Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “Not for me.”

  “You’re making me…feel bad, Peaches,” he said, this man with his chest open and his bowels dangling below his feet. “Did you get…what you came for?”

  “Not yet. But I still have hope.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah.” She dropped her eyes again, more embarrassed by this confession than by honking up her teacakes.

  “I don’t remember what that feels like,” he said with a wistfulness that was somehow both distant and intense. “But I remember… it didn’t always feel good.”

  “No.” Lan looked over at the boys from Mallowton. One of them was mindlessly writhing and snapping his teeth at the other two. “It doesn’t.”

  “You should go,” the ferryman told her. “You can do…me…no good. If you still believe…you can do what you came to do…go there.” He exhaled his unused breath and closed his eyes, looking perfectly at peace above his flayed chest.

  Lan reluctantly retreated, unwilling somehow to turn her back on him even though he could not see her, and promptly bumped into one of the Mallowton boys. Jostled, he dropped several inches further down the spike. He and Lan screamed together, but only once. Then she clapped a shaking hand over her mouth and he sagged back onto his spike, returning to whatever innerspace he’d chosen to die in. It was the other boy who pulled himself out of it and looked at her, saw her. His hands moved, straining as if against tremendous weight to grip at his belly, showing Lan the unseen progress of the pike. His mouth worked in silence. He wet his lips, fought in a breath and choked up, “Help…me.”

  “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “I…can’t…” he said back at her. His fingers scratched at the front of his stomach. “…reach…”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Help…make it…stop…”

  Lan stumbled away, shaking her head and babbling apologies. The pikeman had to catch her before she could back stupidly right into the low wall of the burning pit and maybe fall in. She knew she ought to thank him, but her stomach was churning and she was afraid if she unlocked her throat for any reason, she’d be sicking up again.

  The pikeman stood awkwardly beside her while she took shallow breaths and tried to stop shaking. Now and then, he looked up at the boy, who was still screaming at them with his eyes while he struggled just to breathe. At last, with a sudden scowl of resolve, the pikeman handed Lan his pike, then grabbed the boy’s ankles and pulled. The boy’s gasping whisper became a glassy shriek as the pikeman’s knees hit the ground, but with a sickening crunch, that scream broke. His jaw yawned; in eerie silence, he vomited red-black blood all down his chest. The pikeman leapt nimbly aside, but Lan stood transfixed, hot blood spattering her hair and dripping down her cheeks like tears.

  The boy from Mallowton did not move. His eyes were still open and still aimed at Lan, but they did not see her. His chest shimmered as firelight reflected off his blood-soaked skin, but he wasn’t moving…not yet.

  The pikeman brushed his knees off and took his weapon back. He looked back and forth between Lan and the dead boy, plainly uncomfortable, and finally said, “Do you want to sit down?”

  She shook her head no and said, “Yes.”

  The pikeman herded her over to the foot of the burning pit, out of the smoke, and sat her down. He stood close by, shooting her troubled glances from the corner of his eye as he stirred the burning man’s ashes. Behind him, the first Eater gnawed on its own arm, chewing away every strip of flesh where blood had splashed him. The second Eater was staring at the last boy. She hadn’t even noticed when he’d come alive and now it was as if he’d always been this way.

  “What am I doing here?” Lan asked.

  The guard’s pike paused, then resumed stirring with even greater force.

  “I shouldn’t be here.”

  He inched away from her, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on his work.

  Lan watched him—not the man whose crumbling body he broke down, not the dead men in their possibly eternal torment, not even the live one in the last hours of his mortality. If there were any secrets to be learned in the garden, and it seemed to Lan that there were, it was the pikeman who held the key to understanding it. He was a young man too, or had been at his death, as young as the boys from Mallowton, but much better looking. When he’d laughed at her, his boyish features had relaxed in that carefree way that could have easily charmed open the legs of any number of women, whether he paid them or not. He’d been human once. Handsome and young and human. No matter what else he’d been in life, how was it possible for someone like him to end up here, tending Azrael’s garden? She watched him, smoke burning at her eyes, thinking if she could just understand that, maybe she’d understand everything.

