Lan retreated just far enough to stand out in the corridor with the dozen or so pikemen whose job it was to protect his privacy and carry his messages, trying to think past her tit-punching urge to her meagre store of sense. At last, she turned to one of them and said, “Go get my handmaiden.”
He rather visibly scrolled through an internal list of his duties before deciding on a response, which was to say, “I believe she is otherwise engaged,” in his best now-sod-off tone.
“Yeah? Well, she’d better not be, because she works for me.”
His gaze shifted from the air over her left shoulder directly to her and his eyes were as cold as only dead eyes could be. “I don’t.”
“You want to get into it with me? Huh? Right. Let’s get into it.” Lan stepped up and said, “You’re very pretty.”
He backed away.
She pushed forward. “You know the thing about pretty folks? It’s really, really easy to unpretty them. So you’re going to go fetch my handmaiden for me or you’re going to find out what it’s like to have to fall back on personality, and I have to warn you—” She took another step, rising up on her tiptoes to stare him down from an inch away. “They don’t call this the Land of the Beautiful Personalities.”
“All right, all right.” He squirmed away from her and marched off, glaring back over his shoulder to loudly mutter, “Bloody breather.”
“Fucking deadhead.” Lan went back into Azrael’s room to wait. She had time to wish she hadn’t said what she’d said and time to wish she’d said worse and finally, Serafina opened the door. Before her handmaiden could give her opinion of being summoned, Lan said, “What time is it?”
Successfully unpinned, Serafina made a few half-words before managing, “Just after two. What—”
“What time’s dinner?”
“Seven, as always. And I don’t believe you were invited,” Serafina added, recovering herself enough for a haughty sniff. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, some of us have work—”
“I am your work,” Lan interrupted. “You have five hours.”
Serafina tossed her braids, but her brows pinched with curiosity. “To do what?” she asked at last.
Lan opened her arms, scowling. “Dolly me up.”
* * *
Lan could honestly say she’d never looked better than she did that night, but who wouldn’t, after an hour in the bath, two hours in front of the wardrobe and another two hours in a chair getting her face and her hair done to? The last bit probably wouldn’t have taken as long if it was the chair in front of the vanity where Lan usually got her face and hair done, but Master Wickham had come back by then, so Serafina had to do all the final touches in the library, using just what she had brought with her, which was never enough.
But what did Lan get for it? What did she get after she’d been dollied up and taken in her slippery shoes and too-tight corset all the way to the dining hall? She got an empty room, that’s what, or as empty as a room could be with dead people in it. Neither Azrael nor his court was anywhere to be seen. The tables where they normally sat were made up with candles and flowers, but the chairs were all gone, all but the two at the imperial table. Uniformed pikemen lined the walls at full attention, standing watch over nothing; servants kept close with their trays and ewers, waiting on no one. Looking at them, a forgotten slip of memory surfaced: just her mother’s voice, with only the vaguest impression of a face and no hint at all as to time or reason, telling someone a very small Lan couldn’t see, “I’d have set the room on fire just for the excuse to leave it.”
She took her seat next to Azrael’s empty throne and waited while the food was brought. She waited while it all went cold. She waited until she was dead sure he wasn’t coming and she waited until she was equally sure she could accept that without breaking something and finally, she waited until she’d convinced herself she didn’t care. Of course she did care, she cared like fury, but she was a pretty good negotiator when she wanted to be and she could be convincing. So she wouldn’t care, just for now. Later, that was another story. No sense wasting her caring bits on the servants.
To prove how much she didn’t care, she reached over to Azrael’s side of the table and helped herself to his bottle of wine. Nasty stuff. She never had seen the appeal of sour grapes, especially when the fresh ones were so good. She drank it anyway, because she didn’t care. When she got to the end of it, one of the servants brought another, so she drank that one, too. Then it occurred to her that she was drinking an awful lot on an empty stomach, so she started eating. Cold soup, cold fish, cold veg. Ugh. But she ate it and she used a fork and a napkin, even though Azrael wasn’t there to see it. The quiet got under her skin at first, but being stared at by a bunch of dead people wasn’t much different from being stared at by hanging portraits on a wall, and gradually, she forgot they were there. She ate a little, drank a lot, and was just looking over the sweets trolley when the great doors swung open and Azrael walked in with his steward, deep in angry talk that stopped sharp when he saw her.
