“Praise?” the Archimandrite said. “I inspire terror, marshal. That’s my strategy. I’ve found that to be the quickest and most effective way of ensuring that people learn what is good both for them and for me.”
For glory, then, Archimandrite.”
“Be merciful for glory?”
The marshal thought about this for a moment. “Ultimately, yes.”
“I shall conquer them as I see fit, marshal. We are partners in this. You don’t tell me what to do.”
“I am not trying to, Archimandrite,” the marshal said quickly. “I accept what you must do, I am merely delivering a request regarding the manner in which it is done.”
“And I have heard your request and I will pay it all due heed.” This was a form of words Luseferous had heard somebody use once — he couldn’t remember who or where — which, when he’d thought about it, he thought was rather good, especially if you said it slightly pompously: slowly, gravely even, keeping a straight face so that the person you were talking to thought you were taking them seriously and might even hope that you would do as they had asked rather than — at best — ignore them completely. At worst — as far as they were concerned — you’d do the opposite of whatever they asked, just to spite them, precisely to prove you wouldn’t be pushed around… though that got tricky; then people might try to make you do one thing by pretending to favour another, and even without that complication you were still altering your behaviour because of something they had said, which was giving them a sort of power over you, when the whole point of everything the Archimandrite was doing was so that nobody could say they had any power over him.
Power was everything. Money was nothing without it. Even happiness was a distraction, a ghost, a hostage. What was happiness? Something people could take away from you. Happiness too often involved other people. It meant giving them power over you, giving them a hold on you that they could exercise whenever they wanted, taking away whatever it was that had made you happy.
Luseferous had known happiness and he’d had it taken away. His father, the only man he’d ever admired — even while hating the old bastard — had got rid of Luseferous’s mother when she became old and less attractive, replacing her, when Luseferous was barely into his teens, with a succession of young, erotically desirable but soulless, uncaring, selfish young women, women he’d wanted for himself but despised at the same time. His mother was sent away. He never saw her again.
His father had been an Omnocrat for the Mercatoria, in the industrial complexes of the Leseum Systems. He’d started out at the bottom, as a Peculan (cynically, the very name implied that the office-bearer would need to be corrupt to make any sort of decent living, so incurring a history of criminality that could always be dredged up against them if they ever stepped out of line later). He’d become an Ovate, worked his way through the many gradations of that estate, then ascended to the office of Diegesian, in charge of a district of a city, then a small industrial city, then a medium-sized city, then a large city, then a continental capital. He became an Apparitor when his immediate superior died in the arms of a shared lover. That lover did very well for a while — his consort, in effect — then grew demanding and met an untimely end too.
His father had never told him if he’d had her killed. Equally, he’d never told his father that the woman had lately become his lover, too.
From Apparitor his father rose to Peregal, in charge of first an orbiting fab\hab cluster, then a continent, then a sizeable moon, with all the trappings of power and wealth and glamour such a post presented in a thriving, connected set of systems such as Leseum. At this point, for the first time in his life, his father had appeared finally to appreciate the position he’d reached. He’d seemed to relax and start enjoying life.
It ended there. Finally setting himself up for the next jump, to Hierchon, his father, who had amassed a great fortune dispensing charters and contracts to the merchants and manufacturers of the many systems, took pity on a favoured Apparitor who was somewhat down on his luck, cut him in on a deal and a kickback he didn’t really need to and found himself denounced, tried and beheaded for gross corruption within a month. The same young Apparitor then took his position.
Luseferous, convinced from early on that he could never compete with his father in his own sphere, and anyway always intrigued by the nature of religion and faith, had joined the Cessoria a few years earlier. He’d been a Piteer, a junior priest, at the time of his father’s trial. They had made him one of his father’s confessors, and he’d accompanied him to the execution ring. His father had been brave at first, then he’d broken. He’d started crying, begging, promising anything (but only all the things he’d already lost). He clutched at Luseferous’s robes, howling and beseeching, burying his face. Luseferous knew they were watching him, that this moment was important for his future. He pushed his father away.
His rise through the Cessoria was swift. He would never be as powerful as his father, but he was clever and capable and respected and on an upward course within an important but not too dangerous part of one of the greatest meta-civilisations the galaxy had seen. He might have been content with that, and never put himself in a position of weakness the way his father had.
Then the Disconnect happened. A swathe of portal destruc- tion had swung across the million-star volume all around Leseum back in the time of the Arteria Collapse, leaving only the bunched Leseum systems themselves connected inside a vast volume of backwardness. The system of Leseum9 had been important, seemed vital and felt unthreatened until their own disconnect came millennia later, courtesy of some vast bicker within the ongoing chaos of the Scatter Wars, an essentially meaningless difference of opinion between three pretending sides which until then practically nobody had heard of. By the time it was all over, nobody would hear of those sides again, save as history. The damage was done, though; the portal near Leseum9 had been destroyed and an enormous volume around it had been cut off from the rest of the civilised galaxy.
Everything changed then, including what you had to do to retain power, and who might contest for absolute power.
His father, nevertheless, had taught Luseferous everything, one way or another, and one of the most important things was this: there was no plateau. In life, you were either on your way up or on your way down, and it was always better to be on your way up, especially as the only reliable way to keep going up was to use other people as stepping stones, as platforms, as scaffolding. The old saying about being nice to people on the way up so that they’d be nice to you when you were on your way back down was perfectly true, but it was a defeatist’s saying, a loser’s truism. Better to keep going up for ever, never to rest, never to relax, never to have to descend. The thought of what might happen to you at the hands of those you’d already offended, exploited and wronged on the way up — those that still lived — was just another incentive for the serious player never even to think about easing off the pace, let alone starting to fall back. The dedicated competitor would keep presenting himself with new challenges to take on and conquer, he would seek out new levels to ascend to, he would always look for new horizons to head towards.
Treat life like the game it was. This might be the truth behind the Truth, the religion Luseferous had been raised within as an obedient member of the Mercatoria: that nothing you did or seemed to do really mattered, because it was all — or might be all — a game, a simulation. It was all, in the end, just pretend. Even this Starveling cult he was titular head of was just something he’d made up because it sounded good. A variation of the Truth with added self-denial every now and again, the better to contemplate the gullibility of people. People would swallow anything, just anything at all. Apparently some people found this dismaying. He thought it was a gift, the most wonderful opportunity to take advantage of the weak-minded.