Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

If he’d known about her ever since she’d landed, Deimos had been waiting two weeks already and another question more or less couldn’t make much of a delay, but Lan did not argue. She started to shoulder her rucksack, then just put it down again. There were things in it still that might be useful to another traveler, but Lan would have no more need for it in Haven and, one way or another, she doubted she’d ever leave. The thought brought no apprehension, only an impatience to be there, to slam the door on this whole past year and be back where she belonged.

  “I never should have left,” she murmured, giving her rucksack a push into the middle of the table, unopened. She left it there and nodded at the dead man. “I’m ready now. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  The drive from Norwood to Haven was offensively short, considering how long it had taken her to ride in two years ago. The journey that had lasted two months by ferry (“You have not come a long way,” the memory of Azrael reminded her in his dry, smiling way. “You have rode a little, walked a little and waited much.”) took less than a day in the Revenant’s van. True, he drove through the night, needing no rest and taking no special care on the Eater-less roads, but the unfairness of it still rankled.

  Without anything to look at or listen to except the droning of the engine, Lan drifted off and slept out most of the trip, waking only twice when the Revenant stopped to charge up at the lifeless waystations along the road. When the sun came up again, its light woke her for good, unfolding through the sickly yellow clouds to show her the blasted hills and crumbling fences that divided the land, with the dark towers of Haven peeking over the horizon. She stretched as best she could in the confines of the vehicle, then reached to roll down the window for some bracing morning air.

  “I wouldn’t,” said the Revenant.

  She glanced at him, then looked back at the road just in time to see the first pikes come into view.

  And then all the rest of them.

  She had noticed there weren’t many bodies in the villages. She had even thought, when she bothered to think about it at all, that those she had found were surely only those who had resisted being removed from their homes. The rebels, those who actually marched on Haven and raised weapons against the dead, would be wherever they had fallen…and here they were. The dead, the sheer number of them, defied imagining even as she looked right at them. Fifty was a number, or a hundred or a thousand, but this was beyond counting. After a certain point, trees just become a forest and one cannot see more than that. So it was now: Lan looked and saw only glimpses of what had been men and women, who were now only components of a bodiless whole.

  And then they were driving through them, engulfed by a landscape of dead. The wind of their passage made a whicking sound through their dangling leg bones and made their ragged clothing snap out like banners. Their dead heads lolled, turning as if to watch them pass. Their hanging arms shifted, their fingers seemed to point. The sun itself could not be seen through the thickest drifts. They were as branches against a winter sky, interlocked, uncountable.

  She could smell them, even with the windows rolled up. It was not the smell of rot—she could only imagine what that would have been like, when all these bodies were fresh—but the smell of death. Old death. Eroded. Cool. It was the smell of clothing that had been rained on and wind-dried a hundred times. It was unwashed hair, dry-rotted hide, weathered bone. It was shit and piss left to lie on the open earth. And it was everywhere, in every breath.

  Azrael had done this. She’d known he would, even said he would to those she’d known wouldn’t listen, and if she’d felt anything at all as she took herself away from that doomed place, it had been only bright-burning anger around a hot coal of serves-you-right and then she’d thought of them no more until she saw the first familiar faces turn up in Anglais-en-Port. But now she saw it. Now it was here in front of her and behind her and leaning in on every side and it was not just the people of Norwood or the people of an army, but all of them. It was every person in the world and they were all dead.

  The Revenant watched her as he drove. He seemed to be waiting for something, but she didn’t know what. What could she—What could anyone say about this? The horror was too big to even to choke on.

  “They came to us,” he said at last.

  “I know.”

  “The war was over and we were content with its end. They were the ones to bring it back.”

  She nodded. She knew that, too.

  “What did they think would happen?” the Revenant muttered, bumping over a pike that had fallen across the road.

  Lan could only shake her head. They thought they’d win, of course. Wasn’t that the point of every old book and film and fairy tale, that Mankind would prevail? Dragons, demons, aliens, superviruses…zombies…they were all the same shadow, cringing away from the light. And no matter how terrible the threat or how unstoppable it seemed or how many millions of people had to die first, there would always be survivors and if those survivors just…just survived long enough…well, of course they’d win. Because they deserved to. Because they were fighting for their homes and their way of life and for all humanity. Because nothing could be stronger than the human spirit.

  But that was only true in stories. The Earth may be Man’s home, but it didn’t have to love them for it, and in its unflinching eyes, humans were parasites, no different and no more deserving of life than any other worm feeding on a body from within. They were not owed victory. That went, as it went in every war, to the one best equipped to fight. The dead couldn’t get any deader; the living could.

  They came to the gate and were waved to a halt by the armed guards on watch there, both of whom executed comical double-takes when they saw Lan sitting calmly in the front seat looking back at them. One of them started to order the Revenant out, but stammered to a stop when he saw who he was arresting. The other visibly braced himself and drew his sword, aiming it directly at the Revenant’s amused face. “Traffic of the living is forbidden. You must be taken into custody, by order of Lord Azrael. Exit the vehicle.”

  “I need to deal with this. Don’t move.” The Revenant got out of the van and walked a few steps away to speak with them at a distance.

