Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  His eyes had not fully closed. They didn’t fully open now, but he looked at her. She honestly did not know if he’d seen her in his last moments of life, but in death, he saw her very well.

  He lunged. She could hear something tear inside him. He dropped several inches all at once and continued slowly to slide. The point of the pole began to protrude along his side, wedging his ribs apart and growing impossibly huge until his skin finally tore and it could erupt. He did not notice, did not understand why he could not reach the unmoving meat staring up at him. He was not even a ‘he’ anymore, but just an it. He had been alive, he’d been briefly dead, and now it was neither. It was an Eater.

  It was her Eater.

  Lan’s arms dropped away. She bent until her brow touched the bloody mud at the base of the impaling pole beneath the Eater’s kicking feet and wept into the uncaring earth. For him. For her. For all the stupid boys who set off playing heroes and for their mothers, who would never know how badly they’d died, but who had surely imagined so much worse. For Mallowton, whose people had all died together for the acts of a few. For burnt barns and shattered greenhouses and the black scars left behind on the soil where no one would ever build again. For the world.

  But the world was still there when she raised her aching head. She had cried harder than she’d ever cried in her life…and nothing had changed.

  Azrael offered her his hand. She looked at him, then braced her shaking hands on her knees and pushed herself up. The Eater before her wailed, its fingertips scratching at the air just inches from her face, but she did not back away from it. She studied it as it struggled to reach her, still seeing a boy, just a boy. It wouldn’t be long before predation and corruption made him look like the corpse he was. Until then, hunger put the lie of life in his eyes.

  Azrael let her stare as long as she wanted, making no attempt to hurry her. When she finally turned toward him, he merely removed his mask and gestured toward his cheek.

  Lan looked at him as the Eaters moaned and writhed in the firelight, wondering in a detached sort of way when that face had lost its power to raise horror in her. And worse, when had his actions? Because here was a monster before her, surrounded on every side by his undying victims, and she still saw just Azrael. And even knowing what he had done—what he had made her do—the only comfort she wanted right now was his arms around her. So who was the real monster?

  Azrael put his mask on and stared back at her for a while. She could see the tendons of his throat shifting as he clenched his jaw, and after several false starts, he suddenly spat, “Say something.”

  She looked up into the sky, watching sparks falling up and winking out. It was oddly like looking into a deep pond, seeing pebbles fall away into the dark water. Up and down, sky and water…life and death…all the same.

  “It’s a nice night,” she said. Then she turned her back on him and started walking. If he wanted to keep her, he could have; he’d proven that often enough. This time, he let her go.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Lan took herself to Batuuli’s room, because it was a horrible place and held only horrible memories, and therefore hopefully the last place Azrael would think to look for her.

  It was clear the room had not been used. The little things—vases and paintings and delicate sculptures—had been removed now that no one was here to amuse herself by destroying them. The curtains had been taken down and the furniture covered in white cloth. The flayed pikemen who had been her punishment for allowing Lan to be presented in Azrael’s dining hall were still here, stacked together in the tall wardrobe that used to hold Batuuli’s fine gowns, still bound to their crossed poles and covered over so they wouldn’t get dusty in their neglect. Lan peeked in at one. His skin had dried, shriveling on his bones and even cracking in places. When he rolled his eye to look at her, she could hear it scraping in its socket.

  It took some time to pick the knot loose so she could untie him, but he was easy enough to lift down. He weighed less than a sack of grain. His skin crackled in her hands.

  She left both pikemen crumpled on the bedroom floor and went into the washroom. She took several baths. There was no soap, but she got clean enough. There were no towels, but she dried just fine without them in the open air. She had to dress again in her old clothes, reeking of smoke and blood, but that was all right. That shouldn’t be so easy to wash off.

  When she was done, she filled her cupped hands with water and carried it carefully into the bedroom. One of the pikemen had managed to sit up, so she put her hands to his lipless mouth. He drank, his cracked throat clicking until the moisture softened it. She went back for more, letting him drink all he wanted until it started seeping through the holes in his belly. Then she did the same for the other pikeman. Then she turned off the lights and slipped out the bedroom window, leaping blind into the dark and landing on the soft grass.

  She slept that night in the seedling room of one of Azrael’s greenhouses, curled small beneath a planting table, hidden by bags of soil. The next morning, before his workers arrived, she broke off a thick bunch of grapes and a handful of nearly-there apples and snuck out again. She ate her breakfast behind the goat pen where the new kids were quick to waken and beg for treats. She left them nibbling at her apple cores and moved on, circling the palace walls until she found an open window and climbed inside.

  She came in practically on top of Deimos and what looked to be a full company of Revenants, more than could be easily counted, fair filling the hall from end to end. Deimos was talking at them, making brisk gestures to illustrate this or that point, but he looked around when Lan appeared in her unexpected way behind him and whatever he was saying ended with a terse, “Never mind. Dismissed. You, come with me.”

  “No,” she said and when he reached for his sword’s hilt, she added, “Skin it, I fucking dare you.”

