Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

Lan’s heart sank, although the words themselves were hardly surprising. “It has?”

  They both ignored her.

  “Is there a protocol in place for how to survive his lordship’s wrath?”

  “I’m afraid not. He’s a remarkably even-tempered man, all things being equal, particularly considering your kind’s never-ending harassment.”

  “We were egged on a bit, wouldn’t you say, by the end of the bloody world?!”

  “Our lord’s demands upon his ascension were modest ones. If he had not been betrayed and viciously attacked—”

  “He raised the bloody dead and wiped out billions of people practically overnight!”

  “Do you have to fight about this right now?” Lan asked.

  “Well then, maybe you should have given him what he asked for,” the dead doctor concluded with a little sniff. “My only point being, he must have some reason for wanting her made well and I think it would be prudent if we assume it is so that he can exact his own vengeance for injuring herself in the first place. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. To any of us, really.”

  “Yes, I’ve thought of that myself,” said the living doctor, giving Lan’s hand an idle pat. “As a doctor, I can’t say that I approve, but speaking on a strictly personal level, I’m not exactly willing to take her place.”

  “Nor am I, which is why I also think if we don’t tell our lord she’s awake and he wanders in as he’s been doing in his odd moments to find her up and well and him not there to see it happen, he might consider himself deprived of an elemental component of some greater plan and we could both find ourselves out in the garden with a pike in our nethers for not keeping him informed.”

  “As long as it’s been since I’ve had something hard between my legs, that does not appeal,” the woman said wryly. She looked at Lan. “Right. I say we split the difference, my dear. Keep a watch on her blood pressure and if it holds steady and she stays clear of complications, we’ll bring him in, oh, an hour before dawn. People tend to appreciate news of this sort better when it comes at an inconvenient time.”

  “How devious. And until then—” The dead doctor leaned out to a side table and came back with a syringe. “—we see to it that if he pops in, she’s in a convincingly unresponsive, yet recuperative, sleep.”

  “You could just ask me to pretend to be asleep if he comes,” Lan said crossly.

  “It’s difficult for me to trust your judgment when you’re lying there with a slashed throat,” the woman told her. “Dr. Deadhead, if you please.”

  “Certainly, Dr. Warmblood.” The dead man caught Lan’s restrained arm in an even firmer grip and stabbed the needle into her before she could make another argument. “Count to ten,” he suggested, emptying its heavy contents into her with sadistic slowness.

  “One,” said Lan.

  And that was all.

  * * *

  She woke as something lifted her arm and slipped a kind of short, coarse sleeve around it, high on her bicep. There was a sense of familiarity in this touch, a kind of ominous foreknowledge that came without memory, only a sense that something was about to happen. Something that hurt. There followed a series of wheezy breaths, reminding Lan so uncomfortably of a poisoned rat that she opened her eyes, but the room was too bright. The light stabbed in through just a slit, turning her vision to a watery white in which no details could be made out, only a very blurry face that could have belonged to anyone. She gave up the effort, sinking back into the dark. The wheezing whatnot wheezed on, and with each exhalation, her arm got pinched tighter and tighter. She tried to pull away. But whatever had her, had her good.

  “Get off me,” Lan said. Or tried to. “Grrmfee,” was perhaps a better representation of her efforts.

  Something thumped her on the forehead. “Hush,” said a man.

  “Leggo.”

  Thump. “I said, hush. Don’t you move or I’ll have you back in the cuffs.”

  Lan thought that over and concluded that threatening to put her ‘back’ in them meant she was out of them now. She tried to open her eyes and confirm this theory, but all she got for her pains was a swimmy glimpse of the ceiling before her leaden eyelids fell again.

  The wheezing stopped. The squeeze was now horrific, like having her arm bit off at the elbow. At length, with a great exhaling hiss, she was released. “Eighty-eight over sixty. Not good, but certainly better than it was.”

  “Bassa,” said Lan irritably.

  “She’s getting awfully chatty, isn’t she?”

