Land of the Beautiful Dead (17 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

A
fter the splendor of Batuuli’s rooms, Azrael’s own, which had seemed so luxuriant when Lan first saw it, now appeared grim and sparse by comparison. The wooden panels lining the walls made the windowless room appear much smaller than it was and it was too dark to make out the beauty of their craftsmanship. Here were no glittering chandeliers, no works of art displayed on polished pedestals, no fine carpets to soften the floor. The bed was as impressive as she remembered, but being the only decoration in the room made it almost seem a separate thing—a stage within an abandoned theater.

Lan stroked the coverlet, listening with half an ear as Azrael ordered his guards in the hall outside to stay at their posts unless he specifically summoned them, no matter what they heard. “Are you anticipating a fight?” she asked when the heavy door was shut.

“Our past encounters illustrate an annoying tendency.” He threw her a pointed scowl as he headed for the bath.

She raised her eyebrows. “And you’re blaming me?”

“You suggest you’re blameless?”

“I’m not the one who trained them to come running every time you raise your voice.”

“I don’t raise my voice in daily course. How else should they respond?” He unbuckled his belt and pulled his loincloth away. “Attuning oneself to the moods of one’s lord is a sign of loyal service. I can hardly condemn them for it. What are you doing?” he asked sharply.

Lan froze in the awkward contortion of trying to find the corset stays behind her back. “Getting undressed?”

“I will have that pleasure.” He removed his collar and one arm brace. “And I will attend to it soon enough.”

“Oh. Okay. Do I…” She looked around the room, seeing nothing to do, nothing to distract the eye. “What do you want me to do?”

“Wait quietly.” Stepping behind the screen, he reached up to unfasten his mask. His silhouette removed it, rubbed his face. He set it aside and stepped down into the bath. “Savor this time. No doubt you think you have no innocence left to lose, but you are wrong.”

Lan’s belly tightened. She took a breath and let it out slowly, forcing herself to relax. “Is that a threat?”

“A warning.” He covered one side of his face and submerged, coming up with a broad splash, shaking himself dry like an animal. “My touch, I’m told, is loathsome and I am in something of a temper tonight.”

Lan stepped away from the bed, watching the screen. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Ha! You think I will not bed a liar?”

“I’m not.”

“Then you are a fool as well as a liar,” he told her. His silhouette reached out for a bottle of something to one side of the bath. He poured it into his hand and rubbed them together, then dabbed at himself in curiously precise points. Tending his scars, she realized. “Instead of seeking to impress me with your courage, you should perhaps consider the very real possibility that there is a reason to fear.”

Lan walked around the screen and looked down into the bath. Azrael looked up at her. The water alone moved.

Horror, like lightning, was the first and brightest strike inside her, but like lightning, its flash quickly faded. It was not a man’s face, no, but it wasn’t so bad. Untold years behind a mask had left his skin with a waxen, uncanny appearance even where it was not damaged…and the damage was so great…and it was maybe that surreal quality that enabled her to look at the face he hid from the rest of the world, from his own Children, without fear.

There were no deformities, no monstrous features, no decay. All the same, it was hard to look and see a living person. His nose was gone, just splinters of exposed bone above an open cavity to mark its place, but with a suggestion of regrowth about the skin building up around it. His brow was broad and sloping, cleaved open to the bone in the center, but mostly healed. Below his left eye, there were cracks that opened wider as they spilled down his cheek, becoming gaps that exposed his teeth and the white gleam of his jawbone before merging with the keloided mess over his throat and sealing again. And over all of it, every inch, was the silvery shine of old scars, a filigree of pain he could hide but never completely heal.

How long she stood staring, Lan could not know. The moment lasted however long it did, breaking only when Azrael finally moved. Lan backed away as he climbed out of his bath, but he simply walked past her and over to the fire to dry himself by its warmth.

“Have you a preference?” he inquired, gesturing toward his rack of masks. “It seems only fitting you should choose the face you shall see over you.”