“Who let her in here?” he demanded, turning on his doormen. “Are your orders not clear? When I have not summoned my companions, they are to remain in their chambers! Remove her at once and be thankful I do not pin you in my garden as a reminder you are my guards and not my whoremongers!”
“Nobody mongers me, mate,” said Lan. “I do my own whoring.”
He swung around, one hand raised to halt the many pikemen who had leapt obediently to throw Lan out on her ass. His head tipped; his mask caught new light and dropped new shadows, taking on an expression Lan, in her not-entirely-sober frame of mind, interpreted as smiling surprise and a friendly wave.
She smiled back. And waved.
“No,” he said, not to her, but in answer to a servile murmur from his steward. He started walking again, his head still at an angle. “No, let her be. You have your orders. Go. Lan?”
“It’s me,” she agreed.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m having dinner with you. Or I would be, if you were here having dinner here with me, which you were not!” she added with a scowl. “No, what you’ve done is put me out on your stoop like a yowling cat and I have put up with it for exactly as long as I’m going to. Mom always said, people can only do to you what you let them do to you, and I decided your shit stops today. So I came to dinner. I got dressed up and everything. Oi!” She held up her cup and shook it until a servant came over to top her off. “Don’t I look nice?”
His step slowed, but only for a moment. “Are you drunk?”
“Getting there.”
“Intentionally?”
“You bet. Been drinking like a dippy bird since I got here and I am easily half-ripped to the giddy tits. And that’s another thing,” she announced, glaring. “You drink every night, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk. What gives?”
“Alcohol is a slow poison. My body heals its damage before it can be much affected.”
“Then why bother drinking?”
“I like the taste.”
“Really?” Lan took a deep swig from her cup, held it in her mouth as long as she could stand it, then swallowed with a grimace. “Still tastes like rotten grapes to me. I don’t think I favor wine. What else you got?”
“For you? Water.”
“Is that a note of disapproval I hear, my lord?” She tried to hold a straight face at the end and couldn’t. Snickering, she banged her cup on the table until the pinch-faced servant came back. “My lord. That sounds so funny when I say it. Doesn’t that sound funny when I say it?”
His only answer was a sullen grunt.
She studied him as he drew nearer, trying to gauge his mood through the mask. She had plenty of time to do it in. The room was so much bigger when it was empty. “Well, never mind. The point is, I was sitting here all alone and I decided to drink. I figured it could either make me feel better or worse. I want to feel better. I can’t feel much worse, thanks to you.” She paused to let h
im argue if he wanted; he didn’t. “Mom also used to say no one can make you feel anything you don’t want to feel, which only proves she didn’t know everything.”
Still no answer. He ascended the dais and took his seat at the imperial table, already reaching for the wine. The first bottle he tried was empty, but there was enough left in the second to almost fill his cup. He gave her a special sort of stare as he shook out the last drops and the servants shifted behind her, reacting to his mood like dry leaves in a cold wind.
Lan played her way through an assortment of pretend conversation-openers, then gave up and bluntly said, “You want me to go?”
“When I do, I will dismiss you.”
“You didn’t exactly invite me in the first place.”
“True, but you’re here. And since you’re here…” He beckoned the wine-fellow over, took the bottle from his tray and sent him empty-handed back to the wall. With all his attention deceptively fixed upon the bottle as he poured, Azrael calmly said, “It has been brought to my attention that you have been taking your studies out of doors these past days. Out of doors and, indeed, well away from the palace grounds.” He set the bottle down and picked up the cup, staring intently into its depths as if he could see her there, exploring a wine-colored Haven and all its many historic streets. “Are you enjoying your insubordination?”
