Land of the Beautiful Dead (8 page)

“End the war. Take back your Eaters and let us die.”

“No.”

“Then I guess we keep playing until you kill me.”

“A particularly wasted move in the game, since no one is here to witness your sacrifice. Besides which, you cannot be a martyr to your fool’s cause unless I allow you to die.” He glanced at his stubbornly insistent cock. “You are losing my good humor. Now come, what is it you truly desire? You could have the meat of my table, the wine of my cup. You could have rooms of your own within these walls, servants to attend you, privilege beyond your most reckless imaginings. And you will have had worse lovers, I assure you. I have no pity, but I do know passion.”

“I want nothing but for you to end the war.”

“Never will I allow Man to take back his dominion over this earth. What bejeweled chalice,” he said suddenly, with more than an edge of frustration, “do you hold between your thighs that my sipping from it is worth so many lives?”

It was not clear whether he referred to the value of human lives, or the mindless residue possessed by the screaming Eaters. “I’ll do—”

“Whatever I ask,” he finished for her. “Do you imagine I have never had a willing woman? I have had five at once in that very bed, each of them vying for the privilege I offer you now. You’ve a mouth that I’m sure has paid for many, many bottles of water in the world outside, but here, it is just another mouth.”

“You’re interrupting me.”

His eyes narrowed. In pointed silence, he drew up his arms and folded them across his chest, staring down at her.

At last, she had to say it: “I’ll do whatever you ask.”

He let that weak conclusion sit awhile, making absolutely certain she was done before dryly saying, “My apologies. I did not realize the damage my interruption would do.” He glanced at his cock, then suddenly turned away, bellowing for his chamberlain.

The doors opened. A dead man bowed his way inside and began unobtrusively to collect Azrael’s discarded garments from the bath and select fresh ones from the wardrobe in the corner. When it was opened, she could see flashes of firelight reflected. There had been mirrors affixed to the doors once, but they had been broken and never replaced.

“Are you getting dressed?” Lan asked.

“Ha! And is there some reason I should not?”

“I’m willing—”

“So you’ve said. And said. And said. Indeed, I’ve heard so much talk of your willingness that I must take some time to ponder it lest some vital point slip my consideration. Guard! My guest would seem to prefer the meditation garden to my bedchamber. Escort her.”

“Wait—”

“It’s certain to be a cold day,” Azrael overrode her, “but there should still be a fire by which you might warm yourself. If it’s gone out, I’ll have another lit for you.”

To watch another man burn…from the beginning this time…in full daylight. She would have to see hair melt and skin blacken, smell fat as it popped and crackled, and hear him scream until his lungs charred and split.

Her mother, writhing in flames…screaming…for hours…

“No,” Lan heard herself say.

The pikeman seized Lan’s arm and pulled her to her feet, forcing her either to stumble along beside him or be dragged.

“No!” Lan struggled to turn around, ducking her head in a futile attempt to evade her guard’s cuffs. “Please!”

The guard swung his pike around and raised the butt of it for a blow, only to just as suddenly lower it and step back with a bow. Lan staggered free of him, turning to see Azrael with his hand upraised, regarding her while his chamberlain continued silently to dress him.

“So you
can
beg,” he mused. “Although I note you do even that with an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Do you think you can refuse my table, refuse my bed, refuse even my garden, all with impunity? My hospitality is finite, child, and unless you can convince me otherwise, you have reached the end of it.”

“Please.”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” he warned her with a mocking smile. “Come, come. You cannot have run dry of stirring speeches already! Why, you’ve only just arrived.”

“I’ve seen so many fires,” she said, pushing the words through a throat much too small for them. “Please don’t make me. You can chain me up. You can do anything, just…please…no more fires.”

He gazed at her without moving for what seemed a long time as the pikeman held her in his dead grip, then said, “Take her to the Red Room,” and turned away.

