Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  He came a step closer, then moved away. “I call it weather.”

  “I miss you.”

  Azrael’s footsteps stopped and this time, did not resume. She could feel a faint warmth between her shoulderblades, see her shadow thrown long and dark ahead of her as his eyes burned on her back. He said nothing, but the sound of his dolly breathing was suddenly very loud.

  “I miss your bed. I miss being in the dark with you. I miss seeing this.” Lan held her hand up before her face, angled to catch his eyelight on her palm. “And I hate that I miss it. You…You made me feel what it is to sleep alone. It ought to be the same as before I ever knew you, but it isn’t. I can’t even say how. It just isn’t.”

  The light got brighter, but still he did not speak.

  She let her arm fall, shaking fresh droplets free to scatter on the tiles. “I want to come back to you, Azrael. Even if it’s just to bed, just for tonight. Please. I can’t give you any more than I have, but I can come back if you ask me. And if you can’t ask me, then…then send me away. Right now. Tonight. Because it’s already raining and I…” She pulled in a shuddering breath and made herself laugh, the sound indistinguishable from a child’s sob. “I can’t lose you on another nice day.”

  Shadows fell over her as he walked away, but not far. He stopped close enough that she could hear his breaths behind her, harsh in the air and the rasp of his hand rubbing up under his mask.

  That was all for the longest time, time measured out by the rain hitting the windows outside, raining just as hard as it could rain.

  “Damn you,” he muttered. “Ah, Lan…Lan, come here.”

  She turned and took two steps, unsteady as a child just learning to walk, then somehow ran across the wet floor in her slippers without losing her footing. She fell against him; he stiffened, hissing in one breath and never taking another. His hand flew up as if to slap her away, only to hover there. He stayed that way, silent and immoveable as stone, while she pressed herself close. Water squeezed out of her dress in rivers, beading up on his chest and trickling down to the floor, falling into his open wounds and seeping out again stained grey.

  “I’m sorry I’m wet,” she said, barely at a whisper, like a secret. “I’m sorry I’m so wet.”

  Slowly, his tense muscles unlocked. His claws scratched across her scalp, combing through her damp hair before his arm came to rest at last around her shoulders.

  His dolly’s eyes darted back and forth between them, breathing faster and louder until, just before it could be properly called a sob, she struck the rail with her gloved hand and shrilled out, “I was here! I was right here the whole time! I…I…I was an hour dressing up! She was off running in the street and I was…here…”

  Azrael looked at her and held Lan. He said nothing. Nothing.

  His dolly raised her hand as if to hit the rail some more, then just closed it in a fist. She gave Lan one last glare and marched herself away, her chin high and her back very straight.

  “I said I was sorry,” Lan mumbled, watching her go.

  “I heard you.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I believe you.”

  “But you don’t forgive me!”

  “No. Not yet.” He brought her closer against the awful chill of his body, almost rocking her, and sighed one last time. “But I will. Come to bed, Lan. Come to bed.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  He held her until she fell asleep, which was nice in an awful, clammy way, but when she woke up, she was alone and the woman from the wastes was in Haven. Maybe she’d made her last run on her own or maybe Azrael had sent someone out to get her, but however it happened, she was here and she was his.

  Lan knew this, not because she saw her and certainly not because anyone told her, but because Serafina brought a tray to Azrael’s room the next morning and told Lan to eat quickly because they had to go to town. If Lan didn’t already know she was being run off so the new girl could be settled in—and she did—she knew it soon enough. The errands Serafina kept pulling out of her perfect ass all had to do with dressing up: new measurements and designs for more gowns, fittings for slippers, picking out belts and gloves and all the twee glittery shit that set a ‘look’ off proper. She even went to a hat shop. Hats, for fuck’s sake, who wore hats anymore? Why was anyone even making them?

  Eventually, Serafina ran out of ways to waste time and took her back to the palace, so at last Lan knew what it took to make her glad to go to lessons. But when she got to the library, Master Wickham seemed to have given up on her and was packing himself up to leave.

