“Oh, that is such pigshit! When I set a trap and a rat walks into it, I don’t stand there and say I didn’t kill it. I used a trap, but I killed that rat. You can sit here in Haven and pretend you’re innocent, but you raised those fucking Eaters and they’re killing people, and that means you are killing people!”
Azrael snorted. Through the muzzle of his mask, it came out as more of a growl. “This is how they negotiate in Norwood, is it?”
“Stop making fun of me.”
“No, no, I think I prefer your method to the others I have known. An audience…” He folded his arms, tapping one claw against his bicep, then shrugged and nodded once. “So be it. Who are you?”
Flustered by this easy capitulation, Lan told him her name again.
He stopped with a raised hand, shaking his head. “Who are your people? Not the farmers of Norwood, but the greater sum? Whom do you represent as you kneel in chains to beg my mercy?”
Lan hesitated, then said boldly, “All of them.”
“No, no, truthfully now. The New Earth Alliance? The Republic of Aryan People? The Holy Soldiers of Rome? When I summon your leader to negotiate the terms of your surrender, whom shall I summon?”
Lan said nothing.
Azrael came toward her and bent low to look her over. The eyes she had first seen as pure white, she now saw were full of colors after all, buried beneath the pale glow and difficult to see: greens like swamp water, browns like clay, greys like water-logged flesh. These were death-colors, Lan realized, having believed all her life that death came in midnight blacks and blood reds, but no. Now she saw clearly that blood was life and night was only what there was when the sun went down. Death had its own color and it was the color glowing out of Azrael’s eyes.
He finished his inspection and smiled at her through the teeth of the wolf’s-head mask. “Did you come alone, child?”
Lan refused to look away, but she could feel the burn of a blush in her cheeks. “Someone had to.”
“And it was you. What a splendidly useless gesture. No matter. There will be no negotiations. I have already defeated you. I do not care if you surrender. Enough of this.” He reached out and caught her by the chin, putting their faces very close together. His gaze was hard to meet, not just for their color or the unnatural heat that came from those white fires, but for the hunger she saw there. “Shall you?” he asked quietly. “Say no and the game is done. I’ll not force you. I’ll not starve you or whip you or have you thrown screaming to the mindless dead that scavenge without my walls. I’ll put you in a car and send you home. Say no. Spit.” He shrugged with his chin, his eyes never leaving hers. “I have endured too much offense to be easily offended anymore. All you have to say is no.”
“And if I say yes?”
He inclined his head slightly. “We negotiate.”
“What do I have to do?”
“All that I ask. It will be unpleasant, but you will be well-compensated for your compliance.” His hand opened slowly and just brushed at the line of her jaw. His fingers were rough, rough as stone, but his touch was gentle. “I’ll take nothing you do not give me.”
She could see herself reflected in the dark surface of his mask, distorted, grotesque. Her eyes were bulging sockets. Her mouth, a clownish leer. She couldn’t do this—wouldn’t do this, but what she saw her malformed reflection say was no heated refusal, only a small, stuttering, “I don’t…know if I can.”
He smiled and his smile was horribly sympathetic. “A trial, then.” He straightened and gestured to his groin. “Please me and be rewarded.”
“With what?”
He spread his open hands. “What would you have? And appreciate, if you will, that I could promise you any number of things to win the privilege of your body’s pleasures, but I choose to treat with you honestly.”
She didn’t know what to ask for, so she returned to the one thing she knew that mattered. “A hearing.”
“You have already had it,” he said, with some exasperation.
“A fair hearing.”
“Implying what? That I was less than fair in my assessment of your circumstance?”
“You asked me what I wanted.”
“You try my patience, child, and I warn you, it may be a deep well, but it is not bottomless. If this is not the audience you insist upon—” He caught her chin and pushed her head back, forcing her to look past his thickening cock to the sullen embers of his eyes far above. “—what is it?”
Lan raised her arms in clanking chains. “Captivity.”
