Chapter 5
The long game. You can think of it as a myth, like I do, or a moral paradox, or a precept in orthodox theology. Probably better not to think of it at all, but I had no choice.
The idea is that Evil exists and has a plan, enormously detailed and intricate, like the works of a Mezentine clock.
Compressed springs power shafts that drive trains of gears, operating cams and sears and escapements: a hundred different processes working independently at the same time, to bring about one culminating outcome, which will not be pleasant.
But Evil can never win, because Good is stronger, backed by the omnipotent power of the Invincible Sun.
Evil, therefore, puts off the inevitable day of its defeat by extending the scope of the exercise.
The game can’t be lost, because it’s everlasting; games and sets can be lost, but not the match, not until the end of time itself; world without end, amen.
Good can frustrate Evil, nothing easier, but Evil plans ahead, anticipating each reverse and defeat, allowing for it, making the defeat an essential building-block of the greater design.
Thus Evil infects rats in Echmen with plague fleas and puts them on a ship to Aelia.
Good sees to it that the ship never arrives.
Therefore there is no plague, and half a million people don’t die.
And one of the people who doesn’t die is Carnufex the Irrigator, slaughterer of a million innocents, who should’ve died of the plague when he was three years old.
Actually that’s an incredibly crude example.
The long game is infinitely subtler and more complex than that.
In the classic long game, Carnufex would’ve been stopped by other means when he was twelve, but that interference would itself have been anticipated and used as the foundation for something even bigger and worse, which would in turn have been prevented, which would in turn have served to bring about an even more disastrous possibility.
That’s assuming you believe in all this shit, which of course I don’t.
The beauty of the long game, of course, lies in the way Evil protects its plans from interference by using Good as a sort of human shield.
Another hopelessly crude example: Good King Rothgar frees the serfs, abolishes slavery and stops the hundred-year war against the Permians.
As part of his reforms he dispossesses the hereditary aristocracy and divides their land between the oppressed peasants.
Consequently, a hundred and fifty years later, when the Permians invade, there are no competent generals to lead the army, because they always came from the old nobility; the Permians win and slaughter every living thing west of the Bitter Sea.
That’s a particularly bad example because it’s so large-scale and monolithic.
The details of the long game are much smaller, more intricate, more deeply embedded in the fabric of all our lives.
More to the point, the scope of the plan is inconceivably huge, with every possible contingency anticipated and allowed for.
Think of it as a huge volume of water, testing every surface it touches for a way out, a crack, a fissure, a weakness.
Stop it up at one point and it immediately finds another, or another dozen, or another million.
It flows, it builds up pressure and it only needs one chance; above all, it thrives and flourishes on its own ambiguity, because who can possibly hope to know whether any given event is Good, or simply collateral Good in the interests of Evil?
Sensible people like me take a long step backwards and point out that all this nonsense is a pretty good argument for saying that neither Good nor Evil actually exist; if they’re so closely bound up with each other that they’re practically interchangeable, is there really a difference between them?
Then apply Saloninus’ razor – the simplest explanation is bound to be the right one – and you’re left with the obvious conclusion: there is no Good and Evil, and morality is just fashions in belief and behaviour.
Sensible people like me, however, are few and far between.
Most people believe in the Invincible Sun and the eternal battle between light and dark.
I could point out that truth doesn’t operate on democratic principles, and if a million people unanimously vote for a cow to be a horse, the cow is still a cow; a fat lot of good it would do me, so I rarely bother.
Long story short: I don’t believe in the long game; everybody else does.
On that point, therefore, we agree to differ.
You can see why theologians love it and moralists find it a wonderful excuse for condemning everything as being wrong; I confess I find it irresistibly entertaining, like an ongoing game of chess, or a story with no ending.
But the idea that a short man could be lurking in the shadows orchestrating my actions and those of everybody around me? Bullshit.
I believe that; honestly I do. Blessed are those who have seen and yet have believed.
