Raven Stratagem

I’m not a linguist, but do you ever think there’s something wrong with the things we do and don’t have words for?

Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were.

Never ascribe to irrational benevolence what selfishness will explain.

A cat wriggled in Zehun’s arms: the orange tabby Jienji, who, like all of Zehun’s cats, was named after a notorious Shuos assassin. Even someone who liked cats as much as Zehun did was unlikely to run out of names anytime soon.

Of course, at some point you had to ask yourself how much legitimacy any government had that feared dissension within more than invasion from without, but if you had any desire for a quiet life, you kept those thoughts inside your skull

I have always believed that a properly guided bureaucracy is deadlier than any bomb.

There’s no honor,” she said. “Only duty.

There had always been the rumour that one of the old heptarchs had squirreled away a collection of heretical calendrical erotica. Just how you made abstract algebra erotic was going to have to remain a mystery.

In the dramas people shied from Shuos assassins and saboteurs, but the ones you had to watch out for were the bureaucrats.

History forgives the winner a lot of things.

We're fighting people whose only interest in Kel rules of engagement is to tie us in knots with them. They're going to cheat. Which means we have to cheat better.

what good is immortality if nothing has been done to repair the fault lines in the human heart? -Shuos Mikodez

He knelt to pet the friendlier of Zehun’s two cats, Fenez. The other one was hiding, as usual. Fenez still bore a scary resemblance to a knitting project gone horribly awry.

You would be surprised how many ridiculous footnotes there are in my life.

For a traitor, Jedao had always been a judgmental prick.

Unless you have some archaic problem with being a womanform?” “Shuos-zho,” Jedao said patiently, “I haven’t had a dick in four hundred years. I got over it fast, promise.

What did I do this time?” “Nothing,” Istradez said. “No one ever says ‘nothing’ and means it.

Some of the soldiers made disparaging comments about the fact that he was a womanform when they thought he couldn’t hear them. But his fellow officers were civil about it, which was all he cared about.

I do my job,” Mikodez said, “because after all the trouble I went to get it, it would be irresponsible not to.” He

Most of our systems would be under martial law if we weren’t, you know, always under martial law.

If you didn’t want to be spied on,” Zehun said unsympathetically, “you should have pursued a nice, quiet life as a hopper mechanic or a pastry chef.

Money is a much better defense than violence.” “When money’s gone,” Kujen said softly, “only violence will do.

I have a form of dyscalculia,” Jedao said. He glanced away. “They didn’t even catch it until I was partway through Shuos Academy because I—I just worked harder. But it did mean that while my classmates were doing fancy calculations, I was busy figuring out how to trick them so those fancy calculations didn’t come into play.

Do you know how they carry out purges? I do. She’d come home and talk about it because it was just a job to her. Every little thing was compartmentalized into subtasks, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Rescind the target population’s jobs. Issue them special identification. Refuel the processing facilities. Make sure there were enough bullets or knives or poison canisters or whatever the flavor of the month was. Send out extra patrols to deal with any that try to go terrorist or rouse the rest of the population. If you focused on the little jigsaw pieces, you never had to notice that the whole puzzle added up to people dying.

Sleep, then,” Spirel said with the brisk practicality he liked about her.

This is not the strangest thing I have ever heard, Khiruev told herself, not with a whole deal of conviction.

It looks like a rainbow vomited over a fragmentation grenade.

In theory, six factions shared rule of the hexarchate. Three high factions: Rahal, which governed the high calendar and set the law; Andan, with their financiers, diplomats, and artisans; and Shuos, which specialized either in information operations or backstabbing, depending on whom you asked. Three low factions: Kel, known best for their military; Vidona, which handled education and the ceremonial torture that was fundamental to the calendar’s remembrances; and Nirai, which consisted of the technicians and researchers. ‘High’ and ‘low’ were old designations, more a matter of tradition than actual power, which fluctuated according to resources, infighting, and the interplay between the current hexarchs.