The Long Game, page 8
“I remember now,” she said, with a friendly smile on her face. “You kept wanting to know what I’d done to your friend.”
The idiot looked at her. “What friend?”
“The demon.”
The third time I met him was years later. I’d qualified and finished a two-year posting in Epitedeia, mostly possession work but with some teaching thrown in. I’d done a good job in Epitedeia, and when I got back to the Studium I had high hopes of a relatively quick and easy scramble up the ladder. By this point I’d decided that what I really wanted to do was teaching and research, possibly with a view to breaking into the bossing about and ordering around sectors, which appealed to me on an intellectual level. I wrote that stupid book, and people seemed to think it was pretty hot stuff. I taught a few classes and got good results, and the rest of the time I helped out generally, running errands and doing bread-and-butter work that my superiors were too grand or too lazy to bother with.
So, when a simple possession in aristocratic high society came up, I was all over it like gravy. The victim was the fourteen year old daughter of a junior senator, one of the coming men in the Optimate Tendency and a significant donor to the Studium social welfare fund. The fund paid the travelling expenses of field operatives outside the home provinces, so the senator had favoured civilian status; under normal circumstances, his daughter would have merited the personal attention of the Dean or one of the Lectors. As luck would have it, however, they were all out of town, and the highest ranking officer present, the Chair of Alchemical Theory, hadn’t done a possession for twenty years and didn’t trust himself not to kill the victim. He sent for me. I felt like I’d put my finger up my nostril and hooked out a thousand nomismata’s worth of amethysts.
The girl was small, scared and sullen, with vomit down the front of her white silk gown and deep gouges on her cheeks where her maids had barely managed to stop her clawing out her own eyes. She was huddled in a corner of a vast, unbelievably beautiful room, unable to stand up because she’d broken her leg jumping off the top of the wardrobe. When I came in she threw a penknife at me. It missed me by a whisker. I paused to apply lorica and put on a big smile. Lying next to the bed I saw the body of a middle-aged woman in a clean, neat cream smock, lying with her head at a disastrous angle. Nobody else seemed to have noticed her, so I guessed she was probably a servant.
“Now then,” I said. “What seems to be the trouble?”
The girl screamed at me, a long and fluent string of abuse in Old Permian, which by an extraordinary coincidence I’d taken as a supplementary dead language in Linguistics. She told me several things about myself, all of them true. One of them was that I’d cheated on my Finals.
I considered the damage, and the dead servant. Surely not, I thought.
The senator and his wife were looking at me; why doesn’t he do something? They could see I’d been shocked by their daughter’s tirade, and assumed I was scared. Which I was, in a sense, but not the way they thought. Anyway, it was time to be dynamic and powerful, so I was.
I slipped into her head like an eel through a net. The place was a disaster area. My friend was slumped in a corner, just as the girl was, and he was in a worse state than she was. But the injuries, I noticed, were several days old.
“You look awful,” I said.
“Thank you so much.”
I remembered the dead woman and the nail-gashes and the broken leg. “I misjudged you,” I said. “I didn’t think you were like this.”
He laughed. “Why? Because I helped you? Oh come on. I do my job.”
“I can see that.”
He sighed. “You’re right, actually. This sort of thing just isn’t my scene. But I’ve been under a bit of pressure lately, from the regional brass.”
I peered at his injuries. Their blood is purple, incidentally, or that’s how it appears to me. It was caked in crystals on his forehead and round his mouth, like gemstones. By a real stretch of the imagination, amethysts. “Let me guess,” I said. “You had a rough time in your last assignment.”
“You could say that,” he said with a grin. “I was under orders, stay in there until they drag you out by the roots. Turns out I have unusually tough roots. That,” he added, “isn’t exactly an unalloyed blessing.”
Standard operating procedure. The code of practice says that the demon can’t kill or irreparably harm the host when ordered to leave the body. But it’s entirely legal to cling on tight. The effect is the same, but the actual damage is done by the exorcist, not the demon, so that’s all right. According to the eggheads at the faculty of Law, it’s all to do with who’s active and who’s passive. There’s a lot of case law on the subject, apparently, but it’s been regarded as settled for the last three hundred years.
“They’re saying at Division,” he went on, “that I’ve gone soft, I don’t fancy it any more, one traumatic encounter too many with your lot. Apparently I’m now officially classed as fragile, would you believe. They’re talking about taking me out of the field altogether and putting me on permanent desk duty.” He shuddered slightly. “I don’t want that.”
“Is it so bad?”
He gave me a look I’ll never forget. “In the field,” he said, “I get to have a body. Not one of my own, naturally, but at least I’m me. Like one of those crabs that live in other creatures’ shells. On desk duty, you’re just— You start to drift apart,” he said, and it was my turn to shudder. “After a bit, all that’s left of you is what it takes to do the job. You don’t need memories to correlate duty rosters, or a personality, or a soul—”
I tried to think about the dead woman outside. Somehow she didn’t seem relevant.
“Anyhow,” he said, “it was made pretty clear to me that I was on my final warning. Do a good job, they said, and everything’s fine. Otherwise—” He closed his eyes for a moment. “I did a good job,” he said. “They wanted the host damaged, I saw to it. He’s going to spend the rest of his life in a chair in a dark room, just sitting.”