“No,” said Lan, then said it again with greater confidence. “No. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t wear any of them.”

He grunted and looked away, watching embers flicker and char. “There’s flattery I’ve not heard before.”

“It’s not flattery. What I’ve imagined is so much worse.”

He glanced at her and then, without warning, suddenly leapt at her, crossing the considerable space between them in a single predatory lunge. He seized her in his claws, doubtless sparing her a tumble back into the bath she had entirely forgotten, and yanked her off the ground as he thrust his face right into hers. Her eyes throbbed with the baking heat of his; bloodless hollows, runneled flesh and dry bone filled her vision. “What is there worse than this?” he snarled, his sharp teeth almost touching her lips.

Lan braced herself, then reached up and queasily touched his cheek, her fingertips rasping over cracked flesh until it split and became cool bone. She could feel dry muscle and threads of tendons jump beneath her palm…as if he’d flinched. Then he pulled away.

For a moment, she was certain he’d hit her. Then he smiled. The ruin of the left side twisted it into a leer, but somehow it was the perfect right side that made the smile terrible. “This much I’ll say for you, diplomat. When you commit yourself to a course, you commit yourself wholly.”

“What do you want from me, Azrael?” she asked, keeping her voice low and steady while trying to slow her racing heart. “You know how much I need you, so whatever it is, I’ll try.”

His expression changed; she couldn’t quite tell how.

“I can be quiet. I can be loud. I can kiss you. I can probably cry. I’m your dolly. I’ll fake it any way you want me to.” Lan took a small step forward and touched him again, following the arch of his broken brow up over the curve of his skull and down along his scarred neck until she reached his chest. She watched her fingertips explore in and out of the bullet-holes she found there—most had healed over, which only made the bone she did find that much more jarring—and then she looked up into his eyes. “But I need you. I can’t afford to be scared of you and I won’t be.”

“As simple as that.”

“Yes.”

“Turn around.”

Lan hesitated, but he only gazed impassively down at her, giving no further instruction and no clue as to what to expect. She stepped back, letting her arms drop to her side. Still he did nothing, so she finally turned her back to him. All her body felt numb, except the space between her shoulderblades, which itched to the point of physical pain.

She had time to take one breath, just one, and then he had her by the corset, lifting her right up to her tiptoes. Something slashed down her back—his hand, his claws—and she let out a whooshing little shout of pain before she realized it hadn’t hurt. The squeeze of the corset had loosened and that was all.

Lan waited, her breath heaving in and out of her unfelt, staring straight ahead at the bed beyond the bathing screen. A sound, something between a growl and a purr, tickled her ear, but when she turned instinctively toward it, his hand closed over her face and turned her away. She found herself staring into the silent audience of his masks—the horned gold, the snarling wolf, the faceless stone, the fanged demon—as he cut her remaining corset stays one by one. When it finally fell away, he yanked her hard against him, his bare chest like ice against her bare back. His hand slipped beneath the fabric of her open dress, sweeping around to her belly and then up, caressing one breast briefly before moving between them. His fingers splayed.

“Your heart is more honest than your mouth,” he murmured. “It’s beating like a rabbit’s. Will you tell me again you have no fear of me?”

“You had to work at it pretty hard.” Her voice broke on the last word as his hand moved again, sliding beneath her sleeve to loosen it. It fell down around her wrist, baring her shoulder, exposing her breast. “Why don’t you want me to look at you?”

“In due time. We barter in pieces, remember?” He loosened the other sleeve. When it fell, he cupped her breasts in both hands, his gentle kneading interrupted now and then by the pricking of his claws at her nipples. “You’ll only close your eyes once you have to see me. Only now that I have said so, you won’t,” he added, letting her hear the twist of his smile at her back. “You’ll stare me down to prove how fearless you are, believing that will give you some advantage in the talks to follow. But your body betrays you. It tells me your true thoughts.”

