Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “He emptied the city? The whole city?”

  “Save only a small force in the palace to hold watch over the living, his former…companions. One would think he would use Revenants for that purpose at least,” he said with the barest hint of an edge to his voice. “But he chose instead a small group taken from those in domestic service. Now tell me, why would he do that?”

  “To make absolutely certain he had only the most inept people on guard,” Lan said slowly.

  Deimos pointed at her with grim satisfaction. “I’ve no doubt they were serving tea and biscuits when he left.”

  “Are you absolutely sure he’s gone? I mean, this place…it has a lot of empty rooms. Hell, he could have shut himself up anywhere in Haven.”

  “It is my business to know every room, every cupboard. My Revenants have made several discreet searches. I am confident he is nowhere in the city.”

  “What about his steward or his chamberlain? Or surely a servant must have seen him go, even if they didn’t think much of it.”

  “So one would think, but no. He has been prone to odd moods since your departure and it had become quite common for him to withdraw for days without contact of any kind. And when he did emerge…” Deimos drummed the fingers of one hand on the wrist of the other. “…it was best to keep out of his way. Some of the staff may have begun to suspect by now, but most are quite content within the confines of their duties.”

  “No one’s the least bit curious where he’s been for the last year?”

  “I am.” Deimos spared her a brief, yet intense glance. “But no. We are not, as a rule, overly imbued with curiosity. I confess, although I suspected his absence soon upon my return to Haven, I was loathe to make inquiries. No matter how well our lord’s other companions have been kept, I am not confident of their loyalty.”

  “Yeah, that’s not the sort of thing you want getting out after the purge,” said Lan, disguising her alarm with a short laugh. “You’d have the rest of the living world on your doorstep in a day!”

  “Not so many and not so soon, but yes, they’d come. And in the absence of orders to the contrary, we would be forced to kill them all to preserve Haven.” Deimos clasped his hands behind his back and sent a brooding scowl toward the window that would have done Azrael himself justice. “I am not at all certain the extermination of the living race can be avoided at this point, but I do not wish to set those events in motion without my lord’s approval.”

  Lan bit back a few caustic remarks on the subject of compassion and the sanctity of life and said instead, “No one wants that.”

  “No. So.” Deimos turned all the way around and looked at her. “Do you know where he is?”

  Lan raised her eyebrows until they felt like they might lift right off her head. “Do I? How the hell would I? I’ve been in France! Why don’t you ask his new dolly?”

  “He’s had none since you.” Deimos gave that an impatient moment to sink in, then said, “Think. Has he ever, during your…intimate hours…spoken of his past travels? Is there any place he might wish to revisit?”

  “No,” Lan said dimly. None. None since her. “Not as such. I mean, he’s been everywhere, hasn’t he? And none of them were what anyone would call happy memories. I can’t think he’d want to go back to any of them.”

  “And you? Have you ever expressed a desire to visit any particular place?”

  “I…I don’t think so, but you don’t seriously think he came chasing after me, do you? No,” she answered herself, trying to squeeze a laugh out. “No, he’d have gone to Norwood if that were true.”

  “Oh, he did,” Deimos said with convincing quiet. “I was among those who purged Norwood. I know how I left it. When I first realized he was missing, I went there first. The signs of his presence were unmistakable, but as to where he went afterwards, I’ve no idea. I don’t believe he was ‘chasing’ you, as you say. He must have known he would not find you in Norwood. Not alive, at any rate. But he did go and if he went there, he might have moved on in your memory. Where?”

  “I’ve never been anywhere else.”

  “Think.”

  “You keep saying that, but the answer isn’t going to change! I don’t know!”

  Deimos stared her down for a moment, then said, “There are some within Haven who blame you, deservedly or not, for our present circumstance. The Children are gone. The hungering dead, who have been our greatest defense against the living, gone. And there are some who believe we are next on your list of things that should end. That you have half-convinced our lord of this and that is why he has abandoned us.”

  “That’s not true! I would never—”

  “Think well before you say ‘never,’ seeing as you already have. You are not the first ever to attempt to end the hungering dead. You succeeded only because you chose the most potent weapon—our lord’s will. And if it was in your mind to set his will against the rest of us, you might well succeed, as he certainly bears us no love.”

  He paused, his expression shifting through a number of minute changes as he continued the conversation internally. At the end of it, with a strange, subdued intensity, he said, “I realize our very existence is a decision he regrets. We were an act of vengeance and we remain, not as his protectors or companions or even as his servants, but only out of his sense of obligation to a mistake he made in a moment’s temper. He regrets us and he has done so long before he knew you, but I…I do not feel like a mistake. Maybe only because I lack the capacity, I don’t know. I only know that…that it is not for me to question him, nor cause him to question himself, but if he wants us ended, he should end us, not leave us as Men leave their unwanted offspring in the woods.” He paused a second time to fight and finally master that inner storm of emotion as the faintest traces of it slipped through his unblinking eyes. Then he said, calmly, “Now I ask you again, if you have any idea of his whereabouts, to tell me.”

