Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “The past is dead,” Deimos said, pointedly ignoring her. “The future may yet be changed. Remember why we are here.”

  He was right, damn him. Scowling, Lan climbed down into the ferry and took her seat, pressed uncomfortably close against Serafina’s side.

  Deimos gave the two of them a long stare and then started up the engine. The ferry rolled forward.

  “And if it weren’t for you specifically, we’d all be back in Haven,” Serafina said. “The hungering dead would still be keeping the living at bay, so the siege wouldn’t have happened and our lord wouldn’t have ordered the purge, so you can blame yourself personally for the tens of thousands of lives lost in that pointless enterprise as well.”

  Deimos slammed his boot on the brakes, throwing both of them forward onto the dashboard. He said, softly and while staring straight ahead, “I swear upon our lord’s glorious name, if you do not shut the bleating hole in your face, I will plug it with a pike.”

  Serafina clamped her lips together and folded her arms, her long fingers digging like talons into her own flawless flesh.

  Deimos drew in a deep breath, seemingly just to let it out, since he did not speak again. He took them out of the village through the unattended gate and put them back on the road.

  It was not a long drive, although it certainly felt like one after that. No one spoke, and with the only sound being the road whining beneath them and wind buffeting the van, the morning seemed to last forever. Every time Lan checked the sun, she expected to see it sinking toward dusk and every time, she was surprised to see it not even at high noon yet.

  When Deimos said they were near the end of the road, Lan had pictured it narrowing away to nothing. After all, it had practically been swallowed up already and its condition, such as it was, had deteriorated dramatically since leaving the last village. For the last interminable hour, they had been driving along what might as well be cobblestones, overgrown with creepers that perfectly hid the millions of axle-killing potholes full of rancid water and slime. At the first wide hole, Deimos had gone right through, cracking the fender on the broken asphalt and nearly miring a tire in the half-foot of sludge hiding under that innocent inch of water disguising its true depth. At the next one, he’d gone around, but the terrain was so uneven, Lan had been certain the ferry would go over on its side, no matter how slow and careful he was.

  So it was almost a relief when the road did end, even if she still had misgivings about the bicycles. And the way it ended did a fair of job of livening the tedium of a drive with two dead people and the same bleak scenery on every side—burnt mountains, burnt rocks and burnt sky. The hills had been growing taller and craggier all morning, pushing the road that snaked between them into wider curves and steeper slopes. She could look out one window and see for miles, look out the other and see a sheer rock face. In this way, she saw the wall coming, as glimpses of color between all this grey and black, but never long enough to know what she was seeing, not until they rounded the last corner and were there.

  Lan had seen a lot of walls like this one—cinderblocks, slapped up fast but solid, with razor wire all along the top. There had been a watchtower once, the sort with narrow windows that men could shoot through without exposing themselves to retaliatory fire, but it had been pulled down and salvaged to its metal bones. Likewise, the checkpoint station where guards who still didn’t understand what they were defending themselves from had once turned aside or gunned down droves of panicky civilians who still thought there was somewhere safe. There had been a gate once, but toward the end, it had been bricked up, leaving only this wall to slowly transform from military barrier to public forum. Even here, in the middle of nowhere—probably even while the ground was still smoking and the air too thick to breathe without masks—people had come, because people always believed there would be someplace untouched just a little further down the road. They’d come, not knowing this was where the whole thing started.

  Signs had been posted at regular intervals, but even the ones that weren’t too faded and riddled with bullets to be legible weren’t in English. Over the years, pilgrims had covered over most of these notices in layer upon layer of apocalyptic murals depicting Azrael and Eaters and demons riding skeletal horses that made far more impressive warnings than anything the signs themselves could have said. At one time, there must have been whole curtains of leaflets and banners too, but nothing of those remained but a couple million tattered corners stuck to the wall with ancient tacks. Graffiti in dozens of different languages whispered, pleaded, shouted and laughed—quasi-religious gibberish spewing angry and fearful rhetoric about broken seals and eating the body of Christ; social commentary that was either meant to be ironic or was just badly spelled, like U can sleep when your DEAD or The End is Nigel. Crowning these madhouse musings were thick black letters stretching across the full width of the road—all six lanes—someone had written, WHAT HAPPENED. Someone else had painted a T over the W, which Lan thought so perfect an answer that it was a very long time before she noticed Deimos had stopped the van and switched off the engine.

