Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “In a moment.”

  She drew back at once, not liking the strained quiet of his voice and liking the near-lightless quality of his eyes even less. “What’s wrong?”

  He searched her face in silence for a short time, then said, still in that same taut, roughened way, “How do you feel, Lan?”

  “Fine,” she replied automatically, then stopped to think about it. She did feel fine. And fine was something she hadn’t felt in a very long while. It wasn’t just her tender tum that had calmed. The dull cramps that had shadowed the intermittent nausea had gone as well. No headache. No muscle aches. No pain of any kind. She wasn’t tired, wasn’t hungry, wasn’t thirsty. Even the unwholesome chill of Azrael’s flesh seemed subdued—present, but perfectly tolerable.

  Lan hitched up her skirts at once and stared in confusion at a leg that had been pocked with bruises mere moments ago, or so her mind insisted. Now it was whole. Pale, but whole. She touched the place on the side of her shin where a sore the size of a goldslip had been open and hot with infection just that morning and could not feel so much as a dimple or see even the pink blotch of scarring.

  But it was only dead flesh he had the power to mend.

  She stared at him.

  He gazed back at her.

  “But I’m breathing,” she said finally. It was all she could think to say.

  For answer, he reached up and lay his hand over her mouth, gently pinching off her nostrils. His expression never changed.

  She waited, blinking and looking foolishly around as if someone were about to pop up from under the table to point and laugh at her before explaining how the trick was done. But there was no trick. She wasn’t breathing and her lungs didn’t mind a bit because she didn’t need to breathe. She probably didn’t need to blink either.

  Azrael removed his hand.

  Lan started breathing again, out of habit. Hesitantly, she made herself stop. Then started again, not because she had to but just because not needing to was so disturbing. As he watched, she pulled up her sleeve and gave herself a cautious pinch. It hurt a little, but didn’t leave a mark. “I don’t feel any different,” she said tentatively.

  “You aren’t.”

  “But I’m…I’m…”

  “Apart from that.”

  She sat back on his lap, trying without success to gather in her scattered thoughts, then reached up and felt around on the side of her neck for her pulse.

  Azrael waited with her as seconds slipped away into minutes.

  She felt at the other side of her neck and encountered the raised, unlovely line of her scar. Startled, she looked at him.

  “I’ll mend it, if you wish,” he said.

  “Why did you leave it? You took away all the other scars.”

  “Because that one…” He reached up to trace it with his fingertips, his voice roughening. “That one is precious to me. But I’ll mend it. If you wish.”

  She found the idea of keeping one scar—that one in particular—oddly comforting and started to tell him so, only to fall silent again as a new thought wormed out of the dark and bit deep. Did she find it comforting? Did she really? Or did he?

  Her hand strayed down over his chest to pluck at the buckle of his belt. “Tell me to take this off.”

  His eyes flickered, but not with confusion. There was no passion in his voice when he said, “Unclothe me.”

  “No.”

  He nodded, his expression unchanged. “I command it. I command you.”

  “No,” she said again and sat, tapping her forefinger now and then against the buckle, as she waited to feel whatever overwhelming compulsion the dead felt when their lord’s will lay over them.

  Azrael waited with her, one hand at the small of her back to steady her as she perched on his lap and the other rasping lightly over her scar. “I cannot be your lord and your lover both,” he told her when she looked down at him at last. “And you could not be my Lan were you not free to leave me.”

  There was more he tried to say then, but she silenced him with her kiss.

  His hands flexed, claws digging at her skin in ten distinct points of almost-pain, pulling her hard against him. She could feel the heat of his eyes—not so hot as it had been—and the chill of his flesh—not so cold—and the raised line of every scar crushed between them in ways she never had before. The clarity to which she had been awakened made every sensation new and exhilarating. The least touch brought her nerves to vibrant life; she could feel the split in his lip when he brushed it across her jaw, the scrape of his sharp teeth, the ragged burn of his breath when he groaned her name, right before he pushed her back.

