Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “You haven’t much appetite,” Azrael observed, watching her cut a ham steak into smaller and smaller portions.

  “Neither have you.”

  “I was poisoned recently. You weren’t.”

  They were not speaking loudly, but such was the quiet that Batuuli answered for her with a cool, “I did my best. She wouldn’t eat.”

  “You would do well not to remind me of your presence here,” said Azrael without looking at her. To Lan, in much the same tone, he said, “And you will not refuse my hospitality.”

  “I’m not. I’m just…” She looked out at the hall, but the only one who would look back at her was Lady Tehya and as Lan locked eyes on her, Tehya reached up with her carving knife and drew a bloodless gash across her throat. “I’m not hungry.”

  Azrael’s attention had wandered briefly toward his masked daughter, but now it came back, hard. “Am I here to bow before your wishes? I say you will not refuse me!”

  “How am I supposed to eat when—”

  At her lonely table, Tehya had reached into her wound and found a scarf. It came out and out and out, winding around her graceful hand, shiny wet and bright crimson, like blood woven into cloth.

  “How am I supposed to eat?” Lan finished sickly.

  “Think of all the starving children in Norwood.”

  She rocked back, her mouth dropping open, but she couldn’t really believe he’d said that until she saw him smile. “You think that’s funny?” she demanded. “After everything I told you, you think that’s a fucking joke?”

  A few heads turned.

  “I take it you don’t.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you? You…If you weren’t wearing that mask, I’d smack you!”

  He leaned back, not quite laughing, then reached up and took it off.

  The music came to a discordant halt. Servants scattered back and at least three people dropped their cups, but the shock of seeing their lord’s true face was nothing compared to the chaos when Lan punched it right in his smirking mouth.

  His head rocked back. Every pikeman in the room came running, every Revenant drew a sword and Deimos leapt over the imperial table and threw Lan to the floor. She heard the shrill howl of his blade cut the air and then she heard Azrael bellow, “Stand down!”

  A beat of silence and then boots retreated and chairs were retaken. Lan pushed herself to her hands and knees; Deimos hauled her the rest of the way to her feet and gave her a shove toward her seat. He kept his naked sword in his hand and his eyes, cold, on her.

  Azrael watched her resettle. His lower lip had split slightly. She admired it, her heart burning with ugly pride.

  “You didn’t think I’d do it, did you?”

  “No.” He smiled; a bead of black blood welled up from his lip and dropped onto his chin. “Not when you knew all the ways I might be revenged, the very least of them being to throw you out with your purpose unmet.”

  Her heart chilled at once and sank. She lifted her chin anyway. “Impale me, then. Go on. Stick me in your garden. You’ll never make me sorry.”

  “Can’t I? But I am still enjoying you, child. If I choose to plant fresh flowers in my meditation garden—” Azrael leaned close to smile at her. “—I’ll pluck them in Norwood.”

  She could only stare at him. This was the man she’d been waiting on all these days. This was the man she’d been thinking about, felt sorry for! This was the man…but he wasn’t a man. He was—

  “You’re a monster.”

  His smile opened into a blood-smeared grin.

  Lan leapt up and Deimos immediately caught her by both arms. She scarcely noticed, although she needed the support. Her legs were shaking, not with terror but with a rage so powerful, it had seemed to rob her of her bones. “I don’t give a fuck what you look like, not one cold fuck! You’re a monster because you want to be!”

  He stopped smiling.

  Somewhere in that silent hall, Batuuli laughed.

  Azrael put his mask back on. “Release her, Captain,” he said, picking up his cup. “Sit down, Lan.”

  “Piss off.” She shook free of the Revenant and stormed from the dais.

  The tables rippled with half-raised hands and turning heads, followed by a deafening stillness in which all that moved in the whole of the hall was Lan, marching for the door. Pikemen raised their weapons, sending uncertain glances toward the throne, but no one moved to stop her.

  “I have not dismissed you.”

  She kept going.

