Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  And the door banged open, startling a shrillish cry out of her.

  Azrael straightened up at once, his left arm snapping around her in a gesture of unmistakable protection as well as support, and that was nice, but it did make it impossible for Lan to look and see for herself who had barged in on them.

  Like she needed to look.

  “I knew it!” Cassius shouted. “You put me off and put me off, but you’re not too busy for her, are you? No, you never are!”

  Azrael’s claws dug into Lan’s side, pricking at her through her clothes. “Where and how and with whom I spend my time is nothing to do with you. Remove yourself at once from this chamber or be removed.”

  Her answer was a shuddering gasp, a sickening moment of silence, and a breathless, “That’s…not a mask. That’s…your face…”

  Azrael did not seem to move, but Lan felt the flinch in him. Later, she would have time to wonder if that was why it all went the way it ultimately did—not because of anything Cassius said and not even because Lan was there to hear it, but because she felt him flinch.

  She didn’t have time to wonder then. In the next instant, he had lifted her off him and set her roughly on her feet. In three long strides, he caught Cassius up by the arm and dragged her with him to the open door, bellowing for a guard.

  “Forgive me, lord,” said the familiar voice of the grim Revenant who had escorted Lan herself here. “I told her you were not to be disturbed, but she would not be stopped and I was not certain of my authority to force the matter.”

  “Be certain of it now,” snarled Azrael, flinging Cassius out and against the dead man’s chest. “This woman is trespassing in my home. Remove her at once.”

  “Trespass?” Cassius sputtered, her eyes still horror-wide, but beginning to recover some of their canny shine. “How can you…? For one mistake? How many times has she—” Her trembling finger pointed at Lan, but whatever she saw in Azrael’s bared face made her think better of inviting her into this conversation. She switched tracks, but kept her momentum, saying, “I’m sorry. Please. I have no family, no money, nothing to go back to! I deserve your anger! Punish me, but do not send me away, I beg you!”

  “My anger?” Azrael’s head cocked in an exaggerated show of confusion. “I’m not angry with you. I’m done with you.”

  It was Lan’s turn to flinch now, but no one saw it.

  “My lord!” Cassius stammered, clutching at his arm.

  He brushed her off like a biting fly, shifting his gaze to the Revenant. “Put her in a car and take her back to Balehurst. If she resists, bind her.” He turned away and found himself looking right at Lan. She couldn’t imagine he saw much condemnation in her face, but Azrael’s eyes guttered and he turned back with a scowl to say, “She can…keep the gown.”

  Cassius lowered her hands to her sides and raised her chin, gone in just one cold second from his penitent dolly to a stranger. “Put it on your next whore, my lord. I want nothing from you.” And to prove it, she took the pins from her hair and dropped them, snatched the jewels from her throat and broke the clasp to throw them at his feet.

  He glanced at them, then folded his arms and watched, expressionless, as she broke off baubles, one by one, from her ears and her fingers and her wrists. When they were all gone, she pulled the ribbons from the neck of her gown—no corseted walking dress, this, but something filmy and barely there, just the thing to wear lying across a bed and waiting—and let it fall around her ankles like a drift of pale blue snow. She stepped out over the top of it, brazenly naked, and spat on the floor in front of him.

  Azrael was no more moved than he had been throughout this performance, but that was all Lan was taking from some porcelain dolly with a tongue stud.

  “Right,” she said cheerfully and started for her. “Get ready to lick that up, twinkletits.”

  Cassius turned her back and walked away, a bit faster than she otherwise might have been planning to, but with her head still high.

  The Revenant moved to block Lan from following, then ran an expectant eye back at Azrael, waiting for some small change to his orders.

  “Balehurst,” said Azrael. And, to prove he was not entirely above pettiness, added, “Just as she is,” and shut the door.

  Silence fell, heavy and hard. He continued to face the door, motionless but for the slight flexing of his claws.

  “Wow,” said Lan at last. “That was awkward. I almost feel bad for all the times I’ve done it to your other dollies.”

  He looked at her, then at the scattering of dolly-bits on his floor, and back at the door again.

  “I know, I know. You’ve got work to do.” She hesitated, then softly asked, “Will I see you tonight? Or has this changed things?”

  He bent his neck, rubbing roughly at his scarred face, but at length said, “It’s been a difficult day. I can think of nothing I desire more than to end it, save that I end it in your arms. But I…I may be late to dinner. Will you wait for me?”

  “I’m always waiting for you, Azrael,” she said. It wasn’t a complaint, but a promise. She sealed it with one more kiss—he did not return it, but he didn’t push her away either—and then she left him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Lan did not count the days she spent being tailored on. She didn’t see the point. As near as she could figure it, the tailors had her shirts and trousers made by the end of the second day. Every day after that was just an awkward attempt to pretend they were working while they waited for Azrael to tell them they were done and Azrael waited for them to tell him they were done. Meanwhile, there was Lan, stuck between them, getting measured and pinned and dressed each morning and apparently not supposed to notice it was the same set of clothes every time.

