Land of the Beautiful Dead (13 page)

Lan blushed. “Than I did when I walked in.”

“Oh.” Batuuli looked her over with an arched brow and a dubious frown. “You’ll do for what he wants. I doubt he even cares what you look like. He’s only bathed you to make you grateful.”

“He doesn’t need to do that,” Lan muttered, looking down at herself. She had thought she might see one of those women from the old magazines, pictures of which could still be traded for a bottle of clean water or a bowl of soup, no matter how faded or torn, especially pictures of a body as naked as hers. Instead, she saw a farmer’s body—all weathered skin and muscular limbs, stocky and awkward and banded with sunless white over pink. “I’m grateful enough.”

“So is he, if the truth be known. Oh look, I’ve shocked them,” she said as her handmaidens all glanced at her together. “That doesn’t happen very often anymore. But it’s true, you know. He raised us up to be his children only because he never thought to raise us up to be his whores. Then the war, the hungering dead, his Haven…and that woman. The bloodstains weren’t yet washed from the floors and there she was. ‘Spare me, my lord,’” Batuuli said, now in a piping, lowland voice, “‘and I’ll be yours.’ Ha. Nothing suspicious in that, is there? But he took her. He was trembling when he led her through the gate.
Trembling.
Can you imagine? How many thousands of years he’s lived, how many ages of the Earth, and never known a woman? God, it must have been like fucking a baboon.”

The three handmaidens withdrew and the other three came forward, each one with a different gown—one black, one blue and one deep red.

“Which one should I wear?” Lan asked.

“I hardly think it matters. You won’t be in it long. He took the first one right there in the foyer—no, not the black, it makes you look like a corpse. He has enough of those to look at—and all of us in the rooms beyond, pretending not to hear him grunting and thumping about. And of course it ended badly,” she sighed, rolling her eyes. “He was so eager to get stuck in that he never stopped to think she might have something to stick in him. Not that it did any good. He can’t be killed. In the stories, the ogre always has a weakness, the dragon that one soft scale, but not Father. She did it all for nothing.”

“Why do you hate him?” Lan asked bluntly, lifting her legs one at a time so the shoes that accompanied the dress could be fit, if they could even be called shoes. They were no more than cloth covers for her feet, glittering with golden thread and black crystals, but thin enough that she could feel the grooves between the tiles through them.

“Why should I not?”

“No, really. Look around. He—” Lan sputtered as the blue gown was dropped over her head. When she’d thrashed her arms through the sleeves and could see again, Batuuli was watching her with her beautiful, poisonous smile. “He’s given you everything,” Lan insisted, undaunted. “Do you even know what you have here? Do you have any idea what it’s like outside of Haven?”

“Whatever you think he’s taken from you, he’s taken more from me. Far more.” Batuuli smile thinned, took on edges, but her voice did not reflect them. Her words were soft, like the fabric clinging to Lan’s clean, sweetly-scented body. “I had a life once. A home. Family, friends, maybe lovers. He denied me all. He raised me without memory. He gave me the only name I know, taught me the only languages I speak. It is this creature, this thief of life, I must call father, knowing nothing of what he took from me, only that he took it. Tighter,” she told the handmaiden lacing Lan’s bodice, so that Lan’s next breath was a cough of surprise. “But I did love him once, you know,” Batuuli went on. “Do you know why?”

She was waiting, so Lan had to answer, even if it was just a wild, breathless shake of her head.

“Because I had to. Because he had made himself our whole world and we knew no better. For a time. Tell me, were you happy in Norwood?” she asked. “Were you happy tending your trees in the ruins of the world?”

Lan said nothing. The handmaidens draped her neck with delicate chains and pinned down her unruly hair with glittering combs.

Batuuli nodded as if Lan had answered. “Because you knew no better. It was only after you saw what you had lost that you thought to miss it. Why should it be different for me? Because I have this?” She waved contemptuously at the white room swallowing them. “This fine cage? These beautiful fetters? You think because I have these things, I do not deserve to grieve for what I’ve lost? Or hate him who took it?” Batuuli waited while Lan’s face was painted, then uttered a short, sharp laugh and said, “Well? Answer! Or are you like all my father’s dogs, who must be told what to think?”

