Land of the Beautiful Dead
Page 15
“Okay?” Lan said again, even more baffled than before.
“Do you have an answer?” the servant asked, pinching the paper shut again.
“Was that a question?”
In the doorway, the guard shook his head and sighed.
The servant put the paper down on the vanity and gave it a pat. She picked up her tray again. “Like reading to a pig,” she muttered and the guard replied, “Not at all. Pigs are actually quite intelligent.” The door banged shut on their shared laughter, leaving Lan blushing on the bed, unsure of just why she was embarrassed, but embarrassed all the same.
After a few minutes, she jumped up, snatched the paper and half-tore, half-crumpled it into a wad, then threw it out the window. She felt better.
The day passed with nothing to do. Lan stood. She sat. She lay down. The rain finally came and the bed got wet, exactly as expected. There was nothing to be done about it, so Lan merely scooted around as far from the window as she could and lay down again so that only her feet got wet. She put her wet feet on the wall and amused herself stamping footprints as far up it as she could go. She counted lightning flashes (seventeen) and rolls of thunder (twenty-two). She draped herself in Azrael’s coverlet as many different ways as she could imagine (not many). She ate the rest of her breakfast when she got hungry and drank her cold tea just to get rid of it. She got up and walked, trying to step on every single floorboard in turn, mincing back and forth with her arms out like wings. Once in a while, she opened the door and looked down the dark stairs, but never went further than her own landing. There was a lock on the other side of the door; she wasn’t about to give anyone a reason to start using it.
At last, the light behind the storm went out and soon after, Lan heard the expected sound of boots in the stairwell. Again, she stood, hurriedly redraping her coverlet.
It was a not a guard looking down his perfect nose at her this time, but one of the dead servants, albeit one dressed a bit better than the dead women earlier. He did not have a tray with him, but he did have a frothy bit of cloth draped over one arm which he looked at as one looks at something for the last time before tossing it at her. “My lord commands you to join him for dinner.”
“What?”
He did not repeat himself, just left.
Lan shook the thin fabric out and discovered another dress, pretty and flimsy, too tight and too cold. ‘Dollies don’t get to complain,’ she reminded herself, but gave the coverlet a yearning stare as she put it on. It left her arms bare, not to mention too much of her chest, and the skirts were so light, both in color and in weight, that she could see the shadow of her legs right through them. The breeze that blew through the window flattened the cloth to her body, outlining everything that was not already full on display, so that she might as well be naked and just painted blue with a few fluttery kerchiefs tied around her waist.
Never mind. It didn’t matter. She had a job to do and she could do it naked or dressed or anywhere in between. Keep focus, that was the important thing. Eat dinner with Azrael (she was hungry), dolly up with him after (remember not to kiss him), and do it right this time (maybe he’d let her sleep in his nice, dry bed).
The servant was waiting for her on the landing with a light, which he held up so that he could look her over and make sure she saw his disapproval before he headed downstairs. He did not speak to her again or even glance back to see if she was following. The guards posted outside the dining hall uncrossed their pikes at her approach, but Azrael’s steward seemed surprised to see her.
“At my lord’s request,” Lan’s escort said in response to the steward’s obvious uncertainty, and after a tense moment more, the steward nodded and the doors were opened.
Dinner was well underway and the noise of the dead court’s pretended revelry was tremendous, but not for long. As soon as Lan entered the hall, those at the lesser tables saw her and stopped talking, prompting those seated further north to look around and also stop talking. In this way, the quiet rippled outward until the entire hall was watchful and silent. Lan’s escort left her frozen at the center of their stares and continued on up the aisle to take his place with the rest of Lord Solveig’s valets, of which he was clearly one, now that she could see them all together. And it was Solveig who started the applause, but that got picked up too, so that Lan soon stood alone and foolish at one end of a long tunnel of deafening handclapping, staring up at the empty imperial table where Azrael was nowhere in evidence.