“Beats lessons.”
His eyes glinted; his cup glowed faintly purple with reflected light. “Is that all you have to say?”
She shrugged. “What do you want to hear?”
“I wish to hear repentance, more fool I. Failing that, I think I ought to hear enthusiasm for the sights you risk your liberty—” His eyes flashed. “—and your life to see. Instead, I hear the same disdain you have always shown when confronted by the splendors of my city. Why is that, Lan?”
“I’m not much for ruins.”
“There was far more ruin under Man’s watch than mine,” he said, almost but not quite growling. “I have cleansed their filth and repaired their corruption. Now, in their ruin, I preserve all that was ever best in Man. A treasury of knowledge and art and history…and treasure, for that matter. Are you not awed and humbled by what you see when you—” He gave the cup a swirl and watched the eddy form. “—steal away from me each day?”
“Balls.” Not the smartest answer, but she couldn’t help herself. “I ‘steal away’ in a car,” she told him. “Driven by the captain of your Revenants, with Master Wickham on the seat beside me. I got someone from the kitchen waiting in the foyer every morning with a packed lunch and if it’s raining, there’s someone else waiting in the evenings with a hot towel and dry shoes. I’m not sneaking anywhere and you know it. You want to tell me not to do it, tell me that, but don’t call me names. Ass.”
“Forgive me,” he said dryly, “for calling you names.” He ran a restless eye over the table, picked a piece of beef off the haunch and threw it down again untasted. “This is cold.”
“You should have been here on time, then, huh?”
“Kitchen!”
The servants rushed to clear the table, taking her plate as well as his. Oh well. At least they left her cup. Lan started to take a drink, found her cup empty, and put out her hand.
He looked at it, at her, and back into his cup. He did not pass the bottle. “I must confess, Lan, when Wickham told me you had adopted his little hobby, I found it difficult to believe. You’ve demonstrated no enthusiasm for Haven’s great design on your prior excursions. Quite the opposite. And yet, I’m told you now go out every day, where,” he added pointedly, “the living are not permitted to wander. Now you will tell me why.”
“You make it sound so sinister. It’s just something to do, that’s all.”
His eye slid toward her, narrow and too bright.
“Maybe not all,” she admitted. “But I can’t…” Her smile slipped. She shored it up, but it felt stretched, too hard. A mask, like his, polished bright to cover the scars beneath. “I can’t sit around all day and wait for you when I know you don’t want to see me.”
He returned his stare to his wine.
“I have to do something,” said Lan. “Even when I know it’s the wrong thing. I can’t just…” Giving up on her empty cup, she pushed it away and took his. He let her, his hand still curled into cup-holding shape around nothing while she drank her nerves quiet.
The servants brought hot soup and apologies, both of which Azrael waved away. As they retreated to their posts along the wall, he said, “Do you wish to leave me?”
“What? No!”
“I will release you if you ask it of me,” he said as if she’d never spoken. “But I will not allow you to escape me. Flee and I will hunt you down, Lan. Even you.”
Down went the cup with a bang on the table. “Damn it, why would you even—? I just barely begged you to take me back, remember? Remember me begging?”
“I remember a please.”
“Do you want to fight?” she demanded. “Do you? You’ve been ignoring me for days and I’ve been drinking all night. I am down for it, mate.”
The stiff set of his shoulders held another moment, then fell. “No, Lan,” he said and rubbed his scars beneath the mask. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Good. Because…because I don’t want to fight either. Not really.” She passed him his cup as a peace offering and when he finally took it, she said, “I know you said I wasn’t supposed to go out, but I honestly thought you were okay with it as long as I had someone with me. You’re not and that’s fine. If you really don’t want me out there, I won’t go, okay?”
He scratched at the gold on the rim of his cup. “As simple as that?”
“Yeah, well…I got some books. I’ll stay in my room and read them. I’ll be bored as hell, but I’ll live.”
He looked at her. “Books?”
“Relax, nothing insubordinate. It’s not even storybooks. Books on buildings.”