  “No,” he said, just like she wasn’t right there on his lap to feel all the ways the rest of him screamed ‘yes’. “You need time. You need—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know what I need. Come here.” She took his face firmly between her hands to prevent escape and kissed him again, slowly, relaxing into his hungry embrace and resenting every slip of fabric that kept them separate. “Oh, I’ve missed this,” she breathed into his mouth. “I’ve felt so bad so long, I forgot how it’s supposed to be. I taste you. All the little ways you taste. The way you used to taste before…well, before.” She licked at his lips, then at his chin, then fastened her mouth to his and swirled her tongue along his before drawing back with a frown. “Am I all right?”

  His answer was to yank her into another kiss, but it was unclear who was the conqueror and who the claimed. If he brushed her lips, she bruised his; she nibbled, he bit; he explored, she invaded. With every fresh assault, she could feel the barriers between them weaken until, with a savage snarl, he rose up, lifting her with him and setting her hard on the table, clearing it with a sweep of his arm and a crash of broken porcelain. He lay her down, his hands tearing away his clothes and hers, his mouth like heaven and hell together wherever it moved.

  Her heart couldn’t race and her breath didn’t catch, but in every way that mattered, it was just the way it used to be. Her body was a stranger’s, shocking her with the power of its responses. Every touch was a trigger to far greater rush of sexual frisson. His claws pricking at her thighs as he pulled her legs around his hips, the silver rings on his side tapping to the rhythm they made between them, his chin just brushing at her jaw as he moved his mouth from her breast to kiss the scar on her neck—all were needful, all were bliss. It was pleasure in its purest form, unencumbered by trivialities like stamina or strain, and the more she took, the more she was herself consumed.

  Their bodies came together, but they remained separate for a while, each one trapped in their own world of sensation and desire. Gradually, her greed and his urgency subsided and pleasure grew to include the other. His fevered thrusts slowed and gentled, her desperate clutches became caresses, and although he did fling the last surviving pot of flowers to a shattering death on the tiles when his arm encountered it, the hand he put on her afterward was tender.

  “My Lan,” he groaned, quiet thunder she felt all the way through to her bones. “My light. My life. My lover. With me, now. With me.”

  And she died, one more time, and the light that took her as she came back was dark no longer, but blinding white and full of colors, like his eyes.

  She lay beneath him in the quiet that followed that receding tide, thinking nothing, but only feeling. When he tried to rise, she pulled him back and held on until he settled atop her. Strange, to feel his weight but not be crushed by it.

  Maybe Azrael counted the hours that passed as they lay together amid broken garlands of ivy and spilled sugar, but Lan didn’t even try. She knew how long they’d been there only when the sky outside the windows began to lighten. As the yellow-grey dawn crept into the room with them, Lan finally asked the question that had been growing more and more unavoidable since the last shudder of his body into hers: “Are we going to break this table if we go again?”

  Azrael grunted against her shoulder and gave an experimental rock. Although she was not in a position to see him smil
e, she could feel it curve against her skin and hear it in his voice when he said, “Probably.”

  “Reckon you should take me to bed then, because I’m not tired.”

  He shifted, but when he drew back enough to see her face, both the smile and the light of his eyes had faded. “You’ll never again be tired, Lan. You’ll never again sleep.”

  She’d never blush again either, and she was glad of it, because this would be the time. She knew perfectly well the dead didn’t sleep, but she guessed it would be a while before she knew all the way through that she was one of them now. She looked up at Azrael without flinching, meaning to tell him it didn’t matter and she never remembered her dreams anyway, but said instead, without planning, “I’m glad we had the once, then.”

  “So am I.” He brushed at the side of her head with the backs of his knuckles, smoothing back hair she’d never grow again. “Lan…”

  “I’m all right,” she said, before he could ask. “I will be, anyway. Will you? I know this isn’t what you wanted.”

