by K. J. Parker
My problem is, I quite like being alive, in spite of everything. A wise man, probably Saloninus, once said that the beating of the heart, the action of the lungs, is a useful prevarication, keeping all options open. While there’s life, at the very least there’s being here, even if here is a shitheap. Not being here, even in a shitheap, is nothing at all.
On the other hand, as long as I was in this pitiful state, I was safe. He couldn’t get at me, because there was nothing to get at, and he couldn’t find me, because there was nothing to find. Even what he’d already done to me was neutralized, because I couldn’t remember it. Am I pathetic? Well, yes. I offer no excuses. I was just glad to be out of harm’s way for a while.
So there I am, collating figures from the monthly returns, when it’s as though a door opens in a darkened room and light comes stabbing in. I feel like a lamp that’s just been lit—suddenly full of life, but burning.
“Hello there,” says Division, giving me that look of his. “Just thought I’d drop by, see how you’re getting on. Feeling all right?”
“Not so bad,” I mumble.
“Splendid. Not quite so fragile?”
“Me? Tough as old boots, you know that.”
“Good, because I’ve got a job for you.”
“Of equal value?”
“Very equal indeed.”
It all comes flooding back—who I am, what I was, what I am now, the Unfortunate Event, him, everything—and I’m standing in a place I know well, though I haven’t been there for ages.
“From here,” says Division, taking in the panorama with a vague sweep of his arm, “they reckon you can see all the kingdoms of the earth. On a clear day,” he says, frowning slightly. “That over there must be Perimadeia,” he adds, pointing at Bos Sirene. “Of course, last time I was here, they really were all kingdoms. Now most of them are republics and military dictatorships.”
I have this slight problem with heights, though for crying out loud don’t tell anyone. “Breathtaking,” I say. “Can we go down now?”
“I brought you here,” he continues, “because I think it’s really important in our line of work to keep a sense of perspective. Don’t you agree?”
“In a sense.”
“Perspective.” He fills his metaphorical lungs with clean, fresh air. “Up here, you can appreciate what really matters.”
Yes, indeed: getting back to sea level as quickly as possible. “Absolutely,” I say. “Look, was there something specific? Only I know how busy you are.”
He turns on me. “You’ve been through a rough patch lately, we both know that. I’ve been asking myself, wouldn’t it be better if you transferred to admin full-time? For the foreseeable future, at least.”
Division exists outside sequential linear time, so for him, all the future is foreseeable. “It’s a sweet thought,” I say, “but on balance, I’d rather not.” The word balance does unpleasant things to my metaphorical inner ear, and I wobble alarmingly. He grabs my virtual arm. “It’s all right,” he says, smiling pleasantly. “Even if you did topple and plunge headlong, flights of demons would rush up and break your fall. It’s all part of the service.”
“That’s good to know,” I say. “But I wouldn’t want to be a nuisance to anyone.”
He lets go of me and turns to admire the view. “Just feel that breeze,” he says. “I really like it here. Fancy a snack?”
“No, thank you.”
“Just say the word.”
“Not just now.”
“Suit yourself.” He picks up a stone, transforms it into a truffle, sniffs it, and puts it in his metaphorical pocket. “We need you to do a job for us.”
“I think you mentioned it earlier.”
“It’s not—” He hesitates. “It’s not a nice job.”
“Somehow, I didn’t think it would be.”
“It’s of equal value, goes without saying. But it’s not going to be fun.”
I sigh. “What have I got to do?”
“Which is why,” he goes on, “I want to make it perfectly clear, you don’t have to do it. If the idea doesn’t appeal to you, just say the word and I’ll rush through the paperwork and you can start a permanent admin assignment straightaway. We do care, you know.”
Get thee behind me, Division, I say to myself. Actually, on second thoughts, no. Definitely not the sort of person you want behind you, particularly when you’re on top of a mountain. “You know me,” I say. “The original eager beaver. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“Good man.” He beams at me. “Now then, this lunatic exorcist who keeps bothering you.”
Far away in the distance, I can see the sun glinting on the gilded dome of the Third Horn. Right now, judging by the position of the sun, they’d be ringing the bell for nones. “What about him?”
He taps the side of his nose. “It’s all a bit complicated, and there’s some aspects I’d rather not tell you right at this moment, because then I’d have to kill you.” He laughs. Official Divisional humor. “The point is, you and this character have what you might call a special relationship. Am I right?”
I draw in a deep breath. It’s like trying to inhale cottage cheese. “You could say that.”
“GenTacCom thinks that’s something we can use to our advantage, in respect of certain operations. I won’t bother you with the details, but it’s an important and valuable part of the Plan. What we need,” he goes on, gazing into the deep patch of low cloud currently obscuring our view of all the kingdoms of the earth, “is a great big gray area, if you follow me. A sort of moral no-man’s-land.”
“Always a useful thing to have by you,” I say. “Sorry, I’m not really following any of this.”
“We need to blur the boundaries a bit.” He seems to be having a little trouble finding the right words. “You know, I think sometimes we see things a bit too cut-and-dried, in the profession. Us and them, you know, black and white—”
“Good and evil.”
