The Long Game, page 1
The Long Game Copyright © 2022 by K. J. Parker.
All rights reserved.
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Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2022 by Vincent Chong.
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Print version interior design Copyright © 2022 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.
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Electronic Edition
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ISBN
978-1-64524-061-7
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Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
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subterraneanpress.com
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Manufactured in the United States of America
The book was upside down. But she’d been reading it. I’d watched her turn the pages. She’d come in on the noon coach. Never seen her before in my life, obviously.
“What the hell,” I hissed, “are you doing here?”
She gave me a blank stare. The book, I noticed, was The Mirror of the Empty Soul.
“Excuse me?” she said.
She was very beautiful. A tall young woman with straight black hair; elegant, severe white gown fastened at the shoulder with an old-fashioned grasshopper brooch; sitting on the verandah of the Flawless Diamonds of Orthodoxy reading a book. Apart from the book, her taste was clearly exquisite. I try not to lose my temper, but I don’t always succeed.
“This is my patch.” I was trying to keep my voice down. “If anybody gets assigned here, I’m notified. In advance. In writing. That’s protocol.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
People lie. It’s unfortunate, but there it is. Depressingly often, people lie to me; and that’s a mug’s game. No human being is capable of deceiving me, because I can read minds as easily as you’re reading this. So, if someone tells me something is true when I know it isn’t, and I believe them, one of two things has happened. Either I’ve made a mistake and I was wrong (happens rather more often than I’d like, but not that often), or alternatively, someone’s using estuans intrinsecus. Which is a real bitch of a Form, trust me. I can do it, but only because I practiced for hours and hours and had private coaching from the Precentor of the Studium. And estuans is self-defeating, because although it works (you use it and people believe anything you tell them), it leaves you drained and shaking, dripping with sweat and bleeding from the nose, which absolutely defeats the object of the exercise if whoever you’re lying to is one of us and knows what to look out for. She, on the other hand, looked like she’d never sweated a drop in her whole life.
In which case I was wrong. But I could smell it on her a hundred yards away.
I got this posting because of a stupid mistake; mine. I bet some brash, stupid young lout in the diocesan supervision office that I could do his job better than he could, for a whole month. And I did. In fact, I did it so well that Father Prior transferred me from my beautiful prebendary stall and research fellowship to operational field duties. A man like me, he said, with my talents, stuck behind a desk; it was a horrible, abominable waste.
That was six years ago and the brash, stupid young lout is now junior precentor at Lonjamen, and I’m stuck here, eating rye porridge and leathery bacon with the hair still on, in shitholes like the Flawless Diamonds. My arse spends more time in a saddle than on a library stool, and my breath stinks, as does the rest of me. Trouble is, I keep pulling off these spectacular coups of fieldwork, and every time I cover myself in glory, I practically guarantee myself another six months on the road. The horrible fact is, I’m good at this job and I can’t help being good at what I’m good at, if you follow me. I’m a better than average scholar and a tolerable lecturer, but when it comes to fieldwork I’m hotter than Army mustard. There’s a lot of people who reckon they’re my worst enemy, but you know the saying. If something’s worth doing, do it yourself.
“Name,” I snapped.
She rested the book in her lap, finger between the pages to mark the place. “Are you some sort of official or something?”
“I’m a duly authorised officer of the Studium,” I said. “and I asked you your name.”
She gave me a blank look. “The Studium,” she said. “Isn’t that some sort of school?”
Yes, all right. But I’ve never known it not work, except for this time. “I’m an ordained cleric,” I said. “Which means I’m an officer of the ecclesiastical court, which gives me jurisdiction in matters of ecclesiastical law, including blasphemy and witchcraft. Name.”
She shook her head. “No it doesn’t,” she said. “Not unless you’re a what’s-it-called, canon jury-something. Juridical. Are you one of those?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got a badge or something?”
“We don’t have badges.”
She looked at me as though she’d just bought me and already my seams were starting to split. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Go away.”
Actually, for the record, I’m genuinely an honorary canon juridical, ex officio, on account of having been a serjeant-at-arms in the Reserve in my third year at the Studium. If you were in the Reserve you were let off PE and organised sports, and I despise being out of breath. But I don’t tell lies if I can help it. And we don’t carry badges. We don’t need to. “Your last chance,” I said. “Name.”
“If you don’t go away I’ll call the landlord and have you thrown out.”
Which, very loosely construed, constitutes an act or threat of violence against the person, which entitles me to use reasonable and proportionate measures in my defence. I grinned. Loquar menti; piece of cake. Any second-year can do it, and only a tactical-grade can defend against it.
Her defence knocked me off my feet, literally. I ended up on the floor, on my backside, with my head spinning. I gawped at her. Nobody does that to me.
She sighed. “Oh, all right,” she said. “I’m Amalasomtha. Who the hell are you?”
Fact; women can’t be adepts. They’re physically incapable of harbouring the Knack, just as men can’t give birth to babies.