* * *

The Red Room was at once the most opulent and least comfortable room in which Lan had ever slept, and that after all the hostel cells, ferry vans, abandoned city ruins and of course, the Women’s Lodge at Norwood, her home, and home to all the women and girls of the settlement who were unmarried and therefore vulnerable. There, only a few filthy curtains had separated the thin mattress where Lan and her mother slept from the others and each night’s sleep had been broken by the snores, whispers and errant kicks of her thrashing neighbors. Compared to that, the Red Room, even at scarcely ten paces wall to wall, was luxurious indeed, but it was not restful.

She could not guess what the room might have been back when humans lived here, but having spent so many recent nights in hostels, it had the look of a prison to Lan, even though it was situated high in one of the towers of Azrael’s palace and not underground, where she was accustomed to seeing prisons. The walls were bare stone, painted a deep, unrestful red. The ceiling was made of square tiles, also red. The floor had been laid with a red, patternless rug over red-painted boards. The bed, red-lacquered posts, fine red sheets, plush red blankets, red cushions. Even the chamberpot was enameled in red. The effect was that of a room soaked in blood.

The only light came through a narrow slit of a window, glassless, that admitted a welcome, if chill, breeze and allowed her to look out over the high palace wall, beyond Azrael’s patrolling guards, at the city of Haven, whose residents were just stirring—waking, if the dead slept—to go about whatever they had instead of lives. She watched for a while, but could never quite pretend it was a city like the ones in old magazines, or that it could ever go back to being one.

So yes, it was luxurious, but no, not restful and after some time attempting sleep in the soft red bed she had all to herself, Lan pulled the blankets and one cushion onto the floor and slept there instead, facing into the shadows beneath the bed where all she could see was black. She tried to make herself see pictures, the way she’d done as a child, but all she conjured up was a headache and a few indistinct blurs pulsing in the rhythm of sex.

Could she fuck him? Probably. Shapes in the dark lose power in the light; she’d had his cock in her hand and tasted its deadalive taste. She thought she could probably fuck him just fine. Could she be his dolly? That, she didn’t know.

Lan, a dollygirl. Not just a quick one now and then to buy her meals (or end the Eaters, her brain stubbornly supplied), but a true dolly. It wasn’t unheard of, even in a small village like Norwood. The mayor had a dolly for a few years, when Lan was still too young to really be aware of it. Lisah Tuttle. She had her own house and everything. Often, little Lan would hang over the top of the fence and watch her do her washing—all fine clothes and frilly knickers, and herself pinning them up with her hair in ringlets and ribbons, smiling over her shoulder at Lan until Lan’s mother hauled her away.

“What does she sell?” she’d asked once, because even then, she’d known there was barter in it somewhere. Lisah Tuttle didn’t work in the greenhouses or chase pigs around the sty. Lisah Tuttle’s hands were soft and white as curd and her shoes were always clean. Lan didn’t know what Lisah’s trade was in, but she knew, even at that young age, that she wanted it.

Her mother had looked up from the lunch they were sharing during their brief respite before they got back in the rows, cocking her head so she could aim her good eye through the dirty glass at the blur that was Lisah swishing through the streets. “Everything,” she said. “All she has.”

“Do you reckon I could sell it, too?” asked Little Lan, wistfully. “If I ever get some?”

“I won’t tell you not to,” her mother told her after a moment’s hard stare. “This isn’t the world for that. But I will say, once you start selling, you never really stop. So when the time comes, trade hard and sell in pieces. A dolly wears the nicest dresses and has the prettiest face, but when she’s done being played with, she goes up on the shelf or into the box and she doesn’t get to complain. A dolly’s owned, her whole self. Understand?”

