Land of the Beautiful Dead (27 page)

“Wait,” said Lan.

“You are to break the walls of Norwood.”

“You can’t do that! The Eaters—”

“Shatter their greenhouses. Burn every building. Let nothing stand but the stones of their foundations.”

Deimos nodded once. “And the people, my lord?”

“No!” Lan leapt up, darting around the table to catch at his arm. “I’m sorry! Please! Kill me if you have to, but leave them alone!”

“Shall I show compassion?” he asked, staring coldly down at her as she clung to him.

“Yes! Please!”

“Whose? Mine or yours?”

Lan could only look at him, knowing she was powerless, knowing he knew it too.

He waited.

“Mine,” she whispered. “Mine, but—”

“So be it. Captain.”

“Yes, lord?”

“When you kill them, you will break their backs and burn them. You see? I can be merciful. And I expect you to be grateful for it when next we meet.” Azrael shook her off and seized her by the neck of her gown in the same motion, hurling her off the dais into the Revenant’s ready hands. “Get her out of my sight.”

“Yes, lord.” Deimos turned, dragging Lan with him as he marched swiftly away.

“Please, don’t do this!” Lan cried, stumbling as she fought against the Revenant’s grip, to no avail. “Azrael! Damn it, I said I was sorry!”

He did not answer. He kept his broad back to her and stood, motionless and unfeeling as a statue. She thought he might have turned his head slightly when the first of her noisy sobs shook out of her, but if so, it was only slightly. Then she was out, being passed into the hands of Azrael’s steward with all the care and consideration that might be shown to a bag of potatoes.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” the steward asked, pinching Lan’s sleeves between the extreme tips of his fingers so as to touch her as little as possible.

Deimos glanced back at the doors to the dining hall, his brows slightly furrowed. “He spoke of wanting her grateful at their next meeting. You would know better than I what to do with her until then.”

“I never want to see him again!” Lan wept.

They ignored her.

“All right.” The steward passed her off to a pikeman. “To our lord’s chambers.”

“I won’t go!”

The steward signaled a second pikeman. Between them, they picked her up as she struggled and simply carried her away.

* * *

They had changed the bedding in Azrael’s room from black and gold to grey and silver, which, with the cushions covered over and the room mostly in shadows, gave the whole thing the appearance of stone. Not a bed at all, but an altar. A place of sacrifice. How fitting that the chains she’d last worn should still be here.

Lan locked herself angrily into them and sat down to wait.

Hours passed without any way to count them. The fire had no fuel, but burned no lower. The only sound was the fountain spilling endlessly into Azrael’s bath. Her only companions were his sightless, staring masks.

Gradually, her thoughts shifted from
Have they left yet
? to
Where are they now
? Just how far was it from Haven to Norwood? She’d never spent more than an hour or so in any one ferry, in part because the ferrymen tended to keep regular rounds from which they were unwilling to deviate for one fare, but also because the ferries themselves just couldn’t hold that much of a charge. If the batteries went dry outside the walls, even one mile might as well be a thousand. But the Revenants had better vehicles and no reason to fear the Eaters. They had done in one day and one night the same distance that had taken Lan two months. Could they be there again already? How were they met?

Was everyone she knew dead?

The more she tried not to think of that, the more those thoughts ate their way in. Anger distracted her for a while, but couldn’t last. Fear followed, erosive, opening up a wider, blacker emptiness inside her that filled slowly up with guilt. Eventually, even that was gone and she was left not thinking, not even really feeling anymore, but only waiting.

Finally, he came.

She heard the door open, heard him say, “What—?” and then there was nothing for some time, only the weight of his stare. At last, the heavy door closed. His footsteps approached, aimed nowhere but at her. Lan tensed, her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her.

He sat on the foot of the bed right behind her. She could feel the chill from his body, see the grey blur of him at the edge of her perceptions. When he took his mask off and set it on the bed beside him, one of its horns caught in her hair. He unhooked it, stroked her hair once, then clasped his hands and leaned forward over his thighs. He did not speak.

All the time he’d been gone, she had imagined this moment, when she could be defiant in chains at his feet. Now he was here. She had no strength, no courage, only Norwood.

“I am sorry,” Lan said. “If that makes any difference. I’m…so sorry. Please, I’ll do anything—”

“I have no way to call them back.”

“Then they’re all dead.”

They sat together, silent.

“They may choose not to provoke my Revenants,” he said at last. “They know they are unmatched.”

“I know we’re unmatched. I still provoked you.” Lan rubbed her dry eyes. Her chains rattled. “Haven’t you learned by now how stupidly self-destructive human nature really is?”

Azrael’s hand gripped her shoulder and gently squeezed. “I have learned it is unpredictable.”

“That’s not very comforting.”

There was a short, yet profound pause and then he said, “Are you…Do you want me to comfort you?”

Did
she? She had never felt less like laughing in her life, but she did, and it truly felt funny. The tears that immediately followed were just as unstoppable and just as honest.

Azrael heaved a sigh that stirred her hair. Then he slipped his hands beneath her arms and pulled her up to sit on the bed beside him. Her chains weren’t quite long enough to allow that, so she ended up bent double, sobbing hard with her hands stuck out while he fetched the key from its hook on the wall and unlocked her shackles. Freed, she fell back and rolled onto her side, drawing her knees up to her chest, and just let the tears come.