  Lan spread her empty arms. “I’m sorry, Captain, I just don’t know what kind of help I can be. I didn’t even know he was…” Her arms lowered. “…gone.”

  Deimos watched her closely while Lan thought a few things through. When she looked at him again, he was all attention.

  “Is Serafina still around?” she asked.

  He expelled a terse, unnecessary breath and said, “She’s been pressed into his service, tending his former consorts. She may not even know he’s gone yet.”

  Lan dismissed that with a shrug. “Doesn’t matter. She knows where he is. Better get a van charged up too. I have a feeling it’s going to be a long drive.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was more than just one long drive, it was two, with a quick sea-crossing in the middle that took them from Eastport across the Channel and well up the coast, where they landed under the cover of night in an abandoned portside town. From there, it was inland, moving steadily east and then south, the three of them in a ferry he had taken from the palace stables. It had a winking woman painted on the side, standing tall in a mere suggestion of clothes over a few fallen Eaters. Now that she could read, she even knew its name: Dinah Might. Lan asked no questions as to how Haven had acquired it. Deimos drove, looking handsomer than ever out of uniform in the worn, flashy clothes that ferrymen favored. He said they were inconspicuous and maybe they were, but he drew eyes everywhere they went anyway. Him and Serafina both, who was equally ‘inconspicuous’ and sullen about it. Lan had grown accustomed over the past year to turning heads herself, but in the company of the beautiful dead, she was once more invisible. She was amused and a bit annoyed to learn it made her a little jealous.

  They left France, left Switzerland, left whatever came after, going through places Lan didn’t know the names of. When she finally managed to convince him of the need, Deimos took it upon himself to do the negotiating at the waystations where they stopped, bartering goods from Haven to keep the ferry charged and Lan fed. He had no concept of a coin’s worth and no interest in acquiring one. In a village whose name Lan could n
ot pronounce without at least two more vowels, Deimos poured the entire sum of the wealth they had collected, almost fifty ‘slip, into an old man’s hand and came away with the dubious prize of three sturdy bicycles.

  “We going on a cycling holiday?” Lan asked as she helped him load them into the back of the van.

  “They tell me we’re near the end of the road,” he replied. “The ferry will be no use to us beyond that point. Do you know how to ride?”

  “It’s been a few years, but yeah. Do you?”

  “Of course. They’re more convenient and easier to maintain than motorized vehicles.”

  She tried to imagine him cycling through the empty streets of Haven and simply couldn’t.

  He smiled thinly. “Yes, we don’t do it near the palace and never outside the city. We are aware that we look silly and that can only provoke the living to attack.”

  “These are street bikes, you know,” Lan said, running a critical eye over them. “They won’t take rough terrain for long.”

  “They won’t have to,” Serafina called. “If he’s here to be found, we’ll find him before the end of the day.”

  “We’re that close?” Lan twisted around to look at Serafina, who was leaned up against the town’s open gate, staring out at the world beyond. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I mean sure.”

  “Dead sure,” Serafina said flatly.

  Lan rolled her eyes. “You’ve been saying all this time you don’t know where you are—”

  “—but that I would know it when I saw it,” Serafina finished.

  Lan joined her at the gate to have another look at the same thorny brush and blackened slabs of bare earth they’d been driving through all day. “Yeah? So what am I looking at?”

  “This used to be forest.”

  Lan shrugged, unconvinced but unable to see the significance in any case. “So?”

  “So, it’s been burnt away.”

  Lan shrugged again, irritably this time. “There were a lot of fires, back in the day.”

  “Not like this.” Serafina glanced at her, then heaved one of her entirely unnecessary sighs and went back to the ferry, beckoning impatiently for Lan to follow. Letting herself into the back, she opened the hatch and climbed out onto the roof, stepping aside so Lan could do the same. This new vantage showed her only a little more of the world and it was all the same, but Serafina scanned it intently, oblivious to the young men of the village who suddenly found business close to the charging station where a casual glance upward might accidentally afford one a glimpse of the forbidden country beneath the dead woman’s windblown skirt.

  “Um,” said Lan meaningfully, keeping her own legs tight together even though she was in jeans.

  Serafina glanced down and tossed her hair. “Captain,” she said tersely.

  Deimos uttered a sigh of his own and left off tying down the bicycles to pull his sword out from beneath the blanket that covered their dwindling supplies.

  “Don’t kill anyone!” Lan exclaimed and whether it was her words or the very real weapon, the charging station quickly emptied. “Do we have to keep having this conversation? You know, for a guy so concerned with not drawing attention—”

  “Oh, be quiet!” Serafina snapped. “And look.”

  “Where?” asked Lan.

  “Anywhere.”

  Lan looked and, although she didn’t know much about fire except how to start one and not to touch it, she had to admit there was an eerie completeness to the devastation she saw here. Not a single burnt stump stood to mark where the old forest had been and no new trees had sprung up as a promise of a fresh start. Not a single stone wall or electrical tower had survived the fire. Even the road they’d been following all day was little more than chunks of asphalt scattered like breadcrumbs through the stony hills. There weren’t any road signs left over from the days when there was traffic or the husks of dead cars pushed off to one side…there was nothing.

