Land of the Beautiful Dead (65 page)

“Azrael, no!”

The steward took advantage of Lan’s interruption to bow and loudly blurt out, “Forgive me, lord, but they had no guns, only a hunting knife immediately surrendered. They were not attempting to enter Haven by stealth. Their ferry dropped them at some short distance and they walked to the gate.”

Azrael leaned back and cocked his head. “What,” he said after a lengthy pause to consider, “a fantastically foolish thing to do in the wake of recent events. What do they want?”

“An audience, sire. More than that, I do not know. Shall I have the gatewatch bring them here?”

“No. Release them.” Azrael turned, beckoning to Lan as he resumed his walk.

“Don’t you even want to hear what they have to say?” Lan asked.

“I’ve heard it,” he replied, unmoved and incurious. “A hundred times over from dozens of different throats, including yours.”

“But what if they—”

“Lan, come.”

Lan reluctantly followed him, twisting around to keep watching the steward bow and fidget. He started to walk away, raked a hand through his hair, and abruptly turned and came after them. “My lord, I must recommend you receive these visitors.”

“Visitors.” Azrael threw out a curt laugh. “Beggars at my gate are not guests, and even guests I am not obligated to receive with grace. I reward their audacity with their lives and that, surely, is reward enough. Send them away.”

“My lord, I must strongly—”

“Am I in the habit of granting audiences to beggars, steward?” Azrael asked without stopping.

Lan glanced back to intercept the troubled look the steward sent her way. “You’ve done it before,” she pointed out.

“Hush,” he told her, not without a smile. “I would say you’ve grown too bold in your speech, but you came to me this way.”

“I also came as a beggar to your gate.”

“You had no such respect. You trespassed into my city, invaded my palace, insulted me and made arrogant demands.”

“That’s a good point. When was the last time someone just up and knocked on Haven’s door?”

“More often than one would think.” He shook his head. “It matters not. I grant only one audience each day, and tonight, it is promised to you.”

“Are you going to end the Eaters tonight?”

“No.”

Lan shrugged. “Then they can have it.”

“You overstep yourself.”

“You just said you gave one audience a day. You don’t have one scheduled tonight, so now you have to hear them.”

“I don’t even have to hear you,” he replied with a pointed glance. But he raised his voice to reach his steward, still trotting after them. “What do they want?”

“No one ever asks for an audience because they’re so happy,” said Lan.

Azrael’s jaw clenched. “Ah yes. Life is bleak, the dead are an abomination and I am a monster. Now I don’t even need to meet with them.”

The steward must have agreed, because he actually wrung his hands and suddenly called out, “She claims to come from Mallowton, lord.”

Lan and Azrael both stopped mid-stride. They looked at each other, then turned, still in sync, to look at him.

“She,” Azrael echoed. “You said there were two.”

“A woman, sire, and a child.”

Azrael’s frown deepened. “From Mallowton.”

“So they claim, my lord.”

Softly, so very softly, Azrael said, “Do I know this woman?”

The steward didn’t seem to know how to answer and the silence only grew heavier the longer he made it last.

“Fetch Deimos,” were the words that finally broke it. Azrael’s hands creaked like old leather as he drew them into hooked fists. “And bring my…guests…to the dining hall.”

Without waiting to receive his steward’s bow of obedience, Azrael stalked away, forcing Lan to follow at what was almost a run or be left behind.

“What are you going to do to them?” she asked.

He did not answer.

She caught his arm. “Azrael, whatever you’re thinking—”

He shook her off.

“You can’t—”

He swung around so fast that she instinctively threw up one arm to ward off the blow. He froze, his anger dissipating at once, as Lan tried to pretend she had only been scratching at her hair.

After a long, uncomfortable silence, he said, “You cannot ask me for mercy.”

“These people have done nothing wrong! It isn’t mercy to not punish someone for someone else’s mistake.”

“Mistake? The youths of Mallowton did not offend a fairy as they set off for their fields and magically arrive at Haven’s gate with guns! I fed them!” he snarled. “Would you not call that an overture of peace? And would you not agree that it was rejected, violently?”

“And punished!” She touched his arm again and again, he raised it, but this time did not pull free, although his eyes burned hotter. “I know you think you were making an example out of them—”

“Enough! You swore you would not speak of this!”

“—but all you did was slaughter a village!” she finished stubbornly. “No one else will ever know why! What you did…” Her throat tightened with the remembered stink of ash and blood. It was several seconds before she was able to force her next words out. “Your anger may have been justified, but when no one is left to tell the story, the story will always be, ‘Azrael sent Revenants to brutally murder every man, woman and child in Mallowton for no damned reason!’”

“Men need no reason to murder, but I must have one?”

“Only if you want to believe you’re better than the worst of them.”

He paced away as far as the next window and leaned against the frame, seemingly just to have something to scrape at with his claws. “Your mouth,” he muttered, glaring at her over his shoulder.

“All I’m asking you to do is hear them out.”

“No, it isn’t. You want me to hear them,
agree
with them, spare them and give them whatever they demand of me, and moreover, you want me to do it according to your definition of what is reasonable, which is to say, whatever most benefits my enemy!” His voice had been rising steadily so that his final word was a shout, punctuated by his fist slamming into the wall, but after that he was quiet. His eyelight, reflected in the window glass, flickered and faded. His fingers drummed. He glanced back at her. “If I were to hear them, would you pay for their audience?”

“Yes,” said Lan, going to him without hesitation. “What do you want me to do?”

“Firstly.” He pointed one claw at her, so that the tip nearly touched the sensitive place between her eyes. “You will not speak so long as they stand in my presence. I will hear whatever argument you wish to make afterwards—for days, no doubt,” he added sourly, “but you will remember this is not your audience and be silent for theirs.”

