Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  Lan quickly shook the flowy skirts down around her hips and patted them flat.

  “Oh, you’re just impossible.” Serafina sighed and went to the vanity for a brush, but after just one or two painful passes through the mess of Lan’s hair, she stopped and pinned it up. “Right, it’ll have to do until the stylist has you.”

  “Stylist?”

  “I told you, I made appointments,” said Serafina, stressing the plural. “And I have only one day to do them all, so stop wasting time.”

  “Is it going to take long?” asked Lan.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t—”

  Serafina, back at the wardrobe, abruptly threw down her armload of gowns and slammed the wardrobe door hard enough to bounce it back open. “I don’t care!” she hissed. “Whatever it is you don’t want, I don’t care! You don’t want to eat! You don’t want to dress! You don’t want to bathe! You don’t want to do anything and I’ve had to stand by and let you, but our lord is coming home tomorrow and I will not have him see you looking like…like…” Words failed her. She flung out her hands.

  Lan looked at herself in the mirror. She sighed.

  They went to the kitchens first, or rather, Serafina went to the kitchens while Lan stood out in the hall and waited for them to find a couple thermoses and fill them with hot tea. Then Serafina had to go arrange for a driver, even though Lan insisted she was fine to walk. Serafina ignored her, of course, which was irritating almost as much as it was a relief. Did she really want to walk? No, she did not. It was raining and cold and frankly, fresh air had never done anyone anywhere any good at all. But she didn’t want to go to the tailor either. She wanted to go back to bed and stay there until she’d slept away her headache and maybe wake up with Azrael’s hand sliding up her leg…but there was no telling Serafina that.

  So she wasn’t in the best of moods to begin with and it wasn’t improved by seeing Deimos waiting with the vehicle, and not just any vehicle, but the Dinah Might, which had taken them all the way out to Azrael’s cave and back. She supposed she shouldn’t expect a ride in the fancy open-top car, because Serafina had all those gowns that needed fitting and they couldn’t very well be crushed up in a car’s boot, but Lan had spent altogether too much time shut up with the two of them in that particular ferry and she wasn’t happy to be seeing it again. Plus, it was raining, so not only would she be riding around in a vibrating box with two dead people, she’d be riding around in a vibrating box with two dead people and a wet dog.

  But when Deimos opened the door for Lan, the interior of the car was surprisingly dog-free. Not a hair of the thing to be seen. Lan scouted about as she settled herself, checking the front seat and the floor and even peeping around into the rear hold, but Phobos remained absent. As Deimos started the engine and pulled away from the palace, she said, “Where’s your newest recruit, Captain?”

  His eyes tapped at her in the rearview mirror and for once, the stone-faced expression which was the usual face worn by a Revenant struck her as contrived. “He died.”

  Lan’s smile dropped away. “What? When? You fed it, right? Every day?”

  “Yes.”

  “And water? Were you—”

  “He had some sort of skin disease,” Deimos interrupted, still without expression and without raising his voice. “I’m sure you remember.”

  “Well…yeah, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”

  “Neither did I. But it got worse. I had the doctor give me something for the sores, but they weren’t healing. They didn’t look infected, but they must have been.” He drove for a while in silence, then said, “He got out of his bed six nights ago, as I was cleaning my boots. It was the first time he had voluntarily moved so far in two days. I thought the medicine was finally helping. He lay down beside me and licked my hand. I pushed his head away so he wouldn’t drop hair into the polish. I didn’t notice he had died until I was finished.” Perhaps half a minute passed, marked by rain and the steady rumble of the road beneath their tires. “I didn’t know what to do with him, so I buried him beside the garrison.”

  She didn’t know what to say, so she said awkwardly, “I’m sorry.”

  Serafina looked at her. “Why?”

  She didn’t know how to answer that either. Sympathy was strange enough when it was offered up for people; for dogs, it felt a bit silly.