  “I’m here,” Lan protested, hardly able to believe she was protesting. “I know I’m late, but it wasn’t my fault, I swear.”

  He waved her over, but kept right on shuffling papers together and tucking them into his briefcase.

  Lan didn’t move. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m in a beastly mood, but it’s nothing to do with you. Directly. Come, sit. We won’t have time for lessons today, so I thought we’d have a chat. Just the regular sort of chat,” he assured her, reading her apprehensive thoughts before they’d even fully formed. “I don’t suppose you’ve eaten? It’s a bit late for luncheon, but I have a spot of something here.” He gestured toward the fireplace and the table closest to it, laid out with biscuits and little sandwiches. “The tea’s gone, but you don’t care for it anyway. I put the coffee there, by the fire, so it should still be warm for you, even if it isn’t fresh.”

  “This is you in a beastly mood?” she asked as she filled a teacup with biscuits and took the coffee, kettle and all, away with her.

  “Positively venomous,” he agreed. “My day is half-gone, my schedule is in ruins and neither is likely to change in the foreseeable future. I believe I’ve told you how upsets to my routine, ah, upset me. The very real possibility that this latest upset is soon to become my routine is no-end galling to me.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” said Lan, taking her seat. It was warm. The significance of that took a minute to reach full impact. She knew she ought to keep quiet, that nothing she said or did at that point would make any difference, and would only sound like a jealous chavvy whining anyway. All true, all well and good, and still as soon as Lan’s mouth opened, out came, “I was run around town all morning so some blousy bint can do my lessons for me, is that how it is?”

  Master Wickham gave her his most severe frown. “You should know better than that.”

  “Yeah?” Lan asked suspiciously.

  “You’ll each do your own lessons.”

  “I knew it! Who is she?”

  “She’s none of your concern. All you need to know is that she’ll have lessons in the morning, from nine until one o’clock. You’ll have afternoons, from two until six. Thus assuring neither of you will have adequate opportunity to learn anything. Flaming bloody ruins!” he concluded.

  “Why can’t we just do lessons together?”

  “You have two entirely different curriculums.”

  “Oh balls to that! I don’t need you hovering over me every second of the day, do I? She can sit over there and I can sit over here and you can go back and forth between us. What’s this really about?”

  “Our lord’s living companions have been known to conspire against him in the past. Others have attempted to eliminate their rivals. As a precaution, they are rarely allowed to associate with one another. It isn’t personal,” he assured her. “Just a precaution. Better safe than sorry and all that.”

  “So I don’t even get to meet her?”

  “Why would you want to?”

  She snorted. “We’re about to have a lot in common.”

  Sarcasm rarely had the expected effect on him. This time, it seemed to bring on a startling revelation.

  “You’re upset, aren’t you?” he said.

  “No!” Lan rolled her eyes and threw herself back in her chair, picking restlessly at its scuffed arms. “Maybe. Not the way you’re thinking, though. It’s not about her as much as i
t is, you know…him. Why did he keep her?”

  She could actually see him sifting his answer through finer and finer grades of tact, until all he was left with was, “Did you really think he wouldn’t?”

  “No, I know. I get it. She reached the gate, so he had to be hospitable and give her a look at him and then, I don’t know, maybe she offered or maybe he asked. Whatever. I shouldn’t even care. We’re fucking, we’re not dating. But…he took me back. He took me to bed, anyway.” She acknowledged the difference with half a laugh, unconvincing even to her own ears. “I went to bed with him, thinking we were all the way back to where we were before I mucked it up, and he waited for me to go to sleep so he could go out and pick up another girl. So yeah, it stings a little. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does.”

  He seemed to know some response was expected, but was clearly at a loss as to what it might be, so after an awkward stretch of time, he went back to the table by the fire and brought her the cream and sugar for her coffee. It was weirdly touching.

