Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  Lan choked on nothing, retched nothing, and lay hoarsely gasping.

  “Or I can take those memories. End them, as you would say. I could dip my hand into your death and pull you free of it, newborn and wondering, yet give you all your will.” He passed through her line of sight, paused briefly as if to give her a chance to speak, then kept on walking when she didn’t. He wore a gold ring on his toe, one she’d never before noticed. It tapped at the stone with every step, not quite keeping time with her gasping breaths. “You will know that you are Lan, but only because I tell you so. You will know the tale of how one small child lost her coat on England’s shores, as I tell it to you, but you will not know her face or her name. Every mark upon your body shall become an incomplete clue to a life you have lost. You will question me, doubt me and, eventually, you will hate me.”

  Lan coughed and dragged her leaden arm up through fathoms of tar to grip her swollen throat.

  “So I will deny you all. I will take this cooling clay and shape it as I please. The creature I form will never know pain or grief or loss. Neither will she miss her life nor have cause to question it. She will never be the woman I knew and I suspect I shall tire of her readily, but she will love me…and she will always love me.”

  He completed his circle and hunkered down in front of her. “But here is the vital point you have overlooked. However it happens, whatever I make of you, I need not bargain for it. Death will come for you in its own time and when it does, I will be there to guide you through. I can wait. And if I find myself impatient, I can take what I desire without bartering for it. Haven is mine. All who reside within are mine. You, Lan, are mine.” His hand came out of nothing to lift her heavy hair, rub it between his fingers, and let it drop again. “Chamberlain!”

  The door eased itself open, just bumping Lan’s foot. “My lord?”

  Azrael rose and stepped over her. “My chamber needs airing. I want fresh linens for the bed and fresh company to fill it. Millicent or Hestia, perhaps. I am not particular to flavor, provided it is sweet.”

  “Yes, my lord. And…ah…?”

  “Fetch her handmaiden to clean her up and take her back to her room,” Azrael said, catching Lan by the ankle and pulling her around so that he could open the door wide enough to pass through. “I am done with her.”

  The door banged shut and Lan was alone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She couldn’t be angry forever. She couldn’t even be angry all night, although she tried. When Serafina came in the morning to dress her for breakfast, Lan’s refusal had more to do with embarrassment than any lingering bitterness. She didn’t want to face Azrael. More than that, she didn’t want to swallow the cold lump of her pride and go, only to see some other dolly in her chair. Serafina stood there at least an hour with her morning dress in her arms, alternately berating and wheedling with her, but eventually gave up in disgust and left her alone.

  The next time the door opened, it was a servant with a breakfast tray and not, as Lan anticipated, guards come to drag her to the dining hall. Lan waited for her to leave before she got up to investigate. There was no note, but the tray itself was polished silver, smooth and shiny enough that Lan could see the deep purple blots in the shape of Azrael’s fingers smudging her throat. She stared at them for a long time before wrapping herself in a blanket and making sure she was swaddled up to her chin. She meant to leave the food untouched, but it wasn’t long before she broke and had the coffee at least. It hurt to swallow.

  It was a long day, made infinitely longer by having nothing to do except wait for Serafina’s inevitable return. It never happened. A dinner tray came instead. Still no note. She ate the bread and some of the fruit and put the rest of it out on the landing where the smell couldn’t get to her. She curled up small and cold on the floor under the thin, blood-colored blanket and thought.

  She should leave. Right now, even without food or water or a weapon. She didn’t know where the nearest waystation was and didn’t care. She would just start walking. Maybe the Eaters would get her or maybe a ferry would happen by and pick her up. Either outcome was better than staying here.

  So she told herself, but she didn’t move. She thought her black thoughts and nursed that last hot coal in her heart and replayed ten thousand variations of her last exchange with Azrael, but the one thing she did not do was march herself downstairs and out the front gate. It was not hope that restrained her, either, but the quiet fact that, no matter how many times she said she was not afraid to die, she was. Haven was locked in the ruins of the old world, where Eaters were sure to be drawn by its glowing lights and illusion of life. They would be on her before she was a mile gone from Haven’s gate. She would scream then, oh yes. And eventually, she would rise and walk.

  A hero’s death, maybe, but still a pointless one. Azrael never left the palace. He would never even see the Eater she had become and even if he did, there was no reason to think he would do anything but wave his hand and let her rot where she fell. If he thought of her at all after that, it would only be as a moment’s fond recall while his new dolly wore her old dresses and endured his loathsome touch.

  These thoughts—the last in particular—turned like a wheel through her head. Not a cart or bicycle wheel either. That kind of turning would at least move her forward. This was more like a miller’s wheel, turning in place, grinding the same simple stuff into finer and finer powder, but going nowhere.

  She slept badly that night, but she did sleep.

