Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “I didn’t mean it that way, damn it! You know I didn’t!”

  He raised an eyebrow and slightly bent his neck, looking at her over the rims of non-existent spectacles. “Do I?”

  Lan’s frustration bubbled over at last into real anger. “Look, I don’t know what the fuck you want me to say and you know what? I don’t care! You just want to score points off me in a stupid word-game while out there, in the real world, real people are really dying! That’s what I care about! That’s why I’m here!”

  “If that’s true…” He leaned slightly forward and deliberately cocked his head to an inquiring angle. “Why are you here?”

  “Why am I…? What?”

  “Here,” he repeated. “With all that is at stake, why are you in the library, of all places, rather than apologizing to—”

  “Oh fuck that!” Lan exploded. “If he wants me, he knows where to find me, and whatever he wants me to say when that happens, I’ll say it, but I’m not crawling back just to give his ego a stroke. I may be his dolly, but I’m not his fucking dog, so there!”

  “So there,” he agreed and stood. “Take a walk with me.”

  It was not a request, no more than it had been a chat.

  Lan followed him out from the library, through corridors and breezeways, upstairs and across foyers until they began to see not merely pikemen at their posts or on patrol, but just leaned up against the wall like anyone chatting with their mates. There were watchmen, in and out of uniform, and even Revenants, although they kept to their own kind and never seemed entirely at ease. There were no servants here; if there was work being done, it was done by dead men and women in uniforms. Somewhere along the way, unnoticed, the usual decorative touches had also vanished, replaced by racks of scythes and swords and occasionally even gun cabinets, where rifles were kept in good working order against the next time they were needed to turn dissenters into Eaters.

  “Where are we?” Lan asked, although she hardly needed to.

  “The garrison. Just for a moment. Wait here.” Master Wickham left Lan at a window and went ahead to a plain set of doors, where he had a word with the Revenants stiffly at ease in front of them. One of the Revenants withdrew and returned in short order with Deimos. He listened to whatever Master Wickham had to say, looked once at Lan, then made a brief answer and went back inside.

  “Is that it?” Lan asked as Master Wickham joined her.

  “Not quite. This way.” He smiled at her and extended a hand toward another hall, just as Deimos came back through the door, now with a small leather satchel slung over one shoulder.

  “Is he coming with us?” Lan asked uneasily.

  “Yes. Come along.”

  She didn’t move. “What’s this about?”

  “I’m your teacher, Lan. Consider it a lesson.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “Say no,” Master Wickham invited as Deimos put a hand on the hilt of his sword. “We’ll find out together.”

  She started walking.

  More halls. More doors. They ended up outside, across the rain-grey courtyard, past the iron gate and on the long road that led away from the palace. It was an hour’s walk to reach the city, maybe two, and still they kept walking, making their way steadily down the empty streets of Haven. Lan could see the wall ahead of them now and it was only getting bigger.

  There were stairs at even intervals along the wall and Master Wickham went up the first they reached, with Lan behind him and Deimos behind her. On the top of the wall, the wind seemed stronger. And colder. There were watchmen and even Revenants standing guard up here, not many, but more than enough to keep a lookout on all the nothing there was to see on the other side. The city used to be bigger, before it was Haven, but Azrael had knocked everything down that he didn’t want. There were no forests growing back, not even weeds, nothing living at all, only scorched earth and broken concrete, twisted metal and weathered bones…and Eaters.

  Deimos moved away to speak with his men and Master Wickham went with him, but Lan stayed behind, watching the Eaters below her. They staggered along the foot of the wall, or crawled, if their legs had rotted out from under them, drawn here, even here, either by the electric lights that burned at night or by the sounds and smells of Azrael’s livestock. They were slow now and relatively quiet with nothing to hunt, but even as she watched them, a rat darted out from a clump of debris and every Eater in sight of it suddenly lunged. Those with voices bayed; most could only make that wet, farting sound of air passing through meat. The rat vanished down a hole, but that wasn’t the end of it. The Eaters, now a swarm of a dozen or so, began to dig, tumbling broken rock and debris aside with single-minded purpose until one of them leapt up, eating, and the others converged on it, all grasping hands and snapping jaws and bright smears of fresh blood.