Lan arched her back, pushing her small breasts firmly into his hands. “What is it telling you now?”

“Mm. It tells me…” He bent, placing his mouth against her ear. The bony ridge above the noseless hole in the center of his face pressed at her cheek. He whispered, “It tells me, ‘
End the Eaters
.’” He moved to her other ear. “And I won’t. You are about to pay a terrible price for nothing.”

“We’ll see.”

“So you will.” He plucked the combs from her hair and tossed them to the ground—
tik, tik, tak
. She felt him nuzzling at the nape of her neck, heard him take a deep breath. “Roses. My daughter’s scent. How deeply disturbing. Was it deliberate?”

“I don’t think so. Her servants did everything. Well, not everything,” she amended, glancing down. “Batuuli picked the dress.”

“All the better reason to be rid of it.” He hooked her skirts where they bunched around her hip in clingy folds and pushed them over the swell of her buttocks. Gravity took slow hold; the skirts dropped with a sigh, billowing as they settled, forming petals like a flower around her ankles. He shifted behind her, the hot weight of his erection pressing more firmly against her. “You’re trembling.”

Lan clenched her fists in a futile effort to stop. “I’m cold.”

He stroked her arm—his skin on hers made a sound like sandpaper—then her thigh, and then moved his hand between her legs and slipped one thick finger inside her. “You feel warm enough to me.”

Lan said nothing, all her concentration fixed on relaxing around that invasive hand.

“Would you like to go closer to the fire?” His finger withdrew, only to penetrate again, deeper this time. His other arm closed around her, belying the offer even as he made it and pulling her up, up, until her toes scarcely touched the ground and all her weight was balanced on that slowly working hand. “Or to the bed?”

“What…” Her voice came out too tight and shrill. She swallowed hard, took a shuddering breath, and said, “Whatever you want.”

“Ah. Well. My wants—” He removed his hand and lifted her even higher, fitting himself between her thighs. He thrust, not piercing her or even trying to, but forcing her instead to ride his cock as he mimed the act of sex. “—are not so particular,” he finished.

Lan kicked into empty air, grabbing at his arms, his shoulders, his neck—anywhere to find some support—but she was terrified of snagging her fingers inside one of his many open wounds. At last, she had to give over and let him hold her. Curled tensely around the restraining bar of his arm, her whole body shaking with the force of his mock-thrusts, Lan struggled not to struggle while his cock worked deeper between her folds.

“Oh yes, you’re warm enough,” he grunted, and she was. The friction of his scars rubbing at her in this unexpected way had sparked an intense, almost frightening, rush of heat. “But it does not feel good, does it?” And that was true, too; there was no pretending the thing that held her was a man, a fact that heightened each sensation and stained every response.

‘I’m
not
afraid,’ Lan thought furiously and bucked back at him, finding his rhythm and coming into clumsy sync.

“I admire the strength of your convictions,” he said dryly. “Let’s see how long they last.”

He lifted her higher, then brought her down around him, snarling in her ear as he slowly impaled her, but her body took him in with blind eagerness. She could feel her juices coating him as he began to move her; if it weren’t for the fountain’s covering babble, she’d be able to hear it as well. None of the desperate fumbles or cool transactions she’d called sex in the past had prepared her to be lifted like this, held, filled. He gave her no pleasure, not the way other men had sometimes tried to give it. The act seemed almost mastabatory in that sense—her body like a fist he used on himself—but there was a terrible need in the way he used her, and something in her recognized it and responded. What should have been a purely physical exchange, something to be bartered and endured, became instead alarmingly intimate and intimacy was something Lan had never known.

In that rush of unexpected and unwelcome emotion, Lan burst into tears.

He stopped at once, which only made her sobs more obvious. Mortified, she clapped both hands over her face, as if hiding them could make them disappear, but the damage was done. He lifted her off him and set her none-too-carefully on her feet.