Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  * * *

  Back in the Red Room, with nothing else to do, Lan undressed in the dark. It wasn’t easy. Without her surly handmaiden’s help, if not for the fact that Azrael had cut a few laces, the corset would have been impossible to remove. As it was, it took minutes of hopping, swearing contortions to pluck the remaining laces loose enough so that she could wiggle the damn thing down over her hips. That left her in just the gown, which seemed like a victory until she realized that no amount of fumbling, stretching or shouting could get her fingers on the fastens, which were conveniently located between her shoulderblades. Her frustrations, never exactly cooled in the first place, boiled rapidly over and before she quite knew how it had started, she was tearing at seams and ripping huge swathes of fancy fabric in ribbons right off her body.

  That helped, but she ran out of dress before she ran out of angry, so she turned her attention to the bed, stripping away blankets and throwing them in heaps around her small room until she could get at the sheet. She wrapped herself up like a Roman and stomped over to the window and there stood, staring out over the lights of Haven.

  She had no right to be cross with him. She knew that. She was his dolly and dollies can’t complain. It made no difference that he was also a two-faced ass who asked questions but refused to let her lie and still got snippy over the answers. Besides which, it was her fault, ultimately, because she’d run out on lessons in the first place and there was no getting around that. If she’d stayed and taken her switching like a big girl, she’d have been on time for dinner and instead of being wrapped in a sheet in this drafty old tower, she could be naked in his bed right now.

  Footsteps on the stairs. A pair of boots and a pair of lighter shoes, with lighter feet in them. One of her guards, escorting another person, a woman, by the sound of those shoes. Maybe Serafina, coming to help her out of her clothes.

  Lan had a moment’s guilty pang—not quite sharp enough to be panic or deep enough to be remorse—as she looked at the heap of ribbons that used to be a dress, then set her chin and boldly scraped them all together. When the door opened, she threw them at the first face she saw, which turned out to be a startled servant, most definitely not Serafina, and a guard who was only just on this side of having things thrown at him by a warmblood, even if she was his lord’s dolly.

  “Now pick it up,” he told her, maintaining as much dignity as possible while strips of shiny fabric hung off his collar and puddled around his boots.

  “You pick it up,” she said sullenly.

  “I’ll pick it up,” the servant said with a short sigh, setting the tray she was carrying down on the vanity. “Bloody breather.”

  “What’s that?” asked Lan, looking at the tray. She didn’t need to ask. She could see the pot of tea and two covered dishes for herself. “I told him I wasn’t eating.”

  “He doesn’t take your orders,” the guard replied, glaring at her.

  Lan lifted the cover on one of the dishes to find a cold pie and a small wedge of seed cake. Under the other cover was a small bowl of soup, still warm, and a folded bit of paper.

  It was the paper that she picked up, the paper that she held while she fought, breath by breath, not to lose her temper. And when she lost it anyway, it was the paper that she kept in her hand when she threw the rest of it on the floor and stormed out. When the guard tried to stop her, she had a small explosion—something about telling him to either let her go or run her through, but she honestly couldn’t recall it clearly through the haze of red emotion she was feeling—and another when she reached the door at the base of the tower and found it locked. She beat and kicked at it until the guard came up behind her and unlocked it and then she was out and running through the palace in her sheet with that paper crushed in her fist.

  The next few minutes were as the turning of a page, one moment leaving the tower and the next barreling past the pikemen guarding Azrael’s chamber to burst through his door.

  He was at the bed, bending low over the girl he had with him, but he swung around fast when Lan bounced the door off the wall. The girl immediately kicked herself over to the far side of the bed, covering up what he’d only half-uncovered and rubbing hard at her cheek where he’d been touching her.

  “Not in the mood, huh?” Lan said scathingly. She jerked her thumb back over her shoulder. “Get out.”

  The girl bolted. Azrael stepped back and watched her go, frowning through his mask, then looked at Lan.

  She banged the door shut, marched over and slapped that paper onto his chest. “You got something to say to me, you say it to my face! You know I can’t bloody read and I’m not having your deadheads knowing my bloody business!”

  He threw the paper to one side and advanced a step on her. She gave no ground; he came right up to her, close enough that she could feel the heat from his eyes and the chill radiating from his flesh together. “How dare you come to my chamber uninvited! How dare you raise your voice to me!”

  “I’ll dare a lot more than that! You and me, we had a deal! And one day into it is too soon to start weaseling out!”

  “I sent the food!”

  “It’s not paid for!” she snapped. “I won’t be in your debt! That’s not how this plays!”

  “This plays how I say it plays!” he shot back, striking his fist against his chest hard enough to dent the collar he wore and make the silver rings suturing that gash in his side jingle. “You do not set terms!”

  “You set the fucking terms! You did! And then you sent me to my room and brought Miss Sniveling Thing down here to proxy me? Fuck you!” She brought both hands up and shoved him hard in the chest. It hurt her shoulders a little. It didn’t budge him an inch. “Get in that bed!”

  His head tipped back. “What?”

  “You heard! We’re doing this!” She yanked and stomped her way free of the sheet and threw it down at his feet, then shoved him again. This time, he backed up.

