Land of the Beautiful Dead (22 page)

Azrael turned his back on her and headed for the door, taking Lan’s arm as she stood, frozen, in his path.

“It’s been a lovely visit, Father.” Batuuli waved them off and tossed her half-empty glass to shatter on the floor. “I’ll see you at dinner, then?”

He did not answer, but pulled Lan with him, taking such long, swift strides that she was forced to run to keep pace, hiking her long skirts up around her knees. As soon as he was through Batuuli’s doors, he swung her around and demanded, “Did you eat anything?”

“No, but…but she didn’t really poison it, did she?”

“You!”

A lone servant polishing the long tiled corridor paused and looked up. “My lord?”

Azrael pushed Lan forward. “Take her to the library and summon Deimos to my chamber.”

The servant left her cleaning and got up at once, taking Lan’s right arm as Azrael released the left.

“She didn’t, did she?” Lan insisted, alarmed. “I mean, it was all for you! She wouldn’t poison you! You’re her only family!”

He looked at her, his eyes blazing through the sockets of his mask. Then he pushed past her and continued up the hall alone. He staggered, turned a corner and was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A
‘library’ turned out to be a room where books were read. The fact that people used to have so many books that they needed a whole separate room just to store them, much less a word for the room, said everything Lan guessed she needed to know about the way the world used to be. In Norwood, loose pictures and salvaged magazines were locked up like other valuables. The mayor had a few books, including the town ledger where Lan’s own name had been written on the day of her birth and presumably crossed out along with her mother’s the day she’d left, but all of them together could have fit on one shelf. Here was a room the size of the dining hall, two stories tall and lined in bookshelves, with ladders on runners along every wall so that no shelf was out of reach. These were books that could not be measured in hundreds or even thousands, but in some greater number that had no name.

If only she knew how to read.

Lan wandered through the stacks for a while, pulling out books at random and turning pages. She found some with pictures, but even the ones with just words were worth looking at, if only because someone somewhere wrote them once.

Hours passed, each one a little slower than the last. Overwhelmed by books, Lan looked at the windows instead, which were made from shards of colored glass put together to make pictures of things like trees and peacocks and even people. She investigated desk drawers. She rode the ladders. At length, she went over and opened the door.

The Revenant standing on the other side looked at her. Not a pikeman, a Revenant.

She closed the door. Stood there. Slowly, she opened it again.

He looked at her with no more curiosity, but just a hint of annoyance.

“Can I go to my room?” Lan asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

He didn’t answer, just stared at her with that faintly impatient expression.

“What if I need the toilet?”

“Do you?”

“I will eventually.”

His lips thinned. He closed the door and locked it.

Some time later, as Lan was looking at pictures in a book that didn’t have nearly enough of them, the door opened again. The Revenant directed a short line of servants inside—one carrying a covered tray, the other holding a pitcher, the last with a chamberpot and a pail of ashes.

Lan lifted the cover on the tray, releasing a fragrant puff of steam. A bowl of soup and a split loaf of buttered bread with honey. “Where did this come from?” she asked.

“It’s been tasted,” the Revenant replied.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You didn’t really want to know what you asked. You wanted to know what I told you.” He stood aside as the servants withdrew, then shut the door and locked it.

Lan picked up the bowl and sniffed. Onions, herbs and some kind of fish. Her mouth watered, but she put it back untasted. There was water in the pitcher, flavored with chunks of fruit and mint leaves, chilled with ice. Actual ice. She didn’t taste that either. She was hungry and a lifetime of never knowing when or what the next meal might be made even this simple fare look like a feast, but the word poison still muttered itself in the back of her mind. She didn’t doubt the Revenant’s word, but not every poison acted fast. Better to go hungry and stay safe.

Lan covered up the food so she didn’t have to see it and be tempted more than she already was. Then she found a sofa clear across the room with a window low enough that she could see through. The view was that of rain and Azrael’s greenhouses, tinted improbable shades of purple and blue, but she watched anyway. Behind the glass, she could just make out figures moving inside, working hard to keep food on the imperial table.

