Land of the Beautiful Dead (26 page)

Batuuli turned on her father with a savage grin of triumph, tearing free of her gown and letting it fall around her like petals of a dying flower. She stood, perfection in its purest and most terrible form, and held out her open arms. “Come and fuck me, Father,” she called. “We’re all waiting.”

Throughout all this, Azrael gazed at Batuuli without expression. Only when the applause died and his court began to uncertainly reseat themselves, did he finally speak. “You were all that I desired in all the world. My first. My most beloved child. I cannot look at you without remembering the great promise of joy you once brought to my life.”

Batuuli huffed and tossed her braids. Her breasts shuddered, shaking cream in thin trickles down her dark skin. “I trust that fool’s fancy has died.”

“It has,” Azrael said, nodding once. “It finally has.”

And then he killed her.

He did it quietly, just a wave of one hand and she crumpled, cracking her skull on the edge of the dais as she fell. Her retinue scrambled away like birds startled into flight, but they didn’t go far. Then there was a second silence, a greater stillness.

Tehya stood. Slowly, silently, she opened her arms. She and Azrael faced each other and for so long as their eyes held, they might as well have been the only two in the room, in all the world.

Azrael broke the silence first, his voice as raw as a wound. “No. No, I will not. Not…Not unless you ask me.”

Tehya did not answer. Her open arms lifted, miming shackles for the rest of her body to hang by. Her head lolled. Her wide, staring eyes never left his.

“Will you not speak? My little bird…I would give you anything you asked to hear your voice once more…even your death.”

Tehya said nothing.

Azrael gazed at her a long time, taking breaths that shook his great frame harder and harder in silence. His hand raised, half-clenched, then swept through the air, cutting her down like a scythe through corn. She fell forward into her untouched dinner, the careful arrangement of her hair plopping into a silver tureen and sending a dark wave of gravy washing up around her ears and down her bodice.

“Now me.” Solveig shoved his chair back and pushed the courtier seated beside him to the floor, clearing the way between him and Azrael. He smiled, a grin of savage triumph. “I’ll ask. I’m ready. I’ve wanted nothing else for years!”

“Go.” Azrael picked up his cup in a hand that Lan saw shake, if only once. He put it down again untouched. “Please. My son, please go.”

“Now me!” Solveig leapt up, chin high and blue eyes blazing. “All my brothers and sisters are dead! You’ve killed them all, you son of a diseased whore,
now me
! Grave-fucker! Bone-picking bastard! Haven’t I given you enough to be sorry for?” He looked wildly around, then pulled the sword from a Revenant’s sheath and ran, not for Azrael, but for Lan.

She never had time to react, but somehow Deimos did. His sword flashed, intercepting the other blade with a ringing clash of steel and flipping it right out of Solveig’s grip, which was easy, because he was tumbling to the floor, carried forward by his momentum but falling all the same. Deimos caught the sword by the hilt as it spun in the air and Solveig fetched up against Batuuli’s body with his arms bent at awkward angles under him and Lan just sat there, frozen.

‘Now they’ll start applauding,’ she thought, staring numbly out at the dead court, but that didn’t happen. Then she thought she must still be sleeping, and all these disjointed scenes—Azrael sitting with her in the library, Lan punching him, Batuuli tearing her bodice open and Tehya falling into her tureen, the sword flying up and Deimos catching it—these were all just moments from different dreams, pieced together in her first moments after waking before she forgot them altogether. In a moment, she would open her eyes and it would be morning and the servants would be bringing her breakfast tray and ignoring her when she asked if Azrael was all right.

Lan looked at him. He was not all right.

“Get out,” he said.

Chairs scraped back. Silverware clattered. Dishes broke. For a while, running feet and rustling gowns were deafening, but Azrael never looked up to watch the room empty. Only after the heavy doors shut for the last time did he move, rubbing beneath his mask and then removing it. He tossed it aside, too close to the table’s edge. The heavy horns jutted out over nothing; the mask teetered.

