Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  This was Haven’s infamous dead court. It was said they had been the leaders of the last rebellion in the final days of Azrael’s ascension, the faces and voices of a people who had sworn they would never surrender. Once, they had stood in ruins and made speeches about the sanctity of British soil and a human spirit that would never die. Now they were here, laughing at jokes no one was telling and eating food they no longer needed…

  The food.

  Suddenly, it was everywhere Lan looked, more food than all of Norwood could eat in a year. Whole roasted birds decorated with gold-dusted feathers. Long platters where cooked eels ‘swam’ in sauce. Pies baked in the shape of the animals whose meat stuffed them. Hot soups and cold ones. Glazed onions and stuffed mushrooms and buttered carrots and for what? For who? Even the Eaters had only been made to feel hunger, not succumb to it. None of the dead needed to eat and yet, here they were, eating it. Was there another room just as grand elsewhere in the palace where they could go to sick up their fine dinners? Could the dead even be sick or did they have to stick a hose down their gullets and suck it up mechanically? What if they ate too much? If a dead man accidentally burst his bowels, was that a medical emergency or was it just rude?

  She knew she was staring, and at first, she thought they were looking at her too, but quickly realized their averted eyes and little nods were for Batuuli, who did not acknowledge them in the slightest. And when she had swept past, they merely returned to their conversations and their unnecessary meals. Now and then, a dead eye might linger, but only as an idle curiosity, the same as if Lan were a dog that had nosed the door open and come slinking in. She ought not to be here, was the unspoken consensus, but one did not scold dogs when at another man’s table, even muddy strays.

  Once upon a time, Lan would have been the reason these same people claimed the fight was so important. Now she was a dog in the dining room and they were Azrael’s court.

  Batuuli’s long strides had not slowed. Lan followed her around the stage—the flute-player’s hanging sleeve brushed at Lan’s cheek like a spiderweb—and there he was, alone at the imperial table upon a raised dais. Azrael himself.

  He did not deign to notice her yet. All his attention remained fixed on the musicians. This gave her the chance to stare at him, but the room was so big and there was still so much space between them that she could see nothing but what she’d seen already in pictures: the figure of a man, a god of men, his body carved to appear at once gaunt and grotesquely muscled. He wore few coverings and most of these were plunder—a collar made of slabs of gold resting heavily over his broad chest, a jeweled band high on one arm, a plated belt and long, many-layered loincloth weighted with gold rings. And the mask, of course. In all the pictures she’d ever seen, he was masked, usually the golden one with horns he’d worn during his ascension (he was wearing that one in the picture that hung on the sheriff’s wall), but today, his mask was made of stone and largely featureless—a smooth darkish oval with sockets for eyes, a bump of a nose, a lipless suggestion of a mouth. If anyone had ever seen the true face of Azrael, Lan had never heard about it.

  She was not aware that she had somehow stopped walking until Batuuli came back for her, rousing her from her fascination by snapping her fingers before Lan’s face. She startled, one hand instinctively drawing back in a fist while the other twitched back, reaching for the knife under her shirt before she remembered herself. “Sorry,” she said, but Batuuli had already turned and was walking away.

  Although her thoughtless gesture was not worthy of Batuuli’s attention, it had certainly drawn other eyes. Not Azrael’s, his never left the stage, but Lord Solveig raised a hand to silence the chatter at his table and smiled at her.

  She knew him at once, as she’d known Batuuli. She had seen him many times, in the pages of magazines, before folk stopped printing them. He had been at Azrael’s right hand when his army had walked out of the Channel that winter’s day and first set foot on British soil; she had seen him with his clothes hanging damp and his hair slicked and dripping, puking his lungs empty as he pulled himself from the water. She had seen him on the streets of Haven, before it was Haven, on a mountain of rubble that used to be homes, stabbing a bayonet into some dark nook where a tiny arm reached blindly out for light. She had seen him on the day Azrael took the palace, years before she was even born, and he looked just the same.