  Morning came with wind and rain, blowing in through the glassless window to wet Lan’s pillow, which was already wet. Lan wriggled around to the other side of the small room, as far from the weather as she could get, and waited for Serafina, but her handmaiden never came. A servant brought breakfast and a clean dress, setting both on the vanity and leaving again without a word. There was no note and none again when her dinner was brought that night.

  Lan sat with her supper for what felt like a very long time, staring out the window at a sun that hardly seemed to move at all. Slowly, she began to eat. She used her fork and her napkin. When the tray was empty, she set it out on the landing. She lay down on the bed instead of under it and closed her eyes.

  She woke in a small puddle of rainwater, which set the tone for the day that followed. And the night that followed that. And so it went for who knew how long, each day dragging on a little longer and each night leaving a little more darkness behind, until they all blended together into one long, bruise-colored space in which Lan sat in her tower, alone.

  On the morning that her neck was finally clear (or at least, on the morning that she noticed, since she’d lost count of the days themselves and wasn’t sure anymore whether she was still looking each and every day), Lan left. She passed the servant bringing her morning tray on the stair, but although the dead woman looked startled, she did not attempt to call Lan back. Neither did the pikeman standing watch at the door below. No one spoke to her at all as she walked the wide corridors leading to the dining hall. There, she stood for some time while Azrael’s steward impatiently waited with one hand on the door for her to decide to go in so he could announce her.

  She could hear the rattle and clink of dishes, polite laughter, light music. She could smell sausages and spice…and coffee. No one here drank coffee for breakfast. No one but her. Still, she lingered and in the end, she turned around. Azrael’s steward immediately went in, probably to drop a whisper in the lordly ear. Lan walked away a little faster, but no one followed.

  She didn’t want to go back to her room and she didn’t know where else to go, so she went to the library. It was empty and dark when she got there, but it wasn’t long before Master Wickham arrived. He did not comment on her lengthy absence, merely gave her his usual greeting and opened up his briefcase. She tried to study, or at least, she tried to try, but she was restless and withdrawn and spent most of the day staring out the window with her primer in her lap. Master Wickham doggedly lectured what might as well have been an empty
chair, but eventually retired to a chair by the fireplace and read until the servants brought tea.

  He waited without bothering her or even seeming to watch her while she made a single biscuit last half an hour, then closed his book with a dull clap of sound and set it firmly aside. “Let’s chat,” he said. His voice was as pleasant as ever. All the same, it was not a request and he didn’t wait for an answer before he followed up with, “I’m a creature of routine, Lan, and I find disruption to that routine to be extremely upsetting. Extremely. Now—” He raised a finger to forestall a flurry of apologies or explanations Lan had not been about to make. “—I don’t expect you to feel the same way, but I do ask that you refrain from deliberately exacerbating an already unpleasant situation.”

  Lan blinked a few times in the expectant silence that followed and finally said, “Okay?”

  “What happened?”

  Lan found something inside her coffee cup to stare at. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do. I want to help you, Lan. Our lord rather shortsightedly raised me with the overdriving urge to see my students succeed, whoever that student might be, so I don’t have much of a choice, but however it happened, I sincerely want to help you. What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  Master Wickham sighed and opened his book again, but he hadn’t even turned one page before he shut it and set it forcefully aside. “I cannot function under these circumstances. You are dismissed. I’ll ask our lord to release you from our lessons.”

  “No! Don’t…Don’t do that.” She pushed her mostly untouched cup aside and dragged her primer back in front of her. “We had a fight.”

  His brows climbed and slowly knit, from surprise to bewilderment. “Are you sure?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  He glanced around, as if to judge the veracity of his next words before he said, cautiously, “You’re still here.”

  “It wasn’t that kind of fight. Nobody…” Lan scratched a few lines in her book, realized she was drawing his horned mask, and blacked it out. “Nobody killed anyone or anything. He just…said a few things.”

  Master Wickham gave that a lot more time than Lan would have thought it needed before saying, “He did.”

  Lan shrugged.

  “What sort of things?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Fair enough,” he said after a moment. “Have you apologized?”

  “I don’t have anything to be sorry for,” she insisted, “and if he wants to get his knickers in a knot over nothing, he can do it by himself.”

  “Lan—”

  “Look, mate, he doesn’t want to see me right now and I sure as hell don’t want to see him, so we’re giving it a breather. Okay? Okay.” She found a clean page in her primer, hoping he’d take the hint.

  He did get up and come over to her table, taking the chair opposite her just like he usually did when they were working on her writing, but instead of starting in with the lesson, he took the primer from her and closed it. “No,” he said seriously. “This is not okay. It’s even less okay that you seem to think it is.” And before she could point out that it was a fight and fights weren’t supposed to be okay in the strictest sense of the word, but that no one had gotten hit or, hell, even yelled at much, so for fuck’s sake calm down about it, he asked, “Why did you come to Haven?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Humor me.”

  “I came to ask Azrael to stop raising Eaters.”

  “Have you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Have you asked him yet?”

