Land of the Beautiful Dead (61 page)

The silence was absolute now. The burning man had burnt too much to move and the pikeman had stopped stirring its ashes to stare at her, open-mouthed.

At last, Azrael said, “I give you one chance to beg my forgiveness, for I know you are upset and were you in sober mind, you would not trade all you’ve done here for the sake of one man whose doom was already writ large across his brow.”

“Your forgiveness? I’m supposed to be sorry? Me?” In spite of her best efforts, her voice began to rise. “Fine. Then I’m sorry.”

“For?” he prompted ominously.

“For trespassing in your personal garden of torture. For killing someone before you had a chance to enjoy his suffering. For hitting you.” She tossed off an angry shrug. “Take your pick. I don’t mean any of it anyway.”

His hands tightened, letting her feel the prick of each claw. He said, not loudly but with great clarity, “I’m waiting, Lan.”

“It might save some time if you just told me what to say.”

Azrael yanked her onto her toes to bring her within inches of his face, but his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper as he said, “Again and again, I have shown you privilege beyond that of any who have come before you, and again and again, you repay my generosity with insults and
lies
. Know that I would rather see punishment fall where it is earned—” He stabbed a stare at the pikeman beyond her, then turned the terrible heat of his eyes back on her. “—but if you insist on claiming a death, I tell you now, you will own it.”

She did not have the luxury of confusion, not even for a moment. Her anger turned at once to horror and horror to ice. She didn’t bother pleading; she fought, heaving backwards until her shoulder scraped in its socket, but she could not break his hold. He merely turned around, his grip like iron, and started walking. She dug in her feet until they went out from under her and then he dragged her. She screamed, she slapped, she scratched at the ground. His step never slowed. He took her past the pikes where Eaters writhed and snatched at her to the last boy from Mallowton and there set her roughly on her feet.

Hoarse, shaking, breathless, Lan looked up, seeing Azrael first, his arms folded across his broad chest, immoveable, unblinking. Above him, towering like a pagan idol, the boy. And beyond that, silent as scarecrows, the flayed guard and the ferryman watched her. When her eyes came at last back to Azrael, he unfolded one arm, gave the boy a slap to the stomach, and folded it again, all without expression or hesitation.

The boy woke with a groggy groan, then screamed. His eyes filled and overfilled with pain, like the Eater’s mouth with drool. He screamed again…and again…and again.

“I once saw a girl impaled in Batavia,” Azrael said, maddeningly calm. “She lived eight days, a stripling no taller than my hip, while her father, called by his neighbors ‘The Ox’ for his strength and vitality, succumbed before the pike was fully fixed.” He ran a coolly pensive gaze up and down the boy’s thin frame, musing, “The human will to survive, ineffable, makes such things impossible to predict.”

“Stop it!”

“I? Oh no, Lan. I made my will plain when I had him pinned here and my will has not changed. If you want his suffering ended, end it yourself.”

Lan reached up through air that felt as thick as tar and took hold of the boy’s ankles. Again and again, she took a bracing breath and felt her muscles tighten, but she could not bring herself to pull. If only he would tell her what he wanted—whether it was to live or die. His screams held at least some shards of fear as much as pain; his eyes were not completely devoid of intelligence and reason. She could look up at him and see that he saw her and knew what it meant to feel her gripping at him. He did not beg her to do it and did not beg her to stop. He only screamed.

Her hands fell away. “I can’t.”

“Of course you can,” he said, adding acidly, “Have you forgotten you’ve done so once already?”

“I can’t kill him! He can’t die!” She swung on him, her hands in shaking fists. “I came here to end the Eaters! You want me to make one!”

“Spare me your sermon. With or without you, his fate will fall on him just the same. All that changes is the timeline. How much longer shall you draw out his death? Have you no mercy?”

“Don’t you talk to me about mercy! Don’t you even say the word! You don’t know the first fucking thing about mercy or Men!”

“I know I did not go to these wretches’ home to do murder! They came to mine!”

“You know shit!” she shouted, dizzy with rage and hopelessness and horror in every possible shade.

“Mind your tongue.”

“Mind
your
bloody tongue, you…you dripping fuckhole shit-eating titless ass-goblin! Don’t you bloody scold me for my fucking mouth after you kill an entire town full of people who never did anything to you!”

His hand lashed out, seizing her face in a cruel grip, thumb and forefinger digging into her cheeks until she feared his claws would punch right through. “That is
enough
,” he snarled. “You have forgotten to whom you speak! Get on your knees—Get on your
liar’s
knees and beg my forgiveness!”