  “Never mind me,” said Lan, fixing up her drink. “Tell me about her.”

  “I don’t think that would be appropriate conversation.”

  “I don’t take etiquette anymore.” Lan underscored that fact by helping herself to a handful of biscuits and propping one slippered foot up on the desk. “What’s her name?”

  “I shan’t say,” he said with gentle reproach.

  “Well, what’s she like?”

  She thought she’d have to wrestle an answer out of him and when she did, it would be as vague as possible, but he said straightaway, “She’s a goer.”

  Lan blew biscuit right out of her mouth and across her primer. “She’s a what?” she choked, snatching at a napkin while Master Wickham peered at her with mild alarm.

  “A goer,” he said again, and blinked as she sputtered out more crumbs and laughter.

  “What the hell kind of assessment did you give her to make that out, mate?”

  “Just the standard reading and comprehension—Oh, I see,” he said, rolling his eyes. “A goer, as a jovial reference to one’s sexual stamina. Charming.”

  “Yeah, and you gave her a bit of the old ‘standard assessment.’” Lan snickered and took another biscuit. “Why? What’s it mean to you?”

  He plucked up another napkin and used it to brush away her mess in silence.

  “Aw, come on! It caught me out, is all. Tell me.”

  He glanced at her, shaking crumbs into the bin. She put on her humblest, sorriest face and he must have decided she meant it, because he said, “I try to avoid making sweeping generalizations. Death is complicated. Life, even more so. And people, ah! Having said that, I’ve come to believe there are, or at least, that I only see two kinds of people: the kind who stay and the kind who go.”

  “What kind am I?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. But I am quite confident our newest arrival is a goer of the first order. So don’t get too accustomed to half-days. They won’t last.”

  “Is she pretty?” Lan asked, directing all her attention to her coffee as she stirred it.

  “She has a certain pleasing symmetry,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “But there’s something of a lean and hungry look about yon Cassius which I personally find rather off-putting.”

  Cassius, eh? Lan smiled to herself and took another spoonful of sugar. “Do you like her?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Do you like her?” Lan repeated, drawing little loops in the air with her biscuit as she spoke, as if writing the question out for him.

  “I do not, now that I think about it.” He neatened a few papers in his briefcase. “I would go so far as to say that I dislike her. Fancy that.”

  “Bad student, is she?”

  “No, actually, I expect she’ll be quite a good one. But that isn’t entirely true either. She was quiet and attentive during her assessment, but she reads…I’m certain she reads…and she claims she can’t.”

  “Why the hell would anyone lie about that?”

  “Why indeed,” he murmured, frowning into space for a bit before he shrugged it away. “They all lie, the living. Even you. If she wants to waste her time pretending to learn a thing she already knows, I suppose it’s her time to waste, but I do wish I knew why she’s wasting it in this particular manner.”

  “Maybe she likes you.”

  “Mm.”

  Lan ate a biscuit, watching him think, then leaned conspiratorially toward him and said, “Maybe she likes you.”

  “Do you think so?” He seemed surprised and pleased by the suggestion. “I am told I have a personable way about me. It’s one of the reasons our lord appoints me to tutor his consorts and to act as his intermediary after they’ve left his, ah, intimate company.”

  “Do I want to know what that means?”

  “Intermediary?” Taking a small pencil from his pocket, he wrote the word out in her primer, indicating the salient points as he spoke them. “Inter, a prefix meaning ‘in the midst of.’ Medi, from the Latin media or medium, for ‘an environment’ or other means by which something is carried or achieved. Ary, meaning ‘having the character of or pertaining to’. Intermediary, ‘one who goes between’. This means that our lord’s former consorts communicate with him through me. At least in theory. In reality, if I did not make it my business to look in on them regularly, I doubt I’d see them any more often than he does. Our lord fails to consider that familiarity is not the same as trust or friendship.”

