Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  Lan thought of her mother, how proud she’d always been of the rebellion that followed Azrael’s ascension, and she had to hide a smile in the pages of the book, because that was people all over, wasn’t it? If you couldn’t win the war, at least you could say you’d spit on the Devil.

  “So instead, he put a bounty on them,” Master Wickham continued, “and that did the trick rather nicely.”

  Yeah, it would. Because that was people, too.

  “How many did he get?” Lan asked.

  “I’m not certain. At least fifty, of various specialties. But there was some…unpleasantness in those early days. Sabotage and so forth. It was just easier to kill them and raise them up, like me, with their expertise intact and their loyalties assured.” He looked away out the window, not at Haven, but just into the sky. “I was their intermediary too, while it lasted. There was one in particular of whom I was quite fond. Water management. Pretty girl.”

  Lan blinked and looked up at him.

  “We’d talk sometimes. Go for walks. And once…well.” He glanced at her and away again, shaking his head a little. “I used to see her fairly often, after her…shall we say, conversion. Of course, she was never the same, but I still liked to see her. I had the feeling she reminded me of someone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lan said awkwardly.

  His brows knit. “For?”

  “She’s…uh, you know…dead.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she’s still around. Perhaps not in the palace, but somewhere in Haven. Our lord hasn’t commissioned any major projects in ten years at least, but the streets aren’t exactly running thick with water management experts, are they?”

  Lan started to nod agreement, then looked sharply up. “You think he kept her?”

  “I couldn’t swear to it,” Master Wickham said with a hint of apology. “But I’ve no reason to think otherwise. Their talents are, like the cities they built, relics of a lost age. Even if he personally has no further need of them, he would want that talent safeguarded.”

  “A lot of talents are gone.” Lan brushed her fingertips over a hundred faces, frozen in a moment of life, preserved only in paper. “A lot of people. He doesn’t care.”

  “Many of the living who come here make the mistake of believing that our lord has no empathy, merely because he chooses so often to demonstrate no mercy. I assure you, he feels. And there is nothing he feels so deeply as loss.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I feel it, Lan.” Master Wickham climbed down from the ladder and joined her at the window, but his eyes were on the book in her hands, not the city before them. “Every day, in a thousand different moments, I am reminded there will never be another city to equal Haven. There may be other settlements, if Mankind survives his foolishness, and they may be great, but they will never be as great…no more than Haven could ever be as great as the old city from whose bones she has been raised.”

  “You need to watch it with that talk. Anyone at all could be listening.”

  “It can’t be treasonous if it’s true. And it’s the sort of thought I imagine comes at least in part from him. As I say, he’s stopped building. Three-quarters of Haven is no more than pastureland. Not even gardens, but pastures. Our lord’s cattle graze where millions of people once lived and worked and died. This is not the act of a man making a legacy for himself. This…” He moved closer to the window, clasping his hands behind his back and gazing restlessly and without expression at the empty city beyond the colored glass. “This is a monument to his remorse. I am daily astonished that he does not put us up, like dolls in the dollhouse he has outgrown, and leave us behind.”

  That thought—that stupid, childish, impossible thought—tried to rise up again, to make itself more than just a thought, but an idea. Maybe even a plan. As much as to distract herself as him, Lan turned pages in her book blindly and said, “What’s this place?”

  “Mm?” Master Wickham glanced at the picture under her finger, then took the book and turned it so he could read the tiny letters underneath. “Hampton Court,” he said in a thoughtful tone. “The Tudor palace.”

  “Another palace?”

  “Another and another and another, oh yes. One simply cannot swing one’s demised feline without hitting a royal residence in Haven. And that one is really rather significant, you know, home in its time to Henry the Eighth, Elizabeth, and George the Second. A true chimera, blending gothic Tudor design with magnificent baroque ornamentation. Look here, you can just make out the clock tower.” He tapped the page meaningfully. “That’s a pre-Copernican astronomical clock, Lan, and it still works.”

  “Uh…crikey. You don’t say.”

  “It’s even more shocking when one considers how badly damaged the grounds were during the ascension. The maze, the gardens, the great vine—all destroyed, although I’m told the structure itself came through largely intact.”

  “You ever been?”

  “No. I’ve seen it, of course, at a distance. It’s not that far, but then, Haven really isn’t all that big. It only seems that way when it’s full of people.” He tsked admiringly. “Look at those chimneys!”

  “Chimneys, you say.” Lan took the book from him and squinted at it. “Chimneys are probably my favorite part of any building.”

  “Are they really?”

  “Hell, yeah. Tell me all about the chimneys. I’m riveted, here.”

  “It’s difficult to know where to begin.” He thought, then said, “Would you like to go there?”

  “Ugh.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  Lan managed not to say it twice, but she sure thought it hard. She didn’t mind listening to him talk about chimneys for a few hours (especially since she’d gotten awfully good at only pretending to listen while he talked), but going back out into Haven and standing in her slippered feet while Master Wickham lectured her on the history of flues did not appeal.

  “Gosh, I’d love to,” said Lan, wearing her best dolly-eyes. “But I probably shouldn’t bunk off on my lessons again so soon after the last time. You got to space that shit out.”

