Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “I believe you.”

  They waited, standing close together, but not quite touching. Azrael watched the ferries fill and drive away. Lan watched the clouds wisp across the sky.

  “I buried him,” he said abruptly.

  She looked around, surprised and pleased. “Did you really? Here?”

  “No. At the Natural History Museum.” He glanced at her. “Do you approve? I know you don’t care for museums, but he was a scholar at the heart of him. I wished to honor his memory.”

  “It’s a good place. Brilliant columns there. He loved columns.”

  “I regret you never knew him in life. He, too, thought he could save the world with the right words.” Azrael lapsed into a short silence, but not a brooding one. It ended with a chuckle. “I never knew a man so dishonest, nor one so respectful and engaging as he went about it. He did not conceal his lies, but invited them in and sat them at the table as guests, so that we could both nod at them. I had no experience until then with conversation as an art and he was so very talented an artist that I would have tolerated his deceptions indefinitely merely for the pleasure of his company.” His smile faded. “But his masters had other plans and he proved more loyal than wise. I killed him in a fit of temper and raised him in an equally unfortunate fit of remorse. I did very badly by him, Lan.”

  “I don’t think he held it against you.”

  “But he knew. All these years and I never guessed he knew,” he mused. “I so feared to see how he had been diminished by my actions that I avoided him as much as possible and so deprived myself of enviable company I shall never have again. I have but forged one more link in a great chain of regret.” His eyes dimmed as he sank once more under the shadow of his own unquiet. “It disheartens one.”

  “You know what Master Wickham would say to that, don’t you?”

  “No. Tell me.”

  “You have to want the time you have.”

  Azrael uttered a low, humorless laugh and said, “Why?”

  Lan shrugged. “Because you have it, whether you want it or not. And life is motion. That’s something else he used to say all the time. You can move toward what you want or away from it, but you can’t stop, so you have to want the time you have, because it’s all the time you get.”

  “That loses its intended impact when ‘all the time you get’ is all the time there is.”

  “Master Wickham would say that only means you have a limitless potential for change.”

  “Would he indeed?”

  “He’d say no one can live your life for you and no one else can waste it. He’d say you carry the sole responsibility for your own success or failure.” Lan rolled her eyes a little. “And then he’d say the marble galleries at the Royal Courts of Justice give the best view of the spandrels, which are the finest surviving examples of spandrels from the late-Victorian gothic revival style of arches and we should go have a gander because the grout in the Great Hall is bloody marvelous. I’m going to miss him,” she said as he threw his head back and laughed. “But he’s in a good place now.”

  Still smiling, Azrael cast a glance at the sky and looked back at her inquiringly.

  “A museum,” she explained. “Thank you for that. It means a lot to me that you put him in a good place. Can he have a stone too? You know the kind I mean.”

  “Deimos can make the necessary arrangements. Ask for a monuments mason.” He paused, then haltingly said, “James.”

  “Ask for James?”

  “No. You…you’ll need his full name for the monument. James Wickham. Ah, Felicity, how lovely you look this morning,” he called, too suddenly. He raised his hand and beckoned the first of his dollies to him from the polite distance where Deimos had been holding them. “Your pardon, Lan. This won’t take long.”

  Lan moved away to give them privacy, but not far. His dollies could give him all the goodbyes they wanted, but hers would be the last face he saw before he left. In the meantime, she took up a position beside Deimos, where she could remain conspicuous, but not overbearing as she watched a procession of other women flutter over her man.

  “Do you know what a monuments mason is?” she asked, since it appeared they’d be at it for a while.

  “Yes.”

  “Can you find one for me?”

  “At once. Phobos, fall in.”

  “It doesn’t have to be this instant,” said Lan as the Revenant turned to go. “I know you want to see him off as much as I do.”

  Deimos hesitated, then sat his dog once more and clasped his hands behind his back. “Thank you.”