If she were home, she’d be breathing in that green stink of sweat, soil and manure. If she were home, she would be out there already—sowing, weeding, picking and clearing, until her body was a thousand different points of pain coming together as one exhausted ache. If she were home…but she was here.

She watched until she had mostly forgotten the food, then found herself another book with pictures and sat down to pass the time.

The rain got heavier as the day wore on, so that it started feeling like an hour before dusk long before the pale shape of the sun reached its zenith. Lan’s hunger reached its own peak about the same time (it, too, was a weirdly nostalgic feeling. Sometimes it seemed that she had done nothing but eat since coming to Haven), but her stomach’s complaints eventually quieted and she forgot about them. She drowsed, taking more and more time to look at pictures she then could not remember and which eventually, she couldn’t even see unless she sat right in the window and tilted it up to the palest panel.

Daylight failed. The electric lamps of Haven lit, whole blocks at a time. It was beautiful, the way they said cities used to be, and Lan watched them for a long time, just glittering. But the view could only hold her interest for so long and it was too dark even to pretend to read, so she curled up on the sofa and tried to sleep.

She must have been at least partially successful, because although she got no real sense of rest, the next time she opened her eyes, the room was black and the rain had nearly stopped. She sat up, wondering fuzzily if she was awake or not. She did not remember her dreams, as a rule, but knew that she had them and if she was in one right now, how would she know? It felt like a dream. The library’s stillness was unnaturally complete. Not even the air was moving. In the dark, all the books in their shelves and even the scattering of tables and chairs had a flat, painted-on quality, making her feel as if she were trapped in a paper room, a dollhouse. And when she looked at the window, Lord Solveig was standing just outside, looking in at her through the colored glass.

It was not alarming. She had decided she was dreaming and was therefore removed from fear. And after all, it wasn’t as though he were floating. The library was on the ground floor and the windows, particularly the colored ones, were oversized. He wasn’t doing anything creepier than standing outside and watching her, which would be creepy enough in real life, but she expected better from a dream.

As if prompted by this thought, Solveig began to walk along the wall. She could hear the crunch of gravel beneath his boots and the wet squeaking sound as he trailed one hand along the wet glass until he ran out of window and passed out of sight.

Lan waited for a while, but that appeared to be it. Her dreams were boring. Small wonder she didn’t remember them. She lay back down on the sofa and closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, the sun was just coming up, slowly filling the room with that sickly grey light folks called dawn. Stiff and a bit headachy, Lan sat groggily staring at yesterday’s pitcher of water, weighing her thirst against the probability of poison until she convinced herself that it really didn’t matter because those little chunks of fruit and leaves that had been so cheery when they were fresh were now floating there, all waterlogged and warm, and while that didn’t make the water any more or less poisoned than it already might be, it did make it disgusting.

She got up, scratching the tangles out of her hair, and went over to the library door. There was still a Revenant on the other side of it. “Can I go back to my room yet?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“My orders are to hold you until my lord alone grants release.”

“Fuck it, I’m going,” Lan muttered and took one step. Just one. Then she was looking down the curved gleaming blade of a sword.

“My orders are to hold you,” he told her, “until my lord alone grants release.”

“So, what?” Lan asked incredulously. “If I don’t let you keep me safe, you’ll kill me?”

He didn’t answer, but he plainly didn’t see a conflict either.

She stepped back and slammed the door.

Another day, stuck in this stupid room. It shouldn’t matter. Rationally, she knew she’d be just as stuck in the Red Room if she were there. The library was bigger, warmer, drier, with more comfortable seating and certainly had more to look at, but damn it, she hated having nothing to do. If Azrael thought she was in so much danger, why didn’t he shut her up in a cell somewhere? There had to be a dungeon here. And if she wasn’t in danger, why couldn’t he at least put her to work somewhere? She’d almost rather be cleaning the library than just lying around in it.

Almost.

Lan tried to pace her restlessness and resentment away, but soon found herself circling yesterday’s food and water. To keep her mind off it, she went to the furthest side of the library and rode the ladder back and forth. That worked for a little while, but as it got lighter, the idea that she ought to be working got harder and harder to ignore.