  “She’s waking up,” someone else said. Woman’s voice. Not her mother. The other doctor. “For real, this time. We’d better fetch his lordship. Oh nurse!”

  Lan winced without opening her eyes at the unexpected shout, like a hammer on her fuzzy brain, then winced again when she deciphered the sound that soon followed as those of a Revenant’s bootheels approaching in a familiar stride. “Don’t call him that,” she tried to say, but the mumble she managed to push out was more a snore than real words.

  “Doctor.” Deimos did not bother to disguise his dislike—that one word held whole symphonies of it, in all its varying colors and strains—but if he had comments to make on the subject of his new title, he kept them to himself.

  “Go tell your master my patient is coming around. If he wants to see her, I’ll allow it.”

  There was the briefest of pauses before the boots walked away, just time enough for Lan, and possibly Deimos as well, to reflect on the audacity of ‘allowing’ Azrael to do anything. And it seemed no sooner had the hard tak-tak of his heels retreated than it returned, bring with it the heavier, softer stride of Azrael in his bare feet. Lan roused herself enough to raise her head, but it was too heavy to hold up.

  “Just a few minutes,” the woman said. “It’s important that she rest as much as possible.”

  “Leave us.”

  The room emptied. Lan tried again to work her eyes open and finally succeeded, only to see Azrael above her, his eyes blazing from the sockets of his horned mask. He was, as the doctor had said, very angry.

  They stared at each other in silence as Lan’s head and vision slowly cleared.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I didn’t want to.”

  His hand slashed sidelong through the air. “I am not in the mood to hear your lies now, Lan. Whatever your story was, whatever chain of unfortunate accidents you’ve dreamed up to explain yourself—”

  “I meant to,” said Lan. “I planned it. You wouldn’t believe how much planning I did. But I didn’t want to.”

  His jaw tightened. He walked away, not toward the door but to the window, clasping his hands behind his back. She could see every muscle standing out in sharp relief, coiled too tight, destroying all the sense of calm he intended to convey with this pose.

  “Did you get my note?” Lan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to read it…with all the blood.”

  He gave that no answer, not even a glance.

  “I didn’t realize how much blood there would be. I guess I ruined your bedspread.”

  The claws of one hand punched through the skin of his trapped wrist; black fluid welled up, too thick to fall. He did not speak or look at her.

  “I know what I did to you, okay? You think I don’t, but I do. I know I hurt you, but don’t you get it? It could only have worked if it hurt you! Do you think I wanted to kill myself? Do you think I did it because I was mad at you or ashamed of being with you? Hell, I’ve never been happier in my whole life, but I had to do it! I had to! Because you left me nothing else to try!”

  He breathed, broad shoulders steadily rising and falling. Otherwise, nothing.

  “Say something,” Lan said and even though she said it with anger pounding behind her eyes and eating up her guts, it shook in her throat and came out small.

  He glanced at her, then took off his mask and, with no other warning, whipped about and threw it into the far wall with force enough
that the horns imbedded several inches. It bobbed there, humming softly with the vibrations of impact while Azrael stood staring down at her, his entire body heaving as he breathed. “You,” he said, so quietly, “have always had the very worst notion of what makes up an apology.”

  She dropped her eyes, looking down instead at the mountain ranges and rolling valleys of her body beneath the sheet. “I said I was sorry. How do you say that enough after something like this?”

  He cursed in some other language, an ugly snarl of sound that seemed to tear the air as it passed through it, and paced across the room, past her bed, to the door.

  “Don’t leave me.” Suddenly, she was crying, one hand holding her bandaged throat because it hurt so much. “Please don’t go. Don’t be angry at me anymore. I’m so sorry.”

  He struck his fist against the door, then leaned against it for a long time with his head bent and his breath heaving in and out of him, loud as like a smithy bellows. She wanted him to come back. She wanted him to hold her and tell her…anything. He wouldn’t even look at her.