  Now that she saw it, it was really was everywhere: there was no livestock in this village and no grass where they could have grazed, only a scattering of shallow-rooted thorns over gritty soil. There were no crops growing in the open, Eater-less stretches surrounding the village. The people who made their homes in this dead land were just as hard, most of them as young as Lan or younger, grown old well ahead of their years—survivors.

  “This was the fire you told me about,” Lan realized. “The one that fell from the sky.”

  “Fell.” Serafina gave her a scornful, stabbing glance. “Like rain or snow, is that it? It just fell.”

  Awkwardly, Lan went back to staring at the landscape. “I didn’t know…I thought they just dropped a bomb on the cave…”

  “They must have wanted to be sure.” Serafina’s smile was sharp enough to cut, but she was the only one hurt. She looked away. “One would think they would have already learned by then how pointless it is to kill the dead.”

  “Yeah, but back then, it was new. They saw him raise the dead and make them walk around again. They had every right in the world to be frightened.”

  “Frightened? You think they acted out of fear? And what would you know about it, warmblood? Were you there?” Serafina glared at her, but the heat faded from her eyes when she looked back out over the mountains. “I was. Up there…somewhere…I was born again. In that beautiful place, the one they gave him to raise his Children. It was no palace. I don’t know what it was when the living used it, and I know they meant it to be a prison when they set him in it, but it was still a beautiful place. There, I opened my eyes for the first time and saw him over me…his eyes, burning behind his mask…and I was frightened. I did not have a voice yet or thoughts or purpose, but I had fear…and then he lifted me and set me on my feet and I saw the beautiful place surrounding me…and I saw my mistress…and she was beautiful, too. I knew that I was hers and this was home and all the world was beauty. And I was so happy.”

  Serafina was quiet a moment, lost in the mountains. When she spoke again, her voice was hard and cold. “Until you warmblood bastards lured him out with promises of talk. And when he was gone, you crept in like cowards and opened your guns on his newborn Children. They did not know pain until that moment. They did not know to run. They only stood, crying out for one another, reaching out their hands—” Serafina’s own rose and limply fell again. “—as their flesh was torn away by your bullets. I remember the sounds…blood like rain on the tiles…bones cracking beneath boots…and their little voices, like kittens, really. Crying.” She closed her eyes, as if to listen better. “Crying as they were broken open, thrashing in the mess of their own cold blood, their splintered bones, their brains. They could no longer stand and never knew to fight, but they cried. They were still crying when he returned, trying to crawl to him on their broken limbs. If I slept, I think I should dream of that,” Serafina said, expressionless. “If I dreamed of it, I think I should wake screaming.”

  Deimos grunted, the only sign that he was listening at all, and returned to the rear end of the van to finish securing their cargo and supplies.

  “He could have mended them,” Serafina said, opening her eyes. “But there wasn’t time. He could not even stop to comfort them. He had to end them, these Children he had known only hours, and gather the rest of them to run. He led us through the smoke and the soldiers into the open world we had not even known existed and from there, into the wild places. We thought we had escaped them, but of course, we never had. They were chasing us before we had even begun to run. They were only waiting for us to stop moving, so they knew what part of the sky to burn. But I suppose you had to do it.” She looked at Lan and said softly, viciously, “Because we were monsters.”

  “They thought they were defending themselves,” Lan said, but the words were sour in her mouth.

  “From what?” Serafina demanded. “The hungering dead came after. Whatever had we done to provoke them? What did they think we were going to do?” Her eyes narrowed. “And who
gave them the idea we were going to do it?”

  Lan’s mouth worked in awkward silence, unwilling to give voice to the only honest answer—that the living had these films, you see, and that everyone knew the dead ate the living because the films said so. Mostly she wanted to say she hadn’t even been born yet, that her mother had only been a child, so please don’t ask her to explain it any better than that, because there was no excuse. Even the people who’d had to live through it back when it was happening just had to have known…they were only movies.

  “So don’t look at me like that,” Serafina said with a sniff, nudging past Lan to go back down through the hatch into the ferry’s hold. “They deserved everything they got.”

  Deimos finished securing the bicycles and slammed the rear doors with a silencing bang. As Lan stood staring out at the ruins of the world, he walked calmly around to unplug the charger. “None of that matters now. We have only three hours of power and four hours of light. Please do not waste time.”

  Lan knew what he was saying and a part of her agreed, but none of it mattered? This place, whatever it used to be, was gone. Its people were orphaned, refugees in their own country. The earth was soured. The whole sky was stained that ugly color and maybe there was no point going on about it, maybe they were even to blame, but it still mattered!

  Deimos looked up at her as he opened the driver’s door and put one hand on the steering wheel. “I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I am a Revenant and we are not given to be sentimental. Whatever happened, it is done and cannot be changed by arguing over who was at greater fault.”

  “The living,” Serafina muttered from within. “Theirs is the only fault. Where do you think he even got the idea for the Eaters?”