“No!”

“Beg and I shall allow you to flee.”

“I’m not fleeing anywhere!”

“I said,
beg
!” he roared.

“I’m not your fucking dog!” she shouted back at him.

“And you won’t beg.”

“No!”

“No.” He kept his grip on her, but glanced up at the impaled boy, whose voice had roughened, but who kept trying to scream regardless. “He begged, of course. He begged me to spare his life when he knew that I would not. He begged me to end his suffering when it had only just begun. He would have said anything, made any promise, but you choose instead to stand armored in my affection and lecture me on mercy—”

“Ha!”

“—and never, not even
once
, ask me simply…to free him.”

The heat of rage drained out of her at once.

He saw it go and his cruel smile widened. “No, you never thought of that, did you? It should have been first from your lips and would have been, if you truly cared for the plight of the living in the land of the dead. You don’t. The Lan who walked alone from Norwood to Ashcroft died in my bed, riding the Devil to rapture. You may strike my face and call me all the names you please, but you will never be that mother’s child again. You are
my
Lan now, made in
my
image…and you can stand here all night and watch this youth’s life bleed out before you, secure in the knowledge that you never sold the last piece of your pride.”

“I hate you,” she whispered and had to cover her eyes before he could see the lie in them, because it wasn’t true. Even now…even with all
this
before her…it wasn’t true. It broke her the way nothing else in his horrible garden could and the tears that she had kept locked up all this time came puking out. The more she fought to silence them, the harder they tore free, until she was as hoarse as the screaming boy and as lost in her own hell.

Azrael’s hand opened. She could sense it there, hovering, before it slowly curled. His knuckles brushed at the cheek where she could still feel the ghost of his claws stabbing at her, and his touch was welcome. “Lan…”

She stumbled back a step, but only one. She knelt.

“Lan,” he said again, reaching for her. “No.”

She pushed his hands away and took hold of the boy’s ankles. He tried to scream again, but his voice was gone. He could manage only a scrape of sound, so she screamed for him and pulled, then screamed again because he moved so easily. Shouldn’t it be harder to kill a man than to thread meat onto a skewer? He struggled in her grip, the struggles of a poisoned rat in the hand of the child whose task it was to pick it up and knock its head against the wall to end its pain. She ignored his weak kicks and kept pulling, bringing his feet in scrapes and lurches down the length of the pole until it got stuck somewhere inside him. When she pulled now, he only coughed blood out onto her head; she felt the hot sting of each drop. His hoarse cries died away in moans. Behind them, she heard a child sobbing, babbling that she didn’t mean it, she was sorry, she took it back, but there was no taking this back.

Lan dragged in one more breath, tasting blood, and heaved with all that was left of her strength. Something crunched. His limbs jittered wildly, then only twitched, and finally stilled. The boy sagged, slipping even further down the pole, taking on the greater weight by which the body is imbued when the soul has gone.

Lan’s tears still poured out of her, but quietly now. She was scarcely aware of them except as scratchy heat on her cheeks. She waited, staring raptly up into the boy’s slack face, her knuckles white where they still gripped him. She counted her breaths at first, but kept losing her place and having to start over. In that way, she counted almost to a hundred twice, to eighty-five once and to sixty-something three times before his legs twitched in her hands.

His eyes had not fully closed. They didn’t fully open now, but he looked at her. She honestly did not know if he’d seen her in his last moments of life, but in death, he saw her very well.

He lunged. She could hear something tear inside him. He dropped several inches all at once and continued slowly to slide. The point of the pole began to protrude along his side, wedging his ribs apart and growing impossibly huge until his skin finally tore and it could erupt. He did not notice, did not understand why he could not reach the unmoving meat staring up at him. He was not even a ‘he’ anymore, but just an it. He had been alive, he’d been briefly dead, and now it was neither. It was an Eater.

It was
her
Eater.

Lan’s arms dropped away. She bent until her brow touched the bloody mud at the base of the impaling pole beneath the Eater’s kicking feet and wept into the uncaring earth. For him. For her. For all the stupid boys who set off playing heroes and for their mothers, who would never know how badly they’d died, but who had surely imagined so much worse. For Mallowton, whose people had all died together for the acts of a few. For burnt barns and shattered greenhouses and the black scars left behind on the soil where no one would ever build again. For the world.

