Land of the Beautiful Dead (60 page)

Lan’s gorge rose right to the back of her throat, even if it was just an Eater. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve roughly enough to leave her lips feeling raw and, when she was sure there would be no more embarrassing behavior, she made herself look around. The guard who had been with her during her own night in this garden was still here, although his pike had been moved, presumably so all the raiders from Mallowton could hang together. Lan counted seven pikes, but four were empty now, with nothing but the black stain of their blood left on the wood to prove they had ever been there. The remaining three hung like scarecrows, their clothes flapping around their wasted bodies. She couldn’t tell for sure through the heavy smoke, but she thought they were dying, because if they were dead, they’d be moving more. Beside them, his chest cracked open and organs exposed to the irrigating spray of saline, was their ferryman. Her ferryman.

She moved stupidly toward him, forgetting the boys impaled beside him, forgetting the watching pikeman, forgetting even the Eater in the fire…until its burning hand closed around her knee and pulled.

A little earlier, this would have been the end—she would have surely fallen facedown in the pit, breathing in live embers and screaming out blood and ashes while the Eater rolled over her and ate. It still had the strength, but it no longer had the cohesion. Its fingers—long, thin sticks of charcoal with bones stuck through them—snapped off and lay twitching on the ground. Lan stepped back, but by then, the pikeman was between her and it, shoving it deeper into the hottest coals and pinning it there.

Its head was gone. Its arms, broken. Embers glowed in the cave of its ribs. It wasn’t recognizable as a person. It wasn’t even an Eater anymore, just a writhing lump of charcoal, but it had been a boy once and so she watched it burn. The smoke burned her eyes, but it wasn’t until she turned away and found herself staring again at the pikes—the ones that were empty and the ones that weren’t—that it all blurred out of focus. Lan wiped at her eyes, staring in shame at the moisture on her fingertips as the pikeman smothered another laugh.

Across the courtyard, the ferryman’s exposed lungs took in a difficult breath. His voice was a rusty whisper, a scratch across her ear, as he asked, “Are those tears for me?”

Lan’s feet moved her closer, away from the fire and the thing that burned there. “You remember me.”

“The one who paid…” Another breath. “…with peaches.”

“Did you have any?” she asked inanely.

“Sold them. Sure…they were good,” he added, as if consoling her. “But I don’t…eat.”

Lan raised her hand, but could not bring herself to touch him, even on those few places where he seemed intact. “Can I do anything? Do you want—” She groped for something, anything, she could offer. “—a drink?”

“You don’t have to feel…anything for me, Peaches. Ferrymen…die. That’s just…the way of it. We all say we’re going to stop…and we all get caught.” He dragged in another breath and let it out as a chuckle, almost indistinguishable from the sound of ashes blowing into the air behind her. “From the day…I walked away from him…I always knew…I’d end up stuck…or burnt.” He turned his head with effort toward the burning man. “Or both.” He turned back to her and studied her seriously. “You…look good.”

She smiled wanly.

“Much better…than you used to. Treating you…well?”

She nodded, dropping her eyes, ashamed.

“I worried…about you.” He twitched on his pole, trying to shrug. “Don’t…do that much, but you…were different.”

“I am?” She looked at herself and blushed. “I was?”

The ferryman frowned. “Don’t do that, Peaches. Don’t…look back. Everyone dies…every day. We raise up and…we go on and we…don’t think about who we were. The past…is dead.”

“Not for me.”

“You’re making me…feel bad, Peaches,” he said, this man with his chest open and his bowels dangling below his feet. “Did you get…what you came for?”

“Not yet. But I still have hope.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.” She dropped her eyes again, more embarrassed by this confession than by honking up her teacakes.

“I don’t remember what that feels like,” he said with a wistfulness that was somehow both distant and intense.  “But I remember… it didn’t always feel good.”

“No.” Lan looked over at the boys from Mallowton. One of them was mindlessly writhing and snapping his teeth at the other two. “It doesn’t.”

“You should go,” the ferryman told her. “You can do…me…no good. If you still believe…you can do what you came to do…go there.” He exhaled his unused breath and closed his eyes, looking perfectly at peace above his flayed chest.

Lan reluctantly retreated, unwilling somehow to turn her back on him even though he could not see her, and promptly bumped into one of the Mallowton boys. Jostled, he dropped several inches further down the spike. He and Lan screamed together, but only once. Then she clapped a shaking hand over her mouth and he sagged back onto his spike, returning to whatever innerspace he’d chosen to die in. It was the other boy who pulled himself out of it and looked at her, saw her. His hands moved, straining as if against tremendous weight to grip at his belly, showing Lan the unseen progress of the pike. His mouth worked in silence. He wet his lips, fought in a breath and choked up, “Help…me.”

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“I…can’t…” he said back at her. His fingers scratched at the front of his stomach. “…reach…”

“I’m sorry.”

“Help…make it…stop…”

Lan stumbled away, shaking her head and babbling apologies. The pikeman had to catch her before she could back stupidly right into the low wall of the burning pit and maybe fall in. She knew she ought to thank him, but her stomach was churning and she was afraid if she unlocked her throat for any reason, she’d be sicking up again.

The pikeman stood awkwardly beside her while she took shallow breaths and tried to stop shaking. Now and then, he looked up at the boy, who was still screaming at them with his eyes while he struggled just to breathe. At last, with a sudden scowl of resolve, the pikeman handed Lan his pike, then grabbed the boy’s ankles and pulled. The boy’s gasping whisper became a glassy shriek as the pikeman’s knees hit the ground, but with a sickening crunch, that scream broke. His jaw yawned; in eerie silence, he vomited red-black blood all down his chest. The pikeman leapt nimbly aside, but Lan stood transfixed, hot blood spattering her hair and dripping down her cheeks like tears.