“My dear rumpled dove!” Solveig called, coming to collect her. “My delightful little disaster, how good of you to join me! We missed you so at breakfast! Father can be such a bore about keeping his toys to himself.”
She wasn’t supposed to be here. Lan backed up a step, then turned around and tried to leave, only to see the doors shut against her.
“There now, don’t be shy,” Solveig said, taking her arm. “Father won’t mind. No, he likes it when his Children and his warmbloods get on. And how pretty you look in that frock! Well…relatively. Do you like it?”
“Where’s Azrael?”
“To be honest, you look awful,” Solveig said, ignoring the question as he led her up the aisle. “Father can be a brute, can’t he? But I’m sure some of it can be smoothed over. Come now, sit at my table. Fido will give you his seat, there’s a good dog.”
One of his courtiers got up and stood aside, holding his chair and even pushing it in for her as she sat down. Solveig plucked the sparkly combs from another courtier’s hair and used them to bind Lan’s up. In another moment, they were all around her, offering their jewels or adjusting her dress or even rubbing their make-up off with their fingers and smearing it on her.
It was too much. She tried to sit still for it and couldn’t, but saying no brought on laughter and when she squirmed, they just held her down. Their hands were everywhere—on her face, in her hair, down the front of her dress to fluff her breasts like pillows, up her skirts to massage perfume into her thighs—and their smiling, sneering, beautiful faces shrieking gleefully in her ears, until suddenly, they weren’t.
“That’s better,” said Solveig, taking his chair as Lan sprang out of hers. “But whatever is the matter, dear? You ought to be used to a little rough handling by now. And if you’re not, well, you’d better learn.”
“Where’s Azrael?”
“Sit down. Eat something.” Solveig waved a servant over to clear away the dishes in front of the now-empty chair and bring a clean setting. “Father will want to see you fed when it pleases him to drop by.”
“Where is he?” Lan asked loudly.
“Stop teasing her, brother,” Batuuli said and leaned out over the table so she could point past Lan to another empty table, the one where Lady Tehya should be sitting. “My sister had a small accident at breakfast.”
“Yes,” Solveig drawled. “She accidentally peeled her face off with a paring knife and threw it on Father’s plate. He’ll be all night persuading her to let him mend it, so if you had an appointment with him later, you ought to consider it postponed.”
“Peeled her face off?” Lan echoed dumbly, looking from one to the other of them, searching in vain for some sign that they were having her on.
“He made a comment about her mask and, well, she’s a bit high-spirited,” Solveig explained and gestured again at the many, many platters before her. “If you don’t see anything you like, by all means, place an order with the kitchen. The peaches are especially sweet, I hear.”
Lan looked at him sharply.
He smiled.
“Sit with me, then,” Batuuli ordered. “If my brother is determined not to behave, he shan’t have the pleasure of your company.”
“I think I should go.”
Batuuli flapped a hand at her and picked through a bowl of fruit for just the right grape to taste. “Then go. I’ll just tell Father you refused our hospitality, shall I?”
Lan looked once more at the doors at the end of the hall, then at Azrael’s empty throne, and f
inally sighed and went over to sit with Batuuli. She took a piece of bread and grimly ate it, aware of smirks and whispers all around her, trying not to startle every time someone laughed too shrilly or too close.
“While we wait,” Batuuli said brightly, “I’ve arranged some entertainment in our guest’s honor.”
Apprehension was an immediate cold knot in Lan’s belly. “Me?”
Batuuli smiled at her and clapped her hands twice.
Azrael’s steward went out into the hall and came back shortly with a whole company of dead men and women dressed for the stage. Some were in costumes—women made to look like deer or rabbits, men like stags or foxes—while others wore form-fitting onesies and masks and carried bits of scenery painted up with trees. Seeing them, Lan felt a twinge of interest in spite of herself. Performers came to Norwood once in a while, staging plays and magic acts and singing foreign songs, but it cost a half’slip to see them and Lan’s mother rarely had it to ‘throw away on nonsense.’ And there was no comparison as far as quality, she was sure. The deer and stags leaped about in synchronized steps while the rabbits and foxes tumbled, and as much dread as Lan still felt, she was transfixed and soon forgot even the company she was in to join with their laughter and applause.
