Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  Azrael arrived.

  He entered the dining room like he knew she’d be watching, flinging the doors wide open so his arms were out, putting his powerful body on its most impressive display. She supposed he might have intended to stop the way he did also, to give her a chance to admire him—as she did—but it lasted just a hair too long. At this distance, his expression would have been impossible to read even if he weren’t wearing his mask, but his body gave her broader clues. She would have bet a year’s crop he’d known she was here when he walked through that door; why then, was he so surprised to see her? Not even just surprised, said that flaring of his eyes, but alarmed.

  He surely couldn’t make out her features any better than she could see his and she always looked too skinny in the corsets, so what did that leave? Lan started to feel at the side of her head, but managed to turn the fidget into a wave. If he hadn’t noticed the state of her hair yet, he would soon enough.

  After a moment, he raised a hand in return, but did not move from the doorway. His head tipped toward his steward. Words were exchanged, too low to be heard.

  Lan drank off her nasty tea and poured herself another cup, dumping in spoonful after spoonful of sugar in an effort to make it palatable and thinning out the resulting syrup with milk. The grey muck she created was even less palatable than the unadultered tea, if possible. She choked down two swallows, hiding her shudders in her napkin, and plucked at the front of her corset in an effort to make her tits stand out a little more so her collarbones wouldn’t be quite so apparent.

  “Lan!” Azrael called at last, striding toward her. “Journeys end in lovers meeting!”

  “Also in lemon cake!” She held up the platter to show him, then set it aside and cupped her mouth to loudly confide, “I’m using the jentacular napkins. Shh! They don’t know yet!”

  “Are you indeed?” Azrael laughed. “How devious!”

  The servants waiting on the imperial table exchanged puzzled glances. One of them sidled closer to peer at the napkins.

  He reached the dais at last and stood for some time with one foot on the lowest step, just looking at her. It was not the look of a man drinking in the sight of the woman he had been missing for a month and more.

  “What?” Lan asked. She knew what.

  He started to speak, stopped, then turned his gaze boldly on the side of her head. “Was that deliberate?”

  “Sort of. She deliberately cut it and I deliberately left with the rest uncut.” Her hand half-rose and foolishly hovered. “Is it bad? I know I should have at least let her even it out, but I didn’t want it cut in the first place and I…didn’t really leave on good terms. It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  “Not even were you shaved bald,” he assured her, ascending the dais. “In any event, it will grow.”

  “You really don’t mind?”

  “It wasn’t your hair I desired to hold all these empty nights.” He gathered up a loose lock and tucked it behind a pin, but his gaze dropped to her clean plate. “Were you waiting on me?”

  “I don’t come to dinner—”

  “For the food,” he said with her and picked up her cup. “This isn’t coffee.” He sipped. Frowned. “Gentian tea.”

  “I just thought I’d try something different. I kind of liked the taste when I tried it before.”

  “No one likes this taste,” he said, taking the tea with him around the table. He sipped again as he seated himself, then passed it back to her, watching closely as she drank. Signaling a servant for wine, he asked, too casually, “Are you well?”

  “Don’t I look well?”

  “It’s difficult to say. Your mask is thicker than mine.” He tapped a claw on the golden cheek of his false face as his eyes moved over her, their narrow light belying his nonchalant tone. “Perhaps it was a mistake to send word on ahead of my return. You’ve passed a restless night, it seems.”

  “Hopefully, I won’t be sleeping too well tonight either.” She dropped him a wink and hid from closer inspection in her cup. “So, have you seen to your other dollies or do I have to worry about them wanting to flutter in here and welcome you back while I’m trying to get tapped?”

  He barked out a laugh. “My, you are bold, aren’t you?”

  “I haven’t had my man in a month. You’re lucky you’re not on your back in the butter dish right now. So have you?”

  Azrael looked up from his inspection of the butter dish with a guarded expression. “I must confess, yours is the second living face I’ve seen since my return.”

  She gave him a moment to take that back and when he didn’t, Lan knocked back another swallow of tea and set her cup down, smiling at him pleasantly. “Interesting. So. Whose ass am I kicking tonight?”

  “Heather’s.”

  “Eh? The kid?”

  “I had presents to deliver, if you’ll recall. I thought it best to have it done so I could devote the whole of my night to you.”

  “Oh.” And now she was curious. “What’d you get her?”

  “Seashells.”

  “Nice,” said Lan, genuinely impressed. “Did she like them?”

  “She said so, although she seemed more interested in what I had to tell her of the sea itself. This is an island,” he added, allowing himself a tolerantly puzzled expression. “And it isn’t that big. How is it she’s never seen the sea?”

  Lan drew deep on her diplomatic roots and did not point out the girl had spent most of her life behind walls with Eaters howling on the other side. Instead, she smiled and said, “Neither had I until I went to France.”

  “She wanted to know if I’d bring her a mermaid the next time I went away.”

  “And you said…?”

  “I said I would, if I were fortunate enough to capture one.”

  Surprised, Lan peered at him, but he seemed serious. “Are there mermaids then?”

  He shrugged. “There was a time not so long ago I disdained the existence of dragons. Now I think anything may be possible. And that reminds me, I have a present for you as well.”

