders tell us to. In my experience, doubt glides off the case-hardened faith of a Third Horn monk like water off oilcloth; one of us is wasting his time in a futile act of faith, but it’s not the monk—it’s me. So I have my own approach, which from time to time actually works. Normally wild horses wouldn’t drag the secret out of me, but what the heck.
The way I do it is this: Forget the naked floozies, the resentful thoughts, the nagging doubts. You’re playing to the other guy’s strengths, and you’ll lose. No, go for him where he’s vulnerable. So, when he’s locked in prayer, concentrating on his devotions with every fiber of his being, I offer him a fleeting glimpse of the transcendent. I share with him—just for a split second—my own memories of what it was like before the Unfortunate Event. For a fraction of a heartbeat, he stands where I once stood, bathed in the glorious light of the Word, on the right hand of the eternal throne, looking up into the face of the Everlasting and seeing reflected there—
Yes, I know. It’s a rotten trick to play on anyone, let alone a holy man, but sometimes it works, and all’s fair in good and evil. The better the monk, the more successful it’s likely to be, and I maintain that everyone’s a winner: he gets a moment of transcendent revelation, I get ten points for distracting his attention, the evil sinner in the Hereafter gets a timely reminder of what he paid all that money for—and what excellent value he usually gets for it, except when I happen to be on the job.
Well, not everyone. I get my ten points, but in order to share
the memory, I have to reopen it. That’s rather a high price to pay for ten points. So, some of the time I’m a conscientious officer and do my duty to the best of my ability, even though it’s agonizingly painful, and some of the time I’m a conscientious officer and do my duty the way I’m supposed to, according to the procedure set out in the field operations manual, even though it doesn’t work. I’m only obeying orders, after all.
So there we are, me and Brother Eusebius, who’s basically all right in my book. He’s seventy-six years old, joined the order as a novice when he was nine; as of compline today, he’s recited the mass for the dead 142,773 times. There’s a thing called muscle memory. It’s how archers and swordsmen and athletes train. You do something often enough, your body can do it perfectly, even when your mind is miles away. The muscles that control Brother Eusebius’s tongue and larynx run as smoothly and efficiently as the great mechanical clock in the Third Horn bell tower: word-perfect, unflappable, automatic. His mind is away with me, gazing into the ineffable light of His presence, but his lips are still shaping the magic words, in exactly the right order, with the stresses in exactly the right places. I enjoy a challenge, but this guy’s got me beaten. Ah well. Tomorrow is another day, and tomorrow and tomorrow. No big deal. Light duty.
* * *
I’m on light duty because I’m officially fragile. That’s the new buzzword at Division. It means you had a bad experience at some point that left you no bloody use to anybody. You spend a lot of time sitting in complete darkness, people have to repeat things several times before you reply, and unexpected loud noises or someone asking you to pass the mustard is likely to reduce you to floods of hysterical tears. Not your fault, you can’t help it, your record shows that you were once a brave and reliable officer with a bright future ahead of you in Applied Evil, but that was then and this is now and we have a department to run. You’re still on the books, and something has to be found for you to do. This theoretically counts as work, and if you fuck it up, nobody will know or care. Have at it, therefore. Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the squirrels of war.
Absolutely. I had a bad experience once. I prefer not to talk about it, if you don’t mind.
* * *
Brother Eusebius comes off shift in the early hours of the morning and heads for the refectory, where I’m waiting for him with sesame-seed rolls and mulled wine. They believe in austerity at the Third Horn, in the same way that they believe in the Sashan Empire: it’s real and it’s in all the books, but nothing to do with us. A quarter to three, and no one in the place but him and me, definitely an opportunity worth following up. Brother Eusebius is a good man, but he has an inquiring mind, and what he’s been seeing lately makes him wonder—
He sees me inside a deacon from Odryssa visiting the Third Horn library to consult a commentary on Theodosius. There’s always one or two new faces in a big, cosmopolitan monastery like the Third Horn; it’s one of the things he and I both like about the place. I happen to know, having been inside his mind earlier, that he’s rather fond of sesame-seed rolls, which is why I crept into Brother Cellarer’s head and planted there the notion of baking them today. Some people might call it demonic possession, but to me, it’s just being considerate.
Brother Eusebius nibbles the end off his roll and looks at me over it. “Not bad.”
“Personally,” I reply, “I could do without the hint of cinnamon.”
“Me, too, but nothing’s ever perfect. Thank you.”
Oh. “What for?”
He smiles at me. “Sometimes, to win us to our harm,” he says with his mouth full, “the instruments of darkness bring us buns. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
I think something uncouth, under my breath. “How did you know?”
“Oh, come on,” he says, not unkindly. “I’ve been a monk here for sixty-seven years. I can spot one of your lot a mile off.”
And that’s me told. I sigh.
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” he says. He’s a short man with dark skin, white hair, and pale brown eyes. “Actually, you’re not bad—you’d fool most of the pinheads we get in the profession these days.” He nibbles a bit more of his bun. “Was that you inside my head earlier?”
I nod. “Sorry about that.”