  Lan waited, staring fixedly at the walls ahead of her and not the bodies at her back, but she could still hear them. The sound of thousands of limbs knocking gently against their poles and the fluttering of their thousands of ragged clothes muddled together after a while. She tried to pretend she was listening to the waves hitting the shore back in Anglais-en-Port and couldn’t, quite.

  The Revenant came back and started up the van’s engine as the guards opened Haven’s gate.

  “All sorted out?” Lan asked. She wasn’t really worried for her life, but with the sound of corpses like an endless tide all around her, she wasn’t as confident as she might otherwise have been either.

  “Those our lord trusts to keep his peace and protect his domain, he makes Revenants,” the dead man replied, driving into the city and nodding to acknowledge the salutes of the guards. “Those competent in any other skill, he puts to work. Everyone else, he sets to watch.”

  “He puts people where he thinks they’ll serve him best.”

  “How does it serve him to put fools on the gate?” the Revenant asked scornfully. “Even you got past them once and you don’t strike me as an expert in the art of stealth.”

  Lan shrugged that off and said, “He’s bored. You don’t see that? If no one like me ever got in, he’d never have anyone to talk to but you people, and that can’t be much better than talking to himself. No offense.”

  He had to think that over before he said, “I think I am offended,” in a mildly curious tone. “Although I suppose I shouldn’t be. I can’t see the fault in your logic. All I can say in rebuttal is that he didn’t make us for our conversational skills and he well could have.”

  “I’m sure you’re very good at what you do.”

  “I am. I have laid waste to entire settlements single-handedl
y and killed hundreds of the living without ever taking a scar where one could be seen. I was among those who broke the siege and I did it by going over the wall and engaging those who surrounded us in close combat. There were thousands of them, not even one full hundred of us, and still we prevailed. True, many of them attempted to flee or surrender, but most fought first and I am yet untouched. I took eighteen of their so-called officers and set hundreds of the pikes you saw out there myself.”

  “Let’s stop talking,” said Lan softly.

  He glanced at her after the manner of one who knows he has been perhaps a bit insensitive, but only in relation to one who is prone to be over-sensitive in the first place. “Forgive me. I was made to take pride in work done well, but I should have recalled that you likely had friends among the rebels. I don’t mean to upset you.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “If it comes as any comfort to you, we tortured none of them.”

  “Apart from being impaled alive, you mean.”

  “Yes, apart from that,” he agreed, with no trace of irony. “And most died within a few hours. It’s very unlikely you knew anyone personally who suffered.”

  They did not talk again until they had reached the palace. He drove past flowering gardens and servants scrubbing down statuary, through the imposing iron gate and across the inner courtyard, right to the white steps that climbed to the formal front doors where Deimos stood waiting, along with a dozen or so matched pairs of pikemen. But not Azrael.

  Lan let herself out of the van, searching the empty windows that overlooked the courtyard for a familiar silhouette and finding only curtains. “Where is he?”

  The Revenant did not answer, nor should she have expected him to. It wasn’t his business to know.

  “I kind of thought he’d come to meet me,” she said, as if justifying her reason for asking would make any difference. Then, since she was already embarrassing herself, she looked back at him and said, “Does he ever talk about me?”

  The dead man looked back at her, his thoughts cool behind his staring eyes, and finally said, “He doesn’t talk to us. You remarked on that yourself.” Then he reached across the seat and pulled her door shut.

  Lan stepped back as the van drove away. She could hear its engine long after it had passed the gate and vanished from sight. The empty courtyard and tall, straight walls of the palace caught and amplified every sound. Deimos’s boots walking up behind her might as well have been gunshots.

  “I’d forgotten how quiet it is here,” Lan said, without turning. She could see glimpses of movement just over the courtyard wall, where dozens of servants tended the grounds in silence. The dead didn’t gossip or complain or conspire to advance beyond their position. They just did what they were made to do. “It’s hard to believe thousands of people occupy this city.”

  “Thousands of people occupy cemeteries, too,” Deimos replied.

  “That wasn’t what I meant.”

  “Wasn’t it? An odd choice of word to use, occupy. Far more natural to say people live in a city.” His tone was not accusatory, but there was something off about it, enough to make her look at him at last. His face was just as cold and creepily handsome as she remembered, but that same offness was there to be seen just as clearly as she’d heard it. He waited while she studied him in vain for some clue as to what she was looking at, or for, and after a moment, he put his hand out. “It’s good to see you.”

  “It is?”

  “I hoped you’d come back.”

  “You did?”

  “To spare me the trouble of coming to get you.” Since she hadn’t taken his hand, he used it to gesture toward the palace, then started up the stairs, trusting her to follow. “I wouldn’t have waited much longer.”

  “If he wanted to see me sooner, maybe he shouldn’t have made returning to England punishable by death.”

  “There is no more England.”

  “There will always be an England. And its displaced people will always come home. You—hang on, you said you wouldn’t have waited.”

  “Did I?” Deimos crossed over from the courtyard to the palace floors; his boots stopped tak-takking on stone and instead clump-clumped on carpet.