  Lan shut her eyes tight and turned her face into the wind before she opened them again. One of the watchmen was pointing out into the wastes. Deimos scanned the horizon, then opened his satchel and brought out a pair of binoculars. He passed them to Master Wickham, who trained them on some dark dots in the far, far distance and then lowered them and beckoned to Lan.

  She didn’t know what she was going to see when she raised them to her eyes, but she already knew she didn’t want to see it. Trying to brace herself, she looked, tapping away the distance and bringing the blurs slowly into focus.

  A ferry. Not moving, just idling there. By habit, she shifted her attention first to the picture on the side. A black-haired beauty in a barely-there winding cloth and a scythe, ravens in flight around her and a horde of decapitated corpses below. It wasn’t one she knew, but then, it wouldn’t be, not this far south. There were letters, but they were too far away to make out. The ferryman was no more than a pale blob behind the wheel, with a little movement now and then to suggest he might be talking. His passenger had crawled out through the hatch and was hunkered on the ferry’s roof, long hair blowing in the wind and her hands oddly cupped around her face. She had her own binoculars, Lan realized, and was looking back at them. Maybe not at them specifically, but at Haven.

  “Who are they?” Lan asked stupidly.

  “Spies. Beggars. Rebels. What matter what they call themselves?” Deimos took his binoculars back and had a look through them. “The living have always come to Haven. We see fewer than we used to, but they still come. That one’s been circling for days. Now she’s letting herself be seen. She wants us to send a vanguard out to meet them, so she won’t have to come any closer on foot.” He glanced down, pointedly, at the Eaters who were once more slumping listlessly around the base of the wall, rat-blood drying on their rotting flesh and drool shining on their ragged mouths, then went back to watching the ferry. “So far as I’m concerned, she can stay out there. Our lord does not allow us to kill the living on sight, but that doesn’t mean I have to give them welcome.”

  “If she’s clever and lucky enough to make it as far as the gate, she’ll be taken into custody,” Master Wickham said, standing close beside her and gazing, not out into the wastes, but inward at the many roofs and dark windows of Haven. “The gatewatch will inform our lord, who is not in the habit of admitting guests, but who is just as unlikely to turn her out sight unseen.”

  Lan felt a tightening in her gut that meant absolutely nothing. She lifted her chin. “So?”

  Deimos grunted and turned around, leaning slightly closer to Master Wickham to say, “You’re wasting your breath,” as he resumed his watch over the distant ferry.

  “Ah well,” Master Wickham replied with a hint of humor. “I’m not using it for anything these days. Lan, why do you think I brought you here?”

  She shrugged defiantly. “To scare me, I reckon.”

  “Scare you?”

  “And it won’t work. I already know I’m replaceable. He tells me all the time.”

  “And yet, you don’t appear to listen.”

  “They never do,” Deimos remarked.

  “I am, for the moment, still your
teacher, Lan,” said Master Wickham, assuming his lecturing pose. “So allow me to lay out a few I should think obvious lessons. What you choose to take away from them is entirely up to you. Are you listening?”

  “Yeah,” Lan said sourly, but she wasn’t, not really. She was watching the Eaters, who had all come together at the base of the wall almost directly below her, drawn either by her smell or her heat or just some unseen life-light she shone out like a beacon. There they stood, leaning up against one another for balance, arms hooked around strange necks and chins resting on strange shoulders, licking blood off other Eater’s lips with the casual intimacy of the dead. “Yeah, I’m listening.”

  “First, this land is filled with desperate people who would do anything to be in your position. Second, most of those people…what is the phrase I want?” he asked Deimos.

  “Keep it simple,” the Revenant replied, watching the Eaters stagger around the foot of the wall. “She’s American.”

  “I am not!”

  One of the Eaters raised its head at the sound of her voice and looked around, teeth clacking in anticipatory chewing motions, but it didn’t think to look up and soon lost interest.