“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say. I think I meant it. I was young.
“We can’t be hurt, of course,” he said. “Which is to say, we’re immortal, being composed of pure spirit, and any damage we sustain puts itself right in a day or so. But we can feel pain. We can remember it. I’ve been doing this so long, I can scarcely remember anything else. Maybe they’re right about me, I don’t know. If they stuck me in Clerical and threw away the key, most of what I wouldn’t remember would be suffering.” He lifted his head and laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you don’t want to hear all this. Self-pity from the Common Enemy of Man, for crying out loud.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Sure.” He made an effort and sat up. “Look, I know I’ve got no right to ask this, but would you do me a favour?”
I felt a chill go down my spine. “Depends,” I said.
“The senator,” he said, “is on their shit list. The idea is, I put up such a fight coming out that the girl ends up a vegetable. This shocks the senator into a decline, and so he doesn’t go on to unite the factions, drive through much-needed reforms of agrarian policy and improve the lives of countless generations yet unborn. They told me to wait till all the competent practitioners were out of town, so I’d get an inexperienced newbie who wouldn’t be able to get me out clean. Someone,” he added with a grin, “like you.”
“Figures,” I said.
“Which is where,” he said, “they’ve made their mistake. I know you. The fact is, I taught you everything you know. Well, I gave you all the answers in your exam, which isn’t quite the same thing, but close enough for dance music. I don’t think I can stand another out-by-the-roots job. Can you get me out of here nice and clean? Please?”
I thought hard. “Can you make it easy for me?”
“No. They’d know if I did, and that’d be me up on a charge. We have a three-strikes rule. I’m on two. Have been for six thousand years, as it happens. Something like that hanging over you—” He shook his head. “I’ve got to fight you all the way. But I know you, you’re good, quite possibly the best I’ve ever seen, one day. If I really try my best but I’m beaten by a superior opponent, that’s fine, they’re happy with that. I think you can do it, if you try.”
I thought some more. There’s a technique—a sort of flick of the metaphorical wrist—but it’s dangerous. If it works, out the demon comes with no harm done to it or the host. If it doesn’t, the outcome for the host is catastrophic, and you look like you ruined a human life just because you wanted to show off. I’d never done it before, but I knew how it was done. And it would be such a feather in my cap—
“You made her kill someone,” I said.
He nodded. “Her nurse,” he said. “She’s fond of her parents, but the nurse is the only one she really loves. I made her throttle her until her eyes popped. The theory is, we get hardened to it over time, like you people killing chickens. That’s the theory, anyway.”
I tried to look at him but it wasn’t easy. “If I manage to get you out clean, won’t your people be upset? It’ll mean their plan will fail.”
He gave me a startled look, then roared with laughter. “Of course it will,” he said. “Our plans always fail.”
“Do they?”
“Oh for pity’s sake.” For a moment, I could’ve sworn he was angry with me. “Yes, always,” he said. “We think of something clever, but you stop us, so we go back and reshape it into part of a longer game. That’s what we do, we play the really long game, and every defeat you inflict on us in the short term becomes a building block in the really long game, the one that’s mapped out so far in advance that none of you can see where it’s going. That’s just how it is,” he added, seeing my reaction. “It’s how we’ve been forced to grow. If you can’t be a tree, be a vine. But that’s all grand strategy, nothing to do with you and me. By the time your mistakes come to light, you’ll have been dead for a thousand years. They won’t be able to blame you because they’ll have forgotten you ever existed.”
I felt as though he’d pulled off a mask, and his own face underneath was indistinguishable from it. “Is that right?”
That amused him. “I’ll still be there, of course, to get the credit. Only there won’t be any, because some clown like you will have screwed everything up for us, at the very last minute. So we’ll go back to the drawing board, and we’ll reroute the plan so it comes out in another thousand years, same vine, different tendrils. And so it goes on, for ever and ever, world without end. Just be glad you’re a mortal. You don’t know how lucky you are.”
While he’d been talking I’d seen what I was looking for; the fulcrum, though that’s a completely misleading way of describing it, the tipping-point, also misleading, the spot to aim at. I dug into him just as he was telling me how lucky I was, and he screamed, and I was alone inside the senator’s daughter’s head, just as the knowledge of what she’d done came flooding in. I got out of there fast. There’s enough unhappiness in the world without wallowing in other people’s misery.
The long game. If at nine-million-two-hundred-and-forty-six-thousand-six-hundred-and-eighty-fifth you don’t succeed, try, try again. In the meanwhile, my friend.
“Your what?” the idiot roared.
“My friend,” I said. “Actually, that’s misleading. More of a contact. I use him occasionally to channel misinformation to the bad guys. It’s a long-standing arrangement. They know all about it back home.”
That was a lie, of course, but he had no way of checking. “You have a—a relationship with this—”
“Yes.”
I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. He swelled up like he was going to explode, then turned away, unable to bear the sight of me a moment longer. “Let me get this straight in my mind,” he said. “We set up this incredibly important exchange.” He turned and glared at her. “You come here to get the demon. You just happen to bump into him—”
She nodded. “At the inn. I thought he might be you, but I realised he wasn’t so I got rid of him.”