“I think you only hate him because he lets you,” said Lan and Batuuli’s smile vanished. “And I think you stay because beneath all that hate, you know you used to love him and of all the things you’ve lost, that’s the thing you miss most. That’s what I think.”

Lady Batuuli’s chin lifted. Gracefully, she rose and came three light, quick steps forward, stopping close enough that they could have kissed. “You can think what you like, but you would do well to mind what you say.” Each word puffed against Lan’s lips; Batuuli’s breath was cold and tasted vaguely of wine. “Your time will come and go, warmblood. I am eternal. And I can make your suffering last years.”

“You asked,” Lan reminded her.

Batuuli’s dead eyes narrowed. A moment later, she smiled. “So I did. But it appears you are ready for my father’s bed, so we really have nothing more to talk about, do we?” Without waiting for an answer, without turning her head, she said, “Celestine.”

A handmaiden fidgeted forward. “My lady.”

“Take my father’s whore wherever it is whores wait until they are summoned for use.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Lady Batuuli swept away, her handmaidens bowing around her. Lan followed, but when she reached the door, caught only a glimpse of Batuuli’s veils as she disappeared deeper into her many rooms. Only the flayed and mutilated pikemen were there to watch Lan pass by and neither of them spoke.

* * *

So it was back to the Red Room to wait. And wait. And wait. There was nothing to do except stare out the window, where she could watch either the bruise-yellow clouds rolling across the sky or the guards patrolling the palace grounds. From her high vantage, she could see all the way to Haven’s high walls, but there was no movement in the distant streets. All the essential work that should have been necessary to keep a city this size alive had been reduced to light maintenance now that the dead had it. Azrael may have his grand feasts, but the rest of Haven’s residents had no need to eat and therefore no need to cook, farm, raise livestock or run markets. Under his rule, there was no trade and so no economy—no corporations, no banks, no future markets to invest in or past yields to analyze. She wasn’t even certain they still used money in Haven. There was no illness; they needed no hospitals. His was the only law; there was no parliament, no barristers, no police. Newspapers and television had limped on for a while after the ascension, but one by one, that had stopped and now there was no radio, no movies, no magazines. Lan wondered if the dead were bored or if they even noticed they had nothing to do. Waiting here, it was all too easy to imagine them, thousands of them, standing motionless in their clean, bright homes, staring out windows or at walls or just into space, passing time without measuring it until they were needed.

She could not be so patient or so still. Pacing like a penned goat that senses slaughter, she went back and forth from the window, where she stood and imagined the non-workings of Haven’s citizens, to the bed, where she forced herself to sit and keep her hands off her dress or her hair. She tried to think about Azrael, to plan out her words or at least decide which of her limited store of sexual favors was likeliest to win his approval, but her thoughts had a way of drifting back to Batuuli’s chambers.

Solveig, dancing her across the floor. His hand squeezing her ass in that smirking way. His sparkling eyes when he’d spoken of the little French girl, the one who thought she was seducing him. The wet mark on Batuuli’s breast. Apparatuses.

She’d heard it said that if you fell in a well and looked up from the very bottom, you could see stars even at high noon. Well, Lan was in so far over her head that she couldn’t even see the stars.

She had left Norwood with the single thought of coming here, but beyond meeting him and making her small stand, she had no further plan. She knew he’d never let the Eaters die. If she hadn’t known it when she left Norwood (but she had), she’d known from the moment she first stood in his hall and felt his inhuman gaze move over her. Dollying for him only prolonged the inevitable. He would toy with her for as long as it amused him and then it would be over, nothing ended but her last hope, nothing changed.

She cried. A little. Then she stopped because she didn’t want her eyes to be red and swollen when he sent for her. And then she went back to the window because, really, what else was there to do?

