Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “Your heart is more honest than your mouth,” he murmured. “It’s beating like a rabbit’s. Will you tell me again you have no fear of me?”

  “You had to work at it pretty hard.” Her voice broke on the last word as his hand moved again, sliding beneath her sleeve to loosen it. It fell down around her wrist, baring her shoulder, exposing her breast. “Why don’t you want me to look at you?”

  “In due time. We barter in pieces, remember?” He loosened the other sleeve. When it fell, he cupped her breasts in both hands, his gentle kneading interrupted now and then by the pricking of his claws at her nipples. “You’ll only close your eyes once you have to see me. Only now that I have said so, you won’t,” he added, letting her hear the twist of his smile at her back. “You’ll stare me down to prove how fearless you are, believing that will give you some advantage in the talks to follow. But your body betrays you. It tells me your true thoughts.”

  Lan arched her back, pushing her small breasts firmly into his hands. “What is it telling you now?”

  “Mm. It tells me…” He bent, placing his mouth against her ear. The bony ridge above the noseless hole in the center of his face pressed at her cheek. He whispered, “It tells me, ‘End the Eaters.’” He moved to her other ear. “And I won’t. You are about to pay a terrible price for nothing.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “So you will.” He plucked the combs from her hair and tossed them to the ground—tik, tik, tak. She felt him nuzzling at the nape of her neck, heard him take a deep breath. “Roses. My daughter’s scent. How deeply disturbing. Was it deliberate?”

  “I don’t think so. Her servants did everything. Well, not everything,” she amended, glancing down. “Batuuli picked the dress.”

  “All the better reason to be rid of it.” He hooked her skirts where they bunched around her hip in clingy folds and pushed them over the swell of her buttocks. Gravity took slow hold; the skirts dropped with a sigh, billowing as they settled, forming petals like a flower around her ankles. He shifted behind her, the hot weight of his erection pressing more firmly against her. “You’re trembling.”

  Lan clenched her fists in a futile effort to stop. “I’m cold.”

  He stroked her arm—his skin on hers made a sound like sandpaper—then her thigh, and then moved his hand between her legs and slipped one thick finger inside her. “You feel warm enough to me.”

  Lan said nothing, all her concentration fixed on relaxing around that invasive hand.

  “Would you like to go closer to the fire?” His finger withdrew, only to penetrate again, deeper this time. His other arm closed around her, belying the offer even as he made it and pulling her up, up, until her toes scarcely touched the ground and all her weight was balanced on that slowly working hand. “Or to the bed?”

  “What…” Her voice came out too tight and shrill. She swallowed hard, took a shuddering breath, and said, “Whatever you want.”

  “Ah. Well. My wants—” He removed his hand and lifted her even higher, fitting himself between her thighs. He thrust, not piercing her or even trying to, but forcing her instead to ride his cock as he mimed the act of sex. “—are not so particular,” he finished.

  Lan kicked into empty air, grabbing at his arms, his shoulders, his neck—anywhere to find some support—but she was terrified of snagging her fingers inside one of his many open wounds. At last, she had to give over and let him hold her. Curled tensely around the restraining bar of his arm, her whole body shaking with the force of his mock-thrusts, Lan struggled not to struggle while his cock worked deeper between her folds.

  “Oh yes, you’re warm enough,” he grunted, and she was. The friction of his scars rubbing at her in this unexpected way had sparked an intense, almost frightening, rush of heat. “But it does not feel good, does it?” And that was true, too; there was no pretending the thing that held her was a man, a fact that heightened each sensation and stained every response.

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ Lan thought furiously and bucked back at him, finding his rhythm and coming into clumsy sync.

  “I admire the strength of your convictions,” he said dryly. “Let’s see how long they last.”