But the world was still there when she raised her aching head. She had cried harder than she’d ever cried in her life…and nothing had changed.

Azrael offered her his hand. She looked at him, then braced her shaking hands on her knees and pushed herself up. The Eater before her wailed, its fingertips scratching at the air just inches from her face, but she did not back away from it. She studied it as it struggled to reach her, still seeing a boy, just a boy. It wouldn’t be long before predation and corruption made him look like the corpse he was. Until then, hunger put the lie of life in his eyes.

Azrael let her stare as long as she wanted, making no attempt to hurry her. When she finally turned toward him, he merely removed his mask and gestured toward his cheek.

Lan looked at him as the Eaters moaned and writhed in the firelight, wondering in a detached sort of way when that face had lost its power to raise horror in her. And worse, when had his actions? Because here was a monster before her, surrounded on every side by his undying victims, and she still saw just Azrael. And even knowing what he had done—what he had made her do—the only comfort she wanted right now was his arms around her. So who was the real monster?

Azrael put his mask on and stared back at her for a while. She could see the tendons of his throat shifting as he clenched his jaw, and after several false starts, he suddenly spat, “Say something.”

She looked up into the sky, watching sparks falling up and winking out. It was oddly like looking into a deep pond, seeing pebbles fall away into the dark water. Up and down, sky and water…life and death…all the same.

“It’s a nice night,” she said. Then she turned her back on him and started walking. If he wanted to keep her, he could have; he’d proven that often enough. This time, he let her go.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

L
an took herself to Batuuli’s room, because it was a horrible place and held only horrible memories, and therefore hopefully the last place Azrael would think to look for her.

It was clear the room had not been used. The little things—vases and paintings and delicate sculptures—had been removed now that no one was here to amuse herself by destroying them. The curtains had been taken down and the furniture covered in white cloth. The flayed pikemen who had been her punishment for allowing Lan to be presented in Azrael’s dining hall were still here, stacked together in the tall wardrobe that used to hold Batuuli’s fine gowns, still bound to their crossed poles and covered over so they wouldn’t get dusty in their neglect. Lan peeked in at one. His skin had dried, shriveling on his bones and even cracking in places. When he rolled his eye to look at her, she could hear it scraping in its socket.

It took some time to pick the knot loose so she could untie him, but he was easy enough to lift down. He weighed less than a sack of grain. His skin crackled in her hands.

She left both pikemen crumpled on the bedroom floor and went into the washroom. She took several baths. There was no soap, but she got clean enough. There were no towels, but she dried just fine without them in the open air. She had to dress again in her old clothes, reeking of smoke and blood, but that was all right. That shouldn’t be so easy to wash off.

When she was done, she filled her cupped hands with water and carried it carefully into the bedroom. One of the pikemen had managed to sit up, so she put her hands to his lipless mouth. He drank, his cracked throat clicking until the moisture softened it. She went back for more, letting him drink all he wanted until it started seeping through the holes in his belly. Then she did the same for the other pikeman. Then she turned off the lights and slipped out the bedroom window, leaping blind into the dark and landing on the soft grass.

She slept that night in the seedling room of one of Azrael’s greenhouses, curled small beneath a planting table, hidden by bags of soil. The next morning, before his workers arrived, she broke off a thick bunch of grapes and a handful of nearly-there apples and snuck out again. She ate her breakfast behind the goat pen where the new kids were quick to waken and beg for treats. She left them nibbling at her apple cores and moved on, circling the palace walls until she found an open window and climbed inside.

She came in practically on top of Deimos and what looked to be a full company of Revenants, more than could be easily counted, fair filling the hall from end to end. Deimos was talking at them, making brisk gestures to illustrate this or that point, but he looked around when Lan appeared in her unexpected way behind him and whatever he was saying ended with a terse, “Never mind. Dismissed. You, come with me.”

“No,” she said and when he reached for his sword’s hilt, she added, “Skin it, I fucking dare you.”

He didn’t, but he sure looked like he thought about it. “Our lord—”

“Your lord. Not mine.”

“Lord Azrael,” said Deimos after a short pause, “commands your presence in his chambers.”

“Lord Azrael can lick me.”

The Revenant’s expression underwent several rapid changes before settling on cautious confusion. “I…don’t…doubt it, but that is not at issue. You are to come with me at once.”

Lan rolled her eyes and started walking. He caught her arm. She spun and slapped him.

They both gave that a moment’s thought.