  The first dolly flounced off with a sniff in Lan’s direction. The second stepped up, careful to keep her hands behind her back, although she managed a pasty sort of smile for Azrael to admire. And he did.

  “Did he just say she looks lovely this morning too?” Lan inquired pleasantly.

  Deimos cut her a cautious glance, since he was exactly as far from the goodbying as she was and could overhear it just the same. “Yes.”

  “He didn’t tell me that.”

  The dead man took a deep breath solely to force it out again. “You’re very attractive.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Captain, you don’t have to—”

  “I can notice these things, you know,” he interrupted, staring straight ahead at the pastel-colored skirts simpering up to Azrael. “I can’t feel anything about it, but I notice.”

  “Just stop,” she sighed, more annoyed with herself than with him. “I know he’s only flattering them and I don’t want flattery, not from him and for sure not from you.”

  “I am incapable of flattery.”

  “And I’m not pretty.”

  “Pretty, no,” he said with a soldierly shrug. “I would not call you pretty. Serena, there, is pretty. Aileen is pretty. Even Felicity, I find pretty, provided you look no deeper than her face. I think I must be partial to blondes,” he muttered, frowning. “I wonder why.”

  Lan did not answer, but she found herself thinking of a creased photograph—a woman and two young girls, all blonde.

  “There must be thousands of pretty faces in Haven,” Deimos was saying now, raking his soldier’s gaze across the assembled on-lookers, both living and dead. “But I can’t call many attractive.”

  “No one you’d strap on a diddle-cob for, eh?”

  “None but you.”

  He said it with such disinterested conviction, she could only laugh.

  “Because I’m so attractive?”

  He heaved another of those terse, needless sighs. “Because you have our lord’s right of rule and I must obey your commands.”

  She laughed again. She knew she shouldn’t—Revenants had no sense of humor and Deimos didn’t get to be their captain by being the least Revenant of them all—but this was such a bizarre avowal of loyalty that she couldn’t help herself. “Yeah, but come on! I’d be commanding you to be my dollyboy!”

  “Our lord’s authority is yours. How you use it is of no consequence.”

  “You’d obey any order? Seriously.”

  “I am always serious.”

  “Good to know,” Lan murmured, her attention drifting back to Azrael and the pretty face sending him off. “Very good to know.”

  Deimos sent her a searching, faintly frustrated stare. “Then I…should acquire a prosthetic?”

  “I think we have a good relationship just the way we are, Captain. I wouldn’t want to complicate it with sex. But I appreciate your dedication.”

  “Thank you,” he said, whether in response to the latter half of her remarks or the former, it was not clear, but in any case, it was heartfelt.

  They said no more after that, but the quiet was companionable. Deimos watched his Revenants and occasionally patted his dog. Lan watched Azrael. At last, the dollies had all come and gone and all but one of the ferries had driven away. The last of the assembled dead boarded, but the door was not closed after them. Azrael went to have a word with the driver, then turned and looked at Lan.
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br />   She reminded herself it was only for a few days. A month at most, he’d said. And it was for Haven, for keeping the last lights on in the last great city.

  Lan took a breath, forced a smile, and went to him. He couldn’t kiss her through the mask and she knew better than to think he’d take it off, here with his dollies looking on, but he raised her hands to the slit of his false mouth and she pretended that was good enough, for his sake.

  “Give me a word to send me on my way,” he ordered, lightly squeezing her fingers. “One gentle word to remind me of you when I am tempted to think too deeply on all my reasons for undertaking this journey…and all the reasons I might return.”

  “Oh balls, no pressure there.” She considered. “Hagioscope,” she decided.

  His eyes flickered. “What?”

  “It’s the word for when you have a tiny little hole in an interior church wall just so you can see the altar on the other side,” she informed him.

  “And…you tell me this because…?”

  “It’s the most interesting word I know. I mean, think about it. That needed a word.”

  His head tipped back, then cocked to one side. His gaze dimmed as it grew distant. “That is interesting,” he murmured.