  He lifted her higher, then brought her down around him, snarling in her ear as he slowly impaled her, but her body took him in with blind eagerness. She could feel her juices coating him as he began to move her; if it weren’t for the fountain’s covering babble, she’d be able to hear it as well. None of the desperate fumbles or cool transactions she’d called sex in the past had prepared her to be lifted like this, held, filled. He gave her no pleasure, not the way other men had sometimes tried to give it. The act seemed almost mastabatory in that sense—her body like a fist he used on himself—but there was a terrible need in the way he used her, and something in her recognized it and responded. What should have been a purely physical exchange, something to be bartered and endured, became instead alarmingly intimate and intimacy was something Lan had never known.

  In that rush of unexpected and unwelcome emotion, Lan burst into tears.

  He stopped at once, which only made her sobs more obvious. Mortified, she clapped both hands over her face, as if hiding them could make them disappear, but the damage was done. He lifted her off him and set her none-too-carefully on her feet.

  “Go,” he said.

  “No! I’m okay!”

  “Clearly.” He paced over to the fireplace and leaned on the mantel, staring into the flames while she fought to get herself under control.

  Several minutes passed. The tears would stop, then puke themselves out some more, but at last they dried out, leaving her breathless and a little sick to her stomach. When it was over, finally over, Lan slunk to the bath and splashed a little water on her face. “I don’t know why I did that,” she mumbled.

  “I wonder.” He drummed his fingers once, still not looking at her. “Can you finish?”

  “Of course I can. I’m fine.”

  He grunted, drummed his fingers again, then took a bracing breath and turned around. He smiled, gesturing toward the bed. “When you’re ready, then.”

  She went, taking long, forceful strides at first, only to falter and stop when she reached her destination.

  He waited a moment or two, then heaved a short sigh. “I’ll mask,” he said, moving toward them.

  “It’s not that.”

  “What, then?”

  “I don’t know, damn it!” She sat on the edge of the bed, trying not to squirm at the feel of the coverlet on her bare bottom. She had to remind herself she’d bathed, that it was okay to touch it. Tears threatened again for no reason and angrily, she opened her arms.

  He looked at her.

  “I’m fine,” she insisted.

  “You’re determined. There is a difference.” But he came forward, covering her breast with his scarred hand and pressing her down to the mattress. “But I appreciate the effort and it will be rewarded.” He bent, licking at her nipple. His tongue was black and rough as a cat’s. “I still taste roses.”

  “Sorry. They put the lotion kind of everywhere.”

  “Did they? Let us test that.” Azrael lowered himself to one knee, licking an unhurried trail along her tense body, now at her belly…now her thigh…and now…

  She made a sound. He raised his head, but before he could ask, she said, “I’m fine! No one’s ever…I don’t…It’s different.”

  “I like to hear you stammer.” His claws pried her brazenly open; his tongue rasped along her innermost folds, all the way to her clit and back again. “Roses,” he concluded. “They were thorough.”

  “S-Sorry.”

  “It’s not disagreeable.” His tongue flicked at her clit, teasing it in circular flutters for ages of painless agony before closing his dry lips around it and sucking. At last, he raised his head, then cocked it to one side and said curiously, “Did you know you were wet?”

  Lan could only nod, breathing hard.

  “That doesn’t happen often. How flat
tering.” He tasted.

  Lan shoved herself back against the mattress, her fists twisting at the coverlet, panting through her bared teeth to keep from making too much noise.

  He must have interpreted her struggles as those born of disgust, but while his touch was and could only ever be inhuman, it was not repulsive. What it did was rob her of all power of speech, filling her head with a kind of dark light even as her body locked up tighter and tighter. “Very well,” she heard him say when the assault came to an abrupt end. “I won’t prolong it.”

  He rose over her and while she knew what it meant to see his face above her and thought she was ready, still she cried out when he entered her again.

  He stopped, only for a moment this time. “You are just going to have to suffer this,” he told her. “But I will be quick.”

  Before she could tell him again how fine she was, he began and anything she could have said was crushed in her throat along with a scream of something too feral to be pleasure. Lan thrashed, clawing first at the bedding and then at him, although it wasn’t clear whether she was trying to push him away or pull him closer right up until her hand found the bony blade of his cheek and she surged instinctively up and pressed her mouth to his.