The boy from Mallowton did not move. His eyes were still open and still aimed at Lan, but they did not see her. His chest shimmered as firelight reflected off his blood-soaked skin, but he wasn’t moving…not yet.

The pikeman brushed his knees off and took his weapon back. He looked back and forth between Lan and the dead boy, plainly uncomfortable, and finally said, “Do you want to sit down?”

She shook her head no and said, “Yes.”

The pikeman herded her over to the foot of the burning pit, out of the smoke, and sat her down. He stood close by, shooting her troubled glances from the corner of his eye as he stirred the burning man’s ashes. Behind him, the first Eater gnawed on its own arm, chewing away every strip of flesh where blood had splashed him. The second Eater was staring at the last boy. She hadn’t even noticed when he’d come alive and now it was as if he’d always been this way.

“What am I doing here?” Lan asked.

The guard’s pike paused, then resumed stirring with even greater force.

“I shouldn’t be here.”

He inched away from her, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on his work.

Lan watched him—not the man whose crumbling body he broke down, not the dead men in their possibly eternal torment, not even the live one in the last hours of his mortality. If there were any secrets to be learned in the garden, and it seemed to Lan that there were, it was the pikeman who held the key to understanding it. He was a young man too, or had been at his death, as young as the boys from Mallowton, but much better looking. When he’d laughed at her, his boyish features had relaxed in that carefree way that could have easily charmed open the legs of any number of women, whether he paid them or not. He’d been human once. Handsome and young and human. No matter what else he’d been in life, how was it possible for someone like him to end up here, tending Azrael’s garden? She watched him, smoke burning at her eyes, thinking if she could just understand that, maybe she’d understand everything.

He knew she was staring at him and ultimately, he must have decided she wasn’t going to stop on her own because he planted his pike in the burning man’s mostly-broken midsection and turned to face her. She watched him hunt for something to say and the longer it took, the more the feeling in her grew that
it
was coming, whatever
it
was. She saw the precise moment he settled on what to tell her, saw him rehearse it once or twice to gain confidence. He raised his hand to indicate the burning pit, the impaling spikes, the dead men, the live one, the world.

He said, “Nice night for it.”

Lan looked up. There was no trace of the sun now, not even a bruisy streak over the horizon to show where it had set. Into this perfect blackness, a column of deep red sparks rose, without hardly any wind at all to disperse it. It was dry now, but the air had that clean taste of recent rain. It was cool, but not cold. It was indeed a nice night. Regardless of what was happening here or in Mallowton or anywhere at all, the Earth kept on turning and it was still a nice night.

“Here you are.”

The pikeman came to sharp attention when Azrael entered the garden, standing away from the burning pit to allow a clear view of the blackened remains. The Eaters both turned toward the sound of his voice; the first lost interest and resumed biting holes in its own arm, but the second saw Lan. Drool overflooded its hanging jaw, dislodging clots of blood. It stretched out both arms, making clumsy snatching motions from five meters away, its brow furrowing with dumb frustration each time its grab fell short. She could feel the chillflesh popping out on her arms, but she could not make herself look away from its hungering, death-dull stare until Azrael bodily came between them.

She started to stand; he reseated her with a firm shove, then looked at his hand, rubbing the mixture of blood and ash between his fingers and studying the color it made. He paced around her, paused to lift a blood-crusted hank of her hair, then paced the other way and plucked at her sleeve, where the heat from the fire had baked the fine fabric stiff. He did not speak, only made a low, judicious sound deep in his chest as he turned to survey each of the ‘flowers’ in his garden.

“What,” said Azrael, not loudly, “have you done?”

The pikeman was as still as only the dead can be.

Lan did not look at him. She said, “I killed a man.”

“So I see.” He walked away, unhurried, to the man in question, examining the ground more closely than the Eater. The blood he had sicked up at the end had collected in a roughly circular shape, not quite closed, rounded at one end and tapered at the other. It looked a little like a comma. Inanely, Lan heard the echo of Master Wickham telling her that a comma signified a pause used to modify and separate grammatical structure. That was what this felt like—a pause, a separation. When Azrael had finished his inspection, he turned all the way around, in easy reach of the Eater, who only leaned out to one side so he never lost sight of Lan. “You killed this man.”

She nodded.

“You came unbidden to the meditation garden and killed
this
man.” He began to walk toward her, his eyes catching every spark from the fire, glowing out more brightly than any ember. “A man who came to invade
my
city, to destroy all that I have built here, to kill
my
undying people? To kill
me
!”

“I—”

“Leaving aside your questionable loyalties, let us address your appalling arrogance.” Azrael caught her chin and pulled her to her feet. “What do you imagine gives you the right to belie my orders? When I set a man to suffer, I do not want that suffering curtailed.”

“I know.”

He studied her as she avoided his eyes, then looked out over the garden again, coming eventually to rest on the pikeman. His fingers, digging at her jaw, flexed. “I am reminded that once you told me you could not bear to tend your mother’s risen husk,” he said, still staring at the pikeman, “Yet you would have me believe you sped a living man’s impalement?”

What was he looking at? Lan risked a glance and saw the shadowy smudge of ash and mud on the pikeman’s knees…and two coin-sized drops of blood on his jacket. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“That takes a certain tenacity. And a not inconsiderable amount of strength. I would not have thought it of you.” He finally looked down at her again. His eyes burned cold. “Tell me the truth.”

“The truth?” She tried to shake free of his grip, but couldn’t and had to settle for a shrill, angry laugh. “The truth is, you deserve everything people say about you.”

His head rocked back even more than when she’d slapped him.

She thrust her chin forward, twisting the knife. “You deserve everything they’ve done. Maybe you weren’t born a monster, but you sure as hell became one and monsters deserve to be hated and hunted for the rest of their lives.”