A Practical Dialogue on the Philosophy of War, 4E199

19 Morning Star, 4E199

“Have you ever wondered why the Daedra are all just horrible creatures?”

The cold night air whistled through the trees. The two of us were on our fifth day of skulking silently in the barren forest perhaps a mile north of the Thalmor Embassy. We were not on an errand of diplomacy.

I whispered back. “It’s freezing cold, my fingers are turning blue, building a fire is out of the question, we’re wearing camouflage that keeps none of this damn breeze out, if we get spotted we’ll be killed – probably long after they make us wish we were dead – and you want to talk philosophy? Shut up.”

He shrugged. “There’s nobody anywhere near here yet, and talking keeps me warm. But fine, how about something your depressingly unimaginative brain can handle. In the parts of Tamriel which bother to set rules on hunting, the rules are set such that only the male creatures of rare populations may be hunted. But rewards are given for hunting the female creatures of pest species. Do you know why?”

“I don’t really care about that either, but if it gets the talking out of your system I’ll bite. Why?”

“Because,” he said, “only females can reproduce. Kill ninety out of a hundred males and the next generation will be just as big as it would have been if you did nothing. The remaining ten males can and will impregnate everybody, and they’ll enjoy doing it. Kill the females and it doesn’t matter how many males there are. The next generation will be smaller, because there are fewer females to produce them.”

A fox trotted by a hundred yards away and stopped and looked directly at us. I nodded in its direction. My companion became silent. he hand inched down to a phial on his belt and he dipped the tip of his finger in an alchemical potion purpose-brewed for people who wished not to be noticed. He breathed the warmth of his breath on the drop of liquid. The air smelled briefly of wet earth. The fox seemed to look through us, and wandered off.

“Lovely. Your point?” I asked.

“Just this. You and I have been laboriously soaking cotton cloths in acid, forming them into bricks, sealing them in wax, and placing fifty pounds of them in a well-disguised pile just beside the road to the embassy. Elenwen will pass by with her retinue on her way back to the embassy, we will fire a single flaming arrow into the pile from a few hundred yards away, we will dive for cover, and in an instantaneous flash that will probably be seen and heard over all of Haafingar, she and the rest of the vicinity will be converted into a large smoldering crater. Ulfric will probably promote us himself. But my point is that we’ve probably been thinking incorrectly about this war. The Elvish reproductive cycle is slow, and a given Elvish woman will only produce a few children. And yet in war, we fight the men. We’re going to blow up Ambasador Elenwen, which will be no small victory. But in the grand scheme of things, isn’t depriving the Thalmor of her children probably an even greater victory in the long term?”

I shifted uncomfortably. “War has rules, and we’re probably on the wrong side of them as it is. I wouldn’t want to make a habit of targeting women, especially not targeting them just because they’re women.”

“Then let me answer my own question from earlier. The Daedra are all horribly unpleasant creatures because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t have survived. Love and sacrifice are good things, and the spirits who embody those qualities naturally gave themselves up for us and they now exist,” he nodded at the sky, “up there. Not as active, localized living creatures. The spirits who didn’t sacrifice are still around as Daedra. It’s not that the Daedra all just happen to be awful, it’s just that the awful ones survived.” He looked at me significantly. “We have to survive.”

“Still…” I said before trailing off. I paused for a while and gave it some thought. “I don’t know. I’ll worry about it later.” I handed him my flask. “Drink?”

“Sure,” he said. I listened to the insects chirp and looked up at the sky. Dibella hung in the sky overhead. As a planet she added to the peaceful beauty of the night, but the wonders of nature were not the kind of beauty I missed after almost a week in the frozen wilderness. I contemplated this for a few minutes. “It is a nice night though, cold as it is,” I said.

No response. I jabbed him hard with my elbow and spoke louder. “Hey, wake up.” No response. “All right,” I told him, “here’s some philosophy for you. In war, agents of subterfuge like you and me seek to attack the enemy. But but by the very fact of the attack, the enemy will learn of his vulnerability and defend it such that it cannot be attacked again. This is the central problem of counterintelligence – how to act against an enemy’s vulnerability without tipping off the enemy about it. If, for instance, I were actually working for Imperial intelligence I’d want to stop your plan without revealing that the utterly trustworthy Stormcloak who vouched for my devotion to the anti-Imperial cause was actually himself an Imperial asset. That’s a tricky problem.” His eyes tracked me but the rest of his body remained dead still. “Paralysis toxin in the drink. Nothing personal. Near as I can tell, the best thing is for us to accidentally blow ourselves up in the process of setting this trap for poor Elenwen. The crater will prevent anyone from knowing I wasn’t actually killed in it along with you, so long as I don’t use this cover identity again.”

I dragged him the few hundred yards to the pile of explosives and set a candle on the bomb. It would burn down in about an hour. Looking down at him, I said, “Honestly I’m no friend of the Thalmor. But the Empire is our best hope, and I fight for it. We have to survive.”