  “You came here for a cause,” he reminded her. “Will you abandon it now for the sake of your pride?”

  “My pride?” She swung around to face him, flinging out both hands. “Do I look like I’ve still got pride? After you put me in chains and you put me in bed and you put this stupid shit on me—” She scrubbed savagely at her face, taking smears of whore-paint off on her hands. “—I’m fresh out of fucking pride, but I’m not going to sit there and laugh along while you make jokes about my people dying!”

  “I apologize.”

  “Fuck you!” She stormed another two steps toward the door and turned belatedly back. “Wait, what?”

  “They were cruel words and I apologize for them.” Azrael ignored the openly gaping faces aimed up at him and gestured to the empty chair beside him. “Come. Sit with me.”

  “No,” said Lan, but not with the same force and she did not leave after she said it.

  “Hm. If you will not allow me to take my words back, perhaps I could buy them. In pieces. Sit with me,” he said again, “and I will send what remains of tonight’s meal to Norwood.”

  Lan’s eyes went to the table next to her by their own accord, seeing mountains of bread, slabs of pink salmon longer than her arm, whole roasted swans, towers of fruit glazed in honey and wine.

  “I will even refrain from reminding you that I could have you back in chains at a word.” Azrael retook his throne and pointed at hers. “Such is the depth of my remorse.”

  She scowled and returned to her seat under the Revenant captain’s icy stare. A servant poured her another cup of wine. After an awkward moment, the musicians resumed playing. Azrael watched them, ignoring her, and gradually, the others at the lower tables took up the pretense of eating again.

  “It was a lousy thing to say,” Lan muttered, stabbing at her bread with her fork.

  “It was.”

  “Don’t think I’ve forgiven you, either.”

  “I don’t.”

  She glanced at him. He stared straight ahead at the flutist, one claw tapping out time against the edge of his untouched plate. His other hand was beneath the table, she saw, pressed to his side. Suddenly, it moved to his thigh; she raised her eyes to see him staring back at her.

  Much as she tried to hold on to her anger, Lan could feel it slip away. Not entirely. Like the colored glass in the library, she could look at it or look through it and for now, she chose the latter. “You’re not all right, are you?”

  His mouth twisted behind his mask. “I’ll live.”

  Lan frowned. “That’s not funny, either.”

  His smile, if it could be called that, faded. He returned his gaze to the musicians. “I am in considerable pain. Perhaps you like to hear that better.”

  “No, I don’t like to hear that!” she snapped. “Why the hell would I? I didn’t want you to be poisoned!”

  “I did,” Batuuli remarked. “I love to see him poisoned. I particularly love to see him try to pretend he doesn’t mind afterwards, just because he can survive it.”

  “Well, you’re a bitch,” Lan said crossly.

  “And you’re mortal.” Batuuli toyed with the hilt of the bloody knife that had already slit one throat this evening. “You should remember that, particularly since there are alternatives.”

  “Enough,” said Azrael.

  Batuuli smirked. “You see? My father’s preference is for the living—or rather, his perversion. I can sever you from his favor as easily as severing a vein.”


  “I said, enough!” Azrael aimed his hand down at his daughter, silencing the entire hall, so that his voice, uncontested, was as good as a shout. “You threaten no one in my house, least of all in my presence. Mind your tongue or lose it!”

  Batuuli’s hand rose to flutter at her throat, a theatrical gesture that nevertheless seemed genuine. “You were talking to me?”

  Her courtiers went very still.

  “Let it be, sister,” Solveig sighed, sipping at his wine. “He’s in a mood.”

  But Batuuli ignored him, her beautiful surprise turning beautifully angry. “Mind my tongue?” she echoed. “Mine? But because hers has been at your cock, you let your mud-farming little whore scold me before the whole of your court?” She paused, then smiled. “Why, Father, if those are the rules, I can play. I’ll happily fuck you.”

  Azrael recoiled.

