Land of the Beautiful Dead (33 page)

Lan straightened up from her smiling, unfocused inspection of an herb box to see a dead man right in front of her, aggressively close. She moved aside, in case she was blocking his way in the narrow aisles between the rows, but all he did was move that much closer, practically pushing her into a bed of thick stalks with a strong oniony smell.

“Here, watch it,” she said, just like she really thought he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Why? Am I in your way?” He took another step toward her, forcing her to stumble backwards through the plants and into the aisle beyond it. “What are you doing here, warmblood? What do you want?”

“Nothing. Just looking.” Lan gave a little more ground, only to bump up against another dead man. And there were two others behind him, she saw, and more coming down the rows toward her. She had not felt the missing weight of her hunting knife in many days, but she did now. Her eyes went of their own accord to a garden fork stuck in the soil, then beyond it to Master Wickham, waiting over by the door. She knew at a glance neither would be any help to her, and in a last effort to defuse a situation she didn’t know how she’d started, Lan faced the one who seemed to be their leader and made herself put out her hand. “I’m Lan,” she told him. “I—”

“I know what you are.”

What, he said. Not who.

Since he was ignoring her hand, Lan waved it at the rows. “I used to work in a place like this.”

“I very much doubt that.”

Lan swallowed her first response, reminding herself of her own uncharitable comparisons between this greenhouse and Norwood’s own. “Yeah, it’s a lot nicer here, that’s for sure.”

The compliment brought out unmistakable hostility in every dead eye.

Nonplussed, Lan pretended not to see it. “We grow peaches in Norwood. Some barley, mostly for beer. A little veg, but nothing like this. I don’t even know what half this stuff is,” she admitted with a laugh. “But I’m a good worker.”

Master Wickham said her name and started toward her.

“So if you ever need another pair of hands—” Lan continued stubbornly.

“Talented as I’m sure you are with your hands,” the dead man interrupted, “I have enough of our lord’s warmblood whores underfoot. I don’t need another. Go be bored somewhere else.”

It was Tempo all over again and even knowing how badly that had ended, her first thought was how close to hand that tiller was and the gratifying damage it could do to this deadhead’s pretty face. This time, she restrained herself. Instead, with as much civility as she could muster at a moment’s notice, she said, “I don’t mean to get in the way.”

“Then get out.”

It wasn’t worth another fight.

Lan turned around and bumped into another dead man. He gave her a shove, so that she stumbled against the first one’s chest. Her long skirts caught at the crops. When he pushed her away, her legs tangled up together and she went down, crushing leeks and scraping her back on a hidden harvest marker. She kicked at him, which was a mistake and she knew it in the next instant, but fortunately, the same stupid skirts that had helped trip her up now swaddled her clumsy attack and kept her from landing even a weak blow, although she did hear more fabric tear.

“Get out,” the dead man said, grabbing her arm and flipping her over into the muddy aisle.

She tried, but her feet pedaled uselessly inside her skirts. She thrashed on the ground like a dying rat, snuffling and spitting, her lungs choked with the stink of earth and onions, until finally two strong hands slipped under her arms and she was thumped upright.

“If our lord wants to put another of his useless breathers to work under me, let
him
say so,” the dead man was saying to whoever had her (and she knew who had her, even without turning. His hands were perfectly polite). “Until then, she’s not welcome here.”

“I quite understand,” said Master Wickham, giving Lan a perfunctory pat as he released her. “But we all have our orders and if I choose to err on the side of indulgence, it is only because I believe it is the wisest course of action. He’s very interested in this one.”

“He’s very interested in all of them at first,” the other dead man sneered, but he moved back and when he did, the other dead people did too, clearing a path to the door so Lan could limp away on Master Wickham’s arm. One of them bumped her shoulder hard as she passed by and another muttered, “Warmblood,” at her back, but Lan didn’t respond and the rest just stepped aside.

The morning breeze hit like a slap after the close air of the greenhouse—twice as cold as she remembered, stale and grey and lifeless. Lan turned into its current, letting its chill soothe her burning face as she tried to think how it had gone wrong this time.

“You going to tell me you told me so?” Lan asked tightly.

“I can’t imagine that I have to.”

Lan shook her head, not in agreement or in denial, but just as a kind of impotent frustration. “What happened in there? What did I do to set them off?”

“Try to understand,” Master Wickham said in a hopeless way. “They may be gardeners now, but they were raised to serve in our lord’s army. To drive the living from Haven is the only reason they were made and the rage that formed the foundation of that command has made an imprint upon the very core of their being that can never be erased. To a very real extent, they have no choice but to act as they do toward you, but their feelings are not their own.”

“So you’re saying Azrael hates me too.”

“I’m not saying that at all. He’s alive, as you are. He’s…” Master Wickham frowned and shook his head. “He’s…old and strange…but alive. Whatever mood was on him when he raised his army has long passed. I certainly do not claim to know what he thinks or feels about you, but please do not think the enmity you have encountered here today somehow reflects his present mind.”

“Yeah, right. It’s not personal and I should just learn to live with it.”

“Oh, it’s very personal,” he said seriously. “But they can’t entirely help themselves, either. Being alive, that is something you will never completely understand. Life is like…” He scouted about the empty yard, then waved at her and said, “Well, like you are now, in motion between a past state and a future possibility. Death has no motion. It is a static thing, without potential or possibility. Understand?”

“Not even a little.”

“All right,” he said, undaunted. “Say I photograph you right now, mid-stride.”

“Okay?”

“You have already moved on, but that photograph never can. The step is never finished and can never be finished, but the photograph of that moment is whole unto itself. It is a complete image of an incomplete step.”

“So you can’t ever learn anything new? You’re all just frozen where you were when you died?”

