Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  How long she walked, she could not say, but at last, her questing fingers touched metal and took away a gritty powder. Rust, she thought, until she brought her hand into the light and saw ash instead. She turned the torch on it and looked again. The door was not flat, although it had been once. It bulged in the middle now, bulged where he’d held it against the flames. When she ducked through the opening into the chamber beyond, she could see the marks of his hands still, flakes of skin pressed into the metal when it had been softened by heat.

  She turned around, raising the torch as high as she could and squinting into the dark beyond. It was not a large chamber and although her torch was a weak weapon against the black, she could see it all. There was more to see than she would have thought for a place so small. Stone tables and benches lined the walls, leaving only a narrow path from the door to a bed of dry grass and sticks. There were bowls and cups, scraps of leather, bracelets and necklaces, and dozens of other half-made and abandoned artifacts littered every surface. Anywhere there was a protrusion deep enough to hold them, candles had been set, their years of drippage forming frozen rivers and falls of wax. Burnt bones and ashes showed her where his fire had been; above it, someone had drawn figures on the wall—long, slender bodies painted in yellows, reds and browns danced together, held hands, embraced. At their center, looming huge and menacing, the ash-grey, white-eyed shape of Azrael stood alone and watched. It was an oddly familiar picture and after some puzzling, she realized she’d seen it before. Made with trees, half burnt and half bowed, and one chained stone, but the same picture for all that, in every way that mattered.

  “Tehya drew that.”

  Lan jumped, accidentally dropping her torch. The plastic cap broke when it hit the ground, but it stayed lit. She picked it up, swearing, and Azrael’s hand swept in and took it from her. He raised it high, shining its diminished light over the wall, studying each small shape.

  “Tehya was the only one of my Children who created,” he said. “I never tired of watching her. She could spin whole worlds from her fingertips, using just a palmful of berry juice, a bit of sand. They almost seem to be moving, don’t they?”

  Lan looked at the wall. The figures had no faces, no clothing, no hair. They were only arms and legs and, yes, movement. They seemed so simple, like something a child might draw, but even without features, they somehow managed to communicate feelings. And they should have been good feelings, to see them all holding each other, but the longer Lan looked at them, the harder it was to differentiate innocent joy from the contortions of grief.

  “In Haven, I at last had the chance to give her real paints, the finest brushes, a whole room to be her studio. She never touched them. It had been, by then, eighty-three days.” He lowered the torch. “You should not be here.”

  “Neither should you.”

  “Hm. You are alone in that opinion. Which I don’t imagine dissuades you in the slightest.” He moved around her and away, taking the torch with him. He lit a candle with a flint striker, gazed into its flame a second or two, then lit another. Light grew, flickering and sickly. The stink of hot tallow began to overpower the other smells of this place. “How did you find me?”

  “Serafina.”

  “Ah.” He looked up, as though he could see through layers of rock to Serafina on the surface. “Your powers of persuasion have not lessened. I would have thought nothing short of my own command could have forced her to return to this place.”

  “She didn’t think you’d be here, either.”

  “No? Do not all monsters eventually return to their dens?” He continued to stand by the last bowl of wax for some time, contemplating each ancient furnishing, each sorry attempt at comfort, but when he came once more to the drawings on the wall, he turned away. “Is that what this has become?” he murmured, running one hand along the rough edge of a niche carved into the wall. “My durance…eroded by long years into my den.” His eye fell next on the torch on the table. He switched it off and brought it to her, saying, “I was carried here in chains half a millennia ago, after my last captors had exhausted their efforts to send me to hell by any other means. I would show you the pillar where they fixed me, but that chamber lies far from here and the passageways have become unstable.”

  “I don’t need to see it. And neither do you.”

  “No, child, I do not, for in memory, I am there still.” His gaze was drawn back to the paint on the wall. “I never should have left.”

