Land of the Beautiful Dead (39 page)

“Something else on your mind?” Lan mumbled, drowsing.

“Why do you ask?”

“You’re dim.” She lifted a hand and made it into most of a fist, poking out her first and last fingers. The shadow-bunny this produced was huge on the wall, but very faint, all its edges blurred away. “So let’s have it,” she said, letting her arm drop and pulling the blanket up a bit higher. “I’m listening.”

“You…” he began, only to lie silent for a good minute or three, with that the only word between them.

“What about me?” she prompted at last, mainly to keep from falling asleep on him.

“I wish I knew,” he murmured. In a stronger voice, very nearly the one he used to give orders to his deadheads, he said, “You have provided me many pleasant nights, diplomat, and your people have greatly profited from our alliance. I’ve no wish to see it end. Let us negotiate a renewal of terms.”

“Right this minute?” Lan heaved a sigh with her eyes shut. “You going to end the Eaters this time around?”

“No.”

“Then it can wait until morning.”

Something itched at her shoulder. Lan brushed it off, realizing too late that it was his hand and not a loose thread or lost spider after all. She reached back in apology, groping until she found his arm and could pull it around her hip. There, he let it rest as if it were some inanimate thing separate from himself, but as the minutes passed, she felt him begin to relax and finally truly embrace her. That was nice, in spite of the chill, unnatural feel of him, but it wasn’t restful and the longer it lasted, the further she fell from sleep.

“What new terms, exactly?” she asked at last.

“One shipment of food each month may keep your people from starvation, but likely, they yet know hunger. As I have heard it said, give a man a fish and you only feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him all his life.”

“We already know how to fish. We just don’t do it because it takes a long time and the woods are full of dead people trying to eat you.”

“It’s a metaphor, Lan. I offer seed from my stores, a gift given once that can sustain your people forever after. Would that not be worth…say…one month? Twenty-eight days and nights of your good grace to buy fuller stores every winter that follows, a fuller table at every meal? Would you not call that a bargain?”

“I would,” Lan agreed, “but space in the greenhouses is at its limits already. We’d have to stop growing one thing to grow something else we know nothing about, something that might not even take in our soil. It’s a nice thought, but we just can’t afford to take that kind of risk.”

“I could send supplies enough to build a new greenhouse, then. One equal to any found in Haven.”

“Where?” she countered. “Every inch of Norwood is spoken for. Those walls went up when there were twenty people scratching out a life there. Now there’s more than eighty. You going to build us new borders?”

“I will not armor nor arm my enemy,” he said. His fingers drummed once on her hip. “But I will give blankets. Cookware. Farming equipment.”

“We have all that.”

“But have you anything in Norwood that has not seen thirty years of use and repair?”

“Are you seriously suggesting I sell myself for a garden fork just because it’s shinier than the ones we’ve got?”

“Do not be so quick to dismiss the value of extravagance in a world of survival. When the scavengers come to your town, which of their wares sells for the highest price? Food and water? Or sweets and ribbons?”

“If Elvie Peters wants a new ribbon in her hair, let her walk to Haven and ask for one.”

“Ashcroft,” he corrected with a smile in his voice. “You only walked to Ashcroft.”

“I could have walked all the way if it wasn’t for the Eaters.”

“Yes, and you could have flown if you had wings.” His sigh stirred her hair. He combed it into place again with careful passes of his claws. “Never mind Norwood then. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What do you want? What, truly? There must be something.” He took a calming breath and hid the mounting frustration in his tone behind a low, cajoling growl. “Some long-held wish, fragile and a little foolish. Something you always knew you would never find in the low village of your birth, but which I can give you. Only I.”

“There is, actually.”

He sat up at once, looming over her like a vulture, one hand raised and hovering in the air above her, poised to seize hold. “Name it.”

“End the Eaters.”

He exhaled in a curt, coarse rush and lay back down. “You are the most obstinate human I have ever known.”

“Tee hee,” said Lan, not bothering to open her eyes. “How you flatter me, sir.”

“Do you think you are the first to ever stand before me and demand an end to the hungering dead? One month in my palace, at my table…in my bed…was enough to soften the resolve of all your predecessors. Yours has only grown. Why? Why do you keep asking when you know the answer will never change?”

“I realize those are whatchits…those questions you only ask to sound all brooding and dramatic—”

“Rhetorical.”

“Right, those. But I don’t care. I’m going to answer anyway. How’s that for confidence?” She twisted around to look at him, to see his impassive face and the steady light of his eyes when she said, “What’s happened to the world is obscene. It has to end. It has to. And until it does, I will never stop asking.”

“I have heard many ‘nevers’ in my time, child. I have outlived them all.”

“Then this’ll be another first for you, won’t it?”

He grunted and took his arm back, moving away from her on the bed, but not leaving it. Not yet. “I don’t know why I tolerate your insolence.”

“Because I do that thing you like with my tongue,” she said, unruffled, and resettled herself.

“That must be it.” He was quiet, albeit in a distinctly unquiet way, for several minutes more, long enough that she was nearly asleep in spite of her best intentions when he suddenly said, “Are you married?”

She had to turn all the way over and look at him to make sure he’d really said that. Oddly, when she saw that he was indeed serious and expected an answer, her first impulse was to laugh.

The glow from his eyes perceptibly brightened. “Why is that funny? Do they no longer marry in Norwood?”

There was a hint of a sneer on the last word.

“I’m not the kind of girl you marry,” she told him, turning back onto her side to sleep. “I’m the kind you fuck behind the smoking shed and hope your mates don’t find out.”