  “For real?” she asked, pleased and a little wary. “Or is it one of those and-then-you-put-it-to-me presents? Not that those aren’t fine in their own way, but—”

  “But they’re more a gift for the giver,” he agreed, chuckling into his wine. “No. Neither is it a gift that can be packaged. But I think you’ll like it. Indeed, it was your gift to me once, or would have been, if I’d given you your way.”

  She thought it over and he let her think, but more time only confounded her further and in the end, she had to shake her head. “I give. You’re sure this isn’t a sex thing?”

  “I’m going to build you a town,” he said softly, watching her over the rim of his cup.

  A great stillness fell over her, as muffling in its silence as snow. She looked at him and could not speak.

  “Just a town,” he went on, now gazing deep into his wine. “Perhaps two or three hundred stone houses in neat rows. There will be cows in the pasture. Goats on the roofs. Can you see it?”

  The room blurred. She blinked once to clear it and felt a tear burn down her cheek. She nodded.

  “I confess, I cannot.” He looked at her, saw the tear, and reached out to rub it away under his thumb. Studying the smear of paints he took away, he continued, “But that’s why I keep engineers. And they tell me it shouldn’t take long, given the relative simplicity of the design. The old ruins are being cleared as we speak and the entire project should be completed in no more than ten years, they say. But we won’t wait that long. What do we need to begin with but a roof over our heads and a place to sleep?”

  She took a breath. And another. And finally had enough air for one word: “When?”

  “As soon as can be managed. It’s where I’ve been, touring likely sites. And I found one. An island to the north. It’s small and sufficiently remote for the purpose, with nice rocky beaches and reefs to discourage visitors. It isn’t pretty,” he remarked, “but it has a certain rugged charm, I suppo
se, and there’s always the sea to look at. Our house will be built upon the highest rock. We shall have a view of the sea from every window.”

  “You mean it, don’t you?”

  “I do. I’ll build your town. This place I don’t believe in and cannot see…I’ll build it by your light. And you will stand at my side and teach me to believe in peace. Because that is what you truly want, is it not?” He offered his hand with a crooked smile and squeezed her fingers carefully when she took it. “Not more than anything, perhaps, but more than everything. You want me to believe in peace. And if you truly think I can, I’ll try.”

  “But…But what about Haven? That’s why you left, you said so!”

  He nodded. “To preserve Haven, yes. And I am decided the only way to do that is to leave it. Preparations for the evacuation are already underway. I intend to leave the city much as I found it. When the living come, they will find their treasures largely unspoiled. I’m told the power stations can be shut down in such a way that those with knowledge can readily have them running again, if…well,” he said, looking away with flickering eyes. “And if not, there are always candles.”

  “Are you sure? Are you…I mean…Is this really what you want?”

  He searched her face with a weary smile for several seconds in silence, then said, “I am certain. I can never undo what I have done. I can only move on. And as someone once told me, it isn’t moving on if you leave things the way they are. It’s giving up.”

  “Thank you,” said Lan, but that wasn’t nearly enough, so she leapt up and threw herself against him, spilling his wine down his chest and hers as she crushed them together.

  “And do you have a gift for me?” he inquired, smiling as he steadied her.

  “It’s really more a gift for the giver,” she admitted. “But it’s a good one. Now slide that butter dish on over here.”

  “No. Not here. This table did not come out the better for having been upended a year ago and I doubt it would survive the encounter.” He cupped her chin and kissed her through the mask, his eyes dim and hot against hers. “I will take you to my bed, my Lan, and make it ours.”

  Tears welled again and this time, she couldn’t stop them. “I don’t…I don’t look all right,” she whispered. “I’ve been…um…sulky and I’ve…I’ve lost some weight and—”

  “You’re beautiful,” he assured her, rising from his throne and pulling her up into his welcome chill. “You are so beautiful and could never be other in my eyes. Come. Let me wash away these bitter paints and taste your true sweetness. Come, my Lan…take me to bed.”

  * * *

  She woke in the dark, safe and a bit too cold in Azrael’s arms. For a moment, she only lay there, wondering why she was awake. Then she knew.

  She rolled over, kicking free of the blankets and knocking Azrael a good one at least twice in her hurry. She heard him ask what was wrong and answered with the unlovely sound of her retching into the chamberpot. Lan groaned, gulped air, retched again, and fell back onto the bed, hugging her aching stomach and waiting to live or die.

  After a minute or so, he took the chamberpot and carried it out of the room. She heard him exchange a few words with the guards outside and then he came back and sat down beside her on the bed. His eyes were dim. His hand rubbed lightly at her back, calm. “Lan.”

  “I swear I’m okay.”

  “Isn’t it time you told me?”

  She thought about it, decided that really had made no sense and it wasn’t just her imagination, and finally rolled over to look at him. “About what?”

  His expression subtly shifted toward gentle exasperation. “Do you really think I would be so angry? How long can you possibly hope to hide this? Can we not just talk about it?”

  Lan squinted at him. “About what?” she asked again.

