Land of the Beautiful Dead (30 page)

“I’m…sure you could—”

“Of course I could. At a word, I could have monuments raised, processions through the streets, black horses and wreaths and the tolling of bells, but how can that honor them?” He took a small swallow of tea, grimaced, and set the cup aside. “They would not wish to be remembered as my Children.”

Lan frowned, watching his hand stray to his stomach.

“So that will be my memorial,” he was saying. “That I allow them to be forgotten.”

“Are you all right?”

“I do not grieve for them. As you say, I gave up even the hope of love long ago. But I do regret, although I find even I cannot say for certain whether I more regret their deaths or the lives I gave them.”

“No, that’s not—I mean, that’s something too,” she said lamely, “but I meant…are
you
all right?”

He glanced down at himself, probing at his stomach with one hand. His thumbclaw tapped along the rings that closed his freshest wound and made them jingle together merrily. “Some pain yet, but improved.”

“Are you sure?”

He cocked his head inquiringly, then looked down at his tea and uttered a wordless sound of understanding. With a crooked smile, he passed her the cup and watched as she took a cautious sip. “Gentian and licorice,” he explained as she choked and fought not to spit it right back into the cup. “It helps the pain and aids healing, but I…do not favor the taste. No matter. I endure. How do you find your handmaiden?”

“I found her, all right, but do I really have to keep her?” Lan took a huge bite of her lemon cake and let it wash her mouth clean. “I don’t need one.”

“My concubine will be attended.”

There was no argument in his tone, but she tried anyway. “I don’t think she likes me.”

“She was raised to serve another.” He took a swallow of tea, baring his teeth at it like a warning afterwards. “If she becomes tiresome, tell me. She is fit for no other work and I suspect if I gave her the choice, she would choose the oblivion I gave her sisters, but she volunteered herself at my request and I will hold her to it as long as I can.”

“You killed the other handmaidens?”

“It would have been cruel to put them to other work.”

“But you kept all of them?”

Azrael tracked her pointing finger out into the hall and studied Batuuli’s and Solveig’s courtiers. “I raised them to do nothing,” he said, watching them laugh and feast and fan themselves. “They are happy enough to continue doing it in my Children’s absence. The same cannot be said for my Children’s personal servants, so I showed them the only mercy I could.”

“But—”

“It is not their fault I raised them to be what they are,” Azrael said quietly. “It is not their fault I regret having done so.”

“So everyone gets what they deserve, huh?”

“In Haven.”

“I’m in Haven.” Lan tossed off a shrug, trying to pretend it was a joke. “What do I deserve?”

“Me.”

Well, she’d known it was stupid to ask. She caught the last crumbs of her cake and ate them, one by one, in silence.

He started to drink, sighed into his cup, then set his tea down and said, staring straight ahead into the hall, “This is not how I wish to begin my day.”

“Sorry.” And to put the full stop on that subject, Lan asked, “Is that black pudding?”

“Possibly.” He passed the tray to let her determine for herself. “Did you sleep well?”

“You were there. Did I?”

He took a curiously long time to answer. “You dreamed,” he said at last. “Tea?”

“Hell, no.”

“I have other teas,” he said dryly. “Or do you prefer coffee even at breakfast? I’ve noticed you remain rather American in many habits. Your mother’s influence, I suppose.”

“Influence, right.” Lan laughed through her last mouthful of cake and turned her attention, reluctantly, to her cooling bowl of cereal. “How could you tell I was dreaming?”

“That was rather a scornful laugh.”

She looked up from the job of drizzling honey on oats, then quickly down again, although she did not feel guilty and had no reason to. She was not blushing. It was just a little warm in here. “I loved my mother.”

“I don’t doubt it. She was a strong woman,” he said, passing the butter and cream as if by way of apology. “I imagine she had a strong influence on you.”

“Sure, if by ‘influence’ you mean she did everything but brand me with her bloody lost America.” Lan scooped out a savage lump of butter and stirred it in her bowl. It didn’t want to melt. She’d let the damn cereal get too cold. “She was mad on it. I loved her, but she was.”