  He didn’t, but he sure looked like he thought about it. “Our lord—”

  “Your lord. Not mine.”

  “Lord Azrael,” said Deimos after a short pause, “commands your presence in his chambers.”

  “Lord Azrael can lick me.”

  The Revenant’s expression underwent several rapid changes before settling on cautious confusion. “I…don’t…doubt it, but that is not at issue. You are to come with me at once.”

  Lan rolled her eyes and started walking. He caught her arm. She spun and slapped him.

  They both gave that a moment’s thought.

  “All right,” said Deimos. Without releasing her, he half-turned to whistle sharply at the dispersing Revenants. He brought two of them back with a curt wave, then pushed Lan into their dual grip. “Take this to the Red Room,” he ordered and thrust a pointing finger into Lan’s face as she opened her mouth. “And you have exactly one choice in the matter and that’s whether you want to walk or be carried. Choose.”

  Lan glowered at him. “Carried. That’s a lot of stairs.”

  Deimos nodded to his Revenants and left, moving fast and not in the direction of Azrael’s chambers.

  Lan allowed herself to be taken through the palace to the tower and up the million stairs in the dark to the Red Room. It had been a long run of rainy days since the last time she’d had to sulk here and her return had not been anticipated. Lan stood in front of the window, letting the wind cool her anger, but it took a long time. That hot knot in her chest would finally start to relax and then she would catch a hint of smoke on the breeze and once more be in the meditation garden, tasting blood and ashes as the boy died and the Eater awoke.

  Footsteps, climbing fast. Someone in shoes; the hard soles echoed loudly in the stairwell, making it impossible to say for sure how many there were, but she thought it was only one person and she knew damned well who. When he reached the landing, someone knocked on the door.

  Lan ignored it and pretended to look at the sky, which was the same sky she’d seen all her life, just with different clouds. She waited.

  Whoever it was knocked again.

&n
bsp; “Sod off,” said Lan.

  “May I come in?”

  That wasn’t Deimos.

  “Master Wickham?” She turned in spite of herself, although the door was as blank-faced as it ever was. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been asked to speak with you. May I come in?”

  “What if I say no?”

  “An intriguing hypothetical. I suppose I could leave and report you uncooperative to Captain Deimos, who is permitted to use me an intermediary to carry out our lord’s orders, but who is incapable of allowing you to defy them. I could also open the door,” he went on lightly, “seeing as the lock is on this side. Until you actually say ‘no,’ I shall do neither, although we must consider both outcomes plausible pending determination. Are you familiar with Schrodinger’s cat?”

  “I swear, if you start teaching me through the bloody door, I’m throwing myself out the window.”

  He was quiet for so long, she’d begun to wonder if he’d gone away, but then he said, softly, “You said once you and I were intermedi-mates. It’s not a real word…but I flattered myself to think it was an honest sentiment.”

  Lan tipped her head back and sighed, then went over and opened the damned door.

  He smiled at her. He had a tray in his hands—coffee and biscuits.

  “I don’t want that,” she said, returning to the window.

  “I know.” He set the tray down on her vanity and picked up a folded piece of paper that had been tucked beneath the saucer. “Our lord—”

  “Give it here.”

  He passed it over with a dubious expression that turned faintly pained when Lan flicked the paper out the window. It spun away like a maple seed and was soon lost to sight. Lan watched the clouds like they were the only ones she’d ever seen. She was not remotely curious as to what the note had said. Not even a little bit.

  Wickham poured her a cup of coffee, started to offer it, then took it back and said, “You’re not going to give this a chuck, are you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Here, then.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  Undaunted, he sipped at it himself while she picked at the mortar between the stones surrounding the window. She cracked a fingernail. The mortar did not flake up.

  “How long have you known?” she asked.

  He neither flinched nor apologized. “You’re a clever girl. I think you can guess.”

  “Then you’ve been lying to me all this time.”

  “I had no choice but to obey my lord’s command. I don’t expect you to understand that, but it is true. He speaks…and his voice is the very firmament of the earth. I had no choice, but I say and I think I say honestly that I never would have chosen to lie, even at the risk of damaging our trust. I am a tidy man, as I’ve said. Lies are so untidy.” His brows knit. “Does that…Does that help?”

  It did, rather.

  “Will he let you tell me the truth now?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can I believe you?”

  Wickham gazed at her placidly. “Ask him.”

  Lan frowned and looked out the window. “Tell me about the army Azrael is sending to wipe out humanity. Have they left yet?”

  “Our lord gave no such order. He’s merely removing them in order to discourage insurgency that might lead to further unfortunate acts.”

  “Like the slaughter at Mallowton?”

  “Like the decision of those at Mallowton to rebel against our lord’s rule, thus demanding an immediate and incontrovertible response. If the living choose to provoke violence,” he said with gentle rebuke, “they will have to accept the consequences. And no, they haven’t left yet.”

  “What’s he waiting for?”

  “We haven’t many vehicles in Haven and most of those we do have are entirely unsuitable as troop transport. Although it only takes a few Revenants to…” Wickham stopped there, thankfully, and said instead, “Suffice to say, to make the most bloodless victory possible requires a simultaneous assault upon multiple strategic targets. More vehicles must be acquired before the purge can begin.”