The shadows lengthened. The day began to fail. Haven’s lights came on in gradual, glittering waves, but not in the Red Room. As it grew darker, the cold came on stronger and Lan’s dress was no proof against it. She walked for warmth, hugging herself in a futile effort to hide from the wind that blew through the window and under her thin skirt. Her freshly-shaven skin tingled at each gust, over-sensitive to the cold. It made her wonder if she would feel his cold as intensely.

The chill that swept through her then had nothing to do with the wind.

At last, she heard boots on the stairs. Lan groped her way to the door in near-total blackness, thereby earning herself a stubbed toe when the guard flung it open on her useless pretty shoes, so that her greeting was an explosive, “Bugger-fuck!”

The guard startled, then pinched his pretty lips together and stood aside.

“What?” Lan snapped, limping past him with a glower. “You already knew I was vulgar.”

He did not reply.

Down they went and out into the lamplit halls of the palace, where Lan was confronted almost at once by her reflection in a pane of glass.

She had known, of course, that the bodice was tight—during the long hours of her confinement, her eyes had often traveled down and with some awe over the bared swells of her breasts, made mountainous in this costume—but she had somehow not realized how her figure would be exaggerated, made voluptuous and even wanton. Her skirts clung to every curve, accentuating the fullness of her hips and thighs with shimmers and shadow. The corset came to a point in front, like a crude arrow pointing between her legs. She had been less naked than this in the bath.

The guard gave her a none-too-gentle shove, putting an abrupt end to her fascination. She walked, dazed, stealing glances in every window, mirror and polished surface they passed, as if to reassure herself that, yes, that woman was still her. That painted woman. That bare-legged, nearly bare-breasted woman.

That stranger.

Although she had now been to his dining hall twice, she nearly walked right past it, so absorbed was she in catching these intermittent and somehow reproving glances of herself. Her guard had to catch her arm, which was unexpected enough that, although he surely only meant to give her another terse shove toward the door, he instead hurled her through it. She might have been able to catch herself under ordinary circumstances, but the long skirt of her dress, her soft slippers and that very smooth formal floor conspired to send her crashing to the ground and over it until she banged into someone’s chair and lay in a heap with her dress hiked up around her sprawling legs and the wind knocked out of her.

There weren’t many to witness this demonstration of her grace; once again, the banquet tables were empty apart from Azrael himself, although the half-cleared leavings of a sumptuous feast suggested the guests had only just left. There were servants in abundance along the walls, some of whom had fluttered forward as if to help Lan up, only to retake their positions, casting uncertain glances at the throne.

Azrael himself had stood, either to greet her or in surprise at her violent entry. Now he seated himself again and pointed a casual claw at Lan’s escort. “Impale him.”

“My lord,” the guard stammered, even as other guards stepped up to take his pike. “Forgive…I didn’t—”

“I tripped,” said Lan, struggling to right herself. The corset would not allow her to bend, making even the simple act of standing into an awkward mess. “It wasn’t his fault.”

“If I have compassion, child, surely it cannot be in such abundance that you can beg it on behalf of the living and the dead.”

“But he didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Did you?” Azrael countered. “Did I? Fate strikes where it wills, not where it is deserved.”

“You’re not fate!”

Azrael drummed his fingers once on the edge of the table as the guard was pulled toward the door, then raised a hand to halt them. “So be it,” he said. “If it moves you to be appreciative, so I am moved to be merciful.”

When his hand dropped again, so did the guard, dead before he smacked into the ground.

But of course, thought Lan, flustered, he had been dead to begin with. She looked at him, at Azrael—Devil, God, Death—and wondered when and how she could have forgotten what he was.

He caught her staring and smiled behind his mask. “Such is my mercy. Come. Join me.”

A soft scraping sound behind her drew her eye. The nearest servants had left off clearing the tables of dirty plates and come to clear the body instead. His boots were dragging on the tiles. Azrael’s steward rushed over and knelt down to remove them. So they wouldn’t scuff the floor, she thought dimly, but her eyes remained fixed on the body’s bare feet. She could see them two ways: knobby and soft and pink, as they were in front of her now, and as she remembered them, scratched and muddy.