  “Lan—” he said warningly.

  She caught him by the belt and pulled at the buckle. He pushed her away. She pushed him back and kept pushing, herding him with her ridiculous little slaps and shoves until he hit the bed. He could have knocked her down at any time. Instead, he stood, chest heaving and hands in claws as she stripped him of the many layers of his loincloth and finally got her hands on his cock. He had not been far along with Miss Thing. She could feel him swelling, growing hard in her fist stroke by stroke, although the white heat in his eyes was real enough, too. He didn’t want her. Too bad. This was the deal and this was happening.

  “Lie down,” she told him.

  “With one word, I could have you impaled.”

  “Impale me yourself!”

  He snarled into her face, an animal sound of rage and lust wrapped together. She bared her teeth right back at him, squeezing his cock in her fist, and slowly, reluctantly, he lay back. Not all the way. Their eyes stayed locked together, unblinking, challenging, as she licked and sucked at him. Now and then, he growled. Now and then, so did she.

  Gradually, his breath coarsened, but that fierce light in his eyes only grew brighter and at last, he lunged for her.

  She let him take her, let him pull her atop him and fit them together, but he didn’t try to lay her down beneath him and she wouldn’t have gone quietly if he had. Her human claws scratched over his golden collar until they found an anchoring place on his rock-rigid shoulders. With that for leverage, she bent over him for a kiss. He snapped at her. She flinched back, tried again. He snapped again. She slapped him, grabbed his face between her hands and chased his mouth down. It was just the once, but she had it and when she was done, she leaned back, closed her eyes, and rode him until the headboard hit the wall.

  She had no grace, no rhythm, and the closer she came to that darklight glow he put in her, the worse it got, until she was all but paralyzed by it. When he caught her hips, she couldn’t fight. She had to move as he moved her, had to break when he broke her. She was lost, a conquered thing, and when she thought it
could get no worse, he threw her down beneath him, wrapped her legs through his arms and set her to burn from the inside out. She came screaming and kept screaming until her voice was gone and after that, just lay there, his until it pleased him to finish with her. She managed one last cry when he came and nothing more, not even when he dropped atop her.

  She couldn’t catch her breath crushed beneath him, but it felt all right, for a change, to be breathless. She’d never done this bit before, the lying-after. She wasn’t sure what to do, so she put her arms around him. He felt awful, cool and thick and inhuman. She touched him anyway. Her fingers traveled along scars, dipped in and out of dry wounds, found bone and metal and slicks of her own cold sweat. She thought she might be hurting him, because she could feel the coiling and uncoiling of his muscles, but he never spoke or tried to move her. He let her touch him until her fingers brushed the strap of his mask. Then his whole body locked up at once and he pushed himself away.

  “Don’t go,” said Lan.

  “I’m not.” He worked a hand under the edge of his mask to rub at his scars, then took it off and did it right. He was careful to keep his back to her until he was done and fit the mask back on again. “This is my room. If anyone would leave, it would be you.”

  But he didn’t tell her to go. He sat on the edge of the bed while Lan lay across its foot, curled as small as she could go, neither looking at the other.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked finally.

  “I’m all right.”

  “You ate nothing at my table.”

  “The corset was too tight.”

  “You aren’t wearing it now.”

  “I said I’m all right.”

  “If I sent for food,” he said, with a hint of edge to his tone, “would you eat with me?”

  “I guess, so long as it’s clear you’re the one wanting it and not me.”

  “Yes, yes, and you take no pleasure from it or anything I might give you!”

  “Almost anything.”

  He looked at her.

  She rolled one shoulder, offered half a smile.

  After a tense moment, he returned it. “Impale me yourself,” he muttered and got up. She heard the rattle and rustle as he dressed and then watched him come around the bed and over to the door. He had a quiet word with the guards outside, closed the door, paused, then opened it again. She heard him ask a question with the name Christina in it, but she couldn’t make out the answer.

  “Sorry I ran your other dolly off,” she said when the door closed again. She wasn’t, but it didn’t hurt to say so. “She all right?”

  He grunted, moving in and out of sight on his way to the wardrobe. He shifted things around in the noisy, rough manner of a man who wants to make it clear the frilly things he was touching were for someone else and of no sentimental value to him. He brought back something long and loose and blue, tossed it at her, then sat back down on the edge of the bed and resumed ignoring her.

  She fought her way into the complicated array of folds and drapes and veils, then moved over and sat beside him. Her shoulder bumped against his arm and he shifted like he might get up, only to settle tensely back again.

  They watched the door together, waiting for it to open.

  After several minutes, each one its own hour of prickly silence, Lan said, “So what was in the note?”

  He glanced around at the floor until he found where it had fetched up, but made no move to collect it. “I forgave you,” he said in a way that suggested he had perhaps been premature, “and warned you never again to leave the palace, save under guard. The living are not permitted to wander in my city.”

  “I was with Master Wickham the whole time.”

  “That is the only reason you are still here.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  He did not answer, not even with one of his narrow, knowing glances, but after the silence had stretched out to its snapping point, he said, “Displeased as I was when I heard you had climbed the palace wall, I did not truly consider it an attempt to escape me.”

