Land of the Beautiful Dead (10 page)

“What would you know of prisons?” he asked with a contemptuous twist of a smile.

“I’ve stayed in plenty of hostels. I mean, it’s obvious you made some changes, but was it? A prison?”

He rolled one broad shoulder in a shrugging gesture that made it clear shrugging was not natural to him. “It may well have been. My new home is old indeed, as humans measure age, and its memories are largely lost. But those who came immediately before me had no use for prisons in their home and neither have I. I shaped it to its present purpose. Perhaps when I’ve no further need of it, I’ll shape it to another. Did you sleep well?”

“You keep asking.”

“As with the training of any animal, repetition and patience are the key to success.”

The rebuke, and the tone of mild amusement with which he spoke it, brought a blush like twin slaps to her cheeks. She was suddenly too aware of how she looked—filthy and stinking at his elegant table, stuffing herself on fine foods like a starving dog. She stirred at her porridge, then pushed it away. “I slept fine.”

“You seem disappointed. You didn’t think you’d sleep at all, here in the Devil’s house, did you? But you were tired. Humans so often underestimate how erosive it is to be tired, day after day,” he mused, gazing into his cup. “Or to be hungry. Or cold. Or unwashed.”

Lan frowned, self-consciously tucking her arms closer to her body.

“You came to me believing you came prepared for an endless siege, but I tell you, you came half-surrendered. In another handful of days, you will sit at my table without hesitation. In a year, you will ask me to send to Norwood for peaches.”

“No, I won’t.”

He chuckled indulgently over his cup. “So defiant.”

“Defiance has nothing to do with it. I’ve had to eat them my whole life. I hate peaches.”

He looked at her, then laughed—a great bellow of a laugh that filled the hall and caused no small number of servants to exchange nervous glances. When the last echo had died, he raised his hands and clapped them, slowly, three times. “If you planned that, you planned it well. I find myself feeling most favorably toward you.”

Lan opened her mouth.

“Not that favorably.” He started to reach for his cup, then paused, tapping his thumbclaw against the rim as he regarded her, before finally picking it up. “Yet favorably enough to make some small concession, if you would meet me.”

“Meet you where?”

“Meet me how, you meant to say. I answer, if you will refrain from making your tiresome entreaty for what remains of this meal, I will grant you a second audience in my bedchamber tonight, where you may make all the tiresome entreaties you please.”

“You…just want me to sit here?”

“And talk with me.”

She frowned. He ate, watching her with that scarred, crooked smile.

“About what?” she asked finally.

He opened both arms, gesturing to the whole world.

“And in exchange, you’ll consider ending the war.”

“Never,” he said. “But I will allow you to ask. Are we agreed?”

“I guess so.” Lan picked a grape from its fellows—the only other fruit she recognized, apart from peaches—and ate it. She wasn’t hungry any more, was in fact a bit nauseous and overfull, but the chance to eat a grape was more than she could resist. “Can I talk about the dead or is that considered tiresome?”

“It is tiresome, but I suppose if I forbid it, you’ll have nothing of your own experience to speak of. Speak then, but choose your words well. My patience for criticism is thin.”

Lan ate another grape and thought. At last, she said, “Do you control them, like puppets, or just bring them back and let them go, like a toy you wind up and release?”

He lifted his head and stared at her a moment before resuming his meal. “The latter, although there are degrees to which I ‘wind’ my toys.”

“So the only ones you control are the Eaters.”

“Not even they.”

“Then why do they attack us?”

“In all creatures, there exists the animal urge to kill and feed. Humans imagine themselves a civilized exception, but those you call Eaters betray their true instincts, when all the manners and moral constraints are relieved. No, I do not aim them at your settlements and cry havoc, I merely wake them to a sense of hunger with no sense of consequence.”

“Merely.”

“I could have raised them with all their animal urges intact. Imagine, if you will, the endless tides of the dead seeking actively to drive invading rivals from their territory.” He took a deep drink from his cup and smiled at her. “Or to mate.”

She could not quite keep the thoughts that rose in her at that off her face.

“But no, my intent was one of benign co-existence,” he went on. “The Eaters are not meant to exterminate humanity, but only to keep it at bay so that I and my few favored may live in peace.”

“Benign? How can you even say that?”

“And how can you claim otherwise?” he countered. “They are the least of my creations, possessing the very palest spark of life. They have no capacity to reason, no understanding of weapons or tools, and lack all sense of self-preservation. Can you deny they are confounded by the least defenses? A wall that even a child could climb will hold back their multitudes indefinitely. A simple latch that a dog might be taught to paw at will forever remain beyond their ability to open. And you can well afford to wait them out as they mill around your settlements, can’t you? Their flesh has no integrity, for I have raised them to rot. Even in this poor corner of the world, they are reduced to harmless bones in months. It is human perversity that demands you cleave to your holdings here, for in other warmer, wetter climes, no Eater can retain cohesion more than a few days. And what the elements do not undo, the hungry hordes of insects and scavenging beasts consume. Still, you must imagine yourself beset and waste precious resources and even more precious
lives
to plink away at an enemy that would be of absolutely
no
threat to you if you just
left them alone
!”

His sudden shout at the end of what had been a calm, if caustic, speech made her flinch. He stopped there, glaring and breathing hard through the mouth-slit of his mask, then waved away the guards who had looked in at them and leaned back in his throne.

“But the living will never leave the dead alone,” he said, once more calm. “No more than they will leave me and my Children alone. The dead are an offense to the living and always have been. I understand that and I accept that there shall never be peace, but still I have made my Haven. And Man, who could as easily build cities of his own, has instead chosen the most senseless vengeance—the killing of the dead.”

“You don’t think much of us, do you?”