  “Yeah, but he…oh.” Lan rolled her eyes. “You and your words. Fine, I came to convince him to stop.”

  He nodded once, but his solemn, frowning expression never changed. “How do you intend to do that if you don’t bother to endear yourself to him?”

  “I’ve been endearing him every night for over a month!” Lan snapped. “And for crying out loud, just say fucking, why don’t you? I’m fucking him. It’s called barter and you may not approve, but it’s how the world works.”

  “My feelings are irrelevant,” he said with a cut of one hand. “As are the workings of the world beyond Haven. As for barter, you perhaps fail to take into consideration that it is only effective when the value of what one wishes to possess is greater than what one already has. You cannot expect our lord to relinquish his most potent defense against a proven treacherous enemy merely for a warm body in his bed.”

  Let alone a cold one.

  Lan’s hand twitched, wanting to rise and test her throat, where she knew there were no bruises. She pushed it down again, hard, and said, “Have you ever slept with him?”

  He raised an eyebrow at her. “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Then what gives you the idea you can lecture me on how it’s done? I am a whole lot more than just a warm body, not that it’s any of your business. I know what I’m doing and he likes how I do it just fine.”

  “And you think that’s enough, do you?” Master Wickham watched her ignore him for a moment, then sat back and laced his hands over one bent knee. “Right,” he said briskly. “Convince me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Convince me to put an end to the hungering dead. Assuming sex is not the sum and substance of your persuasive powers, convince me.”

  Lan frowned.

  “I’m quite serious,” said Master Wickham. “I am, like all our lord’s risen, a reflection of the mood that had him when I was raised. My thoughts are, to no small degree, our lord’s own, although I very much doubt he is as forthcoming as I in expressing them. To put it even more succinctly,” he said in his ‘let’s chat’ tone, “if you can’t convince me, you will never convince him, so have a go.”

  “Just the fact that I need to convince you that eating people is wrong means there is no point in having this conversation, so no.” Lan turned back to the window, fumed for maybe half a minute, then swung back to him. “Seriously, how can you defend that? How can you sit here in a palace, with your stupid shiny shoes and your stupid briefcase full of books, and talk about the Eaters like you know anything at all about them? Have you even seen one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eating?” she pressed.

  He did not flinch. “Yes.”

  “Then what the fuck is left for me to say?” Again, she tried to stare down the long-faced lady in the window and again she turned back to find him still calmly waiting for her next words. “You don’t really think they’re people, do you?” she demanded. “That killing them is, what? Murder?”

  “I have no special fondness for them, but I am content to co-exist.”

  “Because you can! You can walk right out in the middle of them and they’ll never even look your way! How would you feel about it if they ate you?”

  “Not very charitably, I imagine,” he admitted. “But I can’t deny they serve a purpose. So long as that necessity exists, so too should our lord’s hungering dead.”

  “And by necessity, you mean as long as there are humans.”

  “I am human,” said Master Wickham with just a touch of frost. “Death did not unmake my humanity. I think. I feel. I speak and reason. Just because I do not breathe or eat does not make me less than I was.”

  “Obviously I didn’t mean it like that!”

  “No? Then let me put to you a question. If you get your way and the choice were yours, would you allow the dead to remain in Haven?”

  Lan blinked and squinted at him, but he refused to explain. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “While the rest of the living, of humanity, continue to squat in the mud behind their walls?” he pressed. “You would be content with that? You would be content to leave and live among them?”

  “How many buildings in Haven are empty?” she countered. “There’s not a hell of a lot of us left. Couldn’t we all fit in Haven? Couldn’t we build on if we can’t?”

  “So you are in fact proposing to move yourselve
s in,” said Master Wickham. “To simply take Haven from us because it appears to you that there is room. And if you decide our homes are more comfortable than those laying empty, why, just take them! After all, we’re dead. And when you propose to set the rights of the living above the rights of the dead—”

  “Okay, let’s get one thing straight,” interrupted Lan. “The living built Haven. Every building, every road. We strung the lights up, we put in the plumbing, we painted the bloody paintings and hung them on the bloody walls. I never said anything about taking your homes away, but if anyone’s got the right to protest being pushed out, it’s us.”

  “Then you consider us usurpers and still you insist you and all your kind would share what you say we have stolen. No,” he said, even as Lan opened her mouth to damn well protest. “I withdraw that remark. That our lord conquered Haven is incontrovertible. Conquest is, of course, the means by which most empires are founded, including that one whose ruins we inhabit…but that is neither here nor there. You say there is room in Haven for the living and the dead, and if the matter were as simple as fitting physical entities into available space, I would have to agree, but it isn’t. You say you only want the Eaters gone. Anyone can see they’re not alive, not—how did you put it?—not people, and what could possibly be the harm? Well, I’m not alive either, so you’ll have to pardon me if I’m not keen to use that as the tipping point between who is or isn’t ‘people’.”