Land of the Beautiful Dead (89 page)

“Affairs, my lord?”

“Yes, Captain. Lan is going to have affairs in my absence.”

“You ass,” said Lan, but she had to smile too.

Brows knitting, the Revenant looked at Lan. “Affairs of state?”

“Affairs of…of bloody affairs!”

“With you,” Azrael elaborated.

“I see.” He took it well, although that faint furrow never quite smoothed itself away. “I’ll do what I can, although sexual intercourse requires a certain physiological response, which I, being dead, cannot accomplish without artificial means.” He stopped talking when Lan clapped both hands to her face, waited for her to drop them, then finished, “I will procure a device immediately.”

Azrael’s shoulders were very slightly shaking, although he was careful not to make a sound.

“That won’t be necessary, Captain,” said Lan, her words riding a sigh. “Thanks anyway.”

Deimos accepted this with a nod, neither relieved nor disappointed, and turned back to Azrael. “Shall I be undertaking affairs with all your companions, lord?”

“In good conscience, I can’t recommend it,” he said dryly. “However, your leisure time is your own. For now, if you would, please inform them I will be departing shortly. If there are any among them who would wish a private word with me before I go, I will receive them. I trust you have no objection,” he remarked as the Revenant rose and took his whining dog away.

“I guess not. They have as much right to say goodbye as I do.”

“I refer to my appointment of Deimos as your intermediary while I am away.”

“Oh.” The inadequacy of that response only made itself more apparent in the silence that followed. Lan dug deep in her internal store of enthusiasm and came up with, “I’m sure he’ll do fine.”

“I’m sure.” Azrael watched the ferries board, one by one by one. “You’ve not mentioned Wickham since our return.”

Lan opened her mouth, but there was nothing to say, so she closed it again and just waited.

“To my knowledge, you’ve made no attempt to call upon him, either to make arrangements to resume your lessons or to apologize for the means by which you chose to end them. I can only infer, therefore, you know he is dead.”

“Deimos told me.”

He nodded, his attention fixed on the activity in the courtyard. His voice was steady, almost indifferent, but the light in his eyes was not as he said, “It is important to me that you understand he asked to be released from the life I gave him. It was not a punishment. And if I had known, had thought there was even the slightest chance you would return—”

“I believe you.”

They waited, standing close together, but not quite touching. Azrael watched the ferries fill and drive away. Lan watched the clouds wisp across the sky.

“I buried him,” he said abruptly.

She looked around, surprised and pleased. “Did you really? Here?”

“No. At the Natural History Museum.” He glanced at her. “Do you approve? I know you don’t care for museums, but he was a scholar at the heart of him. I wished to honor his memory.”

“It’s a good place. Brilliant columns there. He loved columns.”

“I regret you never knew him in life. He, too, thought he could save the world with the right words.” Azrael lapsed into a short silence, but not a brooding one. It ended with a chuckle. “I never knew a man so dishonest, nor one so respectful and engaging as he went about it. He did not conceal his lies, but invited them in and sat them at the table as guests, so that we could both nod at them. I had no experience until then with conversation as an art and he was so very talented an artist that I would have tolerated his deceptions indefinitely merely for the pleasure of his company.” His smile faded. “But his masters had other plans and he proved more loyal than wise. I killed him in a fit of temper and raised him in an equally unfortunate fit of remorse. I did very badly by him, Lan.”

“I don’t think he held it against you.”

“But he knew. All these years and I never guessed he knew,” he mused. “I so feared to see how he had been diminished by my actions that I avoided him as much as possible and so deprived myself of enviable company I shall never have again. I have but forged one more link in a great chain of regret.” His eyes dimmed as he sank once more under the shadow of his own unquiet. “It disheartens one.”

“You know what Master Wickham would say to that, don’t you?”

“No. Tell me.”

“You have to want the time you have.”

Azrael uttered a low, humorless laugh and said, “Why?”

Lan shrugged. “Because you have it, whether you want it or not. And life is motion. That’s something else he used to say all the time. You can move toward what you want or away from it, but you can’t stop, so you have to want the time you have, because it’s all the time you get.”

“That loses its intended impact when ‘all the time you get’ is all the time there is.”

“Master Wickham would say that only means you have a limitless potential for change.”

“Would he indeed?”

“He’d say no one can live your life for you and no one else can waste it. He’d say you carry the sole responsibility for your own success or failure.” Lan rolled her eyes a little. “And then he’d say the marble galleries at the Royal Courts of Justice give the best view of the spandrels, which are the finest surviving examples of spandrels from the late-Victorian gothic revival style of arches and we should go have a gander because the grout in the Great Hall is bloody marvelous. I’m going to miss him,” she said as he threw his head back and laughed. “But he’s in a good place now.”

Still smiling, Azrael cast a glance at the sky and looked back at her inquiringly.

“A museum,” she explained. “Thank you for that. It means a lot to me that you put him in a good place. Can he have a stone too? You know the kind I mean.”

“Deimos can make the necessary arrangements. Ask for a monuments mason.” He paused, then haltingly said, “James.”

“Ask for James?”

“No. You…you’ll need his full name for the monument. James Wickham. Ah, Felicity, how lovely you look this morning,” he called, too suddenly. He raised his hand and beckoned the first of his dollies to him from the polite distance where Deimos had been holding them. “Your pardon, Lan. This won’t take long.”

Lan moved away to give them privacy, but not far. His dollies could give him all the goodbyes they wanted, but hers would be the last face he saw before he left. In the meantime, she took up a position beside Deimos, where she could remain conspicuous, but not overbearing as she watched a procession of other women flutter over her man.

