Margaret Ball

“I don’t know how they find things out so quickly, but haven’t you ever noticed how mercenary troops show up about three minutes after somebody’s decided to increase the war budget?”

“Allie decided that she didn’t understand anything that was going on and didn’t really care. Especially if the sequence of events ended in a hot bath.”

“It was one long scene of unrelieved misery; not the sort of thing a man of his position should ever be subjected to. One knew that these things happened in war, of course; they were regrettable but necessary. But one preferred not to experience them at first hand.”

“For once his years of teaching experience stood him in good stead; he was an old hand at sounding knowledgeable while dodging surprise questions from smart-breeched scholars.”

““You tried to warn me about Aigar. All of you did. And I didn’t want to believe you.”“Loyalty is no crime,” Domerc said gently.“Totally idiotic, unreasoning loyalty is. Or ought to be,” Allie said.”

“Savaric never let reality interfere with his assumption that he and his ways were naturally superior to anyone else’s way of doing things and that everybody else in the world was either a dolt or a weakling.”

“Well, that was interesting. The question she really wanted to ask was, How come you people take all this so seriously? But that wasn’t in the book.”

“At least some of the techniques she’d learned at Valley View still worked. If you talked nonsense long enough and looked like being a major interruption to the day’s work, they would send you on to somebody else. And when they ran out of somebody elses to send you to, the last one would sign whatever it was needed signing just to get you to go away.”

“You’d know that if you’d studied something useful like engineering instead of, what is it this year, Down With Dead White Males, or whatever they call your artsy-fartsy curriculum.”