  “Most of those people don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about the hungering dead,” Master Wickham concluded after a moment spent perusing some mental book of American idioms. “And that should concern you, Lan, deeply. You want our lord to take back one of his most potent defenses, essentially opening himself to an aggressive renewal of the war you claim to be trying to end. But that woman—” He pointed out into the wastes at the dot on the horizon. “—may want nothing more than a full belly and a safe place to sleep. That woman may not only tolerate a doctor’s examination, but be grateful to have one. She may even want an education,” he added with very mild reproach.

  “Takes all kinds, I guess,” Lan said, refusing to drop her eyes or her chin.

  Deimos shook his head in silence, but Master Wickham was undaunted.

  “Indeed. And since all kinds eventually present themselves to him, the longer you spend sulking in your room, the sooner your appallingly unsubtle loathing for the gowns he’s given you will be resolved by having some other woman wear them.”

  “I wasn’t sulking, damn it!”

  She hadn’t meant to shout, but she sure hadn’t been trying to be quiet. The same Eater that had looked around before now did it again, and this time, it looked up. Its left eye was mostly gone—just a shriveled, brownish-green sac stuck to the bottom of its socket—but the right was still working. It saw her and leapt, crashing into the wall and breaking its withered fingers as it clawed in vain for a handhold. Then it was gone, lost in a tumble of grasping hands and snapping jaws, all of them climbing and being climbed by other Eaters until the weakest were crushed and brokenly writhing at the bottom of the death-pile and the strongest was pulling itself up over the ramparts.

  She was in no danger. Lan knew that. She wasn’t afraid and she certainly wasn’t paralyzed. The only reason she stood there, silent, unmoving, was because she knew Deimos would step up the way he did and shear the Eater’s hands off. It fell back, biting at the air in desperation, and was swallowed up by the howling, thrashing, grasping knot below. The hands clung on, weakly jittering, until Deimos stepped up to kick them loose. His boots were black and shiny, unreal against the weathered bricks of the wall. She raised her eyes, unafraid, unaffected, to look at him and said, “How often do you clean your boots?”

  Deimos glanced at Master Wickham, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. He said, “Every night.”

  “They look really good,” Lan said and immediately felt dizzy, like she might sick up or fall over. Right over the wall. Right on top of the Eaters. “I want to go now. Okay? Right now.” She turned around, but there was a Revenant standing between her and the stairs.

  “Lan,” said Master Wickham.

  “He sent me away!” she shouted, turning on him. “This wasn’t my idea! He said he was done with me!”

  “And are you done with him?”

  The wind again, burning her cheeks and her eyes. “I’ve been with him practically every night since I got here! Did you think that was going to last forever?”

  “Oh, I know it won’t,” he replied seriously. “But for all your shouting, I don’t believe you’ve quite grasped that concept yourself or its consequences. You seem to think you ‘get’ to stay in Haven as long as you wish, simply because you wish it. You think you are owed audiences, even when your arguments consist mainly of insults and profanities, which our lord is obligated to forgive simply because it was you who made them. And that sex is all you need to provide him, whenever it conveniences you to do so.”

  “He set the terms!” she insisted. “It’s all he wants!”

  “That may well be true. I personally don’t believe it, but for the purposes of this conversation, I’ll grant the supposition. The fact remains, he doesn’t have to get it from you, whereas no one else in this wide world can give you what you want, and there, Lan, there lies the burden of apology. This is where you’ll tell me again how you have nothing to apologize for,” he went on as Lan opened her mouth to say just that. “And how he said or did this or that and you have the moral high ground. I don’t care. I suspect I wouldn’t care even if I had the capacity. The reality of your situation is, you have less to offer and more to lose, and therefore, you will apologize.”

  The wind blew hard against her face, chapping her cheeks and making them burn. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Oh for God’s sake.” Master Wickham pinched at the bridge of his nose and turned to Deimos. “Do you want to try?”

  The Revenant cocked an eyebrow at him. “I don’t want her to stay.”