“Is that why you came to me? In the hopes I would set you at my side for the whole of the world to see?”

She snorted.

“Apparently not. Is it a child then?”

“Is what a child?”

“The reason you came here.”

“You know why I came here.”

“I know what you came to do. Your motives yet confound me. If it isn’t a man or a child, who is it? Who has your love in
Norwood
?”

That was definitely a sneer.

“No one,” she said. “Norwood isn’t exactly known for its open arms when it comes to strangers. Hell, Timmus was just from Drybridges, three towns over, and he’s still ‘that foreigner’ after twenty years. Me? My mother was born in America. She was ‘that damned Yank’ until she died and I’ll be ‘that little Yank’ until I die.”

“You were born there, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, so?”

“Your father was one of them, was he not?”

A hard, thin face tried to come into focus, bringing with it the phantom smell of hot tea and wet dog. Lan grimly pushed it all away. She was sleeping. “So?” she said again, with a bit of an edge. “It’s not like I knew who he was. I’m not even sure if she knew. I was nothing to them.”

“Then let them go.” He caressed her shoulder and, when that had no effect, gripped it suddenly and pulled her onto her back, looming over her with his face too close and his eyes too bright. “You owe them nothing. They can give you nothing. What can it profit you to play this childish game? Leave them to their fate.” His voice softened, roughened. “Give yourself to me and I will give you all the world.”

“I don’t want a dead world.” She put her hand over his before he could take it back and held it there. After a few false starts, she said the rest of it: “But I will stay with you, if—”

“Yes, I know how this song ends.” He shook his head, almost but not quite smiling. “And how long do you propose to remain my prisoner, if I were to agree? I will not,” he added. “But you make me curious. How do you balance your company against my hungering dead? Shall you give one hour for each corpse that lies down sensibly dead? One month for each village freed from their predation? One year for each year this world has known them? However shall you make it seem convincingly equivalent to me?”

“If you give it all, so will I.”

“And this means what, exactly?”

Lan took a bracing breath and sat up. She reached out and took his hand. He let her lift it, unresisting, and watched without speaking as she kissed it and placed it on her neck. She shivered, but only once. She waited.

Azrael was no longer smiling. His eyes, dim and playful only moments ago, were now almost too bright to meet. “And this means what,” he said, without a trace of humor or curiosity, “exactly?”

“It means…It means you can keep me,” she said. His slack hand on her neck was cold and heavy, and holding it there was starting to feel a bit ridiculous. Lan let go of him and pulled the blanket up, pretending it needed all of her attention so she wouldn’t have to meet his burning stare. “If you end them, you can keep me.”

“Keep you,” he echoed. “How coy. One wonders how sincere the offer can possibly be, when you do not dare to speak it aloud.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes. I do. But do you?” Between one breath and the next, the dry distance of his tone closed and his face was right there before her, all sharp teeth and freezing heat. “Say it. Say it, if you mean it.”

The words he wanted rose as far as her throat and stuck there. “Raise me up,” she said instead. “Tonight, if you want. I’m ready.”

He stared at her, his chest moving harder and harder with his breaths, but making no sound. Throwing back the blanket suddenly, he got up, keeping his broad back to her as he gathered his clothes.

“Where are you going?” Lan crawled to the edge of the bed, watching as he dressed, searching out one last coin in her empty purse, anything with glimmer enough to hold him just one more minute. She found none. “I said I’m ready!”

He cinched his belt tight, kicked his golden collar out of the way and picked up his mask.

“It’s all right!” she insisted. “I know you don’t want another…another…” His unexpected rage made it difficult to remember the right word. “…sick elephant. I get that. I do. But I won’t be one, Azrael! You don’t have to take my memories away to make me stay with you. When you raise me up, it’ll be the real me!”

He turned on her with his eyes blazing, throwing the shadows of the bedcurtains at crazy angles so that the whole room seemed to spin around her. “And that’s all that’s stopping me, is it? The thought that I would create another mindless, tittering fool for my dead court? Were it not for that, I would have raised you up long ago, for surely I kill all my bedmates who provide me pleasant enough sport!”

“What? No! I didn’t mean…” Her voice failed and would not come all the way back in. “I thought…I thought this was what you wanted.”

His head rocked back as from a slap. “You what?”

“You just said to give—”

“Not your life! I’ll own no part of that! That is entirely your foolishness!”

“Foolishness?”

“You think you can buy the world with the promise of your body! How shall you not be a fool?”

“At least I’m buying it dear,” she shot back. “You’re the one selling the world for sex, so who’s the fool here?”

His mask was unchanging, but the tendons in his opened throat creaked ominously.

Lan rolled her eyes and raked a hand through her hair. “I didn’t mean that. Look, can’t we just…I’m ready to die for you here!”

“Not for me,” he sneered. “For your cause.”

“But if it was for you, that would make a difference?” she demanded. “If it saves lives or takes even one step toward cleaning up the colossal mess you’ve made of the world, well, fuck that, but if it’s for you, only you,
then
you’d consider it?”

His eyes faded, flickered and burned out savagely bright. “You twist my meaning.”

“The hell I do! You want me! I know you want me! What is all this pointless horseshit about, all the reading and napkins and that, if not for keeping me? Why muck around with seeds and…and bloody blankets for a month at a go, when I can be forever for you?”

“Forever. What do you know of forever?” he asked with undisguised contempt. “What do you know of death?”

He was baiting her to evade the question. Funny, how she could recognize that and still jump right up and bite.

“I’ve seen death my whole life, thanks to you!”

He laughed at her, if that harsh slap of sound could be called a laugh. “Seeing is not understanding,
child
.”