Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  The Revenant marched up the broad aisle between the tables, his bootheels crisp as gunshots, to kneel before the dais. His uniform was spotless. His hair was neatly combed and very slightly damp. “My lord, as commanded, I have delivered your gift to Norwood.”

  “What happened?” Lan blurted.

  Azrael glanced at her, then at the Revenant. “And?”

  “We were not met nor in any way confronted.” The Revenant made a gesture, as if he’d read about shrugs and wanted to try one. “Some of their youths made remarks.”

  “Ah well. Remarks.” Azrael took his knife to Lan’s plate, cutting a small wedge of black pudding and sampling it. “Treasonous, one assumes?”

  “Rude, certainly. Their elders pulled them back soon enough.”

  “Sensible of them. What am I tasting?”

  “Blood,” said Lan.

  He set down his knife hard and looked coldly at her.

  “Really. Hog’s blood.”

  “Hm.” He turned back to the Revenant. “I do not dignify the boastful chatter of boys with my attention. But now tell me, how was my gift received?”

  “With my men at a distance, lord. But it was received. Or at least, it was not immediately declared poison or burnt. We did not stay to watch them eat.”

  “You mean you just left?” It was not relief Lan heard in her voice as she spoke, but doubt. “You didn’t do anything?”

  Deimos glanced at her, then at Azrael, and finally faced her straight-on. “I do as my lord commands.”

  Lan cut her hand through that like the words could be slapped away. “Yeah, whatever, but did you leave them alive?”

  “Yes.”

  She had so expected to hear a ‘no’ that her heart’s first act on hearing his answer was to cramp in grief, then start beating again, too fast and too hard. She sagged back in her chair, just staring at him. “All of them?” she said at last.

  Again, Deimos looked to his lord for direction. Azrael gave none, only poured himself another cup of tea. The Revenant shifted on his knee, gripping at the hilt of his sword in a restless sort of way. “How am I to know who lived or died within their walls? I say we killed no one. We obeyed our lord’s orders and delivered his gift. It was received. We left.”

  “Well done, Captain. You may stand.” As the Revenant took up a post to one side of the dais, Azrael leaned back in his throne and raised his teacup to Lan. “To human nature,” he said with a smile. “In all its unpredictable variations.”

  Lan had an answer, but the sound of two hundred chairs scraping and two hundred people standing startled it right out of her head. “To human nature!” they all said and drank whatever they happened to have in their cups. Then they all sat down again.

  It was several seconds before Lan realized her mouth was open. She closed it and looked at Azrael.

  “It’s called a toast,” he said, rubbing the brows of his snarling mask.

  “Why did they…?”

  “They’re called sycophants.”

  Lan stared back out at the hall, more confused than ever. The word was familiar, but the hazy image that accompanied it—that of her mother, showing her a picture in a book of some great, grey beast with its tail growing out of its face—had no obvious connection to anything in his dead court.

  “No matter. Your former home is safe and has my promise of regular shipments of table scraps,” he continued, waving a servant over for a fresh pot of tea. “I imagine there will always be hunger from time to time, but with their prudence and my charity, it should be enough to keep the wolf of starvation forever from Norwood’s door.”

  “Thank you.”

  He glanced at her, a glance that became a sidelong, considering stare. His thumbclaw scraped back and forth across the rim of his teacup. “Now that your mind is at ease,” he said at last, in an oddly wary and reserved tone, “I suppose you’ll be wanting to return to the Red Room after our nightly audience.”

  “Not if I have a choice.”

  “Oh?” He looked out at the dining hall, at no one and nothing in particular. “Why is that?”

  “There are a million stairs in that tower.”

  “Ah.”

  “I hit my knee when I fell,” she explained, twitching the now-split skirt aside to show him the forming bruise and also quite a bit of her thigh.

  His gaze lingered there awhile and then he reached down and matched the fingers of his hand to some of last night’s bruises. “I was vigorous,” he remarked.

  Lan raised his golden collar off his shoulder to expose the fresh scratches carved there. “So was I.”

  “Yes. You seek comfort after the same fashion of a terrier seeking rats.” He fingered one of the scratches, smiling. “All the same, I shall be sorry to see the mood depart you. These little hurts are nothing measured against the delights you offer when properly inspired. And in that spirit—” He resettled his collar and took up his cup again. “—I have a proposition to put before you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A suggestion or, as in this case, a contract, put forth for consideration and effected upon mutual agreement.”

  “No, believe it or not, I knew that word. I mean, what are you offering?”

  “The people of Norwood hunger and I have fed them. The people of other villages hunger—” He indicated the tables below. “—and I could feed them.”

  “You’d do that?”

  “Not at a sitting.”

  “But you would feed them?” she pressed. “All of them?”

  “Not the whole world. Just the few fools who refuse to abandon this part of it, choosing instead to starve in my shadow.”

  “Nobody chooses to starve,” Lan muttered, taking another pudding.

  “No? Are you certain? Do you know why I came here?” he asked suddenly. “Here, of all places on this Earth I might have taken.”

  Lan looked around the room.