  She cried, coughing up tears through razors, scarcely able to breathe, but still forcing out the words. She was sorry, so sorry. Don’t be mad, don’t hate her, don’t go. She was sorry. She hadn’t wanted to do it and she’d never do it again. She was so sorry. Please, Azrael. She loved—

  He tore the door open, banging it off the wall, and slammed it shut behind him, final as a gunshot.

  Lan struggled after him, but her legs wouldn’t hold her. She slipped bonelessly from the bed to the floor, tried to crawl and then just collapsed onto her side and curled up small, weeping into her empty arms.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  She stayed on under the doctors’ care another eleven days, long enough for them to quietly get on top of the infection that did indeed turn up. Her throat swelled, but wasn’t too bad. It was the gash on her arm that got really ugly, splitting open around her stitches and making her whole arm throb. The layer of bandages that concealed its suppuration were heavy and sweaty; the medicines they gave her made her nauseous and sleepy, often at the same time, to the effect that she occasionally woke up in a cooling pool of her own sick. That wasn’t as bad as it could have been, since her food during those eleven days was either broth or fruit juice, with a just a spot of thin porridge now and then to test her stomach’s stability.

  Boredom was worse than the weakness. She had nothing but a window to look at, when she wasn’t staring morosely at the damage Azrael’s mask had done to the wall. She had no visitors, only the doctors, who rarely spoke to her, although they were friendly enough with each other in their own acid sort of way. Now and then, she could even hear the living doctor talking to Deimos, who she seemed to delight in needling, but Lan was nothing to her but a few numbers on a machine. She did hear Azrael’s voice outside her door sometimes, but he never came in to see her again, at least not when she was awake. The doctors made no secret of their suspicion that they were only mending her to be fit enough to plant in his meditation garden, but Lan didn’t think so. And if she was wrong…she wasn’t even sure she cared. Nothing seemed to matter anymore, not like it used to. Her world was a window, a damaged wall, a blinking number on a machine, and the echo of a slamming door.

  “I’ll be sorry to see you go, actually,” the living doctor—even Lan had started thinking of her as Dr. Warmblood by then—said as she clipped out the last of her stitches. “It’s been a while since I was able to do any real medicine. Doctoring in New Aylesbury mostly ends in breaking backs. If I had even half the equipment there that I have just in this room!”

  “I’m sure if you ask, Azrael will let you take some stuff back with you.”

  The doctor startled, then laughed. “Back? You must be joking! Why, my room here is bigger than the mayor’s whole house! Clean clothes, fresh food, electric lights…flush toilets! Did you ever see such a thing? Why would I leave all that?”

  “To save lives?”

  “Saved yours, didn’t I? And as it’s been my experience that doing oneself in isn’t the sort of thing one does just once, I’ll probably have to save it again.” She eyed Lan’s face and smirked. “I see you don’t agree, but Dr. Deadhead tells me his lordship’s dollies off themselves quite regular-like. You’ll probably go on denying it right up until you stick another knife in your neck, and by the by—” She gave the bandages a final brisk pinch and then tapped the other side of Lan’s neck. “This is the vein, love. Nick that and you’ll be done before you can say Devil’s dolly. All right?”

  “Are you…Are you telling me how to kill myself?”

  The doctor shrugged. “Just telling you how not to arse it up. That’s what separates us living folk from the Eaters, you know. We can learn. Well…some of us can. Right! Off you go!”

  “You’re letting me go?” Lan reached up to touch her neck. Her newborn scar felt raw and waxy and scabby and hot. Her fingers felt like hooks dragging across an open wound. “Already?”

  “Soonest begun, soonest done, love. I can send you off with something for the pain, if you like.” The doctor glanced over her shoulder at the open door, then lowered to voice to a scarcely-audible breath. “And I can give you something for later…to make it quick. You can hide it in your cheek until you need it. It isn’t painless or pretty, but it’s quick.”

  “No.”

  The doctor shrugged. “Suit yourself. Nurse!”

  Deimos stepped into the doorway. “Doctor.”

  “Escort my patient here wherever it is she calls home and keep a close watch, in case she comes over flowery.”