  He knew she was staring at him and ultimately, he must have decided she wasn’t going to stop on her own because he planted his pike in the burning man’s mostly-broken midsection and turned to face her. She watched him hunt for something to say and the longer it took, the more the feeling in her grew that it was coming, whatever it was. She saw the precise moment he settled on what to tell her, saw him rehearse it once or twice to gain confidence. He raised his hand to indicate the burning pit, the impaling spikes, the dead men, the live one, the world.

  He said, “Nice night for it.”

  Lan looked up. There was no trace of the sun now, not even a bruisy streak over the horizon to show where it had set. Into this perfect blackness, a column of deep red sparks rose, without hardly any wind at all to disperse it. It was dry now, but the air had that clean taste of recent rain. It was cool, but not cold. It was indeed a nice night. Regardless of what was happening here or in Mallowton or anywhere at all, the Earth kept on turning and it was still a nice night.

  “Here you are.”

  The pikeman came to sharp attention when Azrael entered the garden, standing away from the burning pit to allow a clear view of the blackened remains. The Eaters both turned toward the sound of his voice; the first lost interest and resumed biting holes in its own arm, but the second saw Lan. Drool overflooded its hanging jaw, dislodging clots of blood. It stretched out both arms, making clumsy snatching motions from five meters away, its brow furrowing with dumb frustration each time its grab fell short. She could feel the chillflesh popping out on her arms, but she could not make herself look away from its hungering, death-dull stare until Azrael bodily came between them.

  She started to stand; he reseated her with a firm shove, then looked at his hand, rubbing the mixture of blood and ash between his fingers and studying the color it made. He paced around her, paused to lift a blood-crusted hank of her hair, then paced the other way and plucked at her sleeve, where the heat from the fire had baked the fine fabric stiff. He did not speak, only made a low, judicious sound deep in his chest as he turned to survey each of the ‘flowers’ in his garden.

  “What,” said Azrael, not loudly, “have you done?”

  The pikeman was as still as only the dead can be.

  Lan did not look at him. She said, “I killed a man.”

  “So I see.” He walked away, unhurried, to the man in question, examining the ground more closely than the Eater. The blood he had sicked up at the end had collected in a roughly circular shape, not quite closed, rounded at one end and tapered at the other. It looked a little like a comma. Inanely, Lan heard the echo of Master Wickham telling her that a comma signified a pause used to modify and separate grammatical structure. That was what this felt like—a pause, a separation. When Azrael had finished his inspection, he turned all the way around, in easy reach of the Eater, who only leaned out to one side so he never lost sight of Lan. “You killed this man.”

  She nodded.

  “You came unbidden to the meditation garden and killed this man.” He began to walk toward her, his eyes catching every spark from the fire, glowing out more brightly than any ember. “A man who came to invade my city, to destroy all that I have built here, to kill my undying people? To kill me!”

 
“I—”

  “Leaving aside your questionable loyalties, let us address your appalling arrogance.” Azrael caught her chin and pulled her to her feet. “What do you imagine gives you the right to belie my orders? When I set a man to suffer, I do not want that suffering curtailed.”

  “I know.”

  He studied her as she avoided his eyes, then looked out over the garden again, coming eventually to rest on the pikeman. His fingers, digging at her jaw, flexed. “I am reminded that once you told me you could not bear to tend your mother’s risen husk,” he said, still staring at the pikeman, “Yet you would have me believe you sped a living man’s impalement?”

  What was he looking at? Lan risked a glance and saw the shadowy smudge of ash and mud on the pikeman’s knees…and two coin-sized drops of blood on his jacket. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  “That takes a certain tenacity. And a not inconsiderable amount of strength. I would not have thought it of you.” He finally looked down at her again. His eyes burned cold. “Tell me the truth.”

  “The truth?” She tried to shake free of his grip, but couldn’t and had to settle for a shrill, angry laugh. “The truth is, you deserve everything people say about you.”