“So then. As my prisoner, you think to set the terms of your imprisonment?”
“You can do a lot of things to me,” Lan said, as neutrally as possible, “and I’ll lie there and take most of them, but if you really want this, you’re going to have to give me what I want.”
“How very dramatic.”
“No matter what you do to me, you can’t force me to suck your cock without my permission.”
“I would not force you in any—” Azrael broke off and gazed at her a long time while fire smoldered in the fathoms of his eyes. “You threaten to bite,” he said at last.
“It’s not a threat. A threat is something that might happen. I absolutely will bite if you force your cock into my mouth and I don’t care what you do afterwards. But hear me out, let me at least try to convince you, and I will do whatever you want not only willingly but with enthusiasm.”
“You have been trying to convince me. It has not made you biddable.”
“You’ve been refusing me out of hand and twisting my words around.”
“You forbid me to refute your childish idealism? This is the fair hearing you suggest?”
“You don’t like it? Plumb some other pipe. I’ve only got the one with teeth.”
“Is that a challenge?”
This time, it was Lan who shrugged.
They stared each other down in silence.
Azrael released her and hunkered down, letting his arms rest on his bent knees, his hands dangling and claws flexing between his thighs. “An audience,” he said.
“Yes.”
“To beg my mercy and—finding it, one assumes—end the suffering of your kind.”
“Yes.”
“Fairly and reasonably, I say to you that I did not seek to make Man suffer at my ascension.”
“Okay, so I admit you didn’t start the war. I’ll even go so far as to say the people who provoked you deserved your vengeance, but not the whole world and not forever! Anything you could have called a war has been over for years, but only you can end it.”
“What is it you would call an ending?” he asked with some asperity. “No, do not answer. Hear me.” He paused, thinking, then raised a hand and gestured vaguely where his heart might be, if he had one. He said, “Let us imagine that I possess mercy. Let us imagine further that your fleshly pleasures earn my favor and I am moved to grant your every appeal. Say that I put an end to the creatures you call ‘Eaters’ and recall my Revenants to Haven, there forevermore to dwell apart from the living race of Man. How many days of peace will you guess I am given before the gratitude of your kind brings them once more to my threshold to murder my children? Mm? To murder me?”
Lan did not answer, but didn’t drop her eyes either.
“You speak of ending the horrors of your existence.” Azrael’s mouth twisted behind his mask, making the exposed tendons in his throat creak. “I am one of those horrors. They will not end for your people until I am ended and I can never end. So. Unless you have some fair and reasonable rebuttal, I believe our audience is concluded.” He stood. The thick shaft of his organ hung before her eyes, gnarled with scars even there. “I will now hear negotiation for your personal surrender.”
“Will you unchain me?”
“I can be persuaded.” He gestured to himself.
Lan reached up her hand and touched him. He was surprisingly cool; she’d expected that of dead flesh, like the ferryman who had brought her here, but even c
ompared to him, he was cool. It was not merely the lack of warmth, but as if he actually radiated cold. More than that, there was a strangeness to the feel of him. He was at once too smooth and too twisted. Unnatural. Worse than that. Anti-natural, if that was a word.
He hardened quickly as she stroked him, but even that unnerved her. He was much, much harder than human flesh could be and there was no pulse to be felt just below his thick, scarred skin. When he had risen fully, she licked her mouth for moisture, rose higher on her aching knees, and fastened her lips to his swollen head. He tasted of ashes and bones. She shut her eyes and went to work, grimly wetting the full length of his shaft with long, slow swirls of her tongue, but his strange skin dried quickly, so that even the gentlest pass of her fist scraped on her ears. She soon abandoned the effort to suckle at him instead, managing with determination and no small pain to take perhaps half his cock into her mouth. She moved there for some time, claiming and reclaiming the same few inches while milking the rest in her fists.
“You promised me enthusiasm,” Azrael murmured, combing idly through her hair.