  “Not to this palace,” he said with a dismissive wave. “What is it to me but a stack of brick and a dry roof? No, to this land. This…island.”

  “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say you liked it here.”

  “Mark the tone in which you suggest it,” he said with a humorless smile. “It is the very voice of doubt. I put it to you: Do you like it here? Did you like the life you had in Norwood? Do you miss it?”

  Lan bristled, but could not think of any answer that was both affirmative and honest.

  “No. You don’t,” he said for her. “This land is shaped from bitter clay. It is cold. Hard. Men have long since stripped it of whatever natural life it held and then buried it under the choking sprawl of their own cities, which have since fallen. Its watery veins are toxic. Its enclosing seas are always angry. It has the most desolate soil, the most miserable weather, the most loveless and unfriendly landscape. It is a wretched place,” he concluded, thumping a finger on the table to emphasize each word. “Of all my wanderings, it is the most wretched place one can live. Oh, there are lands more barren,” he said as she opened her mouth to protest. “Frozen lands, sere lands, lands infected with more virulent disease and lands teeming with more noisome and lethal beasts…but these are lands that kill. And I am weary unto death, so to speak, of dying, Lan, forever dying. When I ascended, when I had the king’s cut of all Earth had to offer, I thought, ‘I will take this land and set myself within it, for it is wretched and who would ever stay where the Devil dens?’”

  “But it was their home!”

  “Home? Home is a word, child. Your mother could have told you of a time when humans changed their home simply because they did not like the view from the windows. No, this is not their home. This is a forsaken grey hell of stony soil set down in the very shadow of the greatest evil humankind has ever known, and the only reason to root themselves to it is to harry me. So is it not a little funny that they choose to farm this vile land and starve when they could easily travel to more arable lands?”

  “Easily. You keep saying that. Through hordes of Eaters all
the way to the coast and across the sea to a strange land where there are more hordes of Eaters, looking for another village willing to take hundreds of foreigners in. Yeah. Easy.” Lan shook her head, more frustrated than angry. “The more you talk, the more I think you really have no fucking clue what is going on out there.”

  His thumbclaw tapped at the side of his cup. “I could move them.”

  “How?” She pointed at Deimos, who put a hand back on his sword and stared back at her. “Send your Revenants to round them up and take them away? Yeah, that’s sure to end well.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Get rid of the damn Eaters!”

  “No. What else?”

  “You could…I don’t know! We’ll figure something out! You act like it’s one or the other—either you kill us or we kill you—but I know there’s another way!”

  “In all my years, I have not found one.”

  “You stopped looking a long time ago. You don’t even believe another choice exists.”

  “I don’t believe dragons exist either, shall you find me one of those?” he shot back.

  “One thing at a time.”

  He leaned back and stared at her for some time, then shook his head and smiled, albeit in a thin, humorless way. “There was a time I thought only if you had half as much passion in my bed as in speech would it be worth having to endure your never-ending argument. Now I find myself thinking that if you had half as much passion in speech as in my bed, you could convince me.”

  “Does…does that mean—?”

  “No. Sit down,” he added as she rose. “I’m certain we can come to some agreement. As I have said, I reward those who please me. And you…” He reached out to brush the backs of his fingers along her cheek. “You pleased me. I know you would rather appeal yet again on the matter of my hungering dead, but you will never have that. I am, however, willing to negotiate terms on behalf of one more insignificant and ungrateful cluster of humans. You could save them. If not from my dead, at least from their own stubbornness and empty storehouses. What say you?”

  Lan scowled and reached across his plate for another slice of lemon cake. “How much food are we talking about?”

  “As with Norwood, I will send whatever remains of that evening’s meal.”

  “Every month?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “For however long you remain with me in Haven.”

  Lan nodded, tapping her cake against her plate. “Sounds suspiciously fair. What exactly is it you want in return? It can’t just be fucking, because I’m already your dolly and you get that anyway.”

  “Much depends upon your enthusiasm, but my desires, as I have already said, are not so particular. Share my table. Share my bed. Be for my pleasure and pretend some pleasure in return and I will pour the wealth of Haven into my enemy’s larder.”

  Lan searched his eyes, glowing coolly through the sockets of his faceless mask, then shook her head. “There has to be a catch.”

  “Some might argue I am the catch.”

  “Well, you’re not.”

  “Thank you, that’s very flattering.”

  “You keep talking like it’s so awful just to be with you, but you’re—”

  His brow climbed invitingly.

  “You’re not that bad,” Lan muttered, forcing another bite of cake into her stupid mouth. Was she blushing? She thought she was. Damn him anyway.

  “When you tended your trees in Norwood, which took the greatest toll? The first? Or the last?”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Oh, but it is. You’ve tended me twice and tended me well, but if you truly intend to purchase every human settlement in this land, you will have to preserve that energy and dedication row after row. You may be able to comfort yourself for a time with thoughts of the good you are doing, but you will never see their grateful faces.” His smile went crooked. “You will see mine.”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Mm.” He picked up his teacup and scratched at the rim. “There is one more thing.”

  “I knew it. What?”

  “You will not mention my hungering dead.”