In the kind of inspiration that only being bored and unsupervised can evoke, Lan pushed two tables together and began to pull books off the shelves with the intention of building a little fort. It was harder than it looked. What should have been a simple matter of stacking books evolved into a process of first sorting them into like sizes and then layering them in an overlapping pattern against a stabilizing backdrop of a curtain she had pulled down and draped over the tables, with the largest, heaviest books arranged all along the bottom in a footer to keep the curtain as flat and straight as possible. She was nearly done and already eying the closest end tables for a likely volunteer to be a second story when the doors opened.

The dead man who entered was dressed neither as a guard nor a servant, just a man in a suit. He wore a tie and had a black leather case in one hand, squarish and hard, not big enough to be terribly useful to Lan’s eye. He looked like a man in an old magazine, the kind who worked at jobs no one had anymore.

He somehow switched on the overhead lights as he entered, then glanced around and saw Lan. His head cocked. “I say, that’s marvelous,” he said.

“It’s not finished,” Lan heard herself reply inanely. She looked back at the window where a curtain ought to be hanging and shuffled awkwardly to her feet. “I can put it all back. I mostly remember where it goes.”

“There’s no hurry, is there?” The dead man put his case down on a table, shrugged out of his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. Unbuttoning his cuffs, he rolled up his sleeves and came over to join her. “What are we about?”

“I was…going to put another one on top.”

“Capital.” The dead man scouted around and lit on a desk. He pointed, raising an eyebrow at her inquiringly.

“Who are you?”

“Master Lareow is the name I’ve been given, but I don’t much care for it.” He offered his hand to shake.

Beginning to feel as though this, too, were a dream, Lan tentatively shook it. His hand was cold and very smooth. “And…sorry, but
who
are you?”

“Lareow, which is to say, it isn’t, but that’s the name I’ve been given and I answer to it.”

“What is it really?”

“Wickham,” he said after a long, assessing pause. “Master Wickham, if you like. I’m your lessons master. I’ll be tutoring you during your stay. Shall we?”

He went over to take one end of the desk, more or less forcing Lan to take the other, and between them, they muscled it up and on top of her book-fort. Then he went to the shelves for more bricks and Lan was left to stare after him, trying to make sense of his last words.

“What sort of lessons?” she asked finally, because all she could think was that she hadn’t done her dollying right and this was some sort of sexual thing, all ‘lick this’ and ‘wiggle that’, and she wasn’t sure whether to be insulted yet or grateful.

“Well, that’s to be determined. Our first step will be to assess your present level of education and then we’ll work out a curriculum, but I’m very open, as a rule. Have you some interest or area of study on which you’d like to focus?”

“No. What? No.”

“You needn’t feel embarrassed to ask. Lord Azrael encourages his companions to develop hobbies. Architecture, perhaps?”

“What’s that?”

“Building design.” He gestured at the fort that had somehow become a team effort and began to lay in a row of books around the base of the second story. “It’s one of my own interests, as a matter of fact, and I consider myself quite the amateur authority.”

It had never occurred to her that the dead might have interests, amateur or otherwise. Lan watched him build walls around the desk, alternating fat books with skinny ones and occasionally setting one of the really big ones in with the cover facing out, like a window. He even knocked up a dormer in front where the desk was open. Last of all, he set a lamp on the very top in the corner for a chimney.

“Right,” he said, stepping back to admire the end result before gesturing toward the table where he’d left his case. “Shall we have at it?”

Lan sat and watched curiously as he opened his case and brought out two more books, blank ones. Well, hers was blank. His had handwriting in it, but he flipped through until he came to the blank part. Then he brought out a pen and bottle of ink for himself and a pencil for her, already sharpened. He dipped his nib, wrote a few lines in comfortable silence, then gave her a pleasant smile and said, “Your name?”

“Lan. Lanachee,” she amended, because this felt very formal. “I don’t have a last name. Bit of a bastard.”