  Batuuli laughed at him, raising a hand to toy at the lacings of her bodice. “Why take pale satisfaction from your endless chain of warmblood whores when I am here to service you? Was that not your plan from the very start?”

  “No.” The word seemed to leave him as the last breath of a stabbed man. His arm dropped. He lifted it again, palm open. “How can you…? Daughter!”

  “Father,” Batuuli purred, her throat arched with sensual abandon. “Ah, Father! Fuck me, Father!”

  “Stop this!”

  Solveig laughed, a bit wonderingly. “That’s so disturbing and I can’t even say why.”

  “Yes, why? Is this not the body you desired to be made eternal at your side, Father?” Batuuli caressed her graceful curves, then gripped at them crudely and leered. “Are these not the breasts you wished for me? Is this not the cunt?”

  “Get out,” Azrael said hoarsely. “Guards!”

  “Calm yourself, dear Father, I’ll go. But first, just let me ask, to satisfy my own curiosity…” She turned to the pikemen who had come to collect her. “If he desired to fuck me…would that be wrong?”

  “Oh, well put,” Solveig murmured.

  “Would you call the lust obscene that set our great lord’s cock inside me?” Batuuli pressed, smiling over her shoulder at her father. “Would you stop him if it was his will to have me? My brother? My sister? All of us together?”

  The pikemen glanced at each other, then up at the imperial table, but Azrael gave no orders. He waited with the rest of the room, the rest of the world. “Our lord does no wrong,” one of them said at last.

  Azrael leaned back into his throne and raised a hand to cover his eyes.

  “So if it was his pleasure to set me on my knees before him and suck his cock, would you then allow it?” Batuuli took an ewer of cream from her table and stroked its long neck, licking and kissing at the opening, stealing kittenish sips with the very tip of her tongue as she slowly poured it out. “Would you smile to see me bathed in his blessing?” Cream overspilled her lips, trickled down her chin, splashed the swells of her breasts. She caught the last drop on her tongue and tossed the ewer indifferently away to shatter. “Would you not be honored to bear such a sight your witness?”

  The dead man looked nervously up at the imperial table, but Azrael gave him no sign of his thoughts. “If it is my lord’s pleasure,” he said slowly.

  Batuuli feigned bewildered hurt. “And why would I not give him pleasure?”

  “I…yes.”

  “But you hesitate! Am I not ten thousand times more comely than that creature who sits beside him? Should it not be me who embraces our glorious lord, the living god over all this dead Earth?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “Tell him so.” Batuuli stepped back, extending her arm toward the imperial table and raising her voice to fill the hall. “Show him your love and devotion are greater than any petty laws of Men! His is the only law in Haven and if it is his will to take me, shall you not praise him for it? Shall you not applaud?”

  And they did. Just one at first, tentative, then another and another, until the whole court was on their feet and cheering.

  Batuuli turned on her father with a savage grin of triumph, tearing free of her gown and letting it fall around her like petals of a dying flower. She stood, perfection in its purest and most terrible form, and held out her open arms. “Come and fuck me, Father,” she called. “We’re all waiting.”

  Throughout all this, Azrael gazed at Batuuli without expression. Only when the applause died and his court began to uncertainly reseat themselves, did he finally speak. “You were all that I desired in all the world. My first. My most beloved child. I cannot look at you without remembering the great promise of joy you once brought to my life.”

  Batuuli huffed and tossed her braids. Her breasts shuddered, shaking cream in thin trickles down her dark skin. “I trust that fool’s fancy has died.”

  “It has,” Azrael said, nodding once. “It finally has.”

  And then he killed her.

  He did it quietly, just a wave of one hand and she crumpled, cracking her skull on the edge of the dais as she fell. Her retinue scrambled away like birds startled into flight, but they didn’t go far. Then there was a second silence, a greater stillness.

  Tehya stood. Slowly, silently, she opened her arms. She and Azrael faced each other and for so long as their eyes held, they might as well have been the only two in the room, in all the world.

  Azrael broke the silence first, his voice as raw as a wound. “No. No, I will not. Not…Not unless you ask me.”