“All right,” said Deimos. Without releasing her, he half-turned to whistle sharply at the dispersing Revenants. He brought two of them back with a curt wave, then pushed Lan into their dual grip. “Take this to the Red Room,” he ordered and thrust a pointing finger into Lan’s face as she opened her mouth. “And you have exactly one choice in the matter and that’s whether you want to walk or be carried. Choose.”

Lan glowered at him. “Carried. That’s a lot of stairs.”

Deimos nodded to his Revenants and left, moving fast and not in the direction of Azrael’s chambers.

Lan allowed herself to be taken through the palace to the tower and up the million stairs in the dark to the Red Room. It had been a long run of rainy days since the last time she’d had to sulk here and her return had not been anticipated. Lan stood in front of the window, letting the wind cool her anger, but it took a long time. That hot knot in her chest would finally start to relax and then she would catch a hint of smoke on the breeze and once more be in the meditation garden, tasting blood and ashes as the boy died and the Eater awoke.

Footsteps, climbing fast. Someone in shoes; the hard soles echoed loudly in the stairwell, making it impossible to say for sure how many there were, but she thought it was only one person and she knew damned well who. When he reached the landing, someone knocked on the door.

Lan ignored it and pretended to look at the sky, which was the same sky she’d seen all her life, just with different clouds. She waited.

Whoever it was knocked again.

“Sod off,” said Lan.

“May I come in?”

That wasn’t Deimos.

“Master Wickham?” She turned in spite of herself, although the door was as blank-faced as it ever was. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I’ve been asked to speak with you. May I come in?”

“What if I say no?”

“An intriguing hypothetical. I suppose I could leave and report you uncooperative to Captain Deimos, who is permitted to use me an intermediary to carry out our lord’s orders, but who is incapable of allowing you to defy them. I could also open the door,” he went on lightly, “seeing as the lock is on this side. Until you actually say ‘no,’ I shall do neither, although we must consider both outcomes plausible pending determination. Are you familiar with Schrodinger’s cat?”

“I swear, if you start teaching me through the bloody door, I’m throwing myself out the window.”

He was quiet for so long, she’d begun to wonder if he’d gone away, but then he said, softly, “You said once you and I were intermedi-mates. It’s not a real word…but I flattered myself to think it was an honest sentiment.”

Lan tipped her head back and sighed, then went over and opened the damned door.

He smiled at her. He had a tray in his hands—coffee and biscuits.

“I don’t want that,” she said, returning to the window.

“I know.” He set the tray down on her vanity and picked up a folded piece of paper that had been tucked beneath the saucer. “Our lord—”

“Give it here.”

He passed it over with a dubious expression that turned faintly pained when Lan flicked the paper out the window. It spun away like a maple seed and was soon lost to sight. Lan watched the clouds like they were the only ones she’d ever seen. She was not remotely curious as to what the note had said. Not even a little bit.

Wickham poured her a cup of coffee, started to offer it, then took it back and said, “You’re not going to give this a chuck, are you?”

She shook her head.

“Here, then.”

“I don’t want it.”

Undaunted, he sipped at it himself while she picked at the mortar between the stones surrounding the window. She cracked a fingernail. The mortar did not flake up.

“How long have you known?” she asked.

He neither flinched nor apologized. “You’re a clever girl. I think you can guess.”

“Then you’ve been lying to me all this time.”

“I had no choice but to obey my lord’s command. I don’t expect you to understand that, but it is true. He speaks…and his voice is the very firmament of the earth. I had no choice, but I say and I think I say honestly that I never would have chosen to lie, even at the risk of damaging our trust. I am a tidy man, as I’ve said. Lies are so untidy.” His brows knit. “Does that…Does that help?”

It did, rather.

“Will he let you tell me the truth now?”

“Yes.”

“How can I believe you?”

Wickham gazed at her placidly. “Ask him.”

Lan frowned and looked out the window. “Tell me about the army Azrael is sending to wipe out humanity. Have they left yet?”

“Our lord gave no such order. He’s merely removing them in order to discourage insurgency that might lead to further unfortunate acts.”

“Like the slaughter at Mallowton?”

“Like the decision of those at Mallowton to rebel against our lord’s rule, thus demanding an immediate and incontrovertible response. If the living choose to provoke violence,” he said with gentle rebuke, “they will have to accept the consequences. And no, they haven’t left yet.”

“What’s he waiting for?”