  “Nonsense. I see no reason to attempt lessons with this…this farcical schedule I have been forced to adopt. As far as I’m concerned, until this latest nuisance resolves itself, we can have an outing every day. How does that sound?”

  “That…sounds…” Lan heaved a sigh and pressed the heels of both hands over her eyes. She never did know when to rein it in. “Brilliant,” she said, resigned.

  “Then it’s settled,” he said, gathering up her books. “I’ll just have a servant take these to your room. You can read them at your leisure and let me know which chimneys interest you the most.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Lan and had to laugh at the skillful way she’d built that trap around her feet. “I am fuck-wild about chimneys.”

  “I feel the same way about columns,” he confided. “Come along.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  There were ways to handle rejection that did not include running through the palace, kicking in a bedroom door and throwing another woman out by the hair, but Lan didn’t know what they were and was afraid to repeat herself too often. So she waited. She ate her meals off a tray and slept in a cold bed beneath a window that let all the weather in. Master Wickham continued Lan’s introduction to the many, many historic chimneys of Haven, with Deimos to accompany them. The Revenant’s presence was a distraction at first, a funereal shadow across even the brightest British day, but soon became a part of Lan’s new normal. As her awareness of him faded, her mind found an annoying new defense against the boredom of Master Wickham’s lectures: learning.

  Not about chimneys. Not even particularly about architecture, although she absorbed some of that, the way she, as a child, had absorbed the ways and means of peach farming without anyone taking her aside and telling her directly what to do. But she did learn about building, about the way things broke down and the way they were raised up, and sometimes, as the learning bored into he
r reluctant brain, that same hazy thought she’d first had in the library would come back to her, no less laughable, but stubbornly pulling together into some sort of shape. Two shapes, really: the shape of the palace, with and without a tower. And sometimes, that perfectly ridiculous, impossible idea gave her the same sense of excitement as she’d felt walking out of Norwood for the last time or walking into Haven for the first time, like there was a plan and she was a part of it, like it was almost over.

  But only sometimes. And the rest of the time, she was left to wonder if she was only pretending there was an idea there so she wouldn’t have to think about anything else. Or anyone.

  Because there was so much time to think about it. Her days began in the Red Room, with a breakfast on a tray, often cold, and a fresh dress brought by a servant who was not Serafina. Her baths were lukewarm water poured from a pitcher into a basin, a handtowel and a bar of scented soap. She had her books to look at in the morning and another cold tray for lunch and then it was off to those odd, bookless lessons with Master Wickham and Deimos. Ostensibly, they ended at six. In reality, they were never home before nine and often not before midnight. The gate was always left open for her, the lamps always left lit, but no one waited up for her. Master Wickham would say his polite goodbye there in the foyer (after a few days, Deimos took to adding a curt sort of nod before he marched away) and then Lan would climb alone up all those bloody stairs to the Red Room to find her supper tray and put herself to bed. Serafina was never there to meet her. She suspected her handmaiden was off tending the other girl, Cassius, which robbed her of any sense of reprieve from Serafina’s impatient care.

  In the eleven days that followed Lan waking up forgiven in Azrael’s bed, Lan saw him only once, and then it was from across a hall, through an open door, where he stood listening to some other dolly, not one Lan knew. Her, maybe. Lan could not make out their words, only the high piping of her speech and the low thunder of his replies. She didn’t try to get any closer, but even so, when she lingered to watch, his gaze shifted and he saw her.

  His dolly kept talking, her hands like graceful little birds at the end of her arms, flying higher and higher in an effort to regain his attention, until at last, she turned. Her painted eyes first widened, then narrowed. Her lips pressed into a pink slash. With a savage glare at Azrael, she came to the door and slammed it shut.

  Lan went on to the library alone. Sensing her lack of enthusiasm for the day’s outing, Wickham attempted to sweeten the pot by assuring her their destination had magnificent arches. Lan had been to enough buildings by now to know that couldn’t possibly be as dirty as it sounded, but she let him talk her into it anyway, mostly out of gratitude that he even bothered to act like there was a choice involved.

  Wickham would tell her there was always a choice, Lan thought, climbing into the car where Deimos was already waiting. And then he’d talk about buttresses or some bloody thing for the rest of the day and Lan would come home well after dark with a finer understanding of the difference between gablets and pinnacles, only to discover that it was the same exact difference as between elephants and ostriches, which was to say, simultaneously enormous and unimportant. And she would go to bed alone at the top of her tower. And the day would be over. And she would never get it back.

  Deimos opened the driver’s door and took his place behind the wheel.

  “Stop the car,” said Lan.

  The Revenant looked at her in the rearview mirror, then turned all the way around to show her the ignition key still in his hand. “I haven’t started it yet.”

  “Sorry.” She waved at him and covered her eyes. “I’m sorry. Go on then.”

  “Lan?” Master Wickham frowned at her with a fairly good approximation of concern for a dead man. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Fine.” Lan shook her head and looked back at the palace, at all those empty windows that opened on empty rooms. Mostly empty. Azrael was in one of them and not alone. She knew it, just like she knew that she couldn’t charge herself in and throw his dolly out the door every time he picked another girl over her. He still wanted her, that was the important thing. He wanted her, even if he didn’t want to see her or eat with her or go to bed with her. She knew it…because he said so. Eleven days ago. And he hadn’t spoken to her since.