  Off they went to the tailors, where Lan’s weight loss was loudly and irritably discussed, even though Serafina had only brought four gowns to be altered and it had to be easier to take the damn things in than to let them out. But it did surprise her, because although she knew she’d been off her feed and had to have lost a pound or three, according to the tailor-books, she was very nearly as skinny as she’d been the first time she’d been fitted. As the dead folks fussed over the dresses, Lan stood by the mirrors and ran her hands up and down her naked body, frowning at bruises she couldn’t remember bumping into being and feeling bones prodding up through her dry, dull skin. What was lush, she had made lean; what was restored, now ravaged.

  Nothing to be done, she told herself. He was on his way home. He’d see it and for sure, she’d hear about it, but in the meantime…nothing to be done.

  Six hours or so being measured, draped, pinned and fitted was never going to rank high on Lan’s list of ways to spend a day, but it shouldn’t have left her as exhausted as it did. Any enthusiasm she may have had for it fizzled out long before the tailors finished with her. She sat quietly as often as they let her, sipping her tea in a futile effort to drown the headache that was only growing, hour by hour and then minute by minute, until it was wearing her like a poor disguise of a person and walking about on its own. Now and then, her stomach cramped, but whether it was out of hunger or nausea, even she couldn’t tell and didn’t care to know. All she wanted was a dark place to sleep, but even after she was released from the tailor, it wasn’t over.

  Next on the list of appointments was a trip to the salon because Lan had let herself go to a degree beyond Serafina’s ability to repair. The dead woman who met them there took one look and declared Lan’s hair a lost cause. It was too dry and much too thin and the ends were split halfway to the roots. The only way to deal with it was to cut it off short, she insisted, after which there would be more washing and hot oil treatments and perhaps some color because Lan’s complexion was not doing her hair any favors.

  Lan did want to look nice for Azrael’s return, she really did, but the smell of the stuff the stylist was setting out was like a knife directly to her headache. When the dead woman brought out the scissors, she flatly refused to sit in the chopping chair. Words were said. Volume increased. It ended with Lan storming out of the shop minus a good hank of hair over her right ear, and the stylist trying to pull the scissors out of her chest.

  Now thoroughly out of humor, Lan sat in the ferry at least an hour while Serafina alternately pleaded with or berated her. At last, Serafina gave up and slammed herself into the car, only to tell Deimos to take them to the shoe shop. Lan protested, Serafina insisted, so Lan very sensibly kicked open the door and jumped out.

  Deimos had only just pulled away from the salon, so they weren’t going very fast and this certainly wasn’t the first time Lan had jumped from a moving vehicle, but it was quite a different thing to land on Haven’s paved road rather than a town wall with watchmen on the ramparts with their arms out to catch her. She hit and rolled, fetching up hard on the curb, but still scrambled to her feet before the ferry could stop.

  She started walking, hunched against the rain with the car creeping along beside her and Serafina haranguing her from the open door, but the buildings all looked the same in the failing light and the streetlamps hadn’t come on yet. She turned down the wrong street, but was too stubborn to admit it and turn back, so she tried to correct her course with another turn…then another…and another, until at last, the ferry stopped and Deimos got out. She stood, soaking and fuming and feeling stupid as she stared up through rain and her own
swimming eyes at the names of the streets, none of which meant anything to her, listening to his boots splash up behind her.

  He took his uniform jacket off and laid it over her shivering shoulders. He said, “I’m taking you home.”

  “Serafina says—”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  So she turned around and let him guide her back into the ferry, where Serafina was waiting.

  “Not five minutes and you’ve ruined your dress,” Serafina began and probably would have gone on in that vein, except that Deimos went around to her side of the ferry, opened the door, leaned in and pulled her out. Lan couldn’t hear what he said to her and it sure didn’t take long, but when he got back behind the wheel, Serafina didn’t budge.

  They left her standing in the street in the rain, watching them drive away.

  The rest of the ride was silent, except for the rain. The buildings, the roads, even the grass—every surface was made a mirror, reflecting the yellowish-grey sky so that Lan was trapped at the center of a world that seemed sculpted from pissy cement. Her headache dug in, throbbing just behind her eyes and making everything seem too bright, even as overcast as it was. It felt a lot like being hungover, so that when the ferry stopped and Lan got out on the captain’s arm, she thought nothing at all of bending over and retching in the gutter.