“No, please, don’t apologize.” He leans forward a little. “I’ve got to ask. Was that—real?”
“Excuse me?”
“What you showed me.” There’s a certain urgency in his voice, just a faint pink tinge of blood in the water. “Was that—?”
“My memory,” I say. “Yes. Unaltered and unredacted, for what it’s worth.”
“Really real?”
“Do you honestly think I could make something like that up? Besides, there’s rules about that sort of thing.”
“Rules? Honestly?”
“A code of conduct. So, yes, that’s a genuine memory. From before the—”
“Yes, of course.” He’s anxious to spare me the embarrassment, bless him. “So there really is a—?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.” He looks at me, his eyes shining. “And He—?”
“Exists, yes.” Pause. “I thought you knew that.”
“Believed,” he says softly. “As opposed to knowing. There’s a difference.”
“I suppose so,” I say. “Well, then. And now you know.”
“As opposed to believing.” He frowns slightly. “Rather an extraordinary position to be in, for someone in my line of work. Being sure, I mean.”
That makes me smile. “You’ve always believed, though.”
“Oh, definitely.” He’s telling the truth. “Never a moment’s doubt in seventy years.”
“Does knowing—spoil it?”
“Not exactly,” he says after a moment’s thought. “It makes a difference, definitely.”
“But in a good way.”
“On balance, I think so, yes.”
“Glad to have been able to help.”
He looks at me. “Are you?”
I shrug. “He exists,” I say. “Where I come from, that’s not exactly a state secret. It’s you people who make everything so complicated.”
“Ah. Well, in that case, thank you.”
“My pleasure. Sometimes one has to be kind to be cruel, after all.” Pause. “I hesitate to mention it, but a small token in return—”
He looks up sharply. “I’m not sure about that.”
“Oh, go on.” My most charming smile. “It’s not much to ask. A misplaced pronoun or a slurred consonant, that’s all—just enough to make the blessed Sighvat choke on his sherbet. A momentary lapse in concentration, and next time after that, you do it perfectly. It’s not going to kill anybody.”
“Doing deals with the—”
“It’s not a deal,” I point out, “since you’ve already received the benefit, free, gratis, and for nothing. Therefore, there would be no—”
“Collusion?”
“I believe the correct legal jargon is consideration. No bargain. Just a graceful gesture of thanks on your part. Call it a professional courtesy, from one old lag to another.”
“I don’t know.” He looks at me.
I sigh. “It’s one of those cases,” I say, “where the order of events is of the essence. If I came to you and said, ‘Snafu the mass for the dead, and in return I’ll show you the face of the living God,’ then, yes, that would be actionable and we’d have you for it. But where there’s no reciprocity, and no ongoing obligation—”
“Moral obligation.”
“Moral obligation to one of our lot? Oh please.”
He grins. “It would be a sin.”
“True,” I say. “But a forgivable one.”
“If you do the sin with the intention of repenting later, the repentance doesn’t count.”
“Tell you what,” I say, “I’ll pray for you. How would that be?”
“Try one of these rolls,” he says. “They’re really very good.”
If at first you don�
��t succeed—“I met him,” I say. “Once.”
“Sorry, who?”
“Sighvat the Third,” I tell him. “The evil little shit you spend your life praying for.”
“Ah. Him.”
“Yes. Would you like me to tell you about him? Some of the stuff he did?”
“Not particularly, no.”
“I wouldn’t say we were exactly close, Sighvat and me,” I go on, “but I knew him quite well. Very well. Inside out, you might say.”
“Ah.”
“I was in his mind,” I continue, though I don’t like making Brother Eusebius feel uncomfortable. “Deep inside his head.”
Eusebius nods slowly. “What was it like?”
“To coin a phrase, furnished accommodation. Everything I could possibly want was right there already, waiting for me.”
“I see.”
“And that’s the man who,” I say, “thanks to your ceaseless intercession, reclines at ease in the company of the blessed elect. Actually, I’m surprised he wants to. Fish out of water, if you follow me. He must get dreadfully lonely.”
“They do say, hell for company.” He frowns. “His money endowed the monastery, which for a thousand years has been feeding and clothing the hungry and homeless, educating the children of the poor, healing the sick, preserving the text of the scriptures—”
“‘The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.’ Only arse about face, in this instance. Quite. It would only be a very brief interruption. No permanent harm done.”
He looks me in the eye. I don’t blink. “Not to him.”
I sigh. “Fine,” I say. “You win. Though in all fairness, I should point out that ingratitude is also a sin.”
“Nobody’s perfect.” He grins. “I’ll pray for you if you like.”
“Thanks,” I say, “but I have an idea I’m a bit above your prayer grade. No offense.”
“None taken. And it’s the thought that counts.”
“No,” I tell him. “It isn’t.”
No rest for the wicked, so I disembody and trudge back to the chapel to try my luck with Brother Hildebrand on the day shift. Hildebrand was a mercenary soldier for twenty-six years before he heard the call—faith like concrete but not the sharpest knife in the drawer, theologically speaking. Unfortunately—