“Do you know what a monuments mason is?” she asked, since it appeared they’d be at it for a while.

“Yes.”

“Can you find one for me?”

“At once. Phobos, fall in.”

“It doesn’t have to be this instant,” said Lan as the Revenant turned to go. “I know you want to see him off as much as I do.”

Deimos hesitated, then sat his dog once more and clasped his hands behind his back. “Thank you.”

The first dolly flounced off with a sniff in Lan’s direction. The second stepped up, careful to keep her hands behind her back, although she managed a pasty sort of smile for Azrael to admire. And he did.

“Did he just say she looks lovely this morning too?” Lan inquired pleasantly.

Deimos cut her a cautious glance, since he was exactly as far from the goodbying as she was and could overhear it just the same. “Yes.”

“He didn’t tell me that.”

The dead man took a deep breath solely to force it out again. “You’re very attractive.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Captain, you don’t have to—”

“I can notice these things, you know,” he interrupted, staring straight ahead at the pastel-colored skirts simpering up to Azrael. “I can’t feel anything about it, but I notice.”

“Just stop,” she sighed, more annoyed with herself than with him. “I know he’s only flattering them and I don’t want flattery, not from him and for sure not from you.”

“I am incapable of flattery.”

“And I’m not pretty.”

“Pretty, no,” he said with a soldierly shrug. “I would not call you pretty. Serena, there, is pretty. Aileen is pretty. Even Felicity, I find pretty, provided you look no deeper than her face. I think I must be partial to blondes,” he muttered, frowning. “I wonder why.”

Lan did not answer, but she found herself thinking of a creased photograph—a woman and two young girls, all blonde.

“There must be thousands of pretty faces in Haven,” Deimos was saying now, raking his soldier’s gaze across the assembled on-lookers, both living and dead. “But I can’t call many attractive.”

“No one you’d strap on a diddle-cob for, eh?”

“None but you.”

He said it with such disinterested conviction, she could only laugh.

“Because I’m so attractive?”

He heaved another of those terse, needless sighs. “Because you have our lord’s right of rule and I must obey your commands.”

She laughed again. She knew she shouldn’t—Revenants had no sense of humor and Deimos didn’t get to be their captain by being the least Revenant of them all—but this was such a bizarre avowal of loyalty that she couldn’t help herself. “Yeah, but come on! I’d be commanding you to be my dollyboy!”

“Our lord’s authority is yours. How you use it is of no consequence.”

“You’d obey any order? Seriously.”

“I am always serious.”

“Good to know,” Lan murmured, her attention drifting back to Azrael and the pretty face sending him off. “Very good to know.”

Deimos sent her a searching, faintly frustrated stare. “Then I…
should
acquire a prosthetic?”

“I think we have a good relationship just the way we are, Captain. I wouldn’t want to complicate it with sex. But I appreciate your dedication.”

“Thank you,” he said, whether in response to the latter half of her remarks or the former, it was not clear, but in any case, it was heartfelt.

They said no more after that, but the quiet was companionable. Deimos watched his Revenants and occasionally patted his dog. Lan watched Azrael. At last, the dollies had all come and gone and all but one of the ferries had driven away. The last of the assembled dead boarded, but the door was not closed after them. Azrael went to have a word with the driver, then turned and looked at Lan.

She reminded herself it was only for a few days. A month at most, he’d said. And it was for Haven, for keeping the last lights on in the last great city.

Lan took a breath, forced a smile, and went to him. He couldn’t kiss her through the mask and she knew better than to think he’d take it off, here with his dollies looking on, but he raised her hands to the slit of his false mouth and she pretended that was good enough, for his sake.

“Give me a word to send me on my way,” he ordered, lightly squeezing her fingers. “One gentle word to remind me of you when I am tempted to think too deeply on all my reasons for undertaking this journey…and all the reasons I might return.”

“Oh balls, no pressure there.” She considered. “Hagioscope,” she decided.

His eyes flickered. “What?”

“It’s the word for when you have a tiny little hole in an interior church wall just so you can see the altar on the other side,” she informed him.

“And…you tell me this because…?”

“It’s the most interesting word I know. I mean, think about it. That needed a
word
.”

His head tipped back, then cocked to one side. His gaze dimmed as it grew distant. “That is interesting,” he murmured.

“Now give me one.”

“Jentacular,” he said after lengthy contemplation. “It is used to describe that which pertains to breakfast.”

“What, like kippers or porridge?”

“I suppose it could refer to anything, not merely foodstuffs, provided they are used for breakfasting and only that. A jentacular sideboard, for example. Jentacular napkins. An entire room might be jentacular, if one never entered but to breakfast.”

“That’s bloody marvelous, that is,” said Lan with sincere admiration.

They were interrupted by a certain etiquette teacher’s rather unmannerly shout: “Get back here this instant! Get back, I say! You’re not dressed! You—Someone catch the little demon!”

In the next instant, the girl, Heather, bolted through the door and out into the courtyard, hugging her long skirts up around her belly in both arms. Nimbly evading the snatching hands of all the servants and pikemen who stood in her way, she zig-zagged across the courtyard, her bare feet slapping on the stones and splashing through puddles of last night’s rain until she skidded to a stop in front of Lan.

“Here,” she panted, digging into the mess of her skirts and thrusting a fistful of flowers, roots and stems, up at Azrael. “I picked ‘em for you.”

This was the first time Lan had ever seen Azrael taken aback when she wasn’t herself the cause. She stood back, smiling, and watched as Azrael accepted this offering with appropriate gravity. A small drift of petals let go as soon as he took them.

“Thank you,” he said.