  His head rocked back even more than when she’d slapped him.

  She thrust her chin forward, twisting the knife. “You deserve everything they’ve done. Maybe you weren’t born a monster, but you sure as hell became one and monsters deserve to be hated and hunted for the rest of their lives.”

  The silence was absolute now. The burning man had burnt too much to move and the pikeman had stopped stirring its ashes to stare at her, open-mouthed.

  At last, Azrael said, “I give you one chance to beg my forgiveness, for I know you are upset and were you in sober mind, you would not trade all you’ve done here for the sake of one man whose doom was already writ large across his brow.”

  “Your forgiveness? I’m supposed to be sorry? Me?” In spite of her best efforts, her voice began to rise. “Fine. Then I’m sorry.”

  “For?” he prompted ominously.

  “For trespassing in your personal garden of torture. For killing someone before you had a chance to enjoy his suffering. For hitting you.” She tossed off an angry shrug. “Take your pick. I don’t mean any of it anyway.”

  His hands tightened, letting her feel the prick of each claw. He said, not loudly but with great clarity, “I’m waiting, Lan.”

  “It might save some time if you just told me what to say.”

  Azrael yanked her onto her toes to bring her within inches of his face, but his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper as he said, “Again and again, I have shown you privilege beyond that of any who have come before you, and again and again, you repay my generosity with insults and lies. Know that I would rather see punishment fall where it is earned—” He stabbed a stare at the pikeman beyond her, then turned the terrible heat of his eyes back on her. “—but if you insist on claiming a death, I tell you now, you will own it.”

  She did not have the luxury of confusion, not even for a moment. Her anger turned at once to horror and horror to ice. She didn’t bother pleading; she fought, heaving backwards until her shoulder scraped in its socket, but she could not break his hold. He merely turned around, his grip like iron, and started walking. She dug in her feet until they went out from under her and then he dragged her. She screamed, she slapped, she scratched at the ground. His step never slowed. He took her past the pikes where Eaters writhed and snatched at her to the last boy from Mallowton and there set her roughly on her feet.

  Hoarse, shaking, breathless, Lan looked up, seeing Azrael first, his arms folded across his broad chest, immoveable, unblinking. Above him, towering like a pagan idol, the boy. And beyond that, silent as scarecrows, the flayed guard and the ferryman watched her. When her eyes came at last back to Azrael, he unfolded one arm, gave the boy a slap to the stomach, and folded it again, all without expression or hesitation.

  The boy woke with a groggy groan, then screamed. His eyes filled and overfilled with pain, like the Eater’s mouth with drool. He screamed again…and again…and again.

  “I once saw a girl impaled in Batavia,” Azrael said, maddeningly calm. “She lived eight days, a stripling no taller than my hip, while her father, called by his neighbors ‘The Ox’ for his strength and vitality, succumbed before the pike was fully fixed.” He ran a coolly pensive gaze up and down the boy’s thin frame, musing, “The human will to survive, ineffable, makes such things impossible to predict.”

  “Stop it!”

  “I? Oh no, Lan. I made my will plain when I had him pinned here and my will has not changed. If you want his suffering ended, end it yourself.”

  Lan reached up through air that felt as thick as tar and took hold of the boy’s ankles. Again and again, she took a bracing breath and felt her muscles tighten, but she could not bring herself to pull. If only he would tell her what he wanted—whether it was to live or die. His screams held at least some shards of fear as much as pain; his eyes were not completely devoid of intelligence and reason. She could look up at him and see that he saw her and knew what it meant to feel her gripping at him. He did not beg her to do it and did not beg her to stop. He only screamed.

  Her hands fell away. “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can,” he said, adding acidly, “Have you forgotten you’ve done so once already?”

  “I can’t kill him! He can’t die!” She swung on him, her hands in shaking fists. “I came here to end the Eaters! You want me to make one!”

  “Spare me your sermon. With or without you, his fate will fall on him just the same. All that changes is the timeline. How much longer shall you draw out his death? Have you no mercy?”