Then, by some predetermined signal, the ‘animals’ all froze, looked up, and gracefully scattered. The dining hall doors opened wide and in stumbled a woman. A living woman.
She looked as Lan herself must have looked—dressed in torn layers of ill-fitting clothes, her hair in straggled knots, muddy boots and dirty face. She stared around, seeing the hall as Lan must have seen it—oversized, overbright, overfed. She saw Azrael’s court, a hundred dead, smirking faces, and the empty throne. She saw the lights and the flowers and the food. She saw Lan.
The masked performers were stealthily circling as the woman stood staring at Lan staring at her. She only noticed them when they began to press forward, herding her with painted trees into the middle of the hall.
“What is this?” Lan asked. Her voice seemed very small, easily swallowed by the dead laughter that followed. “What are you doing?”
“Just watch.” Batuuli patted her hand, but her eyes never left the stumbling figure of the woman, reeling from one side of the wide center space to the other. “It’s all in fun.”
The dining hall doors opened again, this time to admit five dead men, dressed in artistically tattered shirts and trousers, all clean but in muddy colors—Haven’s idea of village attire. Their faces were painted pale, with their eyes and mouths outlined in black, so that their leers could be seen even by those sitting furthest away.
“Lovely,” someone said. Someone else called for more wine.
The woman backed away as the five men came forward, then turned and tried to run, but the scenery closed her in. She pushed at them, scratching and slapping from panel to panel, and all the while, the men came closer.
“Stop it!” Lan shouted. She jumped up, only to be caught and forced back into her chair. Batuuli leaned over to twine their arms together, like sisters or like lovers.
“Isn’t this exciting?” she murmured. “Isn’t this just how you imagined it?”
The men were almost on her now, so the woman turned to fight, producing a hunting knife in an instant from the sheath strapped under her shirt. She slashed, silent, keeping her movements small and conserving her strength. She’d fought like this before and won. But these men were already dead.
The room cheered as they took her down, their many hands pressing her limbs to the polished tiles and splaying her open. One of them took the knife and began to saw through her many layers of shirts. Another straddled her thigh backwards and began to wrestle with her boot.
He was stealing her boots.
All at once, Lan knew what she was watching, what Batuuli had meant all along for her to see.
Lan screamed, tried to throw herself at them, but she was held just as much as the woman on the ground. She was held and had to watch as the woman’s trousers were pried down and devices produced and fit around dead members to make fitting weapons. One boot was off. The other was being unlaced and Lan never heard anything but the laughter and applause and her own self screaming until Azrael’s roar:
“What the hell goes on in here?”
Silence from the court. There was no apology offered, only a wary confusion from the performers and their audience. Azrael strode forward, shoving painted trees and costumed men aside until he could see the woman at their center, gulping air and struggling to pull her trousers up as she lay on her back.
He did not need a long look to know what he was seeing. He swung on Batuuli, his eyes blazing, then turned his back to her and aimed his arm like a reaping scythe at the servants and guards lining the walls. “Who was it?” he demanded. “Who carried tales out of this hall?”
Below him, shivering, the woman gathered her feet beneath her, skittish as a young hare who hears the hounds, but she did not run. Her eyes darted to her hunting knife, still in the hand of one of the performers, then to the nearest table.
“I say you will stand forward!” Azrael bellowed.
Exchanging nervous glances, two of the servants stepped forward, followed a beat later by a third.
“My lord, the lady Batuuli—” one of them began.
“Impale them! And you!” He reached out and seized the nearest actor, pulling him entirely off the ground and giving him a shake that would have snapped a living man’s neck. “Where came you by this woman?”