“Buildings.” He did not seem appeased. If anything, his eyelight intensified. “The buried temples of Ethiopia, perhaps? The Chand Baori well? The floating city of Venice?”
“Mostly just the ones here. In fact, that’s where I’ve been going every day, not that you’ve asked,” she added. “For someone so concerned about where I’m going and who I’m doing…never mind. I’m not fighting. My point is, all I’ve done is look at some buildings.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Haven has a very diverse, uh…architectural…something. Ask Wickham. He could tell you all about it.” She took his wine away since he hadn’t touched it and drank it herself. “Lord knows, he tells me.”
“Do you favor any particular school of design?”
“I haven’t seen any schools yet, just a bunch of churches and pubs and palaces. Do you have any idea,” she asked, staring at him solemnly over the rim of his cup, “how many palaces there are in Haven?”
“Four, surviving.”
“No.” She blinked. “Hell, no, even. There has to be more than that.”
“A palace, by definition, must be a royal residence. You cannot call just any estate a palace merely because it appears sufficiently lavish.” He took his cup back. “Wickham should have taught you that.”
“I’m sure he’ll get around to it,” Lan said, watching him drink. “Do you know the difference between a column and a pilaster?”
“No.”
“I do,” she said glumly. “You may add to the list of things you did not know about Master Wickham that the man is fuck-wild about columns.”
“Noted. Tell me, Lan, and tell me the truth.” He spoke calmly, almost disinterestedly, but his eyes had begun to brighten in their sockets. “When you go out into my city by day, are you looking for the path of the escape you will take when you leave me by night?”
“I’m not the one who leaves people in the middle of the night.”
His jaw clenched, but his eyes dimmed. “No,” he said after a moment’s silence. “I suppose you’re not.
So be it. Go where you will then, upon two conditions.” He took a drink and gazed again into its depths. “The first: Cross my borders even once, for any reason, and I will put you in chains the rest of your life. No excuses. No forgiveness.” He looked at her at last and his eyes were cold and distant as stars. “You. Will. Die. In chains.”
Lan shrugged. “And the second?”
He held his stare another moment or two before that awful light first fluttered, then failed. He looked back into his cup. “Tell me where you go. Tell me what you see.”
“You sure? That hasn’t worked out too well for us so far.”
He didn’t answer.
“Okay,” she said uncertainly. “Okay, so the first time Master Wickham took me out—for real, I mean—he took me to see this one house. Or a palace, I think. Whatever. The chimneys there were just…amazing. You don’t use words like that on a chimney, but these chimneys were. They were made out of bricks, like everything there, but they were all braided up or woven, like nothing I knew you could do with bricks. And each one was different from the others. They were stood up there in a row, four of them, like four little brick…” She groped for a word and found one, a dumb one. “…princesses.”
Azrael grunted and scratched at his cup.
“But here’s the thing,” said Lan, leaning toward him. “We had to look at them with binoculars. There was no place to see them from the ground, not really. Someone had built them like that, to be on the roof and be just…so pointlessly beautiful. And then we went inside,” she continued, spreading her arms wide, “and everything was like that. Not just the walls and the ceiling and the windows, but the…the doorknobs, the hinge plates! Everything was prettied up, even worse than it is here, some of it.”
“Worse.”
She fell quiet, picking at the edge of the table.
“Even worse, you say,” he mused. His thumbclaw dug at a groove in the side of the cup and slowly scratched up a thin curl of gold. “Humans are, I know, prone to adopt perverse attitudes when in captivity. They hate the squalor of their little lives without these walls, but hate even more the beauty that must be bestowed upon them when they believe they are entitled to it already. So they are all like you in the beginning, determined to take no pleasure and covet nothing while in the devil’s domain. Fair becomes foul, foul becomes fair. I understand. I sympathize. I have done much the same in my time.” He shrugged one shoulder, even as his claws flexed. “But I do wonder…if I were not here to be impressed by your defiance, would you continue to scorn Haven’s many luxuries or simply seize them?”
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 38