  She didn’t have much to heave up, just a few swallows of tea, but it came out like razor blades and left her feeling dizzy and too short of breath.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, helping her climb the shallow stairs that led to the palace. She doubted she could have done it without his help. She felt awful.

  Lan nodded, but still had to hold on to Deimos for more than a minute before she felt steady enough to prove it. “I’m fine. Bad breakfast this morning, that’s all.”

  Deimos nodded, turned her around and scooped her into his arms in a business-like fashion. “You shouldn’t have been out,” he told her, marching up the rest of the stairs and into the palace foyer. “I’m putting you to bed.”

  “Good idea,” she mumbled.

  The nice thing about dead people is, they never think anything is odd. Deimos carried her past a dozen servants and two dozen guards easily, but not one of them gave her a second look as she clung to his neck and dozed. She even entertained the hopeless cause that Azrael might not hear about this after all. All she needed was little lie-in, a little tea. She’d be right as rain tomorrow.

  She let Deimos undress her and it did not occur to her to feel uncomfortable at all with his hands on her entirely naked body as he folded her limbs, one by one, into Azrael’s bed. What did seem important as she curled herself onto her side and hugged her churning stomach was, “I’m sorry about Phobos, Captain. I really am.”

  His impersonal hands paused, then resumed their work. “I’m not. But I think I ought to be. I shouldn’t have kept him. I don’t know why I did. I think he reminded me of something, but I don’t know what. So thank you. Thank you…for feeling something on my behalf.”

  She nodded, too tired to open her eyes, and was asleep before he even left the room.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It was a bad night. She woke, drenched and shivering in an ocean of chill sweat, slept without dreams, woke screaming with her guts ripping themselves apart inside her, slept and puked on herself, and woke as exhausted as when Deimos had put her down to find the dead doctor pulling a hypodermic needle out of her arm.

  “That should control the nausea and help her sleep,” he was telling Serafina. “Make sure she has plenty of tea—”

  “Bugger your tea!” Serafina hissed, actually picking up the cup next to the bed and dashing it against the wall nearest the doctor. “Our lord is mere hours away and you give me tea?!” She seized the pot and threw that too. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

  “Do you?” the doctor snapped back. “I told you to let her rest and you took her gallivanting out about the city—”

  “Gallivanting?! How dare you! She needed gowns!”

  “No, she needed rest and clear liquids! You took a simple matter of stomach complaint and turned it into what is very likely gastritis! Possibly even acute gastritis!”

  “Oh and what book did you read that in?” Serafina asked scornfully.

  The dead can’t blush, but the doctor came as close as the dead could. Recovering, he began to punch his equipment back into his medical bag, his eyes positively life-like with anger. “I find the care of your mistress to be woefully inadequate, madam, woefully, and if our lord asks my opinion, that is precisely what I shall tell him! Good day!”

  He banged his way out the door and Serafina ran after him, solely to open the door and slam it even louder. Lan could see her there through the bed curtains, her hands in shaking fists, and managed to reach through the misery in which she floated to scoop out a little handful of sympathy.

  “If he asks me,” she croaked, “I’ll say it’s bad doctoring.”

  Serafina threw her a look every bit as furious as the glare she’d given the doctor and stormed over to start picking up shattered porcelain. “It won’t matter what you say,” she snapped. “You look awful. There’s no hiding it. He’ll be here tonight! He’ll see you and just what am I supposed to tell him? Oh, why did you have to be so…so difficult?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yes, you’re always sorry when it’s too late to do anything else. I need a broom,” Serafina declared, throwing down her shards to smash into even smaller pieces. “Just stay in bed. You should be able to manage that, you’ve had practice enough.”

  Lan winced when the door slammed, but she didn’t have energy to get up or even to roll over. She closed her eyes just as she was and hugged on her aching stomach until that medicinal darkness came that took the place of sleep when doctors were involved.