He cast a wry glance at her, then looked thoughtfully around his dining room, his gaze lingering at every ornate fixture and decoration. “Humans are such a contradiction in their very essence that I find I can neither wholly hate nor envy them, even after all these years and all the cause I have been given. Your capacity for destruction, terrible as it is, is as evenly matched by your ability to create and to imagine. I could never have built such a hall.” He picked up one of the utensils at his side and tossed it toward her, saying, “I could never have built such a spoon! Whatever it is in you that sees what is not there, I lack it, utterly.”

Lan picked up his spoon and studied the delicate shapes swirling down its handle. “We don’t make things like this anymore, either. I’ve never eaten with a spoon in Norwood.”

“But you will, someday. When the insult of your present circumstance finally fades and you become bored with the squalor of your surroundings, you’ll make new ones. That is your greatest quality.”

“Making spoons?”

“Making worlds. You humans,” he said, almost sighing. “You pride yourselves so on strength, on killing, and for what? Worms kill each other. It takes no wit.” He picked up another spoon—why would anyone need so many?—and turned it so the handle caught the light. “But nothing else in all the world could conceive of this design or bring it into substance. Is that not a marvel?”

“I guess so.”

He smiled, replacing the spoon with its mates. “Meaning not.”

“Meaning…I don’t know. Sure, it’s pretty, but I look at this place—” Now it was her turn to run her eyes around the high ceiling and glittering chandeliers, down carved pillars and around paintings, to the richly-carpeted floor and claw-footed furnishings that weighted it. “—and I don’t see it the way you do. I can’t imagine anyone making it…or even why they would. If you told me you raised it with you out of the earth, I’d believe it and it would be just as marvelous.”

“Would you indeed?”

His undisguised scorn at the superstitious awe of humankind put an edge on her reply: “You can raise the dead, can’t you? During the war, you spread plagues and withered crops and made it rain poison. Look outside!” She waved one arm at the nearest window, but although a few heads turned among the guards, Azrael’s gaze never shifted. “Look what you did to the sky! And for no other reason except you could! It would be stupider to assume those were the limits of your power, especially when all the rest of the world is in ruins and your Haven is so wonderful.”

“The sky…” He leaned back in his throne to regard her, swirling wine around his cup in a pensive, playful way. “Who told you I was responsible for that?”

“Everyone knows.”

“And they say winners write history.” Azrael shook his head and favored her with a thin, humorless smile. “There was indeed a storm in those days and it swept up a great miasma into the atmosphere that did sour all the sky. The moon became as sackcloth. The sun became as blood. The black rain fell, burning away the skin and eyes of those poor beasts who could find no shelter from it. They lay in heaps along the roads where I passed, rotting where they fell in pools of that stinking rain…but of course, it was I who caused the famine that followed, I who unleashed the winds of plague. How much easier it is to be the victim of your enemy than admit you have…” His smile wavered. He looked away. “…become him,” he murmured, almost to himself.

She didn’t believe him, but he said it with such calm intensity that she could feel her certainty shaken. Of course he’d done it. Who else could have?…but if he had, why hadn’t he done it since? Why fight as he’d done, with Revenants and Eaters, if he could just wave his hand and bring down the poison rain?

“Where did it come from, then?” she asked.

He glanced at her, frowning, then up at the window, and finally stared into his cup again. “It was the consequence of the last weapons fired against me. No doubt you would have found it inspiring, to see all the peoples of the world united in the murder of me, their conviction such that they chose to risk the poisoning of every man, woman and child who might survive the inferno rather than submit to my ascension. Ah well. Perhaps it was not deliberate. Perhaps its effects surprised even those who approved its use. Perhaps they regretted it when they saw what they had done.” His mouth twisted into another of those bitter smiles. “They regretted it enough to blame me. Yet Man survived, as Man does, and the stain that he left upon the sky is already much less than it was.” He looked at her again, still smiling. “So it is the living rumor of my power, is it? Mm. When it fades away entirely, will Men credit my mercy?”

“They might,” Lan said, trying to appear casual by spreading butter on a small loaf she didn’t even have room to eat. “If you made more merciful gestures.”

“Such as surrendering the dead to die?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yes, you’ve kept your end of the bargain to the letter of the words by which it was struck, all the while attacking its spirit. You’ve the makings of a natural diplomat.”

“Thanks. When do I get my audience?”

“This evening, following dinner.”

“Evening?” Lan twisted in her chair to check a window. It didn’t face east, so she couldn’t see the sun, but she could tell just by the color of the overcast sky that it wasn’t even mid-morning yet. “Oh for… Can’t we just get to it?”

He had started to raise his cup to his lips. Now he paused. His fingers tightened. He set it down again without drinking. “Impatient, are we?” he said, affecting a dry tone, but it was an affectation and, hearing it, Lan’s cheeks burned.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, picking over the food that remained on her plate. “We can keep talking.”

“Much as I enjoy your company, alas, other matters require my attention.”

“Like what?”

“Civil affairs. The minutiae of managing a city such as Haven.” He gestured vaguely at everything, nothing. “The demands upon my days are many.”

Lan frowned, her curiosity scratching through her frustration in spite of herself. “Like what?” she asked again. “Maybe I could help if I knew what the problem is.”

“Anything is possible, I suppose, but why would you?”

“Isn’t that how this works? I do for you, you do for me?”

He uttered a low laugh, then suddenly shoved his throne back and stood. Circling around the table, Azrael descended the dais with his eyes fixed and unblinking, staring her down like a predator. Her hand tightened on her knife; she put it down and watched him come. When he reached her, he put one huge, scarred hand on the back of her chair and the other on the table before her, effectively trapping her between his arms as he bent low and pinned her in the white light of his stare. In a voice as soft and as ominous as a distant roll of thunder, he said, “Do what you will, you will never have what you want of me.”