Land of the Beautiful Dead (36 page)

But he didn’t tell her to go. He sat on the edge of the bed while Lan lay across its foot, curled as small as she could go, neither looking at the other.

“Are you hungry?” he asked finally.

“I’m all right.”

“You ate nothing at my table.”

“The corset was too tight.”

“You aren’t wearing it now.”

“I said I’m all right.”

“If I sent for food,” he said, with a hint of edge to his tone, “would you eat with me?”

“I guess, so long as it’s clear you’re the one wanting it and not me.”

“Yes, yes, and you take no pleasure from it or anything I might give you!”

“Almost anything.”

He looked at her.

She rolled one shoulder, offered half a smile.

After a tense moment, he returned it. “Impale me yourself,” he muttered and got up. She heard the rattle and rustle as he dressed and then watched him come around the bed and over to the door. He had a quiet word with the guards outside, closed the door, paused, then opened it again. She heard him ask a question with the name Christina in it, but she couldn’t make out the answer.

“Sorry I ran your other dolly off,” she said when the door closed again. She wasn’t, but it didn’t hurt to say so. “She all right?”

He grunted, moving in and out of sight on his way to the wardrobe. He shifted things around in the noisy, rough manner of a man who wants to make it clear the frilly things he was touching were for someone else and of no sentimental value to him. He brought back something long and loose and blue, tossed it at her, then sat back down on the edge of the bed and resumed ignoring her.

She fought her way into the complicated array of folds and drapes and veils, then moved over and sat beside him. Her shoulder bumped against his arm and he shifted like he might get up, only to settle tensely back again.

They watched the door together, waiting for it to open.

After several minutes, each one its own hour of prickly silence, Lan said, “So what was in the note?”

He glanced around at the floor until he found where it had fetched up, but made no move to collect it. “I forgave you,” he said in a way that suggested he had perhaps been premature, “and warned you never again to leave the palace, save under guard. The living are not permitted to wander in my city.”

“I was with Master Wickham the whole time.”

“That is the only reason you are still here.”

“I said I was sorry.”

He did not answer, not even with one of his narrow, knowing glances, but after the silence had stretched out to its snapping point, he said, “Displeased as I was when I heard you had climbed the palace wall, I did not truly consider it an attempt to escape me.”

“Why would I? We just barely struck a deal.”

He ignored that and said, “Likewise, there is nothing you could spy out in Haven that can be used against me. If you wished an accounting of my dead and all my resources, I would freely give it. Let your armies come. The dead cannot be killed.”

“What the bloody fuck, man?!” she sputtered. “I’m no spy!”

He ignored that, too. “When word came to me of your escape, my immediate thought was simply that you chafed at walls and wished to explore your surroundings. What more natural compulsion? As you say, we have just begun in our bargaining and your stubbornness will hold you far better than any chains of mine. No, I knew once your reckless impulse had been indulged, reason would follow…and remorse. And you would return. Even as the hours passed, I remained confident you would come back to me and when I, in my mercy, forgave you…”

And then he only sat, his back stiff and jaw clenched, staring straight ahead at the door.

“We’d come down here and I’d make it up to you?” Lan guessed.

“Ha. No.” He shook his head, rubbed up under his mask, then finally said, “I thought we might…pass a little time talking about the things you’d seen. Haven is a marvel, no matter what else it is, and no one living looks on it save with wonder. I no longer feel wonder and I cannot imagine I ever shall again.” He was silent a moment, then said, even more reluctantly, “I thought I might see my city through your eyes. And I did.”

Lan reached for him. He leaned away without looking at her. She put her hands together in her lap and fiddled with a fold of her skirt. “It’s not that bad. I never said it was. I never even thought it. It was just…”

“Dead.”

“Empty,” she said, but it wasn’t much better and she knew it. “Maybe…Maybe you could take me around sometime, show me the places you like? Maybe if I saw Haven through your eyes—”

“Mine? I still see it burning.” He rubbed beneath his mask again.

“Are you okay?”

He scowled at her, then stiffly shrugged and forced his hand back to his knee. “The flesh is growing in,” he grunted. “It itches.”

“Are you sure it’s not infected?” she asked, reaching for him again. “Maybe I should look—”

He caught her hand in the air and shoved it away, snarling.

She gave that a moment, then got up, not unaware of his sudden tension, but she didn’t leave. She went to the bath, took a dry washcloth from the small stack Serafina kept there, got it wet, and came back to the bed. This time, when he tried to push her hand away from his mask, she gave him a smack to his fake face. His eyes blazed, but dimmed again and he sat rigid and silent as she unfastened the straps and tossed the stupid thing onto the bed beside him.

The open wound of his cheek was no worse than it ever was, but certainly no better. She daubed at it carefully, softening the black scab that edged it and took away a few beads of the tarry substance that was his blood. It didn’t smell soured, certainly didn’t feel hot. The flesh around it looked a little raw where he’d been rubbing, but the wound itself looked about as well as any gash open to the bone could look. She kept daubing anyway, giving every inch of the thing equal attention, as much to make her point as to do any actual cleaning.

Azrael waited for her to finish, then rose and went behind the bathing screen to rummage among the little bottles he kept there. He came back with one of them and placed it, stone-faced, in her hand. He sat on the bed again, staring at the door.

Lan opened the bottle and gave the contents a sniff. It wasn’t familiar to her, but it smelled medicinal and strong, so she got a little on her fingertips and gingerly worked it in all around the edges.

“Why did you come here?” he asked quietly.

“You know why.”

“Here. Tonight.”