“Fine.”

“At your first word, you will be removed and my promise of passage shall be revoked.”

“I said, fine!”

“Very fine.” He lowered his hand and smiled at her. She had come to find over her long stay in Haven that Azrael had many smiles, most of them with at least some degree of real humor behind them. This was not one of them. “Secondly, you must eat.”

Lan waited, her brows knitting, but he just smiled his unpleasant smile at her. “Is that it?” she asked finally.

“Bear in mind that whatever else happens tonight, you and I will end it in one another’s close company. I will hear your empty belly’s every complaint.”

“What makes you think I won’t eat?”

“I think only you may find it difficult once you see her.” His smile twisted even thinner. “And once she sees you.”

They resumed their walk in silence that lasted all the way to the dining hall. As he entered, even as the gathered dead were rising noisily to make their formal genuflections, he said, “Clear the court. Guards, remain at your posts.”

“No witnesses?” Lan asked as the hall swiftly emptied.

“That should comfort you. I don’t mind making public displays of my tyranny. It’s acts of mercy I regret. Clear this,” he ordered, indicating the feast laid out over the imperial table. “Tonight, we serve in courses. But leave the rest.”

“That’s sadistic,” said Lan, remembering only too well how it had felt to see all that food—see it, smell it, all but taste it—the first time she’d set foot in this hall.

“Remind me to congratulate Wickham on his improvements to your vocabulary. Sit, Lan, and be silent.”

She sat beside him. Servants came to fill their cups. Azrael helped himself to a sampling of the starters and watched the door.

Soon, Deimos arrived. He marched toward them, showing no reaction to either the near-empty hall or the obvious black mood of his lord, but went straight to the dais and down on one knee. He waited, his neck bent and one hand on the hilt of his sword, motionless.

Azrael ate another canapé and watched the door.

Silence, deafening as only the worst silences are. No one breathed but Lan. No one moved but Azrael.

At last, an eternity after he had left, the steward returned. “My lord, as requested, the…ah, the envoy,” he said with some satisfaction. “From Mallowton.”

Deimos looked sharply around.

The person who timidly answered the steward’s impatient wave was so small, Lan thought at first it was the child he had mentioned, until the real child came in hugging at her hip. Large eyes seemed even larger sunk in the hollows of the woman’s thin face, especially as she stared at what must seem to her a twinned mile of tables groaning with food. Ill-fitting, over-patched clothes only emphasized her thin frame. She wore her filthy mat of dark hair cropped short. The child’s was longer, tied back with string; a girl.

Lan looked at Azrael and saw only confusion beneath the snarling wolf’s face that he showed to the world.

“I don’t know you,” he said, almost as if to himself. His eyes flickered, then steadied. He beckoned and raised his voice to fill the hall with a curt, “Approach me.”

The woman flinched at the sound and Lan’s heart gave a little twinge of sympathy. She had never heard echoes before coming to the palace either. It must seem as though Azrael’s voice itself had this unfathomable, inhuman quality.

She crept forward, clutching the child’s hand tightly in hers, staring in hungry awe at everything around her and shivering whenever her gaze tapped up against one of the dead. When she looked at Lan, her step faltered and her mouth opened in a round o of despair.

The weight of Lan’s gown, the cleanness of it, squeezed at her, making it hard to breathe.

“Here,” Azrael said, pointing at the shining tiles beside the still-kneeling Revenant staring daggers up at her. “Come before me and speak.”

The woman took her last steps and, after a shuddering glance at Deimos, lowered herself painfully to her knees. “My lord—”

“Louder.”

“My lord, I come to ask—”

“No, no. That is not the way. Begin again.”

“M-My lord?”

“If I am your lord, you do not come before me and speak immediately of the demands you mean to make. First, you give your oath and then offer your gift of tribute.” Azrael waved a servant over with the first course of his meal. Beef broth, rich and full of flavor. “Only then, if I am satisfied as to your fealty, shall I consider hearing any requests.”

The woman huddled on her knees, watching the spoon travel between the golden bowl and black mask. The sound of her breathing was very loud, but she said nothing.

Another bowl was set before Lan. She could feel Azrael’s attention, even if he didn’t look at her. She told herself she had never felt less like eating and it was the truth. She told herself she wasn’t even hungry, but that was a lie. It was a lie and Azrael would know it. She touched her soup spoon, but the thought of eating in front of this woman and her child made her nauseous and never mind her grumbling belly. She’d eat later. Broth wasn’t real food anyway.

Lan put her hands in her lap and kept her mouth tightly shut.

Azrael smiled, although he never looked at her. He kept his gaze fixed on the woman kneeling before him, impaling her with his eyes as effectively as with a pike. “No oath?”

“I…I don’t know how…”

“No tribute?”

“Please, I’ve come a long way—”

“Now where have I heard that before?” he asked, staring at Lan. “Ah yes. From everyone. Why is that? Is distance some indicator of obligation? I came a long way, woman. I came through black rain and burning streets and across the dividing sea, and how was I met? Why should I meet you any better?”

“I…Please.”

“Still. You’re here.” He tapped his spoon twice on the side of his broth bowl and put it aside. “Your name?”

“Mary. My lord.”

“Painfully common. And who is this?”

The woman’s grip tightened on the child’s hand enough that she whimpered and squirmed. “Heather.”

“Slightly less common.” Azrael moved his cup to make room for the next course—poached fish in cream. “You needn’t hold her so close. She can’t run far.”

With obvious reluctance, the woman released the child’s hand. Little Heather promptly grabbed on to the ragged corner of the woman’s shirt instead and stuck her thumb in her mouth, staring with hungry eyes at the mountains of food on the nearest table.