Except (there’s always an Except); that’s not actually true. A tiny, tiny proportion of women have the Knack. And, guess what, as soon as they’re detected they’re snapped up by Doctrine and trained as spooks, to keep a baleful eye on the rest of us—because, of course, no male adept would ever suspect a woman of being an orthodoxy enforcement officer. And, of course, we all know about it, and assume that any female adept we run across is a predator, after our collars. Hence my violent and uncharacteristic outburst when I smelt her at the inn.
She was an adept all right; I had the bruises on my mind and my backside to prove it. Also, the smack across the soul she’d given me hadn’t been the purely reflexive act of an undiagnosed natural. She’d known precisely what she was doing, and she’d done it very, very well. Better than I could, that’s for sure, and as previously noted, I’m good at this stuff. Credit where it’s due, and all that sort of thing.
I hate mysteries. Something of a drawback for a professional investigator. Still, as I think I may have intimated, I’m not here through choice.
“Never mind who I am,” I said, wiping blood from the corner of my mouth—except there wasn’t any blood, needless to say, but it always feels like there should be. “Who are you?”
“I just told you.”
There was nobody around to overhear. But, to be on the safe side, I’d used aes grave, so we were practically invisible to any but our own kind. Of which, I was prepared to bet my collar and all three painfully-won buttons, she was one. But if so, why in God’s name not admit it? You can’t slap a fellow-adept till his head spins and then pretend nothing’s happened, that’s just silly.
Sometimes I’m so stupid I wonder how I remember to breathe.
“Good book?”
“What?”
“That book you’re reading. Any good?”
She frowned, then decided to answer the question. “Yes,” she said. “Why?”
“You don’t think it’s carelessly researched, poorly constructed, wildly speculative and atrociously badly written?”
“No.”
I shrugged. I wrote it, ten years ago. “Ah well,” I said. “It wouldn’t do if we all thought the same. You’re Idalian.”
(Which was, of course, impossible. Except—
Idalia, if it exists, which is not universally accepted, is eight thousand miles away. Liutprand of Gallen claimed to have reached it five hundred years ago, on his way to the Moon. Edinhard the Stammerer wrote a detailed account of his wanderings there, riddled with internal inconsistencies apart from the bits he copied out of Gainas’ Travels in Permia (Permia’s about as far from Idalia as you can get, but nobody knows anything about Permia, either) According to Theuderic of Bingen, Idalians are seven feet tall and have their heads in the middle of their chests; also, he’d have you believe, when they read a book they start at the bottom right of the page and read up to the top left, and they write upside down. He’d have no way of knowing that, of course, since according to Litomer the Deacon, Idalian writing is a series of little pictures, not proper words, so no Westerner would have a clue which way up they’re supposed to be, always assuming that the concept upside down has any relevance in this context. Oh, and—more far-fetched still—Aimeric de Peguilhan in his Catalogue of Earthly Wonders reckons that in Idalia, there are as many female adepts as male, and Idalian women give birth through their ears.
People say a lot of weird stuff. And just because it’s in a book, it ain’t necessarily so.)
She looked at me, with something approaching respect. Actually, I’m exaggerating. It was as though she’d trodden in a cowpat and found a farthing embedded in it.
“Keep your voice down,” she said.
“You’re Idalian.”
“I didn’t say that.”
People can’t lie to me, because I can look into any human head and see for myself. Blue for the truth, red for a lie, it’s that simple. Inside her mind was a sort of soothing beige. She was all pastel colours, all the damn time. “You read upside down.”
“No.”
Well, no, not from her perspective; we’re the ones who do that. So, no lie. Still beige. For crying out loud; why? So I thought to myself; this isn’t my problem. An improbable person from a far country of which we know little has landed up on my patch, but if she’s Idalian she’s unlikely to be a Doctrine snoop, and since I’m not a political grade, she’s not my problem, therefore can’t be my fault. Possibly I ought to report her to somebody, but if I do nobody will believe me, and if I’d happened to come by an hour later, I’d never have known she was here. Nobody can prove I didn’t come by an hour later; therefore, no action required. There, you see? Off the hook.
I wish my mind worked like that.
“All right,” I said. “Answer me one question.”
“Depends what it is.”
“Answer me one question,” I said, “and I’ll go away and pretend I never saw you.”
She thought about it for three seconds. “Shoot,” she said.
And what, you should really be asking yourself (but you haven’t, because I’ve deliberately distracted you with my meretricious narrative tricks) was someone like me doing in Sabades Amar in the first place?
I could fob you off with what I eventually wrote in my official report (a tissue of lies, naturally). I was at the Flawless Diamonds at that particular moment because I’d got off the southbound mailcoach and was hanging around waiting for my connection to Drutz. Which is true. But the southbound coach I’d been on had got in the evening before last, and that day’s morning coach to Drutz had already been and gone. Not the same thing at all. See? I can tell the truth and lie at the same time. Bet you wish you could do that.