Lan picked it up before it could fall and put it down in a safer place.

“Go,” said Azrael. One hand remained over his eyes. The other strayed down to press over his stomach. “Just go.”

She should. She wanted to. She didn’t.

“Do you think you are safe with me?” His hand dropped, banging down on the table in a loose fist. He looked at her, too tired to be angry. He waved at the room, let his hand bang down again. “Safer than they? Get out!” He covered his eyes again. “Or stay. I don’t care what you do. You should not have come here tonight.”

“You brought me.”

“I should not have come here tonight.” Azrael’s claws dug into his brows, drawing tiny beads of black blood to drip down his face like tears. One by one, they fell into the grooves of his scars and disappeared into the hole in the side of his cheek. “Too soon…and too long overdue. Say something, if you’re going to stay. A small degree of defiance is of no use to anyone.”

“Is it my fault?”

“You?” He dropped his arm with a short laugh and looked at her. “What are you to her? What are you to me?”

“A trigger’s a small thing,” she replied, “but it fires the gun. I fought with you.”

“So?”

“You apologized.”

The hand now on the table drummed once. The one still cradling his stomach flexed. “So?”

“Have you ever apologized to her?”

The flames of his eyes flickered. He turned them out on the hall where his Children lay. His eyes rested longest on Batuuli.

“I’m not saying you had anything to apologize for,” she said uncomfortably. “Just that, from her view—”

“Thirty-one.”

Lan blinked.

He stared at the bodies for maybe half a minute more, then leaned back in his throne and picked up his cup again. He didn’t drink, just held it. “She asked how long it was before I saw the love die in her eyes. Thirty-one days. Even before the massacre, she had already begun to turn, but I thought…she would grow out of it.” He glanced over at Batuuli’s body. Blood had made a small pool around her head, like a dark halo. “I could have made her love me.”

“You can’t make someone—”

“Of course I can. My Revenants are made without the capacity to betray me, their loyalty and obedience assured without the inconvenience of earning it. My steward, my chamberlain, my cooks—all were raised to serve me with the most abject devotion, incapable of treachery. I could have brought her into this life with no other thoughts but mine. I could have put every word she ever spoke into her mouth. What are the dead to me but dolls? I can fill them with whatever stuffing I desire.”

Lan picked at the arm of her chair. The gold color was only paint and peeling. Beneath was just wood, greyish with age and a bit dry, as if it had spent too much time in storage. “Why didn’t you?”

“I could tell you I had heard enough of my own thoughts in the ages of my solitude and I suspect you would believe me, but the truth is, I knew no better. They were the first I had ever raised not to rot. All my concentration was taken in that endeavor, to stay corruption and ensure immortality equal to my own so that I would always…always have them. I did not realize until she was raised what I had done. Once made, my dead cannot be altered, only unmade, so I let her be. And I made them all in her image, so hers would not be the only mind among them. I knew it was a mistake.” He looked into his cup and gave it a brooding swirl. “But it was pleasant, for a time.”

“A mistake? Is that really how you thought of them?”

“I mean no offense. Many cherished children begin so.”

“Then why should they love you? Why should they even try? You gave up on them a long time ago.”

He grew perfectly, ominously still.

“How readily you speak those words,” he said after a while. The light in his eyes sparked brighter, but he did not look at her. “Long time. What is that to you? A year? Ten years?”

Too late, Lan bit her tongue. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“I did not give up my Children’s love
a long time ago
,” he said, stabbing the words in like knives and twisting. “I gave that up almost in the same instant that I dared the attempt, but I did not have a long time to live with my mistake. No, child, that wound is still bleeding. A long time? A long time is what I spent in darkness, alone, convincing myself that if I had but
one
companion, I could endure the deathless hell of my existence! To see a face not my own! To hear another voice!”

“I’m sorry,” Lan said again. As bad a taste as it left in her mouth, she said it all: “For…your loss.”

