Ferbin said, “Can you, will you help?”
“In what way?”
“Will you return to the Eighth with me to help avenge my father’s murder?”
Hyrlis sat back. He shook his head. “I cannot, prince. I am needed here, committed here. I work for the Nariscene, and even if I wanted to I could not return to Sursamen in the near or medium future.”
“Are you saying you do not even want to?” Ferbin asked, not hiding his displeasure.
“Prince, I am sorry to hear your father is dead, sorrier still to hear of the manner of it.”
“You have said so, sir,” Ferbin told him.
“So I say it again. Your father was a friend of mine for a short while and I respected him greatly. However, it is not my business to right wrongs occurring deep inside a distant Shellworld.”
Ferbin stood up. “I see I misunderstood you, sir,” he said. “I was told you are a good and honourable man. I find I have been misinformed.”
Holse stood up too, though slowly, thinking that if Ferbin was to storm out — though God knew to where — he had best accompany him.
“Hear me out, prince,” Hyrlis said reasonably. “I wish you well and tyl Loesp and his co-conspirators an undignified end, but I am unable to help.”
“And unwilling,” Ferbin said, almost spitting.
“Yours is not my fight, prince.”
“It should be the fight of all who believe in justice!”
“Oh, really, prince,” Hyrlis said, amused. “Listen to yourself.”
“Better than listening to you and your insulting complacency!”
Hyrlis looked puzzled. “What exactly did you expect me to do?”
“Something! Anything! Not nothing; not just sit there and smirk!”
“And why aren’t you doing something, Ferbin?” Hyrlis asked, still reasonable. “Might you not have been more effective staying on the Eighth rather than coming all this way to see me?”
“I am no warrior, I know that,” Ferbin said bitterly. “I have not the skills or disposition. And I have not the guile to go back to the court and face tyl Loesp and pretend I did not see what I did, to plot and plan behind a smile. I’d have drawn my sword or put my hands on his throat the instant I saw him and I’d have come off the worse. I know that I need help and I came here to ask you for it. If you will not help me, kindly let us go from here and do whatever you might be able and willing to do to speed my journey to my sibling Djan Seriy. I can only pray that she has somehow escaped infection by this Cultural disease of uncaring.”
“Prince,” Hyrlis sighed, “will you please sit down? There is more to discuss; I might help you in other ways. Plus we should talk about your sister.” Hyrlis waved one hand at Ferbin’s seat. “Please.”
“I shall sit, sir,” Ferbin told him, doing so, “but I am grievously disappointed.”
Holse sat too. He was glad of this; the wine was very good and it would be a criminal shame to have to abandon it.
Hyrlis resumed his earlier pose, hands under chin. A small frown creased his brow. “Why would tyl Loesp do what he has done?”
“I care not!” Ferbin said angrily. “That he did it is all that matters!”
Hyrlis shook his head. “I must disagree, prince. If you are to have any chance of righting this wrong, you’d be well advised to know what motivates your enemy.”
“Power, of course!” Ferbin exclaimed. “He wanted the throne, and he’ll have it, the moment he’s had my young brother killed.”
“But why now?”
“Why not!” Ferbin said, clenched fists hammering at the unforgiving stone of the great table. “My father had done all the work, the battles were all won, or as good as. That’s when a coward strikes, when the glory might be stolen without the bravery that afforded it.”
“Still, it is often easier to be the second in command, prince,” Hyrlis said. “The throne is a lonely place, and the nearer you are to it the clearer you see that. There are advantages to having great power without ultimate responsibility. Especially when you know that even the king does not have ultimate power, that there are always powers above. You say tyl Loesp was trusted, rewarded, valued, respected… Why would he risk that for the last notch of a power he knows is still enchained with limitations?”
Ferbin sat boiling with frustration but had resolved not to say anything this time. This only gave occasion for Hyrlis to look to the side and say quietly, “Do you know? Do you look there? Are you allow—?”
Ferbin could stand it no longer. “Will you stop talking to these phantoms!” he shouted, springing up again, this time so quickly his chair toppled over. Holse, having taken the opportunity to sip from his glass at what had seemed a handily quiet moment, had to gulp and stand quickly too, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “These imagined demons have stolen what wits you ever had, sir!”
Hyrlis shook his head. “Would that they were imaginary, prince. And if there are similar systems of observation within Sursamen, they might hold one key to your difficulty.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Ferbin hissed through clenched teeth.
Hyrlis sighed again. “Please, prince, do sit down again… No, no, I’ll stand,” he said, changing his mind. “Let’s all stand. And let me show you something. Please come with me. There is more to explain.”
The airship was a giant dark blister riding the poisoned air above a still glowing battlefield. They had been brought here in Hyrlis’ own small, svelte air vehicle, which had lifted silently from the bottom of another giant crater and flown whispering through clouds and smoke then clearer weather, chasing a ruddy sunset into a night whose far horizon was edged with tiny sporadic flashes of yellow-white light. Below them, rings and circles of dull and fading red covered the dark, undulating land. The airship was bright, all strung with lights, lit from every side and covered in reflective markings. It hung above the livid-bruised land like an admonition.
The little aircraft docked in a broad deck slung underneath the giant ship’s main body. Various other craft were arriving and departing all the time, arriving full of injured soldiers accompanied by a few medical staff and departing empty save for returning medics. Quiet moans filled the warm, smoke-scented air. Hyrlis led them via some spiralled steps to a ward full of coffin-like beds each containing a pale, squat, unconscious figure. Holse looked at the lifeless-looking people and felt envious; at least they didn’t have to stand up, walk around and climb stairs in this awful gravity.
“You know there is a theory,” Hyrlis said quietly, walking amongst the gently glowing coffin-beds, Ferbin and Holse at his rear, the four dark-dressed guards somewhere nearby, unseen, “that all that we experience as reality is just a simulation, a kind of hallucination that has been imposed upon us.”
Ferbin said nothing.
Holse assumed that Hyrlis was addressing them rather than his demons or whatever they were, so said, “We have a sect back home with a roughly similar point of view, sir.”
“It’s a not uncommon position,” Hyrlis said. He nodded at the unconscious bodies all around them. “These sleep, and have dreams inflicted upon them, for various reasons. They will believe, while they dream, that the dream is reality. We know it is not, but how can we know that our own reality is the last, the final one? How do we know there is not a still greater reality external to our own into which we might awake?”
“Still,” Holse said. “What’s a chap to do, eh, sir? Life needs living, no matter what our station in it.”
“It does. But thinking of these things affects how we live that life. There are those who hold that, statistically, we must live in a simulation; the chances are too extreme for this not to be true.”