  “Why would I? We just barely struck a deal.”

  He ignored that and said, “Likewise, there is nothing you could spy out in Haven that can be used against me. If you wished an accounting of my dead and all my resources, I would freely give it. Let your armies come. The dead cannot be killed.”

  “What the bloody fuck, man?!” she sputtered. “I’m no spy!”

  He ignored that, too. “When word came to me of your escape, my immediate thought was simply that you chafed at walls and wished to explore your surroundings. What more natural compulsion? As you say, we have just begun in our bargaining and your stubbornness will hold you far better than any chains of mine. No, I knew once your reckless impulse had been indulged, reason would follow…and remorse. And you would return. Even as the hours passed, I remained confident you would come back to me and when I, in my mercy, forgave you…”

  And then he only sat, his back stiff and jaw clenched, staring straight ahead at the door.

  “We’d come down here and I’d make it up to you?” Lan guessed.

  “Ha. No.” He shook his head, rubbed up under his mask, then finally said, “I thought we might…pass a little time talking about the things you’d seen. Haven is a marvel, no matter what else it is, and no one living looks on it save with wonder. I no longer feel wonder and I cannot imagine I ever shall again.” He was silent a moment, then said, even more reluctantly, “I thought I might see my city through your eyes. And I did.”

  Lan reached for him. He leaned away without looking at her. She put her hands together in her lap and fiddled with a fold of her skirt. “It’s not that bad. I never said it was. I never even thought it. It was just…”

  “Dead.”

  “Empty,” she said, but it wasn’t much better and she knew it. “Maybe…Maybe you could take me around sometime, show me the places you like? Maybe if I saw Haven through your eyes—”

  “Mine? I still see it burning.” He rubbed beneath his mask again.

  “Are you okay?”

  He scowled at her, then stiffly shrugged and forced his hand back to his knee. “The flesh is growing in,” he grunted. “It itches.”

  “Are you sure it’s not infected?” she asked, reaching for him again. “Maybe I should look—”

  He caught her hand in the air and shoved it away, snarling.

  She gave that a moment, then got up, not unaware of his sudden tension, but she didn’t leave. She went to the bath, took a dry washcloth from the small stack Serafina kept there, got it wet, and came back to the bed. This time, when he tried to push her hand away from his mask, she gave him a smack to his fake face. His eyes blazed, but dimmed again and he sat rigid and silent as she unfastened the straps and tossed the stupid thing onto the bed beside him.

  The open wound of his cheek was no worse than it ever was, but certainly no better. She daubed at it carefully, softening the black scab that edged it and took away a few beads of the tarry substance that was his blood. It didn’t smell soured, certainly didn’t feel hot. The flesh around it looked a little raw where he’d been rubbing, but the wound itself looked about as well as any gash open to the bone could look. She kept daubing anyway, giving every inch of the thing equal attention, as much to make her point as to do any actual cleaning.

  Azrael waited for her to finish, then rose and went behind the bathing screen to rummage among the little bottles he kept there. He came back with one of them and placed it, stone-faced, in her hand. He sat on the bed again, staring at the door.

  Lan opened the bottle and gave the contents a sniff. It wasn’t familiar to her, but it smelled medicinal and strong, so she got a little on her fingertips and gingerly worked it in all around the edges.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked quietly.

  “You know why.”

  “Here. Tonight.”

  “Oh. That.” She shrugged and capped the bottle, taking it back to the bath. “Just another reckless impulse.�
��

  He watched her go without moving. “You’ll have to work on those.”

  “Yeah.” Lan hunkered down to wash her hands in the standing bathwater. Whatever the stuff was in the bottle, it was thick and didn’t want to come off. “You know, I was never like this in Norwood.”

  “No?”

  “No. Kept my head down…and my hands clean.” She shook them off and rubbed them dry on her thighs. “Did my work and paid my debts.”

  “How blessed you are, to have led so tedious a life.”

  “Can’t afford to be exciting in a place like that, because there’s always someone else who wants what you’ve got. Your food, your bed.” She returned to his and sat beside him, looking down at her bare feet against his cracked stone floor. “Your boots.”

  “Mm.”

  “There’s not enough,” said Lan. “There’s never enough and there’s always someone else out there who’s stronger than you. So you need people to know you’ll be there for them so they’ll be there for you. One person against the world never wins.”

  “And yet, you’re here.”

  “I’m not against the world, just you. Makes the odds about even, as I see it.”

  He made a sound, not quite a laugh. “I used to be an idealist, too.”

  A soft knock sounded on the door at last. Azrael reached for his mask as his chamberlain entered and stood aside for a full parade of dead people—two carrying a table, two each with chairs, one with a trolley for the settings and the last, almost as an afterthought, with food. The table was placed with some private discussion by the fireplace and swiftly laid out. Just the bare essentials, owing to the odd hour: two bowls full of white and yellow flowers, a dozen candles in silver holders, a dozen dishes each, including finger bowls, salt shakers, pepper grinders, and napkins folded to look like birds. With the last candle lit and flower fluffed, the lot of them paraded out again and only then did anyone speak—his chamberlain, keeping his eyes averted as he asked if anything further would be required.