She pulled back enough to catch a breath and say, “My knees hurt,” before latching on again, this time suckling slow kisses all the way along his undershaft to his balls. They were very hard and smooth, like twinned eggs with just the thinnest velvet cover over them, and she spent some time there, pulling each one gently into her mouth for her tongue to tease while petting his cock where it rested in her hair.
“You have some skill at this,” Azrael remarked.
“I should. Would you like to know who taught me?” she asked, rising up on her knees to trap his cock between her breasts and bob slowly up and down. “Or how old I was?”
“Another appeal to my sympathies,” he explained to the empty room. “You can tell by the withering of my cock—” His cock was stone between her breasts. “—that I am deeply moved.”
Lan shrugged and bent her head so as to lick the very head of him whenever it pushed out into the open air. “I can’t help it if it sounds that way. I don’t think I could say anything about my life that wouldn’t. Or anyone else’s life, for that matter.”
“Shall we trade tales, you and I? Shall I tell you of my childhood and the games I was taught to play in those first years? Oh, I was a child once,” he said, seeing her startled upturned face. “I was never human, but I was of woman born. It is my first memory—pushed out into the light between the mountains of her thighs, the cold air and hot blood, and the screams. I remember that she held me, too weak to run, and her voice as she begged for my life was the same voice I had heard so long in the warm oceans of her womb. It lulled me and so I closed my infant eyes and did not see when the man took the stone from her small hearth and crushed her skull. Her blood fell across my face, blinding me with redness. Her brains fell into my mouth. Through this gore, I saw the man raise up the stone while every other man and woman among them did nothing, and I saw the stone grow huge as he brought it down.”
Azrael wrested himself from her slack, staring grip with just one backwards step. His eyes were burning brighter, lighting the ruins of his face and staining whatever his gaze raked across with faint crimson. “My bones do not break, but I felt the plates of my infant skull separate, heard the sound it makes, tasted my own blood in my mouth. All this, but I do not die. I have been burned, beaten, starved, crushed, stabbed, torn. Do you know, little one, the exquisite pain of drowning? Not for moments or even minutes, but for years? I have felt ice forming in my blood and smelled the smoke of my own flesh. I have worn chains until they rusted through!” He caught hers in his fist, gave them a derisive shake, then flung them at the footboard of his bed. “When at last they thought of entombing me, I embraced my captivity, though it meant aeons in the lonely dark, eternally dying of hunger and thirst, enduring the damp and the cold and the deafening silence, so tell me, o unhappy human, what is your suffering to mine?”
His voice had been rising throughout this terrible speech so that his last words were delivered at a bellow. Now his bedroom door banged open, spilling out half a dozen pikemen who all slid to an uncertain halt as they saw their Master, naked, erect and furious over his chained captive. Azrael threw them a snarl of dismissal and stalked away to the furthest point of the room while they bowed themselves out.
“Now they will wait in the hall all day,” he spat once the door had finally closed, “straining to hear my command to have you executed.”
“It doesn’t appear to be dampening your mood.”
He glared at her, then gave his undiminished erection a contemptuous half-wave. “Flesh has its own priorities. One learns to endure.” He eyed her sourly for a long span of uncomfortable quiet and then, with an air of one who knows better, said, “Are we done with this pointless game of yours?”
“I’m not playing one.”
“You are. You know that you will never win me to show mercy. You act the hero’s role surprisingly well, but if you know how it will end, you know also that it is an act. How long must we play it?”
“End the war. Take back your Eaters and let us die.”
“No.”
“Then I guess we keep playing until you kill me.”
“A particularly wasted move in the game, since no one is here to witness your sacrifice. Besides which, you cannot be a martyr to your fool’s cause unless I allow you to die.” He glanced at his stubbornly insistent cock. “You are losing my good humor. Now come, what is it you truly desire? You could have the meat of my table, the wine of my cup. You could have rooms of your own within these walls, servants to attend you, privilege beyond your most reckless imaginings. And you will have had worse lovers, I assure you. I have no pity, but I do know passion.”