  “Please.”

  “Please yourself. I know what you’re trying to do, but I don’t agree with it. You were made to care for your students, but I was made to protect Haven, and she—” He paused, then turned on Lan herself. “You. You represent a direct threat to this city,” he told her, advancing with one gloved hand on the hilt of his sword and the other drawn into a fist. “If I had even a sliver of doubt that our lord wants you with him, I would put you right over this wall myself. No other warmblood woman has ever had this power over him, ever. You are an infection upon his thoughts and his judgment and with every day that passes, your corruption spreads. If he takes back his hungering dead for you, the living will come. Everything he has built may be destroyed. Ten thousand of his people have made a home here, raised with love to serve him for all eternity, but he will put them all at risk for you.”

  Lan could not answer. She could barely seem to breathe.

  “Thank you, Captain,” said Master Wickham, smiling.

  Deimos looked at him, his brows furrowed. “For what?”

  “He sent me away,” Lan said again. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the Eaters, which strained it, making it seem as though it cracked. “He said he was done and he meant it. He doesn’t want me back.”

  “Please don’t be stupid,” Master Wickham said, looking pained. “You’ve no idea how much that annoys a dead educator. If he was, as you say, ‘done’ with you, you would know it. You are not so formidable that our deathless lord fears to confront you, nor remove you, should that become necessary. And I tell you now, it may, if you continue to make yourself his adversary.”

  “I…” Lan looked from one to the other of them, then down at the Eaters, her breath a hot knot in her chest. “He could have sent for me, if he wanted me back. I would have gone.”

  “Could have and would have, weighed together, measure precisely nothing. What did you do yesterday?”

  “Huh?”

  “Yesterday,” he said, patiently. “What did you do?”

  “I don’t know. I ate. I slept.” She looked at Deimos, who was no help at all, and did her best to hide her confusion with a shrug. “I did a lot of looking out the window. There’s not a hell of a lot to do in that tower.”

  Master Wickham acknowled
ged that with a polite nod and said, “Was it worth it?”

  “Was what worth it?” she asked stubbornly, knowing she was about to get a lecture on the pointlessness of spite.

  But he didn’t. He said instead, speaking pleasantly and enunciating so she couldn’t miss a word, “You traded a day of your life for a little food, a few hours’ sleep, and the view from that window. You will never have that day back. You have no guarantee you will ever have another. You would have returned to him if he’d sent for you, but he didn’t, so you did nothing and now that day is over. That day is gone. So. Was it worth it?”

  She didn’t have an answer. He didn’t seem to be expecting one.

  “You have to want the time you have, Lan,” he said, not unkindly. “More than anything. More than everything. Because that is the cost at which you are selling it. Do you understand?”

  Still she could only stand there, silent, while the wind whipped at her eyes.

  “Good.” Master Wickham tugged his sleeve back to check the time on his wristwatch, then turned a broad smile on Deimos. “Thank you for your help, Captain. I’d like to take her back now. You needn’t trouble yourself to accompany us if you’d rather stay.”

  Deimos glanced out into the wastes, then gave Lan a hard stare. “Behave yourself,” he told her. “I have standing orders to prevent your escape. If you attempt to leave Haven, I have our lord’s authority to hunt you down and do whatever is necessary to have you back.”

  Her chest tightened, but not with fear.

  Signaling the Revenant at the stair, Deimos resumed his watch over the distant ferry as Master Wickham led her away, keeping a weather eye on the next woman who might conceivably fall into his lord’s favor.

  The way back was so much longer than the way to the wall had been. She walked with her head down and her back to the Eaters and the dark dot of a woman who was maybe coming, watching her shadow grow fainter over the cracked pavement as the whole world seemed to darken. The clouds were thickening, but only over Haven, reminding her of the black rains Azrael was said to summon at a whim. She’d believed it once, as she’d believed he could wave his arm and send out plagues or wither crops or start fires. She wished she could still believe it, because it was, in its way, a comforting thought. How much easier this would all be, if only everything were his fault.