And Little Lan had nodded, because who didn’t know what a dolly was? Most of the girls in Norwood played dollies, even though only a few had real ones with painted porcelain faces and fancy dresses with ribbons and lace. Elvie Peters had a dolly like that. Lan had a clothy with the hair drawn on, or rather, she used to have one. One of the mayor’s boys, Eithon, had snatched it away and when they were fighting for it, it had ripped up the middle between her legs, which made all the boys hoot and poke at it, so Lan had run home in tears with no dolly at all. Her mother might have scrounged up another if she’d asked, but she never did. Her reasons had something to do with the sight of those boys, jeering and stabbing their fingers at her torn dolly, but it was a queer, hot-faced reason that didn’t come with words. Anyway, she understood all about dollies and how they were owned. Lan’s dolly had been split and poked and then dropped in the mud where it had probably been picked up by one of the mayor’s dogs and carried off for a gnaw toy, and Dolly did not complain. What all this had to do with Lisah Tuttle, she had no idea, but dollies, she understood very well.

She understood them even better now. Little Lan had grown up and if there were bits she’d sold over the years, at least she’d sold them dear. She was no man’s dolly and never would be.

But she couldn’t sleep.

And after all, it was a silly thing to stick to, wasn’t it? Hadn’t she come to Haven accepting—hell,
expecting
—to die? What sense did it make to put a higher price-tag on her body than her life?

Lan caught herself drumming her fingers on the floor and made herself stop. She’d never drummed her fingers on anything in her life. That was
him
, creeping into her. He didn’t get to do that. She wasn’t his dolly yet.

Or at all. Or ever.

Maybe.

Unpleasant, he’d said. It will be unpleasant, but she’d be compensated. How unpleasant, exactly? About the most oddjob thing Lan had ever agreed to was to take a cold bath and lie perfectly still so the fella could pretend she was dead while he was crawling on her.
That
was unpleasant, but Azrael certainly didn’t lack for dead women, if he wanted one. What
did
he want?

Her. For whatever reason, he wanted her. The only question was, how much was she selling?

All, she realized. For the Eaters, she’d sell it all.

So decided, she shut her eyes against the darkness and forced herself to sleep.

She dreamed in tangles, never quite knowing whether she was awake or not, but whenever she thought she was out, she found herself again in Norwood, hearing screams and choking on the smell of smoke and peaches. If there was more to the dreams than that, she didn’t know it. She never remembered her dreams anymore.

She was awakened by the heavy stride of boots on the landing outside her room and keys scraping in an old lock. As she uncurled her stiff body, the door opened to reveal one of Azrael’s guards, interchangeable with the one who had brought her here. He looked down at her without emotion, without even a hint of curiosity as to why she should be on the floor with an empty bed right next to her. “Our lord commands you join him for breakfast.”

So soon? By habit, she looked out to gauge the time from the sun’s position in the sky, but it hardly seemed to have moved. She supposed she was decided and a few hours more or less made no difference, but she wished she’d had at least a chance to sleep on it.

Pushing herself slowly into a sitting position, Lan rubbed at those of her joints that had come out the worst for being pressed to the floor, aware only of the cold and her many hurts, not the least of which was her bladder. Glancing at the chamberpot, she said, “Can you give me a minute?”

If the disdainful look he gave her was not reply enough, his cool tone as he said, “Our lord’s subjects do not chose the hour at which they obey him,” would have surely withered anyone else who had dared the question.

Lan got up. “Unless your lord doesn’t mind if his subjects piss themselves at the table, give me a damn minute.”

The guard recoiled, his pretty mouth pursing into a moue of aristocratic distaste. “Vulgar, gutter-crawling quim,” he muttered (a rather loud mutter) and slammed the door on her.

Lan used the facilities, such as they were, finger-combed her hair and shook out her clothes so they looked a little less slept in. She wished she had some way to check her reflection—a windowpane or even a polished bit of metal—but there was nothing here. In some desperation, she spat into her palm and scrubbed at her face, hoping to take away some of the grime or at least put some color in her cheeks.

When the door opened again, she was ready, although she could see by her guard’s expression her appearance was not much improved. Never mind. It was Azrael whose opinion mattered.