  “Now give me one.”

  “Jentacular,” he said after lengthy contemplation. “It is used to describe that which pertains to breakfast.”

  “What, like kippers or porridge?”

  “I suppose it could refer to anything, not merely foodstuffs, provided they are used for breakfasting and only that. A jentacular sideboard, for example. Jentacular napkins. An entire room might be jentacular, if one never entered but to breakfast.”

  “That’s bloody marvelous, that is,” said Lan with sincere admiration.

  They were interrupted by a certain etiquette teacher’s rather unmannerly shout: “Get back here this instant! Get back, I say! You’re not dressed! You—Someone catch the little demon!”

  In the next instant, the girl, Heather, bolted through the door and out into the courtyard, hugging her long skirts up around her belly in both arms. Nimbly evading the snatching hands of all the servants and pikemen who stood in her way, she zig-zagged across the courtyard, her bare feet slapping on the stones and splashing through puddles of last night’s rain until she skidded to a stop in front of Lan.

  “Here,” she panted, digging into the mess of her skirts and thrusting a fistful of flowers, roots and stems, up at Azrael. “I picked ‘em for you.”

  This was the first time Lan had ever seen Azrael taken aback when she wasn’t herself the cause. She stood back, smiling, and watched as Azrael accepted this offering with appropriate gravity. A small drift of petals let go as soon as he took them.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “There was cake, but I ate it.” Heather dragged her sleeve across her nose and let her skirts drop. “Yeah, so. Bring me lots of presents.”

  Azrael’s eyes flickered. He looked at Lan, as if for help, then down at the girl again. “All right.”

  “Cheers, then.” She waved, scooped up her skirts and ran back into the palace, ducking the switch with a flexible ease Lan genuinely envied, although by the sound of it, she got nabbed just inside.

  “That was unexpected,” Azrael remarked, staring after her. “I cannot think of any cause I have given her to show me affection.”

  Lan could, but now was not the time to remind him of the life the child had known before Haven. She said instead, as noncommittally as she could, “Kids can surprise you.”

  “That they can.” He glanced at her, seemingly about to speak, then moved abruptly away and spent altogether too much time placing the flowers in the ferry. Keeping his back turned and his tone as careful as her own had been, he said, “I find the longer I live, the more inclined I am to celebrate surprises. You, now. Ages after I believed the world had nothing new to show me, you have proved me wrong again and again. I would have you do so once more before I go.”

  She blinked. “Do what? Surprise you?”

  “Please.” He straightened and faced her again, broadly smiling beneath a too-bright stare. “As an omen, shall we say? They needn’t all be sinister. Send me off with one more first, mine…or yours.”

  Sure, like she kept surprises in her pockets. Lan thought, rubbing distractedly at her stomach, which had begun to cramp and roll with its own sinister promise, and slowly said, “All right, I have one. Come here.”

  He came at once, taking both her hands in his and gazing at her with what felt like far too much heat, even for a goodbye.

  “Closer,” she told him. “It’s a secret. I have to whisper.”

  He bent, turning his head so that she could touch her lips to the ragged shell of his ear. He waited, tense and silent.

  Too conscious of the living and the dead looking on, even if none of them were near enough to hear, she lowered her voice to no more than a breath and said the words she had never said out loud, words she had herself only heard once before, because secrets were more precious than ‘slip in this world, and this was the most precious she had left: “My mother’s name was Maya.”

  As soon as it left her mouth, she felt silly. What could it mean to him, another name? Blushing, confused, she would have stepped back, but his grip on her hands tightened.

  He looked at her, his eyes dim in the sockets of his mask. It seemed to Lan that he was too quiet for too long, but that bad moment blew away like smoke when he smiled. He shook his head, not at her, and laughed softly, still not at her. “Thank you,” he said and closed her briefly in a full embrace. “Ah Lan…my Lan…thank you.”