  He recoiled, one sharp fang catching on her lip so that she fell back in a daze on the bed with the taste of blood on her tongue.

  They stared at each other, both breathing hard.

  He was the first to recover, the fires of his eyes blazing as they narrowed. He did not speak, but pulled free of her with a bestial snarl, flipped her roughly onto her stomach and drove back into her with one huge hand between her shoulderblades, pinning her down. He resumed, the whole bed shaking with the force of his thrusts, and Lan bit down on her screams again. With every slap of his hips, she could feel something happening inside her, like a snake coiling before it strikes. The part of her still capable of thought realized this was the loathsome thing he’d warned her about, but it didn’t feel loathsome. It ate her, bite by bite, and she let it eat her, let it burrow in deeper and deeper until there was nothing left and she became it.

  It was like fainting, except she didn’t go all the way under. It was like waking up, except she didn’t come all the way out either. It was like dying, then; she died, a little…and came back, changed.

  Azrael wasn’t moving. His hand on her back had claws. His breath stirred her hair in gusts, but he didn’t speak.

  “Please don’t,” Lan whispered. Whatever it was he’d done to her, it was already fading, leaving a hollow place that seemed so much bigger than her entire body. “Please…don’t stop.”

  He made a breathy sound. Not a grunt or a laugh. Lan had been punched in the stomach once; she’d made a sound like that. Then he tore free of her with more violence than he’d ever entered. “Get out.”

  Lan’s hands tightened on the coverlet. More useless tears stung her eyes—where were they all coming from? She curled on the bed, suddenly naked and human and stupid.

  Azrael stalked over to the door and banged it open, then came back to the bed. He tore the coverlet out from under her and threw it at her as she found her feet. “Get out.”

  Lan wrapped herself with shaking hands and left. He slammed the door behind her. The pikemen in the hall looked at each other uncertainly. One of them took half a step toward her, then resumed his post. They ignored her.

  Lan went back to her room.

  * * *

  It was not until hours into that awful night that Lan realized she had not insisted on the audience she had, after all, paid for. So in addition to all the other misery she felt, she had the comfort of knowing he’d been right—she had done it for nothing. By that time, she simply couldn’t cry any more, but she went through the motions just the same, braying and hugging her cramping stomach while her swollen, aching eyes stayed dry.

  How had she lost control so completely? And to what? Before tonight, she would have been sure there were no sexual mysteries left to discover. She’d been with men she’d wanted more, men who’d made her feel good. Whatever Azrael had made her feel when he’d trapped her in his bed, it wasn’t good. She was nothing to him but a squeeze he hadn’t felt yet, a new toy he could play with and put up any time he wanted. And honestly, that was a role she was comfortable in and certainly the role she expected a dolly to perform, so what the hell had happened?

  She couldn’t answer, so she cried. At last, she slept, curled on the floor with her head under the bed and Azrael’s coverlet, not a red one, wrapped around her shoulders.

  In the morning, she was awakened by the noisy tromp of boots in the echoing tower stairwell, which gave her enough time to sit up and make sure that everything that ought to be covered was before the door opened. A guard entered and stood aside for two dead women dressed as dining hall servants. The first carried a tray with tea and coffee—real coffee, not just brewed roots—along with real cream, sugar, honey, drinking chocolate, cinnamon sticks and a small caddy filled with spices and flavor extracts. The second brought in three covered dishes, a napkin folded to look like a bird, and a relatively small selection of silverware. The spoon had a ribbon tied around it.

  Lan, sitting on the floor wrapped in a blanket, watched as they arranged all this on the vanity and wordlessly left again. The guard closed the door without ever even looking directly at her.

  Was she still his dolly? After last night and everything? Or was he just feeding her before he sent her away?