  After her fitting, Deimos would drive her clear across Haven to the enormous house Master Wickham had arranged for her to inhabit during her exile. Not a palace, he assured her, just a house, but there was nothing ‘just’ about the place. It was perhaps paranoid to think Deimos was taking her by a different route every day solely to keep her from figuring out exactly where she was…but paranoid didn’t necessarily mean she was wrong.

  The house had a big lawn with a lot of useless trees and even more useless plants around it and although Lan knew this was probably meant to inspire her, she could not help but find their unnatural precision and trimmed appearance depressing. She far preferred the view through the windows of the west end of the house, where, on a clear day, she could just glimpse rows of tiny stone houses through the trees. She spent many silly hours fantasizing how it would be to move the living into them, not just from Norwood, but all there were left in England, where they could be safe and maybe even happy after a while, kept distant from the dead but still protected by Haven’s walls.

  When she asked Master Wickham if they might have a stroll out that way to look at the houses, he reluctantly informed her it wasn’t a distant village at all, but a fairly close cemetery. It did dash her daydreams, but not her desire to see it, and after some creative wheedling, he gave in and took her over. It was the best part of her exile—seeing all those grand little houses where folk used to bury the dead, back when that was good enough. Any day she could, she’d slip her tether and sneak her way back in, wandering the rows and reading all the nice things the living wrote into their markers to remember the dead by. Beloved father. Beloved wife. Beloved child. And sometimes she cried, because that world was gone forever too, the world of the beloved dead.

  Master Wickham discouraged her from these forays in his passive, polite way, by doubling up on her lessons and dragging her off into Haven to look at gardens every chance he got. Sometimes, Azrael would be there already when she returned to the just-a-house, but more often, she went to sleep alone in the overlarge bed that was hers for so long as she was here and he woke her as he slipped beneath the covers and took her silently into his chill embrace.

  He always tensed when she kissed him, but allowed it, even on those nights he did nothing but let i
t happen. He was more comfortable with sex than kisses. So was she, if the truth be known, but the kissing came naturally when she was with him. The fucking was almost an afterthought for her, the full stop at the end of a long and complicated sentence, but for him, it was everything—reward and punishment both.

  As much as she looked forward to those small hours, she dreaded them too. Oh, he was good, even if he wasn’t always gentle, but he wasn’t with her in any sense but the most physical. There was a new reserve in his love-making, a distance she could not breach, and the more she tried, the more apt he was to position her where she couldn’t see him, pin her so she couldn’t touch him, and use her in that fierce masturbatory way, just like the first time.

  He never said a word. Afterwards, sometimes, he’d talk a little, but only about the fluff that didn’t matter—where she went, what she saw, how she was coming along at lessons. Then, like as not, there’d be another silent grapple in the dark, two bodies locked more in battle than in passion, teeth biting and nails scratching, her hot sweat cooling on his skin and his eyeshine lighting up her world with white, each of them pretending they could bridge the growing space between them with flesh. And eventually she’d sleep, knowing she’d wake up even more alone than she’d been with him.

  She could have asked him what was on his mind, but she didn’t want to hear him say he was sorry he’d thrown Cassius out. She consoled herself with the knowledge that even if he sent someone out to fetch her back, he’d never find the lying bitch in Balehurst.

  So the days passed, threatening with each new unchanged day to become her new normal, until it fell to Lan herself to decide they were done.

  It happened without planning for it, like all the best and worst decisions of Lan’s young life. Spooned up against his side in that stranger’s bed, with his hand stroking slowly up and down her arm, she suddenly blurted, “I want to go home.”

  His hand stilled. “Norwood?” he inquired, his voice striving for calm, even underscored as it was by a thin growl.

  “What? No. I meant the other home. The palace.”

  “Ah.” He resumed his gentle caresses, but did not wholly relax. “All right.”

  “Really? That was easy.”

  “I may as well allow it. You only obey me when it pleases you anyway.” He nudged her more comfortably into the crook of his arm and tucked the other behind his head. “If you return against my will, I should be forced to punish you. Neither of us want that.”

  There was no true threat in his tone, in spite of the words themselves, but the silence that followed felt heavy, as if it were only waiting.

  “Do you want me to come home?” Lan asked, even if she couldn’t help but hate herself a little for it.

  He looked at her until she stopped playing with the silver rings on his side—the wound they had once closed was almost entirely healed now, no more than a raised white line, but still he kept the rings—and met his eyes before he said, “Yes.”

  “You’ve been strange lately,” she said, feeling like she had to justify the question.

  He grunted and turned his dim stare back on the ceiling. “I’ve been strange all my life. Therein lies the root of all our present miseries.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  More silence.

  Without warning—without a tightening of his muscles or a flexing of his claws, without even a momentary flare of his eyelight—he said, “If you could kill me, would you?”

  It caught her so entirely by surprise that by the time she thought to sputter and get angry over it, it would have been silly. She shrugged instead, using the gesture to snuggle herself closer against him. “Would you want me to?”

  Now his silence had a thoughtful quality.

  “Yes,” he said at last.

  “Then I would.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. This is your game. What’s the magic way I could kill you?”

  “Say I were human.”

  “If you were human, I wouldn’t do it,” she told him.

  “No?”