  It was not especially restful, but it ate up the hours, and when its hold over her broke at last, she did feel better. It helped even more to see Serafina setting out her black dinner gown and all the shiny shit that went best with it. That meant she was going to dinner and, after a month of eating her meals off a tray as a matter of routine, that could only mean one thing.

  “Is he here?” she asked as she groped for the teapot that had miraculously restored and refilled itself on the bedside table. “Is he home?”

  “Finally!” Serafina exclaimed, turning on her at once. “I thought you’d sleep all night! Get in the—wait, are you going to be sick?”

  Lan took cautious stock of herself. “No.”

  “Good.” Serafina came swiftly to the bed and tore the covers away. “Get in the bath. No arguments! Dinner is in less than an hour and you look dreadful.”

  “But is Azrael—”

  “Not yet returned to the palace, but he’s sent word to say he will see you at dinner.”

  “Still changing out lightbulbs, is he? A girl does like to know where she stands,” Lan muttered, pulling herself from bed and onto her unsteady feet. And then she caught sight of her reflection in the glass of the vanity. “Less than an hour?”

  “And I’ll need every minute, won’t I? In the bath!”

  Lan got in the bath.

  In quick order, she was scrubbed, dunked, out and dried. Scented lotion softened her dry skin and powders smoothed out its uneven tone. The dress went on and for once, Lan was thankful for a corset to put curves on the wasted lines of her body. She sat and watched anxiously in the mirror as Serafina expertly painted her from her hairline to her neckline, erasing sunken eyes and hollow cheeks as if by magic. There wasn’t much she could do about Lan’s hair, but diamond combs and sprays of feathers could at least distract the eye from the choppy bits and the rest was artistically piled, pinned and lacquered into place to give the illusion of fullness. All the while, Serafina said encouraging things like, “This isn’t working,” and “Try to stay out of the light as much as you can. If he can’t see you, he can’t see how bad you look.”

  Before she knew it, Azrael’s ch
amberlain was knocking on the door to inform them they’d run out of time and so Lan had to hurry upstairs and through the dimly-lit halls to the dining room, only to find it empty. Azrael’s steward ushered her in like she was last to arrive instead of first, holding her arm all the way to the imperial table and even pulling out her chair for her.

  “Is it just me tonight?” she asked, eyeing the lower tables, which had all been fancied up with flowers and such, but not with plates and cups.

  “As per our lord’s command. He should be here shortly. Shall I bring a bottle of—” The steward started to indicate the wine-lady, only to perhaps recall the last occasion on which Lan had tipped a bottle or five and freeze in that awkward position while he tried to think of some way to rescind the offer. “—coffee?” he sputtered at last, the sure knowledge that coffee did not come in bottles stamped large across his puckered face.

  “No, thanks anyway, but could I get some tea? The kind Azrael drinks when he’s got, you know, tum trouble? I forget what it’s called…gentleman’s tea?”

  “Gentian?”

  “That’s it.”

  The steward gave her a dubious look and a chance to change her mind before nodding at a servant. “Will there be anything else?” he asked as the dead man ducked out. “Consommé? Amuse-bouches?”

  “Non, merci,” Lan replied unthinkingly, watching the doors. “J’attendrai.”

  “Ah…yes…well, then.” The steward backed off, blinking rapidly, then turned and bustled back down the long hall to take up his position outside.

  The tea came, every bit as nasty as she remembered. Her first swallow tried hard to come back on her, but she fought it down and kept it there, shuddering and staring at her cup with a despairing eye. Forewarned is forearmed, it was said, but knowing what was coming only made the second swallow harder to take and the third, harder still. It did calm her stomach though, or at least, it dulled the overused ache of it and quieted the persistent rumblings that promised more to come later that night. All the same, she couldn’t bring herself to drink more. Like a child at a dolly-party, she only brought the cup to her lips and set it down again. She told herself it was the taste of the tea and not nerves that made it impossible to drink, but she didn’t have time to torture herself over it.