  Pointless, asking questions she knew she couldn’t answer. If he was turning her out, she’d learn soon enough. If she was still his dolly, she’d learn that too. She wasn’t terribly eager either way.

  But she was hungry, so she ate. She drank the coffee pot dry one half-cup at a time, trying out various combinations until she found out just what she liked. The idea of having a ‘favorite’ coffee still struck her as absurd and possibly sinful, but she supposed Mayor Fairchild’s wife had a favorite fine dress and Elvie Peters had a favorite necklace, so why not favorite coffee?

  She worked her way through the breakfast slowly, eating the porridge while it was hot and wrapping the sausages and scones in the napkin for later. There was a little dish of fruit, too—grapes and apples, no peaches—which she hid under the pillow of her bed, just in case the servants came back to clear the trays. And because she was bored and full of coffee, she decided to make their job easier by stacking everything together so one person could carry it all. It was as she was shifting plates around, catching odd crumbs and stray drops of honey and licking them off her fingers, that Lan found the paper.

  It was a smallish paper, a hand’s width on all sides, folded over and mostly hidden under that flowerpot. Very white, that was the first thing she noticed. There was paper in Norwood, of course, they weren’t that far-gone country, but it was of the rough, reddish sort they milled in Torrey Green. This was different in every way, so much that she wasn’t even sure she could call it paper. She could neither see nor feel the bits of rag and flax fibers that it was made of, nor could she smell the retting or the ammonia they must have used to get it so perfectly white.

  There were letters written on one side, well more than it took to spell her name. The handwriting was neat and level, with a broad stroke and looping flourishes at the ends. Lan traced them over with her fingertip curiously, then unfolded the paper and had a look at the letters inside. She had a thought it might be the menu, but it didn’t look like a list. Instructions to the servants? The ticklish idea that it might be a note to Lan herself did occur, but what a silly place to put it, if so…under a plate, with only the corner sticking out, easily overlooked.

  Lan tossed it back on the tray and wandered over to the window, looking out over the roofs of Haven at the unnatural stillness of the city. Looked like rain on the horizon, but it wasn’t here yet. No way to shut the window. Her bed was going to get soaked. With any luck, she wouldn’t be in it tonight.

  She was still there, cloud-watching and restless, when she hear
d footsteps once more on the stair. Lan straightened up, tucking her coverlet more securely around her body, and waited expectantly in the middle of the room for the door to open. Just the guard and one servant this time. She gave Lan an irritated sort of glance as she took everything off the trays and stacked them on again, all but the teapot which was still full and which she must have thought Lan still wanted, but paused when she spied the paper. Careful not to touch it or to look again at Lan, the dead woman took her tray and left.

  Once more alone, Lan sat down on the bed, but she had hardly begun to fume when the door opened again and the servant stuck her head in.

  “Are you sure you want to be rid of this?” she asked, holding up the paper between two fingers with an odd sort of look on her face.

  Lan shrugged and nodded.

  The dead woman stared at her.

  “Why? What’s it say?”

  Now the servant looked back at the guard, who deliberately turned his back on the both of them and pretended the head of his pike needed inspecting. The servant came all the way inside, set down the dishes, and closed the door. Holding the paper between the very tips of her fingers so as to have as little to do with it as possible, she read, “To my blameless Beauty in her tower,” and looked at Lan.

  “Okay?” said Lan after a puzzled moment.

  The servant unfolded the paper, making a point to appear uncomfortable, but with that same gossiping gleam in her eye that Lan supposed all people, living or dead, must feel with poking their fingers into other people’s pies. “How inconstant I must seem. I have made claim of simple desires, given you rein without direction, only to cast you out for daring to anticipate the one whim I do not possess. You confessed early enough and often enough that you are innocent—” The servant paused to give Lan a dubious look from under the shadow of her hair. “—of the courtesan’s coy trade, and for all your skill at barter, I see it is true and surely the most forgivable of offenses. By my accounting, you have paid a precious coin and I would not see you so misspent. If you are content to remain, I am content to have you.”