“Mm.”

“She didn’t say much, you know. So it was hard, because sometimes it seemed like everything she did say was her correcting me. ‘It’s not rubbish, it’s trash.’ ‘It’s a sweater, not a jumper.’ ‘Don’t call it a bin.’ ‘That’s a flashlight.’ ‘I’m not your Mum.’” Lan broke it off there and came back with a strained smile. “So, yeah, coffee. Thanks. Could you tell what I was dreaming? I never remember them, myself.”

A servant twitched forward, but it was Azrael who poured. “I would not have thought your mother’s memory of her homeland to be sharp enough that she should nurture it so devotedly all the rest of her life. You say she came here as so young a child.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, but she did. She said it was how she kept it alive. With words,” said Lan, rolling her eyes as she stirred sugar into her drink. “Hundreds of millions of people dead, and that was her whatchacallit. Her memorial. What did I dream?”

“I suppose it made her feel less alone. I don’t imagine she met many Americans, and fewer still as the years passed. Eventually, she must have wondered if she were the last.”

“Maybe. Why are you avoiding the question? Do I talk in my sleep or something?” she demanded, and leaned forward to teasingly whisper, “Did I say another man’s name?”

“You wept.”

Lan blinked, her smile fading. One hand rose toward her eyes, as if there would still be tears to wipe away, and hovered there.

The dining hall doors swept open at that awkward moment to admit Azrael’s steward, not alone. “Deimos, my lord.”

“Ah.” Azrael beckoned, cutting his eyes at Lan and shaking his head when she started to rise. “You have a report for me, captain?”

The Revenant marched up the broad aisle between the tables, his bootheels crisp as gunshots, to kneel before the dais. His uniform was spotless. His hair was neatly combed and very slightly damp. “My lord, as commanded, I have delivered your gift to Norwood.”

“What happened?” Lan blurted.

Azrael glanced at her, then at the Revenant. “And?”

“We were not met nor in any way confronted.” The Revenant made a gesture, as if he’d read about shrugs and wanted to try one. “Some of their youths made remarks.”

“Ah well. Remarks.” Azrael took his knife to Lan’s plate, cutting a small wedge of black pudding and sampling it. “Treasonous, one assumes?”

“Rude, certainly. Their elders pulled them back soon enough.”

“Sensible of them. What am I tasting?”

“Blood,” said Lan.

He set down his knife hard and looked coldly at her.

“Really. Hog’s blood.”

“Hm.” He turned back to the Revenant. “I do not dignify the boastful chatter of boys with my attention. But now tell me, how was my gift received?”

“With my men at a distance, lord. But it was received. Or at least, it was not immediately declared poison or burnt. We did not stay to watch them eat.”

“You mean you just left?” It was not relief Lan heard in her voice as she spoke, but doubt. “You didn’t do anything?”

Deimos glanced at her, then at Azrael, and finally faced her straight-on. “I do as my lord commands.”

Lan cut her hand through that like the words could be slapped away. “Yeah, whatever, but did you leave them alive?”

“Yes.”

She had so expected to hear a ‘no’ that her heart’s first act on hearing his answer was to cramp in grief, then start beating again, too fast and too hard. She sagged back in her chair, just staring at him. “All of them?” she said at last.

Again, Deimos looked to his lord for direction. Azrael gave none, only poured himself another cup of tea. The Revenant shifted on his knee, gripping at the hilt of his sword in a restless sort of way. “How am I to know who lived or died within their walls? I say we killed no one. We obeyed our lord’s orders and delivered his gift. It was received. We left.”

“Well done, Captain. You may stand.” As the Revenant took up a post to one side of the dais, Azrael leaned back in his throne and raised his teacup to Lan. “To human nature,” he said with a smile. “In all its unpredictable variations.”

Lan had an answer, but the sound of two hundred chairs scraping and two hundred people standing startled it right out of her head. “To human nature!” they all said and drank whatever they happened to have in their cups. Then they all sat down again.