  Then he released her, raised his hand once to all those watching, and put himself without another word into his waiting ferry. The Revenant acting as his driver started the engine at once and before the door was even shut, the ferry was pulling away. One of Azrael’s dollies called out loudly and some of the others followed suit, like birds on a wire, all fluttering feathers and shrill voices, but when the ferry was out of sight, they all stopped.

  The gardeners were the first to disperse, moving away to pull up all the plants they’d put there for farewelling to make room for the plants that would be welcoming him home. Their return to their established routine started a ripple of like movement among the rest of the dead and although it was not a long walk back from the road to the palace stairs, by the time Lan got there, the foyer was empty apart from the assembled guards who presumably waited upon Deimos for their dismissal, Azrael’s dollies, and the girl, dancing on the end of a switch while her instructor drilled her on the finer points of etiquette.

  “So,” said Lan, once more rubbing her stomach, as if it were a surly cat that could be quieted with petting. Like a cat, it growled beneath her hand and twisted, all claws. Doing her best to suppress a wince, she turned to Deimos, who had followed her inside and stood with his dog at attention just behind her. “Do I have to give you orders or do you mostly know what you should be doing?”

  “Giving orders now,” one of the dollies said, just a hair too loud to be a mutter.

  Deimos’s steely eyes shifted in that direction before they came back to Lan’s. “I can manage the city’s concerns, although I stand ready to receive your will. Have you any orders?”

  “No,” said Lan, ignoring the whispers behind her. “I just want to know if I can go back to bed without Haven turning tits-up.”

  “High opinion of herself, hasn’t she?” someone not-muttered and someone else sniffed.

  “Have you any orders?” Deimos asked again, holding Lan’s eyes with his as he put a hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “I don’t know,” Lan sighed and turned around. “Do I?”

  Azrael’s mouthy red-head gathered in her cohorts with a glance and, as they formed ranks around her, fixed Lan with a sneering sort of stare. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she sniffed. “I don’t know the first thing what it takes to run a city the likes of Haven and I wouldn’t pretend I do. But then, I’m jus
t a dolly, not some jealous chavvy who thinks being under him last puts her above them what’s been under him before her.”

  Lan had to take a moment to work that out. “Is that what you think I am?” she asked, once she was fairly sure she had it. “His dolly?”

  The red-head blinked, a bit nonplussed by the placidity of Lan’s response, but recovered quickly. “And what do you think you are? His wife?”

  “Oh no. No, I’m a magician.”

  This was not the answer her opponent was expecting. She tried to hold onto her haughty face, but it slipped some and never quite pinned itself back. “You’re what?”

  “A magician.” Lan caught Heather’s attention and asked, “Want to see me do a trick?” When the child curiously nodded, Lan turned to Deimos and said, “Captain, round up those eight bitches there and take them to France.”

  Deimos turned at once and gestured. Sixteen pikemen stepped up in unison and laid hands on eight gasping and protesting dollies. The ninth gripped her flute and frowned.

  “Coo,” said the child, impressed.

  “Hold up a moment,” ordered Lan as the dollies were pushed into a line preparatory to being marched out into the courtyard. She went directly to the red-head and put her face right up in the other woman’s face. “You call me a jealous chavvy just once more and I’ll act like one, is that clear?”

  Thin lipped, lightly trembling, the other woman nodded.

  Lan stepped back and nodded at Deimos. “Turn them loose.”

  Freed, she and her fellows made themselves scarce, leaving only the flute-player and the girl for Lan to deal with.

  “Want to see me do another one?” Lan asked the girl.

  Heather nodded excitedly.

  “For my next trick—” Lan looked at her former etiquette teacher, standing behind Heather. “—I’m going to make that switch disappear. Forever.”

  The dead woman opened and closed her mouth a few times, her eyes darting from the switch in her hand to Deimos and back to Lan, but in the end, she surrendered it without speaking at all.