He scowls at me. “Yes, we’re on opposite sides. But opposite sides working towards the same objective. It’s like a pyramid.”
“Is it?”
“Just like a pyramid,” he says. “At the bottom of the pyramid, you’ve got two pairs of opposite sides facing each other, in a standoff, us against them. By the time you reach the top, there’s no sides, just a point. That’s how we see the Plan. And the two sets of opposing sides support the point, they’re the solid base on which the point depends. Their mutual opposition makes possible the ultimate coming together in unity. Anyway, wasn’t it Saloninus who said, ‘That which is done out of love is beyond good and evil’?”
“He was a mortal,” I point out. “And I’ve always thought it was one of those sayings that sound really good till you stop and try and figure out what it means.”
He smiles bleakly at me. I am one of his people and the sheep of his pasture, but that doesn’t mean I’m not getting on his nerves. “Sometimes,” he says, “we have to look past our differences and see what we’re really trying to achieve. And sometimes we can’t achieve it unless we temporarily put those differences aside.”
I gaze at him. “You mean collaborate.”
“No, I don’t mean collaborate,” he snaps, and for a moment I can’t help remembering how very far off the ground we are. “You’re twisting my words, which really isn’t helping.” He stops, takes a deep breath, starts again. “Think about it calmly and logically. After all, what is conflict?”
“Excuse me?”
“Conflict,” he repeats. “We all know it takes two to make a quarrel. Conflict is where two parties come together to sort out their differences through combat, with a view to reaching a definitive conclusion. It’s a voluntary act of cooperation designed to achieve a positive outcome.”
I think about him, twisting my metaphorical head through 180 degrees. He likes doing that, but so far, we don’t seem to have come to any helpful conclusion as a result. “Where is all this leading?” I ask.
“I’m trying to explain, but you will keep interrupting. Your friend. The exorcist.”
“Yes?”
“He needs a demon. One he can control.” He looks at me. “That would be you.”
“He needs—?”
Long sigh. “He has a job to do,” he says. “He needs you to help him. So I’m temporarily assigning you to him. Sort of a medium-term secondment.”
My metaphorical teeth are so tightly gritted I can barely speak. “Doing what?”
“He needs you to possess someone.”
“What?”
“Oh, come on—you know what possessing someone means. There’s a mortal human. You go in. You do your stuff. In this case, what he tells you to do.”
You think you’ve heard it all. “He wants me to do this.”
“Yes.”
“That’s crazy. His job is casting out demons. Casting them in—”
“Look.” We’ve reached the end of his rope. “This has been authorized by Area and JoCenCom. You can do it, or you can look forward to eternity in admin. Your choice.” Unpleasant grin. “Free will. It’s entirely up to you. Only I need you to make up your mind now. Capisce?”
“Presumably he asked for me specifically.”
“Oh yes. It’s you or no deal. And it’s important, to the Plan. It matters.”
Wherein, I assume, lies the difference between it and me. The sheep of his pasture: his to shear, his to flay, his to roast on skewers. “Can we go down now?” I say.
* * *
The dog bites you, they say, because it likes you. I think he must like me, because the first thing he does is bite me.
With his actual metaphorical teeth—they meet in my throat, he shakes me, then lets go. “You think you’re so clever,” he says.
“Do I?”
“Getting your monk friend to rescue you like that. So smart. You make me sick.”
He smashes my metaphorical head against the wall of his skull, and for a moment it hurts so much I can’t think. “Would it help if I say I’m sorry?”
“No, because you’d be lying. Why can’t I ever do anything to you? I keep bashing away at you, and nothing happens.” He twists my broken metaphorical arms behind my metaphorical back, and I scream. He clicks his tongue irritably. “Don’t do that,” he says.
“But it hurts.”
“I don’t believe you can feel pain. I think it’s all just an act.”
He’s stronger than I am, in the same way that you’re stronger than a newborn baby. He always has been. But sooner or later he tires himself out, and we have a brief respite. That’s when my shattered bones knit, my dislocated joints realign, my ruptured organs mend, all ready for the next bout. “They told me you’d asked for me.”
He nods, exhausted. He’s slumped against the wall of his skull, pale and drawn with fatigue.
“Why me?”
“Because I know you. And you know what I’ll do to you if you try and piss me about.”
“What do you want me to do?”
He gazes at me. I can feel him forcing himself to endure me without taking action. It’s a real struggle for him. Think what it’s like when you inadvertently touch a burning hot surface, the instant of yelping pain before you can get your hand away. Now imagine deliberately leaving your hand there. That’s what it’s like for him. I don’t like him much either, but I never felt that intolerable, to-the-death, him-or-me loathing. I’d feel sorry for him, if it weren’t against the rules.
“Have you ever,” he asks, “been to Antecyra?”
* * *
The answer is, of course, yes. By an odd coincidence, it really is the last place He made—day six, when it was getting late and His mind was starting to drift toward other things, with consequences that will shortly become apparent.