It was several seconds before Lan realized her mouth was open. She closed it and looked at Azrael.

“It’s called a toast,” he said, rubbing the brows of his snarling mask.

“Why did they…?”

“
They’re
called sycophants.”

Lan stared back out at the hall, more confused than ever. The word was familiar, but the hazy image that accompanied it—that of her mother, showing her a picture in a book of some great, grey beast with its tail growing out of its face—had no obvious connection to anything in his dead court.

“No matter. Your former home is safe and has my promise of regular shipments of table scraps,” he continued, waving a servant over for a fresh pot of tea. “I imagine there will always be hunger from time to time, but with their prudence and my charity, it should be enough to keep the wolf of starvation forever from Norwood’s door.”

“Thank you.”

He glanced at her, a glance that became a sidelong, considering stare. His thumbclaw scraped back and forth across the rim of his teacup. “Now that your mind is at ease,” he said at last, in an oddly wary and reserved tone, “I suppose you’ll be wanting to return to the Red Room after our nightly audience.”

“Not if I have a choice.”

“Oh?” He looked out at the dining hall, at no one and nothing in particular. “Why is that?”

“There are a million stairs in that tower.”

“Ah.”

“I hit my knee when I fell,” she explained, twitching the now-split skirt aside to show him the forming bruise and also quite a bit of her thigh.

His gaze lingered there awhile and then he reached down and matched the fingers of his hand to some of last night’s bruises. “I was vigorous,” he remarked.

Lan raised his golden collar off his shoulder to expose the fresh scratches carved there. “So was I.”

“Yes. You seek comfort after the same fashion of a terrier seeking rats.” He fingered one of the scratches, smiling. “All the same, I shall be sorry to see the mood depart you. These little hurts are nothing measured against the delights you offer when properly inspired. And in that spirit—” He resettled his collar and took up his cup again. “—I have a proposition to put before you.”

“What’s that?”

“A suggestion or, as in this case, a contract, put forth for consideration and effected upon mutual agreement.”

“No, believe it or not, I knew that word. I mean, what are you offering?”

“The people of Norwood hunger and I have fed them. The people of other villages hunger—” He indicated the tables below. “—and I could feed them.”

“You’d do that?”

“Not at a sitting.”

“But you would feed them?” she pressed. “All of them?”

“Not the whole world. Just the few fools who refuse to abandon this part of it, choosing instead to starve in my shadow.”

“Nobody chooses to starve,” Lan muttered, taking another pudding.

“No? Are you certain? Do you know why I came here?” he asked suddenly. “Here, of all places on this Earth I might have taken.”

Lan looked around the room.

“Not to this palace,” he said with a dismissive wave. “What is it to me but a stack of brick and a dry roof? No, to this land. This…island.”

“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say you liked it here.”

“Mark the tone in which you suggest it,” he said with a humorless smile. “It is the very voice of doubt. I put it to you: Do
you
like it here? Did you
like
the life you had in Norwood? Do you miss it?”

Lan bristled, but could not think of any answer that was both affirmative and honest.

“No. You don’t,” he said for her. “This land is shaped from bitter clay. It is cold. Hard. Men have long since stripped it of whatever natural life it held and then buried it under the choking sprawl of their own cities, which have since fallen. Its watery veins are toxic. Its enclosing seas are always angry. It has the most desolate soil, the most miserable weather, the most loveless and unfriendly landscape. It is a wretched place,” he concluded, thumping a finger on the table to emphasize each word. “Of all my wanderings, it is the most wretched place one can live. Oh, there are lands more barren,” he said as she opened her mouth to protest. “Frozen lands, sere lands, lands infected with more virulent disease and lands teeming with more noisome and lethal beasts…but these are lands that kill. And I am weary unto death, so to speak, of
dying
, Lan,
forever
dying. When I ascended, when I had the king’s cut of all Earth had to offer, I thought, ‘I will take this land and set myself within it, for it is wretched and who would ever stay where the Devil dens?’”