  Now he sat in a high-backed chair with one leg thrown carelessly over its gilded arm, surrounded by dead men and women as beautiful as he, eating food he didn’t need and drinking wine instead of boiled water, smiling at her, but he said nothing. He looked at his father and waited.

  His was one of only three tables that lined the eastern wall, larger and more elaborately appointed than those they faced, which were themselves noticeably richer than those in the southern end of the hall. Odd that his Children should be seated here and not with him at the imperial table, where there was more than enough room, but then, where would their retinue sit? There were eight at Lord Solveig’s table and twelve at Batuuli’s, which table Lan identified not only by the empty chair at its center, but by Batuuli’s handmaidens taking up position behind it, making up a backdrop of lithesome bodies and filmy white tunics.

  The last of Azrael’s three Children sat alone, neither pretending to eat the food nor enjoy the music. Lady Tehya had no companions to fill the empty chairs around her, although she had handmaidens of a sort—a half-dozen dead children painted white to look like statues. Like her father, she went masked, although hers was painted to look like a fine doll’s: bone white, with dark lining around the eyes, a perfect heart of a mouth, and two startling pink circles for cheeks. She raised her head as Lan walked by, and as their eyes met, Lady Tehya reached up and removed her porcelain mask; the face beneath was painted just the same, but cracked all over. And then she realized it wasn’t paint. Tehya’s face…was broken. Her skin, smooth and white and clean, had been shattered the same as one of the mayor’s fine plates and mended again, just like a plate, with glue.

  Lan was not aware of shying away until she bumped the arm of her guard. The dead man gave her a shove to put her back in line, so that she stumbled hard against her other guard, who also shoved her. Down she went on her hands and knees, but she’d hardly hit the floor before she was hauled roughly up, not quite to her feet, so that she couldn’t walk at all but had to be dragged.

  Lady Batuuli reached the end of the aisle and went to her empty chair, ignoring her father, who ignored her. Lan’s guards continued on another few steps before they finally set Lan on her feet, only to knock them out from under her. One of them put a hand on the back of her neck, forcing her to bow as she knelt on her throbbing knees. Lan peeked up through her hair as best she could, trying hard not to resist, but Azrael paid her no attention. From behind the sockets of his mask, white light glowed; if that was his gaze, it remained fixed on the orchestra. The clawed finger of one hand tapped time as he listened to the music, acknowledging neither his fidgeting guards nor the living Lan between them. Now and then, he used a knife and fork to cut a bite from one of the many platters orbiting the golden-roasted pig’s head dominating the imperial table.

  The musicians played on and on. Slow and plunky, not Lan’s style. The flute in particular hit on her ear like a tiny barbed hammer, although she didn’t think that was the player’s fault. She appeared quite absorbed in her playing, not at all nervous and certainly not unskilled. Lan just didn’t care for the tune. Which was fine. They weren’t performing for her.

  At length, Azrael’s attention began to wander. Toward Lady Batuuli first, who ignored him, then to the pikemen flanking Lan, and finally to Lan herself. He raised one hand, palm up, and crooked a claw in silence. Four hands closed on Lan at once, pulling her up and jostling her between them in a circle so that she was fully displayed to their lord’s inspection. Azrael sipped at his wine while his unblinking gaze moved, point by point, all the way down to her shoes and all the way back up to her hair. The voice t
hat at last rolled out was, like his hands, cracked and grey and edged in points. “Who is this?”

  Freed at last to notice her, nearly every head at every table turned. The musicians played on.

  The guard on Lan’s left bowed low. “The human you requested, lord.”

  “Oh?” Azrael took up his golden cup and scraped a thumbclaw along the rim. “How odd that I do not recall making such a request.”

  “I’ve come to—” Lan began, but had to stop there when he held up a silencing hand.

  “Where did you find our guest?”

  “In the west hall, my lord,” the guard answered, now distinctly nervous.