  “Azrael—”

  “Spare me your sympathy,” he said sharply. “And spare a thought instead for the billions of lives lost to my ascension. The skies would yet be full of color and the Earth full of life. Your mother would have grown up never knowing the singular experience of severing a spine with an axe. There would be no Norwood and no simple folk there to starve year by year. They could have bought their peaches from shops all their indulgent lives and never guessed…” The bitterness died from his voice as he looked around the cave. “…what horrors lay beneath their feet.”

  “You’re not horrible.”

  “I am…and I am sick to my very soul by it. I did not want this, Lan!” he said suddenly, no louder, but with a rawness that hurt her ears more than any of his roars. “I wanted nothing but an end to this deafening silence! I wanted companions in my solitude. I wanted a home.” His eye slid toward her and away. “I wanted you.”

  She lifted her arms slightly and let them drop, unsure even as she did it whether it was a shrug or an aborted embrace or just an uncomfortable fidget in the face of his pain. “You can still have it. You can have me, anyway. It’s a start.”

  He turned away from her. “Leave me, Lan. There must be one man left alive in the world. Go to your Adam and make your Eden before the last days fall. Have children.” He leaned one arm against the cave wall, his voice dropping to nearly a whisper, all but swallowed by the rock. “You would make such beautiful children.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she sighed, pressing the heel of her hand into her eyes to keep from rolling them. “Don’t do this. Let’s just go, huh? I don’t want kids and I don’t even know anyone named Adam. I came here for you.” Lan gave up on words and went to him. He turned away, his body stiff under her hand as she put her arms stubbornly around him and pressed herself to his unyielding back. The damp of the cave made his flesh feel even more chill and awful. She held him anyway. “I want you.”

  He pulled her hands off him. “Go, Lan. There is nothing for you here. Just go.”

  “I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”

  “There’s a familiar tune.”

  “Yeah? I meant it then and I mean it now. Look at me.” When he didn’t move, she grabbed his shoulder and turned him around. He allowed it and he allowed her to grip his face between her hands and pull him down into her angry kiss, but he did not respond. He didn’t even dim his eyes; she could feel the heat of his steady gaze as he waited her out and at last, she broke it off and bounced her fist off his chest. “I think about you every day, you ass! I lie awake at night, remembering just…the stupidest stuff! The things you said…things I thought I’d forgotten…things that don’t even matter. I wake up at night thinking I was dreaming about you…and sometimes I cry, because I can’t remember my dreams…and it’s like I’m losing pieces of you, pieces I never even really had.”

  “I would have given you all. You made another choice.”

  “Yeah, I did. I had to do what I thought was right. I walked away and after everything I’ve ever had to do, that was the only time I ever felt like I sacrificed something.” Her voice cracked. She looked up at him through a shine of tears and shook her head. “I mean…sacrificed. Like the old Picts with their stones. It cut me open. It bled.” She shoved him back with a sudden surge of furious strength. “I loved you, you son of a bitch! And I begged you not to make me choose!”

  “So you did.” He turned away and seated himself on one of the benches crowding the cave, rubbing at his scarred face. “What masochisti
c whim was that? I knew full well how you would fall. And I know I could have as easily gifted you my hungering dead in return for your promise to remain as my consort. You would have readily agreed to such a bargain at any point from the very first hour you ever stood before me. In your eyes that night, I saw whole flights of ready promises, if only…” His hand dropped. He looked up at her. “Were you tempted? Even a little? ‘Say you were,’ you told me, ‘just so I don’t feel like so much of a fool.’ So. Were you?”

  “It was the world, Azrael. It was the whole world. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Just what you did.”

  “You could have called me back.”

  “You could have refused to go.” One side of his mouth twisted in a bleak, humorless smile. “You could have stayed to see Haven besieged. You could have seen me order the purge. Hundreds slaughtered, thousands uprooted, every settlement emptied…it’s the sort of thing that really demands a witness.” He paused, his smile—if it could be called that—fading. “Did you see it? Did you see your home…broken?”