Motto of the field division since time out of mind; we get all the rotten jobs. And we do, we do. But some jobs are more rotten than others, and one man’s rotten job is another man’s self-indulgent pleasure. In my case, a chance to catch up with an old friend—
Wash my mouth out with lye and water. Except—
People make friends in unlikely places. And in some places, they’re more likely to make unlikely friends than likely ones. The classic example of that is the House. Ask any senator; which side are your true friends on—not the ones you vote with and agree with on points of ideology; the ones you meet for a drink and a good moan afterwards? And they’ll all tell you, the other side, naturally. The guys on your side are the ones who’ll let you down or stitch you up at the drop of a hat. With the enemy you can be yourself, because they aren’t after that junior secretaryship or scared stiff you’re a spy for the whip’s office. Sort of the same in my line of work. Some of my closest colleagues would cheerfully cut my throat with a broken teabowl if it meant getting a junior fellowship with tenure. And, by the same token, some of my truest friends are the Enemy.
No, really. I mean it.
Take the particular example I was hanging round the Diamonds looking out for. He’s—sorry, it’s, but I always think of it as a he—it’s a fairly innocuous specimen, generally doesn’t do any lasting harm to its hosts, or victims if you really insist. It pops in, usually when they’re asleep, burrows down into the dark, warm places in their minds, makes a cosy little nest for itself and hibernates, quiet and peaceful, hardly eats anything, you really wouldn’t know it was there. I get the impression that its superiors aren’t wildly impressed; a serial under-achiever is one of their more polite assessments, so I gather. But (it argues) so what? If it started making a nuisance of itself, throwing its weight about, screaming fits and bouts of gory self-harm, it’d quickly be spotted by someone like me and be thrown out on its ear quick-sharp, and how would that advance the Dark Cause, precisely? Instead, it argues, it’s deeply and securely ensconced, out of sight and mind of the other side (that would be me), ready and waiting just in case some circumstance arises in which its presence might just conceivably be useful… They can’t argue with that, it tells me, because they’re so used to being found out, chucked out, sooner or later losing every fight they pick that it’s hard for them to criticise one of their own simply for being useless. Which raises the question of why they bother; but that’s high doctrine, and if I explained you wouldn’t be able to follow it, trust me. I don’t understand it, that’s for sure, but that doesn’t stop me explaining it twice a year to graduate students.
So there I was in Sabades, hanging round the coaching inn sniffing the passengers in hopes of meeting my old friend/enemy, who I had reason to believe would be passing through, embedded in the mind of a corn chandler from Obergallen who’d been reported by his family for acting a bit oddly in a very distinctive and characteristic way… Not that I had the slightest intention of evicting my old pal; but we have an understanding. I threaten to drive him out, though he doesn’t believe me for a moment. In return for being allowed to stay, he gives me certain snippets of information about the activities of his colleagues (which may or may not be true, naturally). It’s a little game we play, and it gives us a chance to chat and whine about our respective superiors, and that’s absolutely fine. And I realise I’ve been calling it him, but so what? Go back and change the pronouns for yourself, if they offend you.
“Is it true,” I asked her, “that Idalian men have four testicles?”
She blushed. “I wouldn’t know,” she said.
“That wasn’t the question, just me being nosy. Why are you here?”
She sighed. “If I tell you, will you go away?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.” She looked away, took a deep breath, then looked back at me. “I’m a [some Idalian word] of the [several more Idalian words] and I’ve been sent here to do a very important job that I’m not allowed to talk about. And obviously you’re a—” She hesitated. I nodded. “Right, that’s fine. Actually I’m surprised. Back home, they tell us there aren’t any, in the West.”
I found that mildly offensive. “Is that right?”
“Yes. But we don’t actually know very much about you.”
“So it seems.”
“When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me that in the West, people only have one leg, with an enormous foot they hop around on very fast, and when the sun gets too hot they lie on their backs and use it as a sunshade.”
I nodded. “There’s an element of truth in that. A very, very small one. We do have feet.”
“I noticed. But really and truly, I’m not supposed to talk to anyone about why I’m here. And you did promise you’d go away.”
So what, I thought. I’ve met an Idalian. And nobody can prove it. A bit like seeing a purple kingfisher—they’re supposed to be extinct, but they don’t know that. Unusual, certainly, but not significant, doesn’t mean anything. Nothing I’m obliged to do anything about. And I did promise.
“Fine,” I said, discreetly teasing a single hair from the back of my head. “I’ll let you get on, then. Nice to have met you, and welcome to the Ozidan peninsula.” And then I got up and walked away, without looking back.
I met my pal an hour or so later, when the City coach pulled in. I caught a glimpse of him in the corn chandler’s eyes, before he had a chance to scuttle away and hide. I went in after him. You again, he said.
Me again. Actually, someone once did the arithmetic—I think it was the same scholarly clown who calculated how many angels can dance on the head of a pin—and came up with a figure of 203,686. That’s how many of them—demons, he called them, but I don’t like that word—are on active service in the world at any one time. Sounds a lot, I know; but think about it. In the Empire alone (and that’s only a third of the known world) there must be, what, eleven, maybe twelve million people, so that’s just one of them for every fifty-eight of us. And the other side are like us; they get assigned their territories, just like we do, and they’re answerable to their area supervisors and regional, provincial and divisional officers, just like we are, and—well, there you go. I know them all, by sight and by smell, and boy, do they know me. So. Me again.