  “The west hall…of the palace?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Lord Azrael,” said Lan. “I’ve come a long way to—”

  “And you brought her…here?” Azrael leaned forward with a narrowed gaze and just a hint of humor about his mouth. “Have I offended you in some fashion? Are you unhappy with my rule?”

  “My lord?”

  Two more guardsmen were coming toward them, silent in the few shadows of this luxuriant room, stalking Lan’s escorts like hungry cats.

  “I have given you the gift of this enduring life and the honor of serving me, and you have never given me cause to regret that decision, yet when you find an assassin in my home and you elect to bring her within killing distance of her target, that can only be an act of incompetence or betrayal. Which is it?”

  “I’m not an assassin.”

  “Be silent or be silenced,” Azrael said, never taking his eyes off her guards. “You were not raised for this duty. I understand that you may not have the aptitude for it. And that…that is my failing. But you have served me well until now. I am disposed to be lenient. What punishment, therefore, seems fitting to you?”

  The two dead men, now with guards of their own at their backs, could only stand in the glow of those eyes. One of them thought to say, “Forgive us, lord,” but the other merely bent his neck and closed his eyes.

  “Forgive? No. Offenses—” His eyes moved to Lady Batuuli. “—must be addressed. Would you not agree, daughter?”

  “What matter my opinion?”

  “Did they not come in your company?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps they came at my command, is that what you think?” Batuuli breathed out a cool laugh and tasted her wine. “I cannot walk in the arboretum without earning your rebuke, yet you think I can hire out for assassins at will?”

  “I’m not—”

  Azrael pointed at her without taking his eyes from his daughter. Lan shut her mouth and calmed her rising frustration with deep breaths.

  “I found them in the hall,” Batuuli said. “I know no more of their circumstance than you, but this I can say, since you ask. However murderous the girl may or may not be, the fact that she has been allowed to come before you at all, unchallenged, unsearched, can only mean someone in this room wishes you dead.”

  Azrael studied her with less emotion than showed on his stone mask. “A foolish wish. Yet someone might easily repent of it.”

  Lady Batuuli laughed and tossed her elaborate braids. “Oh Father! I say again, this is not my doing. I would never send an assassin against you, surely you know that!” She took another small sip of wine and smiled. “I would much rather kill you myself.”

  Lan looked at her, startled.

  Azrael merely nodded, unsurprised. “So be it. Take them to the garrison. I’ll be along presently. And you, to your chambers,” he told Batuuli as the dead men were marched away. “There you will stay under watch until you have earned release.”

  “Shall I? And here I thought I would be punished.” Lady Batuuli rose, looking over at the table where Lord Solveig sat and watched all this play out with a bored eye. “Will you join me in exile, brother? Unless you’d rather stay and enjoy our dear father’s company.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Solveig said, idly fondling a courtier’s breast while staring too directly at Lan. “I quite like the company tonight.”

  Azrael’s eyes sparked brighter through the sockets of his mask. He raised a hand and every pikeman in the room came one step out from the wall.

  Solveig looked at each one in turn, then sent a crooked smile up at the imperial table. “Still haven’t forgiven me, eh?”

  Azrael waited, his hand motionless in the air, like the sharp points of all those pikes.

  “If it’s any consolation, she wasn’t that good.” Solveig pushed his chair back and stood, taking the bottle of wine with him. “I was disappointed, in fact. You’d think a warmblood would be…livelier.”

  Batuuli laughed with him and they left together, arm in arm, with their courtiers and servants trailing after. Azrael watched them go, glanced once at Lan, then looked at the last of his Children.

  Lady Tehya masked herself again.

  “Go, then,” said Azrael, taking up his cup.

  Lady Tehya held out her arms like a puppet on strings and let her head tip to an awkward angle. She jittered, then swept up onto her feet and sketched a doll’s bow in the direction of the imperial table. When she straightened again, her arms dropped and suddenly, without moving at all, she was no longer a puppet. She looked at her father without speaking as the rest of the room ate and drank and laughed. Then she turned, beckoning to her statue-children, who all fell into two neat rows behind her and followed her away.