“Oh. That.” She shrugged and capped the bottle, taking it back to the bath. “Just another reckless impulse.”

He watched her go without moving. “You’ll have to work on those.”

“Yeah.” Lan hunkered down to wash her hands in the standing bathwater. Whatever the stuff was in the bottle, it was thick and didn’t want to come off. “You know, I was never like this in Norwood.”

“No?”

“No. Kept my head down…and my hands clean.” She shook them off and rubbed them dry on her thighs. “Did my work and paid my debts.”

“How blessed you are, to have led so tedious a life.”

“Can’t afford to be exciting in a place like that, because there’s always someone else who wants what you’ve got. Your food, your bed.” She returned to his and sat beside him, looking down at her bare feet against his cracked stone floor. “Your boots.”

“Mm.”

“There’s not enough,” said Lan. “There’s never enough and there’s always someone else out there who’s stronger than you. So you need people to know you’ll be there for them so they’ll be there for you. One person against the world never wins.”

“And yet, you’re here.”

“I’m not against the world, just you. Makes the odds about even, as I see it.”

He made a sound, not quite a laugh. “I used to be an idealist, too.”

A soft knock sounded on the door at last. Azrael reached for his mask as his chamberlain entered and stood aside for a full parade of dead people—two carrying a table, two each with chairs, one with a trolley for the settings and the last, almost as an afterthought, with food. The table was placed with some private discussion by the fireplace and swiftly laid out. Just the bare essentials, owing to the odd hour: two bowls full of white and yellow flowers, a dozen candles in silver holders, a dozen dishes each, including finger bowls, salt shakers, pepper grinders, and napkins folded to look like birds. With the last candle lit and flower fluffed, the lot of them paraded out again and only then did anyone speak—his chamberlain, keeping his eyes averted as he asked if anything further would be required.

Although the question was clearly directed at Azrael, Lan couldn’t stop a wry, “Yeah, let’s get some ice in that water. What, am I supposed to drink it warm?”

“Unnecessary,” Azrael said, showing a thin smile through the fangs of his snarling wolf mask. “That will do. You may go.”

The chamberlain bowed himself out with a murmured apology to Lan and they were alone.

“I will never understand why you need all this silly shit just to eat,” Lan said, lifting the covers on the serving dishes. Bread and cake, fruit and cheese, water and wine—nothing that needed the fuss that had been laid out to receive it.

He glanced at her, then studied her place setting, and finally reached out and took one of her spoons. “At the summit of my first ascension and after my…small vengeance for the assault I was made to suffer, I was brought before certain men…leaders of men…and we all sat down together to negotiate peace.” His mouth twisted in something that was not a smile, but pretended to be. “They set food before me. Poisoned, as it turned out, but I did not discover that until later. At the time, I knew only that I was an animal among Men. I was…filthy and bloody and naked…and I did not know how to sit at a table and eat. The poisoning was nothing compared to that.” He returned the spoon to its proper place. “I embarrassed myself then, but it was, as you would say, a long time ago and it hardly matters now.”

Lan watched him pour the wine, fill his plate and settle back to eat, all without looking at her. After a while, she unfolded her napkin. After a little while longer, she said, “Do I embarrass you?”

“No.”

“We’re not much on airs in Norwood, but I always thought I was fairly mannered-up until I got here.” She looked down at the silverware framing her small stack of plates. “I don’t know what half this stuff is for. I shouldn’t even be allowed to touch it.”

“You don’t embarrass me.”

“I see the people in your court, the way they look at me when I’m up there with you.”

Now he looked at her, but his face behind the mask was impossible to read.

“I hear them laughing at me.” She shrugged one shoulder, playing with the handle of a fork, one of many. “I tell myself it doesn’t bother me, that they’re the ones making fools of themselves, them in their fancy dress and painted faces. I guess I never really stopped to wonder if I’m the fool after all. Did everyone used to eat like this? Before?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Not even here, save for rare occasions.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“Because I can.” He acknowledged the pettiness of that with a smile, then returned his attention to his meal. “But if it makes you so unhappy, you needn’t resume instruction. That you talk to me when you eat is of far greater import than what spoon you use.”

“If it matters to you, it should matter to me,” Lan said grudgingly. “I’m your dolly, you’re not mine. And I’m not your only one, so…so I guess I should be making more of an effort.”

He ate his dinner and watched her play with the silverware. At last, he said, “Are you waiting for me to argue?”

“I thought this would be easier, that’s all. I thought I could be your dolly and still be me.”

“I have a withering effect upon all my consorts,” he remarked, helping himself to a small bunch of grapes. “I wish I could tell you it won’t last.”

“I don’t feel withered. I feel…I don’t know. Can I tell you something?”

“If you like.”

“I’d really like to sleep with you tonight.”

He tipped his head back to study her, then put down his cup and laced his fingers together. “If that’s the opening bid to some greater negotiation,” he said evenly, “it’s a strong one.”

“It’s not. It’s just the truth. I never slept with anyone before. I like it.” Far from encouraged by his impassive stare, Lan settled her nerves with a swallow of wine, then looked directly at him and said, “Can I stay? I mean, unless you were planning on bringing your other girl back.”

“I wasn’t, no.” He considered her, tapping now and then at the table as he thought, and finally said, “I’ve no objection.”

“You’re sure?”

“It was a pleasant way to pass the time. If you change your mind, you know the way out.”

She didn’t know what sort of welcome she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this.

“Do you want me to stay?” she asked.

His eyes flickered. He looked away.

“I didn’t mean that like, did you want
me
—”

“Yes.”