“And he just happens to know this particular demon.” He sucked in a very deep breath. “And then you just happen to find the demon for yourself, before I can catch it and hand it over.”
“Oh,” she said. “Was I supposed to wait?”
“Yes, it was all arranged, it was in the briefing.” He was furious with her. Well, quite. People who don’t read the briefing, for crying out loud. “But instead of waiting you went ahead and took the demon—”
“Actually he took me. At least I think he did. I can’t actually remember.”
“And a senior cleric gets murdered.” He couldn’t bear the sight of her, either. He was running out of directions to look in. “And he’d been talking to the demon shortly before it found you.” He was close to tears. “I don’t know,” he said. “This whole operation is going to hell in a handcart. Someone’s going to have to explain to the abbot what’s gone wrong, and I really don’t see why it should have to be me.”
At which point something happened in my mind. It was as though I was in a dark cave, and a stray shaft of light happened to fall on a cluster of purple gemstones. It was so sudden and unexpected—like finding I knew the answers to a set of exam questions—that for a moment I looked around to see who else was in there. In vain. Nobody here but us humans.
I looked at her. She pulled a sympathetic face, then hit the idiot with something remarkably like instar fulminis. Every muscle in his body went taut, just for a split second, and then he dropped to the floor like a discarded shirt and lay there in a heap.
I knelt over him. He was still breathing. “I know,” I said. “You’re not allowed to kill people. Except—”
She shook her head sadly. “No exceptions.”
“Pity,” I said, though I guess I was relieved. Being complicit in an actual murder is above my pay grade. “All right,” I said to her, “you can come out now.”
“In a minute.”
I wasn’t prepared to argue. “When he wakes up, he’s going to remember. And then we’ll both be in the shit.”
She thought about it. “I could go in,” she said, “and you could drag me out again, but I might not come quietly, and there could be an element of collateral damage or friendly fire or whatever. It’d mean some poor sod will have to spend the next forty years feeding him with a spoon, but it wouldn’t be you.”
Temptation almost beyond endurance. “Get thee behind me,” I said. “No, it’s a sweet offer, but I don’t think so.”
She grinned. “He won’t be in a position to make trouble. There are going to be big changes at the Studium shortly, you’ll see.”
I thought; let’s not go there. “The body,” I said. “Is she really Idalian?”
She rolled her eyes. “I thought you knew. There’s no such place as Idalia. It’s a myth.”
“Oh. But I thought—”
“Gullibility in matters geographical,” she said sternly, “clearly runs in your family. I seem to remember your brother lost all that money sending a fleet of ships to Essecuivo, another mythical destination. Do yourself a favour. Buy a map.”
“All that money,” I repeated. “While we’re on the subject—”
“Oh come on,” said my friend. “That’s not fair.”
“You put it there,” I said. “In the cave.”
My friend hesitated, then nodded. “Your father understood,” he said. “Intuitively, I guess, I sure as hell didn’t tell him. But I did lead him there, before you ask. See? I’ve been looking after you since before you were born.”
“Why?”
He rolled his eyes. “The long game,” he said. “The everlasting game. The game that we always lose, except—”
“Except nothing’s really decided till it’s over,” I said, “and it can’t ever be over, because it lasts for ever. Your actual paradox,” I pointed out.
“So you were paying attention in Logic. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bothered taking notes for you.”
“Because the game is never over, it can never be lost.”
He grinned. “In theory,” he said. “However, don’t bet money on us to win. You can’t afford it.”
“Tell me,” I said, “about the long game.”
The main object of the exercise, he told me, was to kill the prior of Sabades. At the time of his death, my pal tod me, he was nothing special. But, in about eighteen months’ time, he was due to experience a beatific vision which would transform his life. He would preach a new, compelling gospel, and thousands of converts, lay and adept, would flock to him. Result; both the church and the Order would be splintered into violently opposed factions, leading to two centuries of heresy, schism and ultimately war—
“Hang on,” I said. “You wanted to prevent that?”
Do let me finish, he said. What’s two centuries? Nothing. After two hundred years, a new orthodoxy would emerge and unite the known world into something not all that far removed from the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. That was what Divisional Command was so eager to forestall. They’d been able to sell it to the Oversight Committee because Oversight isn’t really interested in anything more than seventy years ahead. But the long game—
“I see,” I lied. “Just shows how wrong I can be. I thought all of this was about discrediting the abbot of the Studium.”
He smiled, snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Give the man a big jar of olives,” he said. “That was the second objective. You probably noticed that all the goodies we tempted the abbot with are strictly demonic powers.”
“Flying, alchemy, transfiguration, speaking in tongues, necromancy. A bit obvious.”
“Not to your precious abbot. And not to you, I suspect, until the penny finally teetered on the brink and dropped. We made up Idalia so he’d be tempted. And he was. Now your friend here will go home and tell all the abbot’s enemies about how stupid and gullible he’s been, and my guess is, he won’t be abbot for very much longer. Which suits Oversight just fine, incidentally.”