  He covered his eyes and stayed that way several seconds, alternately chuckling and shaking his head. Then he dropped his hand and turned around.

  “What are you doing?” Lan asked, struggling up on her elbows to watch him.

  “I’m dressing,” he said unnecessarily, showing her his belt before he buckled it on. “And I advise you to do the same.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “So it is.”

  “I’m sleeping!”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “I fail to see what that has to do with anything.”

  “I’m not getting dressed!”

  “That is your choice, but, my dear child—” He returned to the bed with a tolerant smile and bent low, his fists braced on the cushions to either side of her, trapping her loosely within his arms. “—that is your only choice in the matter. Now. Shall you be dressed? Or shall we begin?”

  The words ‘Begin what?’ rose to her lips, but no further. She wasn’t in the mood for peaches. Heaving the blankets back, she swung herself out of bed and went grumbling to the wardrobe for a clean gown.

  Once dressed, he took her upstairs and all the way across the palace to the garrison and deposited her in a small, white room with nothing inside but two chairs and a dead doctor.

  “Oh balls, not him again!” Lan groaned.

  Dr. Deadhead was a tad more politic in his expressing it, but he seemed to share her feeling as he said, “My lord, be assured, there is absolutely nothing wrong with her beyond the usual frailties inherent in the living condition.”

  “My Lan has many qualities. Frailty is not among them. There is something else here and it has continued far too long under your care.”

  The doctor took a sharp breath, but thought better of arguing that particular point. Instead, with a certain surly stiffness, he said, “If you’ve no confidence in my diagnoses, lord, with your permission, I will consult my colleague. Perhaps her experience with the living will shed some light on your consort’s mysterious symptoms. But I advise you in the strongest terms, when she also fails to find an actual illness, you might consider the possibility that the patient’s malingering is no more than a childish attempt to secure your attention.”

  “So noted,” said Azrael with a dismissive wave. “Fetch her for me.”

  The doctor bowed and left, shooting Lan an accusatory glare on his way out the door.

  “How is that fair?” Lan demanded. “I tell you there’s nothing wrong and you make me come to the doctor anyway. Now when she tells you there’s nothing, I’m malingering?”

  “Is that what she’ll tell me, Lan?” he asked mildly, watching the door.

  Her patience for his passive horseshit was never more than a thin veneer over the necessity of the moment and in the middle of the night, it tended to crack sooner rather than later. “What the hell else do you think she’ll tell me?” she demanded. “If you think you know something, spit it out!”

  But he merely shook his head and waited.

  Very soon, there were voices in the hall—the dead doctor’s, lowered to an affronted mutter and the live one’s, hoarsened by interrupted sleep—batting words back and forth in a comfortably abrasive manner as they approached.

  “That’s a broad array of fairly fakeable symptoms,” Dr. Warmblood concluded, now right outside the door and making no effort either to enter or to lower her voice. And laughed. “Don’t you hush me, I don’t care if he hears. If his dolly’s pulling out her own threads, I’m sure he wants to know. One more time now, just to see if I have the full picture…when did this all start? When his lordship left?”

  “Well, no,” Dr. Deadhead admitted. “It was a bit before that.”

  “How long is a bit? No, no, don’t strain yourself. Begin at the beginning. Lovey comes home and the very first time you see her next is…?”

  “The next morning, for the sunburn.”

  “Sunburn?” Dr. Warmblood said, laughing again as she said it, as if she thought she were being put on. “It’s hard enough to get that in the summertime!”

  “She’d been traveling, hadn’t she? It was a serio
us sunburn. I saw it myself. It had made her seriously dehydrated. She was very ill at that point, very ill.”

  “All right, all right, don’t ruffle your feathers, dove. So how many times have you seen her since?”

  “Six.”

  Azrael glanced at Lan, who found an interesting spot on the spotless wall to investigate.

  “She presents the same symptoms every time,” the dead doctor was saying, his tone making it clear what he thought of them. “Apart from the sunburn itself, I mean, which was speedily healed with the rest and fluids I prescribed. But she keeps coming back with complaints of nausea, indeterminate stomach pains and general nonsense. One day, she’ll be fine and the next, flat on her back, groaning she can’t be moved because our lord, in his infinite wisdom, granted her his full authority during his absence and she knows her handmaiden can’t do anything but coddle her along.”

  “You should have sent for me a long time ago, mate. I would have put a stop to that rubbish. Right! Let’s have a look at her.” The door swung open and in she came with a broad smile that went crooked the moment she clapped eyes on Lan. “Good gracious, you look horrid.”

  “Thanks.”

  The doctor took a penlight out of her pocket and came over to the chair where Lan sat, but she was in no hurry to turn it on and shine it around. Her gaze instead moved slowly over Lan’s head. “What’s happened to your hair, lovey?”

  “Bad day at the salon. It’ll grow out.”

  Dr. Warmblood reached up and ran one hand over Lan’s scalp from her browline all the way to her neck. When she brought her hand back, there was an awful lot of hair winding through her fingers, but Lan hadn’t felt any pull free. “This started with a sunburn, eh?” she said, no longer smiling. “Where?”

  “Kind of all over, but it’s all gone now.”