  “Is this it?” Lan asked, opening her door to stand on the runner in an attempt to see over the wall. This showed her only a little more of burnt mountains she could already see, but just stretching her legs felt so good, she stayed there. There was a bit of a breeze as well, blowing her hair back and bringing her the outdoorsy smells of earth and char and rot. Not a good smell. When she stepped down and scraped her heel over the ground, she scratched away less than an inch of ashy soil before encountering what almost seemed to be a layer of black glass, metal and stone, all melted together. Not good ground. “We walk from here?”

  “Ride,” Deimos corrected, opening the rear of the ferry. “Although I suspect we’ll be walking soon enough. How are your shoes?”

  Lan lifted one of her feet and had a look at the sole of her boot. “Still good. The most I’ve been running lately is wine bottles across a crowded pub. They’re practically new.”

  “And yours?”

  “What difference does it make?” Serafina said sullenly. “I have no others.”

  Deimos acknowledged that with a grunt and unloaded the bicycles. He changed out the batteries on their lamps, checked their chains, and made sure everything that took grease had some. Then he took his shirt off.

  Lan started to avert her eyes, but they were drawn back against her will, not by his body, which was as perfectly sculpted as his face, but by the startling mark on his upper left bicep—a tattoo. Darla, it said, closed in a heart, and beneath that, in two linked ribbons, Ann and Twyla.

  Deimos, wiping his hands on the shirt, noticed her staring. He glanced at his arm and said, without interest, “That was there when I was raised.”

  “Who are they?”

  “They’re dead now and so am I. It hardly matters.” He tossed the grease-stained shirt into the ferry and unbuckled his belt.

  Lan found an interesting section of the wall to stare at while he changed out of his clothes and into his Revenant’s uniform. When he was done, he buckled on his sword-belt, finger-combed his hair, checked his reflection once in the side-mirror of the ferry, closed it up and turned around.

  “Feel better?” Serafina asked dryly.

  Ignoring her, he selected one of the bicycles and pushed it over to Lan. He started to turn away, then paused and turned slowly back. He glanced at Serafina, who was busy tying up her skirts so as not to risk them becoming entangled in the spokes of her wheels, then moved closer to Lan. Disturbingly close. Close enough that she should have felt his breath, if he breathed. He reached into his Revenant’s jacket and drew out a much-creased sheet of what appeared first to be paper, then plastic, but which she quickly realized was a photograph. An actual photograph, not a page from a magazine.

  She took it, staring in wonder at the thing and only belatedly seeing the three smiling faces represented there. A woman and two blonde children, one hugging at her hip and the other too small to stand without
help. All three were smiling, although in the case of the youngest, it might have been a yawn.

  “I found this when I was raised,” Deimos said, frowning at the photo. “I don’t know why I keep it. I feel…nothing…when I look at it.”

  “But you do look at it.”

  “Yes. I do. I have even decided this one—” He tapped the older of the girls. “—is Ann. I have no reason to think so. She just…looks like an Ann to me.” He took it back and studied it, his perfect brow furrowed ever so slightly. “I don’t remember them. I don’t miss them. I don’t wonder about them. But sometimes, I look at them.” He folded it and tucked it away, impassively watching Serafina take her first clumsy loop around the ferry. “I suppose you find that encouraging, that it means I have not wholly forsaken my previous life.”

  “Have you?”

  He looked at her, almost but not quite smiling. “Do you believe in a plane of existence beyond this one?”

  Lan felt her eyebrows climb. “What, you mean God? Like, Jesus and thou-shalt-not-bugger and all that?”