  “You know you did. What does that mean? Why would you wait at all if Azrael ordered you after me…and if he didn’t, why would you come get me?”

  Deimos just kept walking, forcing her to keep pace at his side or be left behind. Lan stopped at the threshold to indulge a moment’s frustration, which meant she then had to run to catch him up before he disappeared around a corner. The pikemen stationed at the doors showed no reaction when she raced past, but as soon as she was over the threshold, they shut her in and crossed their pikes. Lan skidded to a stop, Deimos momentarily forgotten as she looked back, but they were faceless once again, staring through her down the wide hall.

  Lan could not deny a twinge of apprehension, but she didn’t bother with questions she knew they wouldn’t acknowledge. Instead, she went after Deimos, who wasn’t very likely to answer either, but who could take her to the one man who damn well would.

  “Where is he?” she demanded, falling into step at the Revenant’s side. Irritation had a way of lengthening her stride, so that she had to make a conscious effort not to overtake him. “I won’t be his prisoner until he at least has the courtesy to say so himself.”

  “You are no one’s prisoner.”

  “I don’t appear to be free to leave either.”

  “Did you think you would be?”

  “Well…no,” she admitted, and because she knew exactly how silly that made her look, even if he didn’t smile, she had to recover herself with a forceful, “I still want to see Azrael. He doesn’t want to see me? That’s too damn bad. Take me to him right now.”

  Deimos took a breath and blew it out again in a dead man’s frustrated sigh. “I wish Lareow were here,” he said. “He knew how to talk to the living. He knew how to talk to you.”

  Lan’s heart sank down into her knotted stomach. Knew. That was the past tense use of those words. It was Master Wickham himself who’d taught her that, patiently and politely, over and over because she so rarely listened at lessons. Oh, she’d made his job so hard, and now that she thought about it, why hadn’t Wickham come to meet her instead of Deimos? Wasn’t that really more in line with an intermediary’s line of work than a Revenant’s?

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said. “I don’t mean…damn it, you know what I mean. He’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he…in the garden?”

  “No.”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “Yes,” Deimos said again. He glanced upward, hunting out his next words in the ceiling tiles, and awkwardly said, “My condolences. I know that doesn’t mean much, coming from me. But I also know Lareow was fond of you.”

  “Is that what killed him?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “I’m not asking how it happened,” she interrupted. “I’m asking why.”

  “No,” said Deimos, staring her down. “You’re asking me to tell you it wasn’t your fault. And I can’t. He liked you. Do you understand what that means? How…unnatural that is for us? You destroyed this place. You destroyed him, his purpose, his meaning. What happened between him and Lord Azrael was nothing but a report filed after the fact.”

  To that, Lan could say nothing. In spite of the words themselves, there was no blame in the Revenant’s voice, not so much as a shadow of it on his handsome face, but Wickham was still dead. And she’d liked him, too.

  Deimos glanced behind him at the mostly empty hall—a few pikemen stood at the crossways and there were servants at strategic points, cleaning windows and polishing floors—then raised his arm and indicated the first door on the left.

  Lan knew she wasn’t going to see Azrael on the other side and she didn’t, but she gave Deimos the benefit of the doubt and waited for him to join her and close the door again before she laid it out. “I don’t wa
nt to make trouble for you, Captain, but you’d better tell Azrael—”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. Go tell him…” The rest of that thought slipped away as a new one took its place. Lan looked inanely around the room, then at Deimos again. “You don’t mean he isn’t here, you mean…he isn’t here. Where is he? Wait, that’s a stupid question. How long has he been gone?”

  “I can’t know for certain. I can only tell you that I last saw him when he gave the order to purge the living from his lands. He seemed distracted, but it was a difficult decision for him and I did not find his demeanor suspicious.”

  There was an odd stress on the word ‘demeanor’. Not much, just enough to make Lan wonder if she’d heard it at all. “Something put your wind up,” she guessed.

  Deimos nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on some point beyond her, as if he were looking right through her and watching that other scene play out. “His orders. I knew they weren’t…right.”

  “The purge.”

  “The purge?” He focused sharply in on her again. “No, not in and of itself, but…but how he went about it, yes.” He crossed the room in a long, soldierly stride, apparently solely to brace his arm on a tabletop, which was as close to fidgeting as Lan had ever seen any Revenant come. “Perhaps you know that virtually all the dead of Haven were originally raised to serve as his army during his ascension, but only out of the need of the moment. They were not soldiers in life and, as he himself had little knowledge of such matters, in death, they had no particular aptitude for it. His first efforts to create an effective military force were met with limited success and each new wave replaced the one before, until we Revenants were raised.” His chin lifted and shoulders squared, speaking with pride that, objectively, she knew to be justified. “We were the force that won the war. We tore through the armies of the living. We destroyed their best defenses and slaughtered their leaders in their lairs. We drove every last one of them out of Haven in days. We could have purged the living from this land at any time. We were more than enough for the task. All of which I say so that you understand the full impact of what I am about to tell you now.” Deimos leaned forward, cutting each word out separate from the rest and hammering it in place. “He mustered virtually all of Haven for the purge. Ten thousand untrained, unskilled, unarmed…laborers.”