  “I’ll intermediate with you,” Lan said loyally. As an experiment, she dipped a biscuit in her coffee and sucked at it. Soggy, but tasty. “Hang on, ‘one of the reasons’? Why would he need reasons? Didn’t you say you were raised just to teach us dollies?”

  He gave her a rare censuring frown. “I do wish you wouldn’t call yourself that. It’s demeaning. And no, I never said that. I said I was raised for the purpose of teaching.”

  “His Children?” Lan guessed.

  “No. Well, yes, for a time, but I was his tutor originally.”

  “Azrael’s?” Lan looked around, trying to picture Azrael at one of the tables with a primer open before him and a pencil in his hand, scrawling out the same shaky letters as she had only just begun to master. “Really?”

  “Yes. He had a voracious appetite for learning in the earliest years of his ascension. His memory, of course, gives him a unique advantage in languages. He speaks hundreds of them, dozens of which have been lost to human understanding. His mind holds priceless insights to this world’s history, to the very birth of civilization…” He trailed off, then shook his head. “…and its death. Such a waste. In any event, he could speak, but not read or write, and so I taught him. In fact, I was engaged as his tutor before my death.”

  “He told you that?”

  “No.”

  Lan looked at him curiously over her coffee, recalling Azrael’s surprise (if surprise was the right word for that dark distraction) at hearing that Master Wickham knew his name. “Do you…Do you remember it?”

  “Our lord does not permit us to retain our living memories. And having seen…well, no,” he interrupted with a self-deprecating chuckle. “That’s hardly pleasant tea-time conversation.”

  “Seen what?”

  “Really, Lan, I’d rather not. And I’m certain you’d rather not hear it.”

  “I don’t know what kind of hothouse flower you think I am,” said Lan with half a smile, “but I can just about guarantee I’ve seen worse in Norwood than anything you have here in Haven.”

  “Perhaps. But I predate Haven by some three months.” He looked down at the book where the word intermediary sat alone on its page. “And they were bad months.” He closed the book. “But if you insist, as I see you are prepared to do, I’ll tell you. When our lord claimed this land, he offered amnesty to the living if they agreed to relinquish it. Certain promises were made. But when he made landfall, he was met with armies.” A pause. “I can’t imagine that surprised him.
” A longer pause. “Yet he took…a terrible vengeance.”

  Lan, who had grown up with nothing but a wall between her and an ever-present horde of rotting, howling, hungry corpses, ate her biscuit and waited impatiently for him to get to the good part.

  “When they were dead, Lord Azrael raised them up as what you call Eaters, but…not quite. They…” Master Wickham frowned, tapping one finger against the cover of his book in a gesture that could only have been culled from Azrael himself. “They knew who they were,” he said at last. “They knew what they had become. He made them his vanguard, sent them against their former companions, against neighbors and friends…family…and he made them know what they were doing even as he denied them the power to stop. Before we had reached the palace, they could do nothing but scream. And eat.”

  With some effort, Lan took another sip of coffee, but it was a long time before she could swallow it. “What happened to them?”

  “He raised them to rot.” Master Wickham shrugged with his hands. “He let them. But he pushed them out beyond the wall, where he didn’t have to listen. To my knowledge, no matter how angered, he has never raised their like again. And I, for one, am grateful. Memory is not a comfort to the dead.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Is it?” He looked away, then shook his head. “Well, I like to think I’d believe it anyway.”

  “So you don’t remember anything from before you died? Nothing at all?” She hesitated, then said, “Not even your name?”

  He gave her a quizzical glance that bloomed into one of understanding. He smiled, nodding at her as if to award a point. “No, I don’t remember Wickham, but I’m quite sure I am he. Ask me why.”

  “Why?” asked Lan obediently.

  “I am a tidy man in this incarnation and I’ve reason to believe I was a tidy man in life. Apparently, I changed clothes regularly in a public setting, but so meticulous were my habits that I wrote my name in the linings of my garments so as to be certain no other man mistook them for his own.”

  “Maybe you stole the real Wickham’s togs.”