  “Nothing so specific. Do you, Lan, believe in a soul? Do you believe it goes on after the physical body has died?”

  She was horribly afraid she knew where this was going, but she said, “I guess so.”

  And now he would ask if she thought he still had his, but to her surprise, he said, “Do you believe your soul existed before you were born into this physical plane?”

  “I…never thought about it. Yeah, I guess I do.”

  He nodded once—his soldierly nod, at odds with that strange smile—and leaned close to say, “Have you forsaken that life?”

  She made a few sounds. None of them were words.

  He waited.

  “No, I…I don’t…” She lifted her arms and dropped them. “This is the only life I know.”

  He turned back to watch Serafina’s increasingly confident circles around the ferry. “And this is the only life I know. That I embrace it does not invalidate the life that came before. Do you consider me a man?”

  Just when she was beginning to think she could not be more unnerved.

  “Like…a male? In a, uh, masculine…sexual sense or—?”

  “A human.”

  “Oh.” She rolled her eyes at herself and her ridiculous level of relief. “Yeah, sure.”

  “There aren’t many of the living who would agree.” He watched Serafina take an inevitable spill over her handlebars, then said, “Nor many of the dead. We even call you ‘humans,’ as if we are not. I must admit, the more we are forced into contact with the living, even with such as you, the more we seem to want that divide between us. One would think, with billions dead, the world would be big enough for both of us…but I think there can never be peace.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “Yet, you came once again, seeking it.”

  Lan tried to smile, but she was afraid the effect was more like a wince.

  Deimos did not appear to be watching her, yet his eyes narrowed and not on behalf of Serafina, who had bent all the way over to check her bicycle for damage, helping her tied-off skirts ride even higher over her shapely thighs. “I thought not. Then why did you come, when you know you can do your people no good?”

  “How much good did I do them in France? Or in Norwood?” She thought about it and laughed without much humor. “Or in Haven, for that matter? I tried to save the world once. I think we can all agree it didn’t work out. So now I’m here just for me.”

  “And what do you want with our lord, should we find him?”

  “Same as you. To have him back.”

  He nodded once, acknowledging an answer he had clearly expected. “I suspect we have different motives, but I do believe you have his best interests at heart. I do not, as a rule, concern myself with our lord’s concubines, but I have found your company on this trip to be not disagreeable.” He gave her a sharp, steel-eyed glance. “You won’t tell anyone about the picture.”

  It wasn’t exactly a request. Lan shook her head anyway.

  Serafina pedaled by with her nose in the air. “If you two are quite finished chatting each other up, let’s go! I’m not waiting on you any longer!”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Lan walked her bicycle through the nearest hole in the wall—painted over to look like the flaming gates of Hell, with Azrael and an army of rotting corpses marching out of it—and stopped short to take in the full effect of the desolation on the other side: a broken grey line lying over slabs of jagged rock and tangles of thorny brush, with Serafina already picking herself out of another spill. She’d be tempted to indulge a little spark of spite, except that she knew she’d be eating asphalt herself before too long. The flimsy street bikes Deimos had procured wouldn’t last an hour on this rocky excuse for a road and, optimistically assuming she didn’t break a leg in one of her many anticipated falls, they’d be walking the rest of the way.

  Lan pinched her eyes shut and rubbed them, as if that might help the view change. When she opened them again, the scenery was the same except for Deimos beside her.

  “It won’t be easy going,” he observed.

  “You have a real talent for understatement.”

  He ran through an internal list of responses and came up with, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Lan said with a sigh, and pushed off.

  * * *

  The bicycles did better than Lan had thought, but ‘better’ was a relative term. Spokes bent, chains slipped and tires went flat. Deimos managed some small repairs at first, but he was only delaying the inevitable. When they were forced to leave the road and go overland, it was almost a relief to leave the troublesome things behind.