  “It wasn’t my home anymore.” Lan sighed and sat down beside him. “And no. I left ahead of the tide.”

  “The tide, you say. You went to sea?”

  “Sort of. Just across the Channel.”

  “And from there?”

  She shrugged. “Back here.”

  “Ah, Lan.” He leaned back, shaking his head. “You might have seen mountains, jungles, canyons…there are still good places left, or so you once claimed. Instead, you settled in another Norwood and taught yourself to fish. You disappoint me.”

  “I pulled pints, actually. And I didn’t settle there, I just passed the time.” She glanced at him and bumped her shoulder against his side. “I always knew I’d come back to you.”

  “I would not have thought I agreed,” he said after a moment. “An hour ago, I believed myself resigned never more to see another face, let alone yours. Yet I am distinctly unsurprised to see you again.”

  She chose to take that as encouragement and never mind the flat, scowling way he said it. “I came to bring you back,” she said.

  “Back to what? The dream of Haven is ended. The world—” He swept his arm through the air, making candles gutter and throwing shadows huge across the cave wall as he pointed at the nothing all around them. “—is ended! If I cannot end with it, at least let me pass out of mortal memory. Let me be.”

  “You can’t stay here, Azrael.”

  “I can. Moreover, I should. I can never undo the damage I have done, but I can hide myself away until, in my absence, Men come to believe one of their kind has slain me. As the years pass, his deeds shall become legend while mine diminish. In time, I will once again be nameless, save as his nemesis.” His mouth made a smile that touched no other part of him. “I may not be the only beast this Beowolf of future telling bests, nor even the worst of them.”

  “And that’s it, is it? I seem to remember someone who looked a lot like you telling me how you had an obligation to protect the people you raised up and now you just throw them to the wolves?”

  Azrael went back to staring at the wall. “I trust Deimos to do what is best for Haven.”

  “Really? Because Deimos brought me here to look for you. What he thinks is best for Haven is to have you back in it, because Deimos knows, even if you don’t want to admit it, that having you hide halfway around the world is only going to make things worse. And since we’re on the subject,” she added, letting her temper take her gently by the hand, “I think it was awfully bloody low of you to run off when everybody’s back was turned. If you really thought coming here was the right thing to do, you’d have put Deimos on the throne in front of your whole bloody court and then walked out the front door. So don’t you sit there and give me this golden flood of horsepiss about heroes and legends and future wolves. You knew what this was when you knew you’d have to sneak out to do it.”

  He did not reply.

  “Hiding is not the answer. And hiding here…” Her eyes swept the cave—Tehya’s pictures, his filthy bed, the blackened marks of his hands burnt into the door—and came back to him. “You’d think after all the time you’ve been alive, you’d have learned by now that you can’t fix anything by hurting yourself.”

  He glanced at her, then raised his hand and brushed the backs of his knuckles along the scar on her neck.

  “This is not about me,” she said tightly.

  “Do as I say, not as I do.” He looked away, smiling. “I have missed your unique style of diplomacy.”

  “Of all the things you could be missing…”

  “I did not say I missed it most of all.”

  “But, like peaches, you noticed the lack.”

  “Yes.” His eyes dimmed and his voice roughened. “Like peaches.”

  Her frustration did not disappear, but she was able, with a little effort, to put it aside for the moment. She put her hand over his. He let her, but as the minutes passed, each one a little longer than the one before, he made no move to hold it or to invite any other touches. Even as she felt his flesh cold and inhuman against her side, he was far away and he seemed to want to stay there.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I realize it’s too late now, but I’m…so damn sorry. You told me exactly how it would go and you were right. I thought I was saving the world.” She laughed a bit without feeling it at all. “I thought the world was worth saving.”

  “It is.” The cave had a way of muffling sound, but his voice in those two words was all edges, a scrape across her ears.

  “I believed that once. I must have, to have gone and done what I did, but now…now I don’t even remember what that felt like. It all went so wrong!” she burst out, flinging up her empty hands just to slap them on her thighs. “I got everything I asked for, everything I went there to get…and now I’m not just sorry I did it, I’m ashamed.”