  “Now,” said Azrael and turned his eyes at last on Lan. “Speak.”

  “Lord Azrael,” she began.

  “Am I?”

  Again, she stuttered to a stop. “Huh?”

  “Am I your lord? I have never been titled by the living. Indeed, when last I spoke with the emissaries of Men, I was told they would never acknowledge nor submit to my right of rule.” His gaze moved over his dead court. Where his eye lingered, dead men and women bowed from their chairs and showed him fawning smiles. “They were wrong, as things turned out. But if the living can bring themselves to at last admit their defeat, I suppose I can be gracious enough to accept their honorifics.” He looked at her again. “Am I now lord over the living as well as the dead? Shall I send my Revenants to hear the oaths of my full people? Shall they ask a tribute in my name? Or yours?”

  “I…”

  “I am not made foolish by empty praise, nor by titles no Man would honor. Do not insult me so again.” His claw tapped at the side of his cup. “Who are you?”

  “Lan.”

  Faceless, he nevertheless registered some modicum of interest. “I’ve not heard that one. I shall have to add it to the great book.”

  “It’s short for Lanachee.”

  “Even better.” He looked her over, dredging a bit of bread through the sauce that had pooled around the pig’s head before slipping it between the stone lips of his mask. Sauce, as thick and red as blood, oozed out through the dry edges of that gruesome wound and trickled down the side of his throat. “Does it have some meaning?”

  “It’s where my mother lived as a child. The town or maybe the state, I don’t remember. She came over from America, before they knew it wasn’t just there.”

  “How fortuitous. There is little left of that land.”

  “There’s little left of any of them.”

  A few courtiers murmured at this bold statement, but Azrael himself merely grunted and helped himself to the pig’s right eye. “I left them more than they deserve. You’ve come a long way, you say.” The left eye. “Whence?”

  “Norwood.”

  A smattering of derisive laughter let her know which of the courtiers knew where that was, but Azrael merely tipped his head. “Distance is relative, I suppose, but that sounds more like a long time than a long distance. How long have you been traveling? Do you know?”

  “Two months. If I could—”

  “How do you know?”

  She blinked at him, flustered. “What do you mean?”

  “How do you know it has been two months? I confess, I rather thought time would be among th
e first of Man’s conceits to be surrendered in the age of my ascension. One day is so much like another. How do you count them?”

  He was making fun of her, he had to be…but she couldn’t see the joke and what little she could read of his masked face showed only curiosity. “By the moon,” Lan said at last. “I left Norwood at New Crow Moon and it’s past Full Milk Moon now.”

  “Those are farming names.” Azrael eyed her with greater interest. “Do they farm in Norwood?”

  “Yes. My mother and I had a small orchard.”

  “Of?”

  “Peaches. Lord Azrael, if you would—”

  “In what state?”

  “What?”

  “The peaches,” Azrael said patiently as the members of his court snickered and whispered at each other. “In what state of growth did you leave your family orchard?”

  “It…Fruiting,” she stammered, utterly nonplussed by this line of questioning. “There’s always some in fruit. We use greenhouses.”

  “Ah. Yes, I suppose you’d have to, in this cursed climate. Did you bring any?”

  “I…I traded them to the ferrymen.”

  “Pity. I had a peach once. I remember it fondly.” He beckoned to a servant. “Fetch Deimos. All the same, two months is a suspiciously long time to travel from Norwood to Haven,” he continued as the servant left. “Did you walk?”

  “Part of the way. Please, can I just—”

  “How many days would you say you walked?”

  Lan gave up with a stifled sigh of frustration and said, “Six. From Norwood to Ashcroft.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “I took ferries.”

  “Ah.” Azrael tore a strip of meat from the boar’s head and dredged it through the sauce pooled on the platter, but didn’t eat it. “So in point of fact, you have neither come a long way nor traveled a long time. You have walked a little, rode a little and mostly waited.”

  Laughter swelled again along the tables flanking her. Lan just stood there, feeling heat crawl in her cheeks.