  “You’d die on your own eventually. I’d want every moment I could get.”

  Silence.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Hell if I know,” she answered, snorting to blow her hair out of her face. “We haven’t exactly been giving each other an easy time.”

  He grunted.

  They lay together after that just long enough that Lan had to start thinking about ways to remove herself from the deeply unpleasant feel of his flesh so she could get some sleep, when he said, “Is it, Lan? Is it home? Have I made you a home with me?”

  She raised her head and looked at him, startled.

  He did not look back at her. His body beneath hers was cold, hard. He didn’t even appear to be breathing at the moment.

  Lan lay herself back down on his chest and stared into the darkness, thinking of Norwood, thinking of home, doing all she could do to hammer those words back into a single shape, but they wouldn’t join. She might someday return to the village where she was born and it might even feel familiar and comfortable to her—certainly more comfortable than Azrael’s palace, with all its shiny lights and bathwater—but someday might as well be a thousand years off and a hundred miles distant. Tonight was all that mattered, so never mind Norwood and never mind its people and its mud and its peaches.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, you did.” And, also without planning: “Damn you.”

  “Then come home.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Yes. It is too soon,” he added with a dimming of his eyes. “But if it is your home, my Lan, I will not keep you from it.”

  With that, he gently took his arm back and got up, stooping to gather his discarded clothing.

  “Are we leaving tonight?” she asked, reluctantly pushing back the blankets, but making no real effort to rise.

  “I am, but you needn’t join me. It’s late. Sleep.” He dressed, then came back to the bed to cover her over again and to run his rough thumb once along her frowning lips. “Sleep, I say. I will meet you at the palace steps at the very blush of dawn, if you wish, but tonight, sleep.”

  And she did. Not easily, deeply or well, but she did, and in the dreams she could not remember, his touch on her lips lingered.

  * * *

  So she went back, if not quite at the blush of dawn, at least that next day. He met her on the steps as promised and it was good to be home, to be back in her library, her dining hall, her bed. After all those days stuck at the tailor shop, it was even good to be out in her garden.

  Grey no longer, Tehya’s garden had undergone a startling transformation in her absence. The chained stone and circle of slumped trees had become the pond Master Wickham wanted, with a platform in the middle where she supposed the tea house would eventually go, made accessible by a low stone bridge. Fish swam in the water, all over spots in black and gold and red and white, finding shade beneath floating hyacinth and lotus pads or darting up to bite at bubbles on the water’s surface. Already, her crew of deadheads were planting bamboo and low shrubs designed to further enclose and divide the remaining space, with pockets of flowers hidden here and there.

  Working with her hands—hell, just being in britches and boots again—was more invigorating than even she had thought. She would never be a garden person, but she honestly didn’t mind this one so much and every day that she spent working there, she felt a glow of possessive pride that she had certainly never felt in Norwood’s greenhouses. The only sour note, ha, was that she had apparently come back smack in the middle of the peacock breeding season.

  They strutted around the grounds by the dozens, perching on the wall or even bold as brass there on the palace steps, fighting and flaring their buttfeathers for the hordes of disinterested hens they hoped to impress. All day and especially all night, their intermittent screeching could be heard, so much like a human cry of suffering that Lan never really got used to it. She even asked Azrael if he could please
have them moved somewhere else, at least until they were done with the noisier bits of their mating dance, but he refused, saying this was when the birds were most vulnerable to predation and if he put them any further out, they might be eaten, and wouldn’t that be a shame?

  When she wasn’t out digging in the dirt (or, more often, watching dead people dig in the dirt and occasionally pointing at the places they missed), Lan was back in the library. Now that Cassius was out of the way, lessons were once again the bulk of her routine and somewhere along the way, she had apparently advanced out of the kiddie pool because her days were now divided down into subjects. Just reading was no longer good enough. Now there was arithmetic, science, biology and grammar, and at the end of every day, Lan had to do something called ‘vocabulary’. This was a word that meant learning what other words meant, which had to be the most pointless word in any language, ever. Her vocabulary words were mostly derived from whatever lesson he was trying to drive into her that day, which meant she was learning the definitions of words that were only used to define other words, like ‘adjective’ and ‘conjunction,’ words no one but people teaching other people to read would ever use. However, the concept got a hook in her and even after vocabulary was done for the day and he was nattering incessantly on about plants for the tea garden again, Lan often thought about words.

  Words like ‘home’ and the disturbingly ambiguous way she had come to define it. Words she had used all her life, thinking she knew what they meant, like ‘safe’ and ‘protected’. Words that hurt a little, like ‘happy’.

  ‘Hero’. That was another troubling word, one Lan knew mostly from big-talking ferrymen and the farmer’s sons who pretended to be like them. They were heroes who went over Norwood’s wall to hunt, whether or not they came back with ducks or a coney, because they had dared to enter the wastes and return. They were heroes who ever sat on the wall, nicking at their palms with pocketknives to bait Eaters, and never mind that bullets couldn’t kill them any more than tears, because taking a shot at them was taking a shot at Azrael. They were heroes just for talking about rebellion, even when they did it from the muck-bins behind the stockhouse.