  Some of the stiffness went out of his body. He looked at her, his eyes barely lit at all.

  “I should have chose you. But as much as I hate myself for what I did, there’s always some stupid little part of me that thinks it really could be better now. We can pick ourselves up, bury our dead and build it all back again. Hope.” She all but spat the word. “I loved you. That was real. I loved you and I traded it for hope.”

  “That precious light,” he murmured. “The light that glowed out so fiercely, even I felt it once.”

  “Did you ever love me?”

  “I had to.” He rose with half a laugh, half a snarl, to pace as far away as the little room would let him go. “Against all reason. Such was the power of that pure, white light.”

  “Did you stop?”

  He was silent a long time, turned away, watching his own shadow flicker on the wall while he stood motionless. At last: “No.”

  “Then what are we still doing here? Come back with me!”

  “How can you ask? How can you wish me upon this world, knowing what I have done to it? In thirty years, I have undone all that Man has created in one hundred thousand years of his dominion! I have crushed all that I ever sought to hold, destroyed all that I have ever coveted and ruined this Earth beyond all rebuilding! Am I not Death? Am I not the very body of Evil? What…” He swung around, his arms outflung and all his heart bared to her. “For the love of God, woman, what do you want with me?”

  She got up. His arms lowered, but not far; he held them out, held them open, as she went and pressed herself close to the cool slab of his chest. “Just this,” she whispered, listening to the deep, unnatural workings of his heart. “Sorry it’s not more noble, but it’s all I want and if you really won’t come back, well, I guess I have to stay.”

  He groaned her name, but his arms closed around her. “No,” he said, holding her. “No, I won’t keep you in a grave.”

  “And I won’t leave you alone in one. So there.”

  “I’ll carry you out,” he said, but he didn’t. His claws passed once through her unbrushed hair and then he rested
his chin atop the crown of her head. “I’ll command Deimos to take you away and never return.”

  “I’ll come back without him,” she warned and laughed through the threat of tears. “Have you even met me? I’ll be back in this room before you are. Is that really the bed you want to lay me down in?”

  His head turned to look at it.

  She waited.

  “Damn you,” he said and sighed. “So be it. Take me home.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  It took all night to get back to the wall, since they had to pick their way over blackened, uneven terrain. Lan gave up the last pieces of her jacket and half her shirt to wrap her boots, but they were full of blood before they were an hour gone. She did not complain; Serafina’s shoes had already been cut away by the sharp rock and Azrael’s naked feet were open to the bone. When the time came to tear her trouser legs off, she offered to share out the fabric, but Azrael declined. His was the power to mend dead flesh, he reminded her, and as for his own wounds…he’d live. Lan argued, but not very long, and limped on with her feet padded as best she could manage.

  As morning colors of yellowish-grey stained the sky, they arrived, only to find the van’s bonnet up and all that remained of their supplies gone. Deimos set off at once on foot, gloved hand already on the hilt of his sword, to address the theft and acquire new transportation. While they waited, Azrael called Serafina to him and began to mend her feet. Under his careful fingers, scored bone smoothed, torn muscle wove itself whole, and flesh as pliable as wet clay came together without scarring. Lan watched for a while, but the sight made her queasy, so she crawled into the back of the van and fell asleep.

  She did not wake until Deimos came back in an old tub-cart pulled by a plodding mule with a skeletal deerhound straggling along after, hunched but hopeful-looking. He brought with him a fresh battery and tires for the van, several bottles of water, a large pot of dubious stew and a pair of boots for Lan. The boots were stiff with blood in places and everything smelled strongly of smoke, that particular smoky smell that comes not from burning wood or even meat, but cloth and hair and mortar as well. Lan put on the boots, drank the water, shared the stew with the dog, and then went back to sleep so they’d have an excuse not to have to drive through the village again until it was too dark to see it.