  “Lan?”

  “I’m fine,” she said again and faced front. “Let’s go.”

  The engine turned over. The car rolled forward.

  “Stop the car,” said Lan.

  Deimos stomped on the brakes hard enough to throw Lan against the back of his chair and looked at her again, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel and glaring at her in the rearview mirror.

  Lan got out of the car, but then just stood there, staring up at the yellow-brown sky and breathing in the damp air. She could smell green grass and flowers, wet pavement, cow shit and chickens. Good smells. Grounding. There was no smoke, no rot, no Eaters to sour the air. It could be a beautiful day if she let it. What could she possibly accomplish by going back now, getting between him and another girl?

  He might forgive her—he had the last time she’d done it—but deep down, she knew he wouldn’t always. Deeper still, she knew he shouldn’t have to. She ate the peach. She’d brought it to her own lips with her own hand and bit. She belonged to him. A dolly doesn’t get to jump down from her shelf and demand to be played with. A dolly waits and never mind how long, because a dolly’s owned.

  Funny, how a girl could agree with all that and still want to punch another girl straight in the tit.

  “Lan.”

  “I won’t,” she promised sourly.

  “Won’t what?”

  Lan glanced back at Master Wickham, then sighed and turned all the way around. “Listen, I need you to do something for me, if you can. Two things, really, because I also need you to do it without telling me how it won’t work. I know it won’t work,” she said as Master Wickham’s brow furrowed. “But here’s the thing. I have to try. I have to be able to say I did everything I could, even the stupid stuff…or else it’s like I didn’t do anything, you know?”

  He studied her in silence for maybe a minute, then said, “You’re not coming, are you?”

  “No. I’ve got to stay here and…and figure some stuff out.”

  “And you honestly expect me to go off to Hyde Park without you?”

  Lan hesitated.

  “No,” he answered for her, both eyebrows climbing. “You expect me to go somewhere else. And do what exactly?”

  She told him.

  Both he and Deimos tipped their heads at exactly the same time and to exactly the same angle.

  “I can’t,” Master Wickham said, not shocked or outraged, but only stating a fact. “I thought you understood. I haven’t the faintest notion where to find them.”

  “I do,” said Deimos.

  All the surprise Wickham had not shown for Lan’s request now came out as he looked at the Revenant. “I can hardly ask the captain of our lord’s elite guard to help in this. You must have some idea why she’s asking.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Forgive me,” said Wickham, now peering at the other dead man as though he stood half a mile away and not right there in the front seat, “but if there were ever a textbook written on the subject of preserving Haven, this would be the textbook definition of how not to preserve Haven.”

  “I do my lord’s will. If I do this and the result is that it is his will to destroy what he has built here, so be it. If it is his will to destroy the woman who suggests it, so be it.” He glanced at Lan. “No offense.”

  She shrugged. “So you’ll help?”

  “I’ll drive.”

  She looked at Master Wickham.

  “Lan, I sympathize with your situation, as much as one can given our respective circumstances, but I cannot be recruited to your cause. Even if I believed rescinding the hungering dead was the right thing to do, and I don’t, I cannot act against my lord’s will.”

 
“I’m not trying to make you—”

  “However,” he interrupted, silencing her with an upraised hand, “as your intermediary, it is my duty, appointed to me by Lord Azrael himself at my rebirth, to speak to the dead on your behalf. If that’s what you’re asking me to do, I don’t see how I can refuse.”

  “That’s all,” Lan said quickly. “And maybe, you know, bring them back with you. But that’s all!”

  “Dare I even ask what you’ll be doing in the interim?”

  “I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “But don’t worry. I won’t be punching anyone in the tit.”

  The dead men exchanged glances.

  “I don’t know what troubles me more,” Wickham murmured. “The fact that she was apparently considering it at one point or the fact that I don’t quite believe her.”

  “Americans,” Deimos replied with a small shake of his head and started up the engine again.

  Lan did not bother to defend her nationality this time. She shut the car door (a bit harder than necessary) and left them to it.

  The pikemen guarding the palace doors let her in without comment. No one on the inside gave her a second glance as she made her way through the halls, even after she picked up her skirts to run, but for all her hurrying, when she reached the room where she’d last seen Azrael and his redheaded dolly, it was empty.

  She wasn’t going to search for him. What would be the point? The palace had a hundred rooms and Haven had a thousand palaces set down in the maze of its million streets. She really didn’t want to find him anyway, or at least, she didn’t want to find him with anyone. No, the far more sensible thing to do now would be just to go to the library and wait for Master Wickham.

  So naturally, she went to Azrael’s private chamber, bracing herself against the possibility that his room (his bed) might not be empty when she flung the door open, but it was. The fire was off, the lamps were unlit, the fountain still. All was dark and quiet. Where was Azrael if he wasn’t here? He was never here at this time of day, Lan knew, but this made absolutely no difference right now. She wanted to see him. She wanted him to see her.