  “The purge. You’ve got a name for it already.” Lan glared at him while he drank her coffee. “And where is he getting those vehicles?”

  Master Wickham did not answer.

  “So don’t tell me it’s bloodless.” The last word twisted in her mouth; she spat it out. “It was never going to be bloodless! You know, I know and Azrael knows no one is going to watch those ferries roll up and those Revenants hop out and say, ‘Give us a tick to pack and we’re off!’ So what you’re really saying is, he wants to kill everyone, all in one night. He doesn’t want it bloodless, he just wants it over!”

  She thought he would ask her why she was here in the tower then, instead of talking to the one person who could actually change things, or maybe trot out a ‘Life is motion’ or ‘You have to want the time you have,’ or any other number of Wickisms she’d come to expect from him. Instead, he drank her coffee and watched the sick sky darken with her and finally said, “I’m sorry.”

  She looked at him, her hot breath hitching in her throat.

  “I am. I can do nothing to help you, but I am genuinely, deeply, profoundly sorry it has come to this and I am sorriest of all to see you so hurt by it.” He put his empty cup on its saucer and returned them both to the tray on the vanity, then moved to the door. When he had his hand on the latch, he said, “What does that tell you?” And then he left.

  Lan kept her back to the door, but listened to his footsteps recede. Then she waited to hear a Revenant’s boots coming back to drag her away, but that never happened. The smell of coffee swelled and swelled until it pushed out even the stink of corpse-smoke and day-old blood, but it wasn’t until the coffee cooled and its good smell died away again that Lan gave in and poured herself a cup. She drank it bitter between bites of dry, crumbly biscuits, and then cried because she had become the sort of person who could kill a boy and still want sugar in her coffee.

  The clouds thickened. Rain that had been threatening itself all afternoon finally arrived. Lan maintained her stubborn vigil for a while, but the picture she made standing alone overlooking Haven wasn’t worth getting wet for, especially since no one could see it. She went over to the bed and sat, listening to the rain and thinking of the ferryman in Azrael’s garden, getting water in his open chest. Did it hurt? She couldn’t imagine it not hurting, but maybe it wasn’t so bad, comparatively. She wondered if someone would stop her if she just took a blanket down and covered him up against the weather. Except there was that other guard there, so she’d have to bring two blankets. As for the Eaters, they could get wet.

  Lan did not gather the blankets off her bed. She lay down on it instead, folding her hands over her stomach and staring at the ceiling. She thought about her ferryman, but not the way she thought she would, not flayed open and impaled, but just driving…the music he’d let her play…how he’d bought her dinner at the waystation…even that little time in the back of his ferry and the feel of his hands on her. She wondered if he remembered sex or if it was like hope, that he could not remember except as something he used to know.

  The day died. The light faded. There was a lamp on the vanity and a box of matches to light it, since there were no electrics in the tower, but Lan didn’t get up. She watched it get darker and when she could no longer see the spaces between the tiles to count them, she rolled over and faced the wall. Her stomach growled, reminding her she’d missed two meals already and how many more was she going to miss before she quit pouting? Because that was all this was and she knew it. If this were Norwood and if her mother were still alive, she would have had Lan out of this room and on about her chores and never mind Mallowton or the garden or killing a kid. There were no excuses good enough to mope the day away. ‘If you can do something, do something,’ she used to say. ‘If you can’t, do something else, but quit sulking or I’ll give you something to sulk about.’

  Who would have eve
r thought she’d miss hearing that? Or miss seeing that face, her head perpetually cocked because her left eye was nothing but a socket full of scars? She missed her mother’s hands—rough and chapped, with a knuckle bitten off on one and two fingers that wouldn’t bend on the other, so she was constantly flicking people the Vs if she didn’t consciously fold them down when she made a fist. She missed the heat of her mother’s body close to hers on the camp bed they shared in the women’s lodge and how she’d wake at the slightest cough or rustle in the dark and sit up, knife in hand, to listen…then lean over and touch Lan’s face, so lightly, never knowing Lan was awake to feel it or to hear her mother’s whisper, “She’s okay. She’s just fine,” as she tried to talk herself into going back to sleep.

  She’d never told Lan she loved her. Lan never told her either. She’d missed…so much.

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs. The guards, coming to fetch her down for dinner. Lan brushed at her eyes, which were dry but smarting, and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders. Light splashed across the wall when the door opened, but Lan did not move. “Sod off,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

  “No one in the dining hall is hungry,” Azrael’s voice replied. “But they attend when summoned and so will you.”

  Lan stared at the wall as he entered and crossed the very limited space between them to set his lamp down next to her unlit one on the vanity.

  “Does it really help so much to do your suffering in the dark?” he asked, lighting it.

  She did not answer.

  “It makes a far more impressive picture if one were to see your silhouette at the window throughout the night and know you neither slept nor ate for grief’s sake.” He picked up the coffee pot and shook it so she could hear how empty it was.