“When we were raised,” he corrected. “And no, not exactly. Most of the dead who reside in Haven were raised to serve as Azrael’s army during his ascension and with very few exceptions, he has since put them all to different work, but the key is that
he
put them to work. His will is as fundamental to our being as your breath and blood are to you. When he commands his army to act as servants or watchmen or gardeners, they have no choice but to obey, but it is not what they were raised to do and they will always feel that conflict. Even Azrael himself cannot alter the sense of purpose with which we were originally imbued.”

“Why didn’t he—” Lan began and quickly realized what a tremendously rude thing she was about to ask. Sometimes she forgot Master Wickham was dead, like the rest of them. “Never mind.”

“Why didn’t he kill off his army and raise them again better suited for the work he would have them do in Haven?” Master Wickham asked mildly. “I don’t believe he can. As unhappy as his Children were, I’m certain he would have remade them, if he had that power. I suspect we can only be raised once. To return to my allegory of the photograph, he can either tear it up and take another or learn to live with an imperfect picture. He cannot reuse the same film.”

Lan found herself thinking back to the hapless guards who’d escorted her into her first audience with Azrael and who were very likely going to suffer for it forever, then of the guard who’d flung her a hair too forcefully into the dining hall. Azrael had ordered him impaled with all the emotion of a man ordering a fresh cup of wine, then had killed him solely to score points off Lan. More evidence of the monster who went masked as a man, she’d thought at the time, but now she wondered.

“Is he sorry he made you?” she asked slowly. “Is he looking for reasons to take it back?”

“Possibly,” Wickham replied, seemingly unbothered by the notion. “Now that I think on it, he has become rather quick to execute the dead of later years.”

“So he might regret you too.”

“He might indeed.”

“And he might kill you, if you gave him the least little reason.”

“He might.”

“How do you feel about that?”

A faint wrinkle appeared between his brows as he looked at her. “Fine,” he said in a slow, inquiring manner that suggested the words, ‘Weren’t you listening?’ without having to say them aloud. “All his dead were raised to a purpose and their autonomy restricted in some manner that they might best serve him in that purpose. I am proud to serve my lord. I take no pleasure in my work, but only in that I do it well, at his direction and to further his rule.”

“That’s horrible,” said Lan, peering at him. “Do you know that’s horrible?”

“We must define the word in different ways,” Wickham replied without sarcasm. “I regard Haven as an oasis of peace in a world of war. It knows no unrest. Its people work without resentment or ambition, knowing their efforts are always appreciated by our lord. Can you say the same of the living?”

“No. We’re messy and imperfect and we don’t always get along, but we’re our own selves. We’re free and you’re not. That should bother you, you know.”

“Why? Autonomy is not an arm or an eye; once it’s gone, you don’t miss it.”

“Because he doesn’t let you miss it,” said Lan, thrusting her face toward him and speaking slow and clear.

He leaned over to meet her, speaking just the same way. “And we don’t.” Then he straightened up, once more smiling. “I say, I am enjoying this. I hope we’ll have many more debates during your stay.”

“I’m not upsetting you?”

“Not at all. Our lord’s living companions have little or no experience with the dead beyond those you call Eaters and there’s often some anxiety in their first days. I’m happy to address any concerns you may have. Ah,” he said, frowning with some consternation at one of the windows. “I believe Miss Mannerly-Buggery-Do has spied us.”

“Oh hell.”

“Indeed. I suppose you ought to face the music, as they say.”

“Balls to that, I hate music.” Tempo’s face tried to swim up at her, all accusing eyes and a broken clarinet. She pushed it away. “You said something about looking at pubs?”

“I did,” he said, looking startled. “Now?”

“Now. I love pubs.” Lan hiked her torn skirts up and kicked her muddy slippers off. “Let’s run.”

“Run?”

“I really love pubs.” Lan looked back over her shoulder at the windows of the palace, but her etiquette teacher was nowhere to be seen in any of them, which meant any second now, she was going to be popping out one of the doors and coming right for them. “What do you say?”

“I say—” Master Wickham removed his shoes and loosened his tie, then took her arm in a strong, cold grip. “—the concept of a public alehouse has its roots in the Roman tabernae, from which we get the word ‘tavern’ and if we run two miles or so this way, we’ll come to the oldest surviving tavern in Haven.”

They ran.

* * *

Lan was very late to dinner that night. She knew she would be. The pubs Master Wickham took her to see were only a few miles from the palace and there really weren’t that many of them, but none of them were used these days and so none of them had power. Poking around in all those dark, musty buildings made it easy not to notice how low the sun was getting outside, until suddenly, it was night. They walked back straight-away, but by then she was already late for dinner and she still had to get cleaned up and dressed, an hour made to feel infinitely longer by having Serafina yell at her the whole time.

As punishment, Lan was fit into a very tight gown and laced into a corset so brutally that she thought a sudden sneeze might well crack a rib. She then had to make the long walk to the dining hall, pinched at every seam from her neck to her hips and struggling for every breath. She was feeling distinctly light-headed by the time she arrived. Hungry as she was, the sight and smell of the food was more an assault than a temptation, making her feel a bit sick just looking at it. It was almost like being drunk in a vaguely removed way, as if all the empty pubs Lan had visited today were still open on some other plane of existence and some other-Lan had spent the day drinking while Lan had plodded along behind Master Wickham, staring up at original oak beam rafters and kneeling down to study the baseboards. She felt sick, strangled. The bright lights did not seem to be fixed above her, but moved slyly about at the very edges of her vision. The colorful costumes and painted faces of the revelers blurred together, throbbing in and out of focus with every step she took. The music was exceptionally loud tonight, scraping across her ears and stabbing her sinuses, so that she didn’t even notice how quiet the rest of the room was.