  She said it, knowing there was no good answer, not ‘Yes, it is,’ and certainly not, ‘No, it really isn’t,’ but he did not hesitate.

  “I’ve wanted you all my life, Lan. All my life.”

  She stared up at him, now almost sort of wishing she could still blush. “Right,” she said, not quite steadily, and put her arms around him. “We’re going to break this table.”

  EPILOGUE

  The fog rolled in around midnight and only got thicker with the dawn, so that the palace seemed to float in an ocean of white nothing. Nevertheless, as the sun rose somewhere behind the thick clouds, the ferries came. Lan, watching from a high window overlooking the front courtyard, couldn’t hear the rumbling of their engines, but it was eerie enough just to see their headlamps in the mist, disembodied, like glowing eyes, and then the indistinct smudges of their hulking bodies before the fog opened up and they were just vans.

  Azrael’s steward came bustling out to meet them, followed in short order by Deimos, who took charge over the steward’s protests. Under his direction, the last residents of Haven were brought out, arranged into groups and loaded for transport. It wouldn’t take long. Most of Haven had evacuated over the summer, when the weather was best for traveling. Those that were left had relocated to the palace so that, for a while, it had been positively bustling, but then those had started trickling away, too. There was hardly anyone left now—just servants to shut up the house, gardeners to put the grounds and the greenhouses to bed, a handful of Revenants to keep watch, and Azrael’s musicians. One must have one’s musicians, after all.

  As Lan watched, they appeared, led by Tempo and surrounded on every side by Azrael’s steward, who had nothing much to do with his days anymore but find new ways to be obnoxiously underfoot. They loaded instruments into the largest ferry, more than anyone could possibly need, except that Lan knew they wouldn’t be finding any more on the island that was to be their home. They’d want all they could get, which was only fine and natural, but they had only the one ferry to put them all in, which presented some harsh realities. They struggled half an hour at least with the piano before they finally gave it up. As they wheeled it back inside, the flute-player reached out to clasp Tempo’s slumped shoulder in a brief gesture of sympathy which seemed to be accepted in good grace.

  She was the last of the living in Haven, the flute-player. The rest of Azrael’s dollies had all been packed off with enough useless sparkly shit to make them welcome anywhere in the world and hopefully, none of them had even the slightest notion why. As far as they all knew, they were leaving because Lord Azrael no longer had any use for them, and Lan was perfectly happy to let them think she’d talked him into it, although she hadn’t. He was trying to do right by them, that was all, provided that doing right didn’t also mean getting stuck with them on some island well away from the luxuries to which they had become accustomed. Personally, Lan thought Azrael was fooling himself if he didn’t think they’d end up right back here before the year was out, looking to be taken in and taken care of, and no doubt shocked as hell to find the city empty, but then again, they were moving awfully fast now that Felicity and them all were gone, so maybe he wasn’t fooled after all.

  As for Heather, she ought to be here still, but once she’d learned of the new place, the girl put the full force of her daughterly wiles toward going there. She and Azrael had been reading Le Morte D’Arthur and for her, any island might be Avalon. Her relentless energy, combined with the growing number of minutiae demanding Azrael’s attention as Haven emptied, ultimately wore him down and he formally relented at the end of summer, sending her away with Dr. Warmblood, her governess, her tutor, and her solemn promise to behave, doubtless broken before she reached the gate. Without her, it was much quieter, which was not entirely a good thing. Lan was a little bemused to discover she actually missed the little blighter and was looking forward to getting her underfoot again almost as much as she was looking forward to finally being in her true home, that new place she had never seen and still yearned for with all her heart.

  “My lady?”

  Azrael’s steward, come to fidget at her. The ferries below were already starting to drive off—it never took the dead long to get underway and after all the practice they’d had these past months, they had the procedure down with a precision a clock would envy—and Azrael was still nowhere to be seen in the courtyard.

  “Where is he?” she asked, smiling.

