“You flatter me, Sire,” Feck said, with only a trace of irony.
“Do I?” the king exclaimed. “Do I really? You have made a powerful enemy, sir, and it need not have been so. You'll learn just how flattering my attentions can be! But nevertheless, you have earned my respect, and that is a thing not lightly won.”
He took another step and stood before Eustace, who lay with her head in Feck's lap and her arm thrown across her face. “You,” he said, “are awfully young to have fallen in with a crowd like this. A pity you'll spend your formative years in such a noninformative environment. You have my sympathy, dear, and that is not lightly given either.”
“These sound like good-byes,” Xmary said.
“And so they are,” the king agreed. He strode farther around the room, to place a ghostly finger underneath Xmary's chin. “I have fond memories of you, little one, and I regret that we've not been better friends. Perhaps if we were, this sad affair would not have intruded on our reality.”
Xmary smiled thinly at that. “This is a point, Sire, which I fear you've never fully grasped. We haven't been friends, nor lovers, for the very same reason that we aren't allies now. Place the fault with me, if you like, but I don't have any other enemies that I'm aware of. Only you. My regret, Sire, is that you caught my adolescent eye before Conrad did. Feck and I have history as well, but notably, I feel no regrets about that.”
“Ouch,” Bascal said mildly. “You wound me, and deliberately so. I've never sought your pain, Xiomara, nor anyone else's. But I do not shrink from it, either. The avoidance of pain at all costs . . . well, that has a name. It's cowardice, and I have no wish to embrace it. So fare thee well, my dear, until we meet again.”
Conrad sat up in his couch. “You're just going to erase yourself?” This was an idea he couldn't stomach even now: disposable people. This was of course a matter of choice, deeply personal for everyone who made it, but no one could stop him from being offended.
The king smiled. “I wish I could hug you, Conrad, or tip a glass and be drunk. We remain good friends, don't we? You could put a knife to my very throat—you could cut my throat—and still I'd seek your advice, your humor, your warmth. ‘What do I do now, boyo? Bleed to the left? To the right?' Does this say more, I wonder, about you or about me?”
“It says something,” Conrad answered with a helpless shrug. It was true; time and circumstance had gotten between the two of them many times, but had never truly separated them. It was tragic, in a way. For both.
“Yes,” Bascal said, “I shall erase myself forthwith, having spent enough years on this ship for one lifetime already. Even an immorbid lifetime! Good-bye, First Architect, and farewell. We'll meet again if it's within King Bascal's power. This much I promise in his name. Though he knows it not, and I shall not remember, you may keep this promise close to your heart.”
“Don't be like that,” Conrad said, suddenly intense and sincere. “No one wants your blood. We can set aside a bit of wellstone to store your recording, and if we arrive safely at Sol, I'll transmit you back at my own expense. You'll be home before you draw your next virtual breath. Even the awful moments of our lives are precious, Bas. Don't throw them away.”
The recording looked at him silently for several seconds, then finally said, “That's a kind offer, sir, and will not be forgotten when the final tallies are weighed. It's also a pointless gesture, but it does indeed make a difference to me personally. I will do as you say, with your captain's permission.”
“Granted,” Xmary said tiredly.
The king's smile turned genuine then, and he stared expansively around the observation deck—indeed, around the whole ship. “If every subject in my kingdom were as brave and as kind as you traitors and dogs, I should have no worries for the future. Very well, then. Let's do this thing before I offend you further, and the offer is withdrawn. Feck, if you will assist me?”
Feck nodded. “Sure thing, Bascal. For old times' sake.”
“A fine reason to do anything, since it's more the old times than the new ones that define who we are. Lead on, please.”
And so Feck got up and left the room, with both Bascal and Eustace trailing behind. Not that Eustace could expect to help, but perhaps being so young, so burning with passion, she couldn't bear to be parted from her husband for more than a few minutes. Either that, or she sensed that Conrad and Xmary might want some time alone. Either motive spoke highly of her, Conrad supposed. Perhaps she would be a fine officer one day, a fine human being. There would be plenty of time to find that out.
Sighing, Xmary got up from her couch and plopped herself down in Conrad's lap. “Look at those stars,” she said quietly. “Never moving, never changing. Seven hundred years from now, we'll look out the same window and see the same view.”
“It'll change a little,” Conrad assured her.
“Don't be a smartass, all right? I'm not in the mood. This seems a very sad way for things to end, after such a promising beginning.”
And here, in spite of everything, Conrad couldn't help but laugh. “Is that any way for an immorbid person to talk? Young lady, darling, baby doll, this is still the beginning of our lives. If there are endings, they're unguessably far in the future.”
He squeezed her for a long, fond moment before adding, “This thing is just getting started.”
And history may remark at length upon the errors of Conrad Mursk, but assuredly, this statement is not among them.
epilogue
Chapter twenty-six.
In which the footsoldiers of an army are confronted
The “base” of this Aden Plateau, Bruno muses, is more properly an inflection point, where the concave-down shape of the bluff itself gives way to the wrinkled but generally concave-up terrain of the basin beneath. The city of Timoch is still visible in the distance, through the tree line running along the bluff's base, but he sees that if they travel much farther, those towers will disappear behind forests and ridges, not reappearing until the two men are much closer.
Not that they will get any closer. Not that they will have that opportunity.
“Is there a road?” he asks his old architect, Conrad Mursk, whose name, like his face, has worn down over time. Like the moon itself, yes, it has been crushed to half its normal width, made denser and more gravid. Radmer, indeed. A strange—yet strangely appropriate—abbreviation.
“Aye, there is a road,” Radmer agrees. “But we'll have to cut several miles to the north to reach it. And the enemy patrol, I'm afraid, is directly in our path. I tried to skirt around them, but—”
“But I am too slow for you,” Bruno finishes. “My apologies, Architect. Or should I say ‘General'?”
Radmer shakes his head. “I've been neither thing for many centuries, Sire. These days I'm a . . . a hobo, I guess you'd say. Though I don't like the sound of the word, particularly when applied to myself.”
Bruno, who has never had much patience with self-effacement, says, “I'm confident you are much more than that, sir, and I do not require you to pretend otherwise.”
He hefts his only weapon: an iron bar with a T-handle at one end and a slight, pointed curve at the other which Radmer has identified as a “trenching hook.” Radmer himself carries a small pistol and a satchel of “glue bombs,” plus a kind of stubby blitterstaff with a lightly weighted pommel and a basket handle. Bruno asks, “How long before this battle commences? I cannot see our enemies, and do not know how fast they move.”