  Deimos put his hand on his sword and held out the other, never taking his steely eyes off the doctor. Lan got out of the bed that had been her prison and walked on stiff legs to join him. She was annoyed to find that being upright after so many days lying-in did indeed have a wilting effect on her, so that she was obliged to actually accept the arm the Revenant offered. The feel of his cold flesh through his immaculate uniform raised the fine hairs all over her body; she tried not to let it show.

  As he led her out of her sickroom into an unfamiliar hall, the damned doctor called out, “It’s a pity I won’t see you again either, nurse. Good help is so hard to find and once you’ve trained up some, why, you could almost be adequate!”

  The dead don’t have to breathe except to force air through their vocal chords and Deimos did not speak, so there was no reason for him to take that deep breath and let it slowly out again. Lan watched him from the corner of her eye while pretending to keep her full attention on her feet. Her senses, sharpened by days of convalescing boredom, effortlessly brought her the creaking of his leather glove as he adjusted his grip on his sword and the minute flexing of the muscles under her hand, but that was all he did. He did not stop. He did not turn back. He did not knock the head off the doctor’s shoulders with one practiced sweep of that deadly weapon. Whatever emotions he might be feeling, he held them in reserve for the next time Azrael sent him out to slaughter a village.

  “Where is he?” Lan asked, now thinking of Azrael.

  Deimos did not require clarification. To him, there was only one ‘he’. “Our lord has matters to attend to elsewhere.”

  “Matters like sharpening a pike?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What’s he going to do to me?” Lan asked bluntly.

  One of the Revenant’s eyebrows arched, although he did not look at her. “Nothing, as far as I know.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “How many other meanings are there?”

  “You can’t possibly be saying he forgives me.”

  “Oh no.” Deimos actually laughed a little, in a cold, dead way. “No, I’m certainly not saying that. This way.”

  She followed Deimos blindly through the maze of halls and out into fresh air and chill sunlight, neither very welcome. He had a car waiting, the only car in all the empty lot, but still he’d parked it in the outlines painted to that purpose, even though it
meant a longer walk. There was plenty of room right up by the doors, but there was a sign there saying the space had been reserved for emergency vehicles and Deimos was dead. In absence of direct orders, he could only obey the laws of Haven, where Azrael was lord.

  Lan sat quiet while he got the car going and carefully navigated his way out of the lot, just as if there were hundreds of other cars and careless pedestrians to factor in. He even looked both ways before pulling out onto the street. She studied what she could see of his handsome face in the rearview mirror as he drove and finally said, “Do you know why I did what I did?”

  “Do I understand your motives, you mean?” His cool eyes tapped at her once and went back to watching the traffic. “Yes.”

  “If it was you who had to forgive me…could you?”

  The faintest crease appeared between his brows. “I can’t answer that.”

  Lan nodded and looked away.

  “But only because I don’t care,” he explained.

  “Thanks,” she muttered.

  “I don’t think I meant that the way it sounded.” He heaved another of those curt, unnecessary sighs, his hands flexing on the steering wheel. “I can’t care. About anything, apart from our lord’s will. I can forgive nothing if I can’t take offense.”

  “Oh.”

  “I don’t imagine that’s much comfort to you. Our lord cares very deeply about things.” Deimos rolled his eyes just a little before adding, “About you.”

  The words went through her head and heart a hundred times before she could bring herself to say, “I don’t think that’s true anymore.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because he’s angry.” He glanced at her with another of those almost-frowns. “That’s probably not very comforting either. I apologize. I’m not very good at comfort.”

  He drove in silence through the city while Lan leaned up against the window and watched the buildings roll by. Her eyes had a way of lighting on and identifying architectural details, which put her in mind of Master Wickham. She wondered if he’d been feeding her fish all this time, even though she knew she didn’t have to wonder; he’d said he would and he had. All the same, the thought grew stronger and when at last the car turned onto the familiar road that led to the palace, she said, “What happens to me when we get home?”