“My loss? Mine?” He threw a laugh at her and banged his cup down. “I’ll not end my hungering dead for your empty platitudes. There is such a thing as being too diplomatic.”

Lan opened her mouth to argue and shut it again with a grimace. It was a stupid thing to say, even to the living. To him, it was obscene. But she couldn’t take it back, even in her own mind. She was sorry. She really was.

She picked at the arm of her chair, prying up flakes of gold paint and reminding herself with each splinter flicked away of the things he’d done—to her, to Norwood, to the whole world. “At least you can grieve for them.”

There was no answer, not one she could hear anyway, and she refused to look up. She watched her fingers chip away at the arm of the chair, exposing more and more of the ugly wood beneath. “You realize, don’t you, that you’re probably the only one in the world who can? You can be alone with them, say all those things you forgot to tell them and not have other people listening or laughing at how corny it sounds or just sighing because you’re taking so long. You can clean them up instead of chop them up. You can hold their hands because they’ll never grab you. You can kiss them one last time and never think even once how close that brings you to their teeth. You
can
grieve…and you don’t.”

“I gave them all they wanted from me. I gave them death.” He rubbed once more at his lidless eyes, then took up his mask and stood, calling for his steward.

After a noticeable pause, the dining hall doors opened and a dead man entered. There was no sign of apprehension on his pretty face, but he bowed quite a bit lower and longer than usual. “My lord.”

“Have this—” Azrael walked to the edge of the dais and gestured vaguely at the tables. “—packed and call in Deimos.”

“Yes, my lord.” The dead man gestured to someone out of the sight in the hall. “And…your Children?”

Azrael had already turned away. Only Lan saw the shadow of pain that tightened his muscles and dimmed his eyes. And he knew it had been seen. She could actually see him considering killing her for it, as clearly as if he were painting pictures in the air, but then his gaze fell to Solveig, lying at the foot of the dais steps. His voice, when he spoke, was no louder than a breath. “What do I do for them?”

“Why…” Lan shifted uncomfortably closer and lowered her own voice to a whisper. “Why are you asking me?”

“I don’t know what to tell him.” He raised his eyes, with effort, to search hers. “I don’t know how…How do you tend the dead? How do you honor them?”

Lan could feel that same stupid flutter of sympathy crawling up her throat. This time, she swallowed it. “Ours turn into Eaters,” she reminded him. “We break their backs and burn them.”

He turned his head and stayed that way, motionless, long after any sense of victory at seeing it had died. “Make whatever arrangements you deem appropriate,” he said finally.

“Yes, my lord.” The steward glanced behind him into the hall. “Deimos, my lord.”

Azrael beckoned, but did not turn, staring instead at Lan while the Revenant captain marched toward them. It was quiet enough, empty enough, that his boots made echoes and when those echoes stopped, Azrael said, “I require you to take a delivery of food to Norwood.”

The Revenant showed no surprise. “At once, my lord.”

“I trust it is more than Norwood requires or, indeed, can easily store,” Azrael went on, still staring down at Lan, “but whether they send the excess to other villages or sell it for profit or let it rot in the mud, I leave to their own judgment. I suspect they would rather waste what they cannot themselves consume. Humans, by their nature, do not readily extend sympathy to the suffering of others.”

“That’s funny, coming from you.”

“Is it? I don’t seem to understand humor well. I do, however, understand suffering. And sympathize. So if it is accepted,” Azrael continued, “such a delivery shall be made following the nightly feast, say, on each full moon.”

Lan had only been waiting for him to stop talking so she could answer his use of the words ‘suffering’ and ‘sympathy’, but this unexpected offer killed her argument unborn. She stepped back, uncertain.

He stepped forward, taking up that distance and more. “
If
it is accepted,” he repeated, with a distinct emphasis on the first word. He waited until he saw that Lan had heard it, then swung around to face his Revenant captain. “If it is not, if they choose instead to refuse my generous gift, if they fire upon the hands that extend it—”