  “But—”

  “Not one word,” he warned her, leaning forward to point a claw in her face. “If you speak of them—however indirectly, even once, at any time, for whatever reason—our negotiations to feed the living of this land are concluded.” He gave that a moment’s dramatic emphasis, then took the uneaten portion of cake from her and ate it himself. “You may of course continue to press me in vain for the ending of the Eaters after that,” he said with a careless wave, “but you will never have another village fed by my hand. Is that clear?”

  “Why? What difference does it make to you if I ask for one thing or the other?”

  “I am under no obligation to explain my reasons. Those are my terms. Shall you agree or not?”

  She spit on her hand and held it out unhesitatingly.

  Quite a few conversations throughout the room broke apart at that and all heads turned when Azrael bemusedly copied her. They clasped hands briefly. His spit in her palm burned like a live coal at first, but quickly cooled to something merely hot. It called up the intensely unwanted memory of his tongue teasing up between her thighs. Suddenly flustered, Lan pulled away first, not quite able to suppress a shiver.

  Azrael wiped his hand on a napkin. “Yes, it is a cold morning, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, avoiding his eyes. Her palm still tingled.

  “No matter. The nights are warm enough. Or will be, with you to share them with me.”

  “You don’t think I can do this, do you?”

  “No, but I mean to enjoy you anyway.” He ran an eye over her in a manner calculated to intimidate. “I won’t be hurrying our negotiations. And before you boast to me of your rustic mettle and incorruptible purpose, you might bear in mind, my patience is measured in centuries. You cannot win.”

  Lan lifted her chin. “I don’t know what kind of girl you’re used to, but it’s clear you’ve never had one from Norwood. We don’t give up and we don’t back down.”

  “But you taste just as sweet as the peaches you grow,” he replied. His head cocked. He smiled. “You blush like one, too.”

  Lan drank her coffee, trying to will away the burning in her cheeks. “I’m not blushing.”

  “How many times must I tell you? I do not keep company with liars. No matter how prettily they blush.” He ran a finger along the curve of her cheek, then rose. The dead court stopped talking to stand up and bow at him, but he ignored them all to bend low, putting his mouth right against her ear. “Or how sweet they taste.”

  She shivered again, tight-lipped, and felt him smile.

  “I’ll pretend that’s anticipation,” he murmured, straightening up. “Until tonight, then.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Although she had been in Haven nearly half a month by then, that was when it really began for her. With a goal to work toward, even if it was more of a ‘delay’ than a ‘goal’, she felt herself again. It was a good feeling, one that gave her something solid to hold onto when she left the dining hall and fell again into Serafina’s clutches. She was Lan of Norwood again and when the state of her skirt was immediately called to the attention of quite possibly everyone in the palace, Lan of Norwood could shrug it off. She let her handmaiden’s mutters lead her through the palace while she thought ahead to bed that night. Not about Azrael, not about his hands or his mouth or that hoarse growling sound he made just before he came, but just the act…although it was strangely difficult to separate the two.

  How many villages could there possibly be at stake here anyway? She couldn’t remember how many she’d passed through on her way from Norwood, but that alone said something: it was more than could be easily counted and that on just one road. Did waystations count? And if they did, did she really want to pay for them? There again, there were only so many days in a month, so Azrael only had so many
nights to barter. Say she bought them all…

  Moments from the previous night spilled through her mind, magnified by a month’s worth of repetition. She felt something. A hot, shivery feeling she refused to name. She tried to chase it off by reminding herself how cold and clammy and dead his hand was, but even in the privacy of her mind, it was a trap—she couldn’t visualize his hand without seeing it against her skin.

  Enthusiasm, he’d said. He wanted her enthusiasm. Somehow she didn’t think that was going to be a problem.

  Serafina brought her to an unfamiliar room, small and plain and poorly lit, whose only furnishings were a handful of gowns on fitting molds, a few shelves stacked with shoes and some boxes heaped with belts and gloves and stockings and every other kind of dolly costume. Lan extracted herself from the first dress without complaint and was cinched into another one, just as pretty and ill-fitting, but that at least allowed her to walk. Then her hair had to be rearranged to better suit the new dress and her face scrubbed off and repainted, with the dead woman muttering under her breath all the while about how impossible Lan was to work with. “And now you’re late!” she concluded, throwing up her hands before shoving Lan toward the door.

  “For dinner?” Lan asked sarcastically.

  “You have an appointment with Master Tempo and after that, your usual lessons.”

  “Oh bugger, still? I thought I was done with that nonsense.”

  “Our lord insists his warmblood women use their time in Haven to better themselves,” Serafina told her, adding, “A more perfect waste of time and effort, I cannot imagine.”

  Although Lan had been thinking just that, if not in those exact words, hearing it from her unasked-for handmaiden put her hackles right up. “Well, fuck you very much!” she said irritably. “Where is this attitude of yours even coming from? What have I ever done to you?”

  Serafina raised her hands in a gesture of frustration. “You are not my mistress.”

  “You know what? If that’s the way you want it, fine. I don’t want a handmaiden anyway. Sod off.”

  Serafina stayed, tight-lipped, right at her heels.