She saw their faces—Danae and her children, snotty little Abbey and serious Ivy, who slept on the other side of the curtain next to Lan and her mother; Mother Muggs, who kept a hawk’s eye on all the goings-on of the Women’s Lodge and whose pinching fingers traveled freely through everyone’s pockets when no one was there to see; the Goode twins, Pippa and Posey, who had bought Lan’s share of the orchard for a pair of worn-out boots and a patched rucksack; Sheriff Neville and the louts who served under him, keeping order with batons and bare knuckles; Mayor Fairchild and his prune-faced wife and their brood of soft-handed children, Quillan and Henry and Sora and Eithon—oh, Eithon—none of whom ever set foot in a greenhouse unless it was to mock those working there. She was close to none of them, but she knew them all, every man and woman, every elder and every child, and knowing that dawn might find them all in an ash-pile while Eaters wandered through the broken glass and burnt wood of their ruined village made it easy to forget all the bad feelings and remember simply that they were human and how precious and rare life was.

If it ended tonight in Norwood, it would be her fault.

She hadn’t been able to stop the tears when they started. She couldn’t call them back when they dried up, even though her misery still sat like a stone in her chest, undiminished. She stared into the wall, her heart breaking into smaller and sharper pieces with every beat, and thought of herself in this very room, saying, ‘There never was an Eater turned back by tears.’

“I wish I’d never come here,” she said.

Azrael, waiting out her useless hysterics over by the fire, did not reply.

“I want to go home.” She curled up tighter, burying her face against her knees. “Let me go.”

“Why?”

“I should die with the rest of them.”

“Why?” he asked again, this time with the faintest hint of irritation. “How would that help?”

“It doesn’t.” She laughed once, bitterly. “I can’t do anything to help them. No matter how hard I try.”

“Self-pity is not attractive.”

“So? I’ll never be one of the beautiful dead.” Thoughts of Norwood rose like bubbles in mud, slow to surface, bringing with them the stink of deeper decay. She had always known this would end in failure. Now she would have to return to tumbled walls, to the dead staggering restlessly through blood and mud and broken glass. No one would be there to burn her when they took her down. No one would break her back to stop her from getting up again. “Let me go,” she said again. “You said you would. You said you’d send me anywhere I wanted.”

“You will recall I am a tyrant.”

She thought of Norwood. Pippa and Posey would have turned the rows as soon as Lan left, planting their own good barley and selling Lan’s marrow plants and next season’s bean seed to those who could afford no better. The trees which had been the source of such grim pride to Lan’s mother would be fruiting, assuming they hadn’t already been picked clean to supply Azrael’s first demand. In the alehouse, they would be making yeast cakes and drying hops in preparation for brewing the beer that would keep the mayor richer than everyone else for another year. The late-season lambs would be weaned and their mothers ready for fresh breeding; the yearlings slaughtered at Yule would soon be coming out of the smokehouse to make room for the hogs that would go under the hammer at Beltane. These were the rhythms of Norwood’s simple song: sow and reap, work and sleep, birth and death. Every day like the day before, building a year that would pass the same as every other.

Azrael’s rough hand brushed at her shoulder. She hadn’t heard him approach.

“Please end the Eaters.” Lan rolled over, catching at his arm before he could withdraw. “Just for tonight. Please. If they have to die, let them die, but please don’t make them come back!”

“Deimos has his orders. He will fulfill them.”

“Yeah, he’ll break their backs so they can’t move, but they’ll still come back! He’ll burn them, but he’ll burn them alive!”

“Not alive.”

“They scream, Azrael! Eaters scream! Don’t tell me they can’t feel it!”

He clenched his jaw and looked away.

“There are children in Norwood! There are babies! Have you ever seen an infant Eater? Have you ever heard the…the sound they make?”

She could see his pulse ticking in the black vein exposed at his opened throat. Otherwise, he did not move.

“Please.” Lan pulled his unresisting hand close and curled around it, pressing her brow to his cold, cracked flesh. “One day. Just in Norwood. No one has to know!”

“No.”

“Let them die,” said Lan, “or let me die with them.”

“No!” His hand wrenched free of hers. “Hate me, if it makes the grief easier to bear, but I will not unmake my victory for you. The people of your village must suffer the fate they forge by their actions.” He stood glaring down at her a moment, then seized his belt and battled it open. “As you did, when you came here and when you gave yourself to me.”

She rolled over in his bed, staring at the wall without seeing it as he undressed. Her eyes ached, but stayed dry. Her chest hurt, but she kept breathing just fine. She could feel the mattress shift as he climbed onto it, but it might as well be happening to someone else, in a story she had once been told and half-forgotten.

“This is the fate you have chosen,” he told her, trailing the backs of his fingers down her thigh. When he found the hem of her dress, he turned his hand and drew it back up, fabric bunching around his wrist. His palm made a rasping sound against her skin, unpleasant to hear, but not to feel. “So embrace it. The past is dead.”

“So is Norwood,” she whispered.

“Perhaps. But even if so, grief cannot bring it back to life. Leave it behind.” He slipped his hand beneath the folds of her dress and cupped her breast. “Be with me.”

With him? With the man, the
monster
, who had sent the Revenants to Norwood, who had raised them in the first place? He was Death. He was the Devil. So why wasn’t she fighting? Why not scream, kick, spit in his horrible face? She let him touch her, caress her, and if she shuddered when he did it, it was only because she wanted it so much. Why did she
want
this?

Nothing had changed. Norwood may still be burning and all that she had may be lost, but all that was in the world outside. Here, if only in this room, this bed, she thought she could let it go. It would be all the heavier when she had to pick it up again, but she could let it go for now.

Lan rolled over and put her arms around him.

He stiffened, then shook his head hard and hissed, “
Stop it
! Your past lovers may have found a pretense of desire endearing, but I do not. I will not be mocked in my own bed!”

“W-What?”

“Close your eyes,” he ordered, roughly gripping her thigh and maneuvering himself atop her. “Say nothing. I’ll take what I want, I need no help from you.”