“I don’t know, my lord,” the man stammered. “She was provided with the script.”
“Mine is the law here! Not my daughter’s! Traffic of the living is forbidden in Haven! Who among you does not know this?” Azrael threw the man into a table and turned on Batuuli, but before he could speak, the woman lunged out, yanked the carving fork from a capon and leapt. Lan let out a shout of alarm that held perhaps half Azrael’s name. He turned toward her and the fork that might have otherwise been buried in his back instead stabbed hilt-deep into his left eye.
Lan screamed—a hoarse, unlovely, dog-like baying. Azrael staggered, slapping his assassin to the ground as the sound still hung in the air and then there were pikemen on every side, breaking around him like black waves. Lan had not heard their running boots, but she heard the sound it made when a body is pierced—it is a quiet sound—and she heard it over and over and over. Batuuli applauded and Solveig joined in, as if the execution of their father’s attacker were just another act in the play, but not even their fawning courtiers dared to follow along.
Lan twisted free of the hands that held her and ran forward, only to be seized and thrown down beside the other woman with a boot in her back and a pike digging into the side of her neck. From that vantage, with Azrael a thousand feet tall above her, she saw his hand close around the fork imbedded in his head. He pulled it out, inch by slow inch, as if it had been sunk in tar, and like tar, it came burning, dripping white fire in clots that turned grey in the open air and burned away before they hit the ground. Fresh flame sparked in his smoldering socket. He looked at the fork, the tines now bent and charred black, and threw it away.
He lunged, batting pikemen aside like curtains to seize the woman on the floor and lift her by her throat high over his head. There was blood all down her chest, blood still pouring out of her, streaming down his arm, spattering his face—more blood than anyone could lose and live, and Lan could see her dying, see the terrified, trembling smile as she looked down past the clawed hand that held her and spat onto his golden mask.
Azrael did not flinch. He let her defiance trickle down his false face and merely said, “I would have let you live, human. And now…I will not let you die.”
There was a sound, but Lan didn’t hear it with her ears. It struck just once, charging the air like lightning, and then Azrael let her drop.
She struck the floor and lay weakly kicking and writhing for as long as it took her to die—not long—and then was still.
“No!” Lan cried.
“No?” Azrael swung around and advanced on her as the pikeman hurriedly pulled her to her feet. “You tell me no? Am I the villain here? I, the murderer? How can that be?” he demanded, his voice rising to a deafening roar. “She will never die! Get her out of here!”
The pikeman at her back caught Lan’s arm and dragged her away at what was nearly a run.
“And you,” Azrael said.
Batuuli’s voice, calm and smiling: “I?”
“Have you nothing to say?”
“Now that you mention it, you’ve ruined my play.”
“Have I? That can be amended.”
Lan looked back, just in time to see Azrael seize Batuuli by her braids and pull her across the table, smearing her fine white gown with pork grease and wine as she gasped and even struggled in a small, startled way.
“You seem to be missing a player,” Azrael snarled and threw his daughter at the lead actor. “Proceed.”
And then, thankfully, Lan was out and the dining hall doors slammed shut on the first of Batuuli’s outraged screams.
CHAPTER SIX
Every night that Lan had so far spent in Haven was the worst, but the night that followed Batuuli’s play was as far above the previous worst as the stars were above the Earth. In the Red Room, removed from the sights and sounds, she tortured herself with an endless cycle of memories and imagination, until they began to blur together.
‘Am I the villain here?’ he had asked and sometimes, she wished she’d answered him, screamed ‘Yes!’ and slapped and even spit, the way the other woman had, the way her mother surely would have done, while Lan only lay there on the floor and watched. And sometimes she thought of other answers, calm words and reasoned arguments she could sand down and polish and reshape here in her tower until she was certain they would have convinced him, and that other woman would be dead now and at peace, and what the hell, maybe he would even be sorry.