  “He said he didn’t want to be disturbed, you see,” the dead man said, not quite wringing his hands, but clasping them. “He said to inform him at once when the vehicles were charged and ready to depart, and I did. And then he said to inform him as soon as boarding was underway, and I did. And then he said he didn’t want to be disturbed and he went to his morning room.”

  “Of course he did,” said Lan, turning away from the window. “Take me to him.”

  He did, with obvious relief, leading her through silent halls with boarded up windows on one side and covered over paintings and furniture on the other. The curtains had been taken down and all the rugs rolled up. The grit that walked in on the boots of the few Revenants remaining stayed where it dropped off. There were cobwebs on the hanging lights, autumn leaves in the corners, dust everywhere. If she could see outside, she would see empty greenhouses, their beds bare and machinery quiet. Whatever seed had not already been shipped to the new place had been neatly labeled and placed in storage, along with careful instructions for how to get the fans and irrigation going, if whoever came along wasn’t familiar with electrics and plumbing. The livestock had all been butchered and the breeders shipped on to the new place, their old pens cleaned and in good repair for the next occupants. The outdoor gardens had been trimmed down before the gardeners all left, although they’d grown out quite a bit since then. Anyone who didn’t know better might think the palace already abandoned, but not neglected. Every part of the leaving had been done with a thought for someone’s eventual return, although she knew that didn’t make it any easier for him.

  She wished he’d talk to her about it. The nearer they’d come to this day, the more restless and withdrawn he’d become until it was hard enough to get him to talk to her at all. He could deflect any of her clumsy attempts with such finesse that it could be hours later before she realized a simple, “How are you, really?” had somehow turned into an animated lecture on the evolution and domestication of the deerhound and she didn’t even like dogs. Now here they were and all the wordplay in the world couldn’t push this day any further back. It was time to go.

  Azrael’s steward brought her to a door and quickly left her, but she could see his shadow linger at the end of the hall after he turned the corner, waiting to be needed when his lord emerged. Sighing (unnecessary now, but so satisfying), Lan opened the door without bothering herself to knock. The room beyond was empty, as they all were these days, but the emptiness was itself of a familiar sort. No paintings to need covering, just a pal
e lump that might be a single desk with a single chair beneath a sheet, and Azrael in his horned mask before the boarded window, staring into the grain of the wood as if he could see through it and down into his meditation garden, where, in his mind perhaps, the living were planted as flowers and the dead writhed and burned.

  He did not look around, but when she shut the door behind her, he said, “Lan. Are they waiting on me?”

  “Nope.”

  Now he turned.

  “They’re leaving without you,” she said lightly, crossing the small room to join him at the window. “Haven’t decided yet whether I will or not, so I thought I’d come ask which you’d prefer.”

  He made that low half-growling sound in the back of his throat that he only used when he wanted her to think he was annoyed, but wasn’t really, and offered his arm.

  His steward manifested as soon as the jingle of Azrael’s rings were heard in the hall and Lan had to stand for some time as he blustered through a painfully thorough accounting of the last day in Haven, ending on the rather peevish apology that he had no more to report on the matter of the departure, as Captain Deimos had taken it upon himself to oversee it.

  “Very good,” Azrael said, not quite without a sigh of his own. “You are relieved of your duties here. We’ll speak again at the dock…at length, I’m sure.”

  Lan gave his arm a reproachful squeeze even as she smothered a smile.

  “Tell the captain to hold a car for Lan and myself. We’ll be there directly.”

  The dead man’s disappointment at not being invited to share that car was evident, but he managed a respectful, “Yes, my lord,” and bowed himself away.

  Azrael muttered something in another language that sounded unkind as he watched his steward go, then rubbed up under his mask. When he looked at Lan again, it was with a broad smile that went no deeper than his skin. “I shall miss seeing you in gowns,” he said, gesturing at her traveling togs. His voice matched his smile. “I know you’ve never cared for them, but I found it wondrous to see art worn as clothing, however impractical or uncomfortable, and I regret I shall never see you so attired again.”