  Tehya did not answer. Her open arms lifted, miming shackles for the rest of her body to hang by. Her head lolled. Her wide, staring eyes never left his.

  “Will you not speak? My little bird…I would give you anything you asked to hear your voice once more…even your death.”

  Tehya said nothing.

  Azrael gazed at her a long time, taking breaths that shook his great frame harder and harder in silence. His hand raised, half-clenched, then swept through the air, cutting her down like a scythe through corn. She fell forward into her untouched dinner, the careful arrangement of her hair plopping into a silver tureen and sending a dark wave of gravy washing up around her ears and down her bodice.

  “Now me.” Solveig shoved his chair back and pushed the courtier seated beside him to the floor, clearing the way between him and Azrael. He smiled, a grin of savage triumph. “I’ll ask. I’m ready. I’ve wanted nothing else for years!”

  “Go.” Azrael picked up his cup in a hand that Lan saw shake, if only once. He put it down again untouched. “Please. My son, please go.”

  “Now me!” Solveig leapt up, chin high and blue eyes blazing. “All my brothers and sisters are dead! You’ve killed them all, you son of a diseased whore, now me! Grave-fucker! Bone-picking bastard! Haven’t I given you enough to be sorry for?” He looked wildly around, then pulled the sword from a Revenant’s sheath and ran, not for Azrael, but for Lan.

  She never had time to react, but somehow Deimos did. His sword flashed, intercepting the other blade with a ringing clash of steel and flipping it right out of Solveig’s grip, which was easy, because he was tumbling to the floor, carried forward by his momentum but falling all the same. Deimos caught the sword by the hilt as it spun in the air and Solveig fetched up against Batuuli’s body with his arms bent at awkward angles under him and Lan just sat there, frozen.

  ‘Now they’ll start applauding,’ she thought, staring numbly out at the dead court, but that didn’t happen. Then she thought she must still be sleeping, and all these disjointed scenes—Azrael sitting with her in the library, Lan punching him, Batuuli tearing her bodice open and Tehya falling into her tureen, the sword flying up and Deimos catching it—these were all just moments from different dreams, pieced together in her first moments after waking before she forgot them altogether. In a moment, she would open her eyes and it would be morning and the servants would be bringing her breakfast tray and ignoring her when she asked if Azrael was all right.

  Lan looked at him. He was not all right.

  “Get out,�
� he said.

  Chairs scraped back. Silverware clattered. Dishes broke. For a while, running feet and rustling gowns were deafening, but Azrael never looked up to watch the room empty. Only after the heavy doors shut for the last time did he move, rubbing beneath his mask and then removing it. He tossed it aside, too close to the table’s edge. The heavy horns jutted out over nothing; the mask teetered.

  Lan picked it up before it could fall and put it down in a safer place.

  “Go,” said Azrael. One hand remained over his eyes. The other strayed down to press over his stomach. “Just go.”

  She should. She wanted to. She didn’t.

  “Do you think you are safe with me?” His hand dropped, banging down on the table in a loose fist. He looked at her, too tired to be angry. He waved at the room, let his hand bang down again. “Safer than they? Get out!” He covered his eyes again. “Or stay. I don’t care what you do. You should not have come here tonight.”

  “You brought me.”

  “I should not have come here tonight.” Azrael’s claws dug into his brows, drawing tiny beads of black blood to drip down his face like tears. One by one, they fell into the grooves of his scars and disappeared into the hole in the side of his cheek. “Too soon…and too long overdue. Say something, if you’re going to stay. A small degree of defiance is of no use to anyone.”

  “Is it my fault?”

  “You?” He dropped his arm with a short laugh and looked at her. “What are you to her? What are you to me?”

  “A trigger’s a small thing,” she replied, “but it fires the gun. I fought with you.”

  “So?”

  “You apologized.”

  The hand now on the table drummed once. The one still cradling his stomach flexed. “So?”

  “Have you ever apologized to her?”