So, if I refused to believe the short man, I had no choice but to ask the walker. Guess who my own worst enemy is. Go on, guess.
The truth is, I’m not the most patient man who ever lived.
When I’m working with Svangerd I find it easier to be patient, because she’s about as tranquil as a thunderstorm, and I can score points off her by showing off my ability to sit still and wait.
When I’m on my own, however, after a few minutes I start to seethe and fidget, like a man sitting on a beehive.
Immobility, furthermore, breeds doubt. After an hour sitting in the stairwell, with pins and needles in both feet and a crick in my neck, I found myself wondering if there really was a walker at all.
It was so massively unlikely, here in Choris, where the sun shone and there were always people everywhere, the absolute antithesis of the Mesoge.
Maybe – intriguing thought, which hadn’t occurred to me before – maybe the princess was killed by someone who wanted to make it look like the work of a walker.
Why would anyone want to do that? No idea, but surely that was more likely than the alternative.
I gave it some thought. You wouldn’t do that unless you expected the walker’s MO to be recognised.
Was there anyone else at the council apart from me who came from the Mesoge, or who was likely to be familiar with our cherished cultural traditions?
Unlikely, but not impossible. Was this a message aimed at that putative individual; and if so, what was the point?
I was letting myself get quite excited by this possibility when I heard something. It had been dead quiet up till then. People who live in civilised places don’t know what real quiet is like.
The noise I heard was fingers tapping. It’s an annoying habit, one that I’m often guilty of when I’m bored. In fact, when I heard it I assumed it was me, doing it without realising. Then I found that it wasn’t.
The tapping stopped. It was pitch dark. My eyes were open, but they might as well have been tight shut. Listen for it breathing, I told myself, until I remembered that walkers don’t breathe.
Maybe they can smell fear; I don’t know. Something must have prompted it to attack, at that particular moment. A hand grabbed my shoulder. The fingers reached nearly to my spine and the thumb dug into the muscle two inches below my collarbone.
The hatchet was shoved down inside my habit, to keep it from being seen. I couldn’t get to it, not without loosening my belt. Steel doesn’t cut walkers anyway, so that was beside the point.
He’d got me pinned down with one hand. The other hand would be groping for my head, to squash it.
I squirmed, like a rabbit when you take it out of the snare.
Small, weak things can be devilish slippery to keep hold of.
I found myself loose from his grip. I jumped up, bashed my head against the underside of the stairwell, ignored it, scrambled to get out of the way.
He grabbed my foot, but all he got was my boot.
I heard something clatter on the stone floor. That would be the hatchet, shaken loose. I groped for it and my fingers closed around the shaft. A hiding to nothing, but I couldn’t think of anything else, so I swung the hatchet as hard as I possibly could, and felt it connect.
I don’t know if you’ve ever done any forge work, but if you have, think of when you go to hit the hot steel really hard, miss and hit the anvil instead.
It rings like a bell and the hammer bounces, sending a shock up your arm to your shoulder.
I felt the hatchet bounce. No matter. Like I said, I didn’t know what else to do, so I hit him again.
Same outcome. But, I realised, I wasn’t being squashed flat or torn to pieces; maybe that was cause and effect.
I hit him four or five times more, putting everything I’d got into it.
Then one more blow, which met empty air and made me stagger forward.
My knee hit something as hard as stone, but not where the floor or the stairs ought to be.
I felt the hatchet fly from my hand and heard it clatter on the floor.
Nuts, I thought, or words to that effect.
Still, I had an opportunity to run, so I tried that, and went straight into the edge of the stairs.
The impact should’ve knocked me off my feet but I guess I was too worked up for it to register.
I absorbed the pain as being irrelevant, tried again, caught my bare foot in something and went sprawling.
My head bounced off stone. I pushed myself up with my hands, and under one of them I felt the hatchet handle. Nice hatchet.