“We haven’t many vehicles in Haven and most of those we do have are entirely unsuitable as troop transport. Although it only takes a few Revenants to…” Wickham stopped there, thankfully, and said instead, “Suffice to say, to make the most bloodless victory possible requires a simultaneous assault upon multiple strategic targets. More vehicles must be acquired before the purge can begin.”

“The purge. You’ve got a name for it already.” Lan glared at him while he drank her coffee. “And where is he getting those vehicles?”

Master Wickham did not answer.

“So don’t tell me it’s bloodless.” The last word twisted in her mouth; she spat it out. “It was never going to be bloodless! You know, I know and Azrael knows no one is going to watch those ferries roll up and those Revenants hop out and say, ‘Give us a tick to pack and we’re off!’ So what you’re really saying is, he wants to kill everyone, all in one night. He doesn’t want it bloodless, he just wants it over!”

She thought he would ask her why she was here in the tower then, instead of talking to the one person who could actually change things, or maybe trot out a ‘Life is motion’ or ‘You have to want the time you have,’ or any other number of Wickisms she’d come to expect from him. Instead, he drank her coffee and watched the sick sky darken with her and finally said, “I’m sorry.”

She looked at him, her hot breath hitching in her throat.

“I am. I can do nothing to help you, but I am genuinely, deeply, profoundly sorry it has come to this and I am sorriest of all to see you so hurt by it.” He put his empty cup on its saucer and returned them both to the tray on the vanity, then moved to the door. When he had his hand on the latch, he said, “What does that tell you?” And then he left.

Lan kept her back to the door, but listened to his footsteps recede. Then she waited to hear a Revenant’s boots coming back to drag her away, but that never happened. The smell of coffee swelled and swelled until it pushed out even the stink of corpse-smoke and day-old blood, but it wasn’t until the coffee cooled and its good smell died away again that Lan gave in and poured herself a cup. She drank it bitter between bites of dry, crumbly biscuits, and then cried because she had become the sort of person who could kill a boy and still want sugar in her coffee.

The clouds thickened. Rain that had been threatening itself all afternoon finally arrived. Lan maintained her stubborn vigil for a while, but the picture she made standing alone overlooking Haven wasn’t worth getting wet for, especially since no one could see it. She went over to the bed and sat, listening to the rain and thinking of the ferryman in Azrael’s garden, getting water in his open chest. Did it hurt? She couldn’t imagine it not hurting, but maybe it wasn’t so bad, comparatively. She wondered if someone would stop her if she just took a blanket down and covered him up against the weather. Except there was that other guard there, so she’d have to bring two blankets. As for the Eaters, they could get wet.

Lan did not gather the blankets off her bed. She lay down on it instead, folding her hands over her stomach and staring at the ceiling. She thought about her ferryman, but not the way she thought she would, not flayed open and impaled, but just driving…the music he’d let her play…how he’d bought her dinner at the waystation…even that little time in the back of his ferry and the feel of his hands on her. She wondered if he remembered sex or if it was like hope, that he could not remember except as something he used to know.

The day died. The light faded. There was a lamp on the vanity and a box of matches to light it, since there were no electrics in the tower, but Lan didn’t get up. She watched it get darker and when she could no longer see the spaces between the tiles to count them, she rolled over and faced the wall. Her stomach growled, reminding her she’d missed two meals already and how many more was she going to miss before she quit pouting? Because that was all this was and she knew it. If this were Norwood and if her mother were still alive, she would have had Lan out of this room and on about her chores and never mind Mallowton or the garden or killing a kid. There were no excuses good enough to mope the day away. ‘If you can do something, do something,’ she used to say. ‘If you can’t, do something else, but quit sulking or I’ll give you something to sulk about.’

Who would have ever thought she’d miss hearing that? Or miss seeing that face, her head perpetually cocked because her left eye was nothing but a socket full of scars? She missed her mother’s hands—rough and chapped, with a knuckle bitten off on one and two fingers that wouldn’t bend on the other, so she was constantly flicking people the Vs if she didn’t consciously fold them down when she made a fist. She missed the heat of her mother’s body close to hers on the camp bed they shared in the women’s lodge and how she’d wake at the slightest cough or rustle in the dark and sit up, knife in hand, to listen…then lean over and touch Lan’s face, so lightly, never knowing Lan was awake to feel it or to hear her mother’s whisper, “She’s okay. She’s just fine,” as she tried to talk herself into going back to sleep.