Antecyra, as everyone knows, is the bleakest, hottest, most barren, least productive, most hostile, and most intensely desirable piece of real estate on earth. To the west, you have the Great Inner Sea, with the prosperous trading nations of the western islands a day’s sail away across relatively peaceful water. To the north, you have the powerful but arriviste Robur, vulgar, violent men with more weapons than money. They came south from the distant steppes a few hundred years back, having been driven out of their ancestral grazing circuits by savages even more unspeakable than they are. There’s an awful lot of them, and it’s a stroke of luck for everyone else that He took the trouble to impede their southern border with a ridiculously tall mountain range, through which there are only two usable passes. To the south of Antecyra is the ancient, immeasurably strong, nearly brain-dead civilization of Blemmya, where they wrap embalmed cats in bandages and worship them as gods. Blemmyans aren’t like normal people, and time passes very slowly there, but heaven help anyone who is perceived as threatening their mercantile or diplomatic interests. Finally, across the desert to the east, you have the Sashan, inventors of writing and agriculture and self-styled lords of creation. They build vast palaces in the middle of the sandstorm-scoured wilderness, decorated with colossal basalt friezes of war and lion-hunting. They believe that the world belongs to them, and all non-Sashan are trespassers.
Wedged in between these three nightmares, you have Antecyra. There’s a ribbon of flat, fertile land beside the sea, and then the mountains rear up at you, and on the other side of the mountains, you have white, flat desert, in parts of which rain has never fallen. You can forget about sowing grain in Antecyra, apart from that narrow bit of seaside. The lower slopes of the mountains will just about grow vines and olives, and a few miraculously tough sheep wander about on the middle slopes; everything else is bare rock with a graceful, permanent garnish of snow. There are about seventy thousand Antecyrenes at any given time—nobody knows or cares precisely how many—and they make their living selling wine, olive oil, and wool to the Blemmyans, the Robur, the Sashan, and the Vesani, across the calm blue sea. It’s not very good wine, oil, or wool, so they don’t get paid very much for it. They have two mud-brick cities, Amphipolis in the north and the capital, Beal Regard, in the south, where the Duke lives.
Ekkehard VI of the House of Jaos is no better and no worse than his nineteen predecessors on the ducal throne. He’s a man of limited intelligence and stunted imagination, a pragmatist, born and raised in the somewhat patched and faded purple. He knows that his tiny, piss-poor kingdom exists only because if one of his three appalling neighbors were to invade, the other two would immediately attack the invader, and there would ensue a war that would end only when the last man on earth killed the last-but-one and stuck his head up on a pike. He knows that every single thing he does is intensely scrutinized by three sets of spies, all frantically seeking to misinterpret his actions. He also knows that every last cupful of flour in Antecyra comes from abroad, so that if his merchants don’t trade intensively with the people next door, all his subjects will starve to death within a year. The only remarkable thing about Ekkehard is that in order to get this particularly stressful and unrewarding job, he murdered four people, including two close relatives; since that’s been standard operating procedure in the House of Jaos for centuries, nobody thinks anything of it, including him.
The trouble begins when a Vesani merchant, looking to get a few trachea in the nomisma off the tariff, gives Ekkehard a present. It’s a book. It’s a beautiful thing, written and illuminated on the finest cream-white vellum by the monks of the Golden Spire in far-off Perimadeia. The pages are framed with vine-and-acanthus borders on a background of gold leaf, and the pictures are little masterpieces—scenes of daily life, chivalrous warfare, courtly love, the Ascension—all the kind of thing they do so well at the Golden Spire. The cover is gorgeously embossed leather studded with small rubies and emeralds, the fleur-de-lis pattern tooling gilded in the incuse, and there’s a silver-gilt clasp so beautiful it would break a heart of stone. Things like that, the abbot of the Golden Spire told the merchant, go down really well with primitives, whereupon the merchant ordered six and paid top dollar for them.<
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The merchant gives Ekkehard the book, and he’s thrilled with it, though not quite thrilled enough to give the merchant his six trachea off; he says he’ll have to think about it, which is no in dukespeak. No one’s ever given him a book before. He takes it with him into his inner chamber and admires it, marveling at the vibrant colors, the exquisite grace of the shapes and patterns, the sensual textures against his fingertips, the rich smell of the leather, freshly rubbed with camellia oil from faraway Echmen. Then he does something that nobody, not even the deep thinkers on the fourth floor, could ever have expected him to do. He sits down and starts to read it.
Because Ekkehard can read, though not many people know this. It’s his mother’s fault. She realized that a lot of the papers shoved under her husband’s nose for him to sign didn’t actually say what the Grand Vizier said they said, and from time to time, bad things happened in consequence. So, without telling anyone, she hired a scribe to teach her son the dark art, impressing on both of them the necessity of keeping the secret strictly between themselves. Two decades later, when Ekkehard achieves the throne of his ancestors, he comes to appreciate the wisdom of his mother’s decision, almost (but not quite) enough to make him wish he hadn’t been compelled to put belladonna in her onion soup. When the Vizier brings him things to sign, he says, “Leave them there, I’ll do it in a minute,” and when nobody’s looking, he reads them. No one suspects, and the aristocracy of Antecyra attribute his uncanny knack of sniffing out funny business to a pet demon, which he’s reputed to keep in a jar by his bed.