“I want nothing but for you to end the war.”
“Never will I allow Man to take back his dominion over this earth. What bejeweled chalice,” he said suddenly, with more than an edge of frustration, “do you hold between your thighs that my sipping from it is worth so many lives?”
It was not clear whether he referred to the value of human lives, or the mindless residue possessed by the screaming Eaters. “I’ll do—”
“Whatever I ask,” he finished for her. “Do you imagine I have never had a willing woman? I have had five at once in that very bed, each of them vying for the privilege I offer you now. You’ve a mouth that I’m sure has paid for many, many bottles of water in the world outside, but here, it is just another mouth.”
“You’re interrupting me.”
His eyes narrowed. In pointed silence, he drew up his arms and folded them across his chest, staring down at her.
At last, she had to say it: “I’ll do whatever you ask.”
He let that weak conclusion sit awhile, making absolutely certain she was done before dryly saying, “My apologies. I did not realize the damage my interruption would do.” He glanced at his cock, then suddenly turned away, bellowing for his chamberlain.
The doors opened. A dead man bowed his way inside and began unobtrusively to collect Azrael’s discarded garments from the bath and select fresh ones from the wardrobe in the corner. When it was opened, she could see flashes of firelight reflected. There had been mirrors affixed to the doors once, but they had been broken and never replaced.
“Are you getting dressed?” Lan asked.
“Ha! And is there some reason I should not?”
“I’m willing—”
“So you’ve said. And said. And said. Indeed, I’ve heard so much talk of your willingness that I must take some time to ponder it lest some vital point slip my consideration. Guard! My guest would seem to prefer the meditation garden to my bedchamber. Escort her.”
“Wait—”
“It’s certain to be a cold day,” Azrael overrode her, “but there should still be a fire by which you might warm yourself. If it’s gone out, I’ll have another lit for you.”
To watch another man burn…from the beginning this time…in full daylight. She would have to see
hair melt and skin blacken, smell fat as it popped and crackled, and hear him scream until his lungs charred and split.
Her mother, writhing in flames…screaming…for hours…
“No,” Lan heard herself say.
The pikeman seized Lan’s arm and pulled her to her feet, forcing her either to stumble along beside him or be dragged.
“No!” Lan struggled to turn around, ducking her head in a futile attempt to evade her guard’s cuffs. “Please!”
The guard swung his pike around and raised the butt of it for a blow, only to just as suddenly lower it and step back with a bow. Lan staggered free of him, turning to see Azrael with his hand upraised, regarding her while his chamberlain continued silently to dress him.
“So you can beg,” he mused. “Although I note you do even that with an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Do you think you can refuse my table, refuse my bed, refuse even my garden, all with impunity? My hospitality is finite, child, and unless you can convince me otherwise, you have reached the end of it.”
“Please.”
“You’ll have to do better than that,” he warned her with a mocking smile. “Come, come. You cannot have run dry of stirring speeches already! Why, you’ve only just arrived.”
“I’ve seen so many fires,” she said, pushing the words through a throat much too small for them. “Please don’t make me. You can chain me up. You can do anything, just…please…no more fires.”
He gazed at her without moving for what seemed a long time as the pikeman held her in his dead grip, then said, “Take her to the Red Room,” and turned away.
* * *
The Red Room was at once the most opulent and least comfortable room in which Lan had ever slept, and that after all the hostel cells, ferry vans, abandoned city ruins and of course, the Women’s Lodge at Norwood, her home, and home to all the women and girls of the settlement who were unmarried and therefore vulnerable. There, only a few filthy curtains had separated the thin mattress where Lan and her mother slept from the others and each night’s sleep had been broken by the snores, whispers and errant kicks of her thrashing neighbors. Compared to that, the Red Room, even at scarcely ten paces wall to wall, was luxurious indeed, but it was not restful.
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 6