  “Don’t you talk to me about mercy! Don’t you even say the word! You don’t know the first fucking thing about mercy or Men!”

  “I know I did not go to these wretches’ home to do murder! They came to mine!”

  “You know shit!” she shouted, dizzy with rage and hopelessness and horror in every possible shade.

  “Mind your tongue.”

  “Mind your bloody tongue, you…you dripping fuckhole shit-eating titless ass-goblin! Don’t you bloody scold me for my fucking mouth after you kill an entire town full of people who never did anything to you!”

  His hand lashed out, seizing her face in a cruel grip, thumb and forefinger digging into her cheeks until she feared his claws would punch right through. “That is enough,” he snarled. “You have forgotten to whom you speak! Get on your knees—Get on your liar’s knees and beg my forgiveness!”

  “No!”

  “Beg and I shall allow you to flee.”

  “I’m not fleeing anywhere!”

  “I said, beg!” he roared.

  “I’m not your fucking dog!” she shouted back at him.

  “And you won’t beg.”

  “No!”

  “No.” He kept his grip on her, but glanced up at the impaled boy, whose voice had roughened, but who kept trying to scream regardless. “He begged, of course. He begged me to spare his life when he knew that I would not. He begged me to end his suffering when it had only just begun. He would have said anything, made any promise, but you choose instead to stand armored in my affection and lecture me on mercy—”

  “Ha!”

  “—and never, not even once, ask me simply…to free him.”

  The heat of rage drained out of her at once.

  He saw it go and his cruel smile widened. “No, you never thought of that, did you? It should have been first from your lips and would have been, if you truly cared for the plight of the living in the land of the dead. You don’t. The Lan who walked alone from Norwood to Ashcroft died in my bed, riding the Devil to rapture. You may strike my face and call me all the names you please, but you will never be that mother’s child again. You are my Lan now, made in my image…and you can stand here all night and watch this youth’s life bleed out before you, secure in the kn
owledge that you never sold the last piece of your pride.”

  “I hate you,” she whispered and had to cover her eyes before he could see the lie in them, because it wasn’t true. Even now…even with all this before her…it wasn’t true. It broke her the way nothing else in his horrible garden could and the tears that she had kept locked up all this time came puking out. The more she fought to silence them, the harder they tore free, until she was as hoarse as the screaming boy and as lost in her own hell.

  Azrael’s hand opened. She could sense it there, hovering, before it slowly curled. His knuckles brushed at the cheek where she could still feel the ghost of his claws stabbing at her, and his touch was welcome. “Lan…”

  She stumbled back a step, but only one. She knelt.

  “Lan,” he said again, reaching for her. “No.”

  She pushed his hands away and took hold of the boy’s ankles. He tried to scream again, but his voice was gone. He could manage only a scrape of sound, so she screamed for him and pulled, then screamed again because he moved so easily. Shouldn’t it be harder to kill a man than to thread meat onto a skewer? He struggled in her grip, the struggles of a poisoned rat in the hand of the child whose task it was to pick it up and knock its head against the wall to end its pain. She ignored his weak kicks and kept pulling, bringing his feet in scrapes and lurches down the length of the pole until it got stuck somewhere inside him. When she pulled now, he only coughed blood out onto her head; she felt the hot sting of each drop. His hoarse cries died away in moans. Behind them, she heard a child sobbing, babbling that she didn’t mean it, she was sorry, she took it back, but there was no taking this back.

  Lan dragged in one more breath, tasting blood, and heaved with all that was left of her strength. Something crunched. His limbs jittered wildly, then only twitched, and finally stilled. The boy sagged, slipping even further down the pole, taking on the greater weight by which the body is imbued when the soul has gone.

  Lan’s tears still poured out of her, but quietly now. She was scarcely aware of them except as scratchy heat on her cheeks. She waited, staring raptly up into the boy’s slack face, her knuckles white where they still gripped him. She counted her breaths at first, but kept losing her place and having to start over. In that way, she counted almost to a hundred twice, to eighty-five once and to sixty-something three times before his legs twitched in her hands.