  They came the last length on foot, racing the setting sun with Deimos going before them, clearing the thick tangle of thorns and foot-catching ivy with sweeps of his sword. The ground beneath was shiny, burnt stone, buckled in on itself in brittle folds and pockets. The thinner sheets broke under her weight, quickly cutting through the soles of her boots, so that she had to stop several times to wrap them in whatever she had to spare—her coat-sleeves, her overshirt, her belt.

  At last they came to a deep depression, ringed all around with smaller hills and valleys, where jagged protrusions of stone pushed out like teeth in some great worm’s mouth, forming a shadowed grotto.

  “This is the place,” said Serafina, looking sickly aside at an overgrown ledge where a little water still trickled, shining over black lines of scum in the shape of a waterfall and collecting in a shallow basin beneath—the little pool where she had combed Batuuli’s hair, the day the bombs fell that turned their forest to…this.

  Now that she was looking, Lan could see some of the rock here had been cut and stacked, building up a low wall here or forming a bench there. It must have been peaceful once, with the sky overhead and the trees all around, not quite wild and not quite tamed.

  “You said there was a cave,” said Lan.

  Serafina pointed, but even with that help, Lan still didn’t see it right away. She’d been expecting something different—a neat half-circle set into the side of a cliff, maybe even with stairs leading up to it, since Azrael had surely been here long enough to carve out a few comforts. What she saw instead was a crack in the ground, long and alarmingly narrow, overhung with a fresh growth of thorny creepers, died down for the winter. Deimos headed toward it, but Lan caught his sleeve to stop him.

  “Just me,” she said.

  He frowned, but stepped aside, sheathing his sword and assuming a soldierly posture without looking like he was trying at all.

  “It’s dark,” Serafina said. She had not moved, had not taken even one step down into the burned grotto. “And deep. There are many tunnels and winding ways that lead nowhere. It’s so dark. Really, you can’t imagine…the darkness.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that once. I should have brought a torch.” She swore idly, then gave Deimos a narrow, speculative stare and half a smile. “You, on the other hand, always come prepared, yeah?”


  He gave her the other half of that smile and pulled a small torch from his inner jacket pocket. It wasn’t much bigger than a pencil, but it was bright enough to blind her when she pointed it at her face and flicked it on.

  “You’re very stupid, you know,” Serafina said seriously.

  “Yeah, I know,” said Lan, trying to rub the lightburns from her eyes.

  “He doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Nobody gets what they want all the time.” She started climbing down.

  “You don’t even know he’s in there! Even if he is, it must be his will to remain! Why would he come back?”

  “I came back, didn’t I?”

  Serafina threw up her hands with a huff and turned away, muttering.

  “Be careful,” Deimos said, eyeing the low-hanging sun. “If you are not emerged by dawn, I will endeavor to find you, but I only have the one light and I am unlikely to find you without it.”

  And with those comforting words hanging in the evening air, Lan reached the mouth of the cave and went in.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It was dark, just as Serafina had said, dark like a living thing. The cave’s opening was steeply angled, more like a chimney than a tunnel, and yes, Azrael had made improvements on its design—the rougher surfaces had been smoothed down and handholds carved into the rock to make passage easier—but there was no way of knowing how recently these changes had been made.

  Climbing down in this way, Lan could still see daylight, even if it didn’t much touch her, but once her feet hit the bottom, things changed in a hurry. The ground sloped away and the rock was low overhead, forming a throat that swallowed her utterly within a dozen paces. She walked crouched over with one hand up to protect her head, but eventually, the tunnel opened up. After that, her torch could not penetrate the breathing black, but only lie over it, never reaching as far as the floor, much less the ceiling. She felt her way along the tunnel wall when there was one and stumbled when there wasn’t. Nothing was flat or smooth or dry. The ceiling caught her head, the floor caught her feet, and everything felt like soap, if soap could turn to stone. It smelled of sour earth and soot and stagnant water, but more than anything, it stank of time. She hadn’t realized until that moment that time had a smell, or maybe it only did in places like this, where it had decayed.