Land of the Beautiful Dead (3 page)

CHAPTER TWO

I
t had been impossible to make a plan for this part, in as much as it had been possible to make a plan for any of it, and so she simply walked until she found another unlocked door. It opened into a wide corridor, well lit and more sumptuous than any she had ever seen. The floor was made of wood planks, but polished to a dark amber glow and set so smoothly into one another that it was more like glass than any wood Lan knew. The walls might have been plaster, but there were no cracks or patches, no stains, no degradation of any kind. The smell was fresh and clean, two words Lan knew mostly by reputation. Even the lamps were all working, electric bulbs behind clean glass covers, some of them dripping crystals or set in elaborate holders. The rugs that softened the floor at regular intervals all had perfect edges, deep colors and soft fibers. Everything was decorated, even the hinges on the doors and the plates around the light switches.

Lan wandered, turning where she felt like turning, lingering at every open door to gaze at the riches of each dark, luxurious room. She was in no hurry. There were a thousand winding halls, a hundred echoing stairs, but in the king’s realm, all ways surely led to the throne. It was a pleasant walk, which was the one thing Lan had not anticipated—that she could ever feel wonder as she walked here, that she could ever feel envy. There was so much to see here, so many fine things. After a while, they all seemed to blend together, but Lan had to stop when she saw a familiar face.

A painted face. A portrait. It hung on the wall in a wide place, more a foyer than a hall. Its frame was heavily carved and brushed with gold. Its subject was a woman, her head and upper body anyway. An older woman, her hair like iron and her eyes like steel. Her mouth was smiling, even if nothing else about her was.

It was not quite the same picture that hung on the wall in the sheriff’s office in Norwood, but it was definitely the same woman. Lan had never heard her name, only that she used to be the queen, before Azrael’s ascension. “God save the queen,” Sheriff Neville would say each time he brought out a bottle of the twins’ finest for a quick nip, to which one of his deputies would invariably reply that God hadn’t, God had brought Azrael. So, “God save Azrael,” the sheriff would say and all of them would laugh. When Lan was ten or twelve, an old newssheet picture of Azrael had found its way into a frame and been hung beside the queen’s, but of course, he’d been masked. And now Lan wondered…were there any portraits of him in these halls? And why had he left this one, come to think of it? Why would he, or any conqueror, want reminders of the previous rule?

Distantly, she heard heavy footsteps and although there were numerous doors and cross-halls she might have darted down, she was not here to hide. Lan waited, her heart pounding in spite of her slow, even breaths, and soon enough, two guards marched out of one hall and into hers.

They halted, not quite in unison, and stared at her. They weren’t Revenants, or at least, they weren’t wearing the same uniform as the Revenants in pictures Lan had seen. Similar, maybe, but not the same. Not quite the bog-standard, but much plainer. Both were men and very attractive, although their features were pretty rather than soldierly. Regardless, the pikes they carried and the swords on their belts were shiny and sharp and by no means ornamental.

“I’ve come to see Azrael,” said Lan.

The two guards eyed one another with obvious uncertainty, a hesitation she was sure they would not have had if they’d caught her running through these fine halls or attempting to hide in these beautiful rooms. Lan decided to press the advantage as if it really was one.

She stepped forward, lifting her chin in what she hoped was a confident manner. “Take me to him immediately.”

The guards exchanged a second lingering glance.             

“If you can’t take me to Azrael, find someone who can,” Lan ordered, adding in a kind of reckless inspiration, “I’m late.”

That was what seemed to finally decide them. Being late to see Azrael implied he was expecting her and really, how else could she have entered the city and penetrated so far into the royal palace without his permission?              The guards conferred another minute or so, but Lan already knew, miraculously, she’d won. Soon she was walking again, with a guard at either side, leading her in grimly pretty-faced silence deeper into the palace.

They passed through rooms as large as some houses Lan had lived in, under glittering lights like diamond explosions frozen in the air, past paintings and sculptures and even furniture that could have just as easily been art to Lan’s eyes. She wondered if the whole world used to look like this, before Azrael. She wondered if it could ever go back.

They took her to a tall set of doors, but there stopped, muttering at each other in an air of uncertainty while Lan waited a short ways behind them. Before they came to any decision, however, the doors swung open.

Standing on the other side with a few of her courtiers was Lady Batuuli. Lan knew her at once, without effort. The royal family were the only celebrities left in the world. Her picture did not hang on the wall in the sheriff’s office, but there were plenty of them in the old newssheets and magazines the sheriff kept, and when Lan’s mother was in the other room, paying their month’s rent, little Lan would sit and look at all those old papers. Yes, she knew Batuuli.

Where the guards and courtiers were all pretty in death, Lady Batuuli was beautiful. She dressed in white, which stood out magnificently against her dark skin, draping a flawless figure in some kind of goddessy gauze designed to make a man wonder what lay beneath. Her face, dark porcelain, might have been truly breath-taking if not for her eyes, which shone out of her perfection like chips of crystallized hate. They did not look at Lan as much as impale her. When she finished seeing whatever ugly thing she saw in Lan, Lady Batuuli turned that same stare on her guards. “Explain this.”

“Lord Azrael summoned her,” one guard said, which he no doubt thought a safe presumption, one Lan did not correct.

Lady Batuuli sneered (even that, she could not help but do with grace) and turned away, beckoning contemptuously and in silence for them to follow. Her courtiers echoed both the sneer and the retreat. Lan trailed after them with her guards toward the golden light and distant music of the royal dining hall.

Here, the corridors were lined with heavy curtains, works of art, and a hundred armed guards. When they came to a set of heavy, carved doors trimmed in gold and guarded by dozens of paired pikemen, a wave of Lady Batuuli’s elegant hand was all it took to admit them.

The music she’d heard from the hall now swelled the air, played by the dead on an elevated stage in the center of this huge room. Mostly dead, she amended privately; the woman with the flute might be alive, although she was pretty enough to be dead. She tried to get a better look, but her eyes couldn’t seem to focus. There was just so much to see and it was all so clean and sparkly and fancied up that none of it looked real. The light was too bright. The colors, too garish. Two rows of tables ran down the length of the hall, leaving a wide aisle between them, wide enough that the whole of Norwood’s common lodge could have fit in it. Likewise, the dead men and women seated there were pressed together, elbow-to-elbow, but only along the outer side, like dolls laid out for an appraising eye.

Like dolls. An idle thought, but a fitting one. They were dressed like dolls, immaculately made up and trimmed out. Most wore uniforms of some sort, men and women both, many of them still proudly displaying the medals awarded them by armies and governments that did not, for all intents and purposes, exist. With few exceptions, they were neither young nor attractive, facts emphasized rather than disguised by the elaborate care that had gone into preserving them.

This was Haven’s infamous dead court. It was said they had been the leaders of the last rebellion in the final days of Azrael’s ascension, the faces and voices of a people who had sworn they would never surrender. Once, they had stood in ruins and made speeches about the sanctity of British soil and a human spirit that would never die. Now they were here, laughing at jokes no one was telling and eating food they no longer needed…

The food.

Suddenly, it was everywhere Lan looked, more food than all of Norwood could eat in a year. Whole roasted birds decorated with gold-dusted feathers. Long platters where cooked eels ‘swam’ in sauce. Pies baked in the shape of the animals whose meat stuffed them. Hot soups and cold ones. Glazed onions and stuffed mushrooms and buttered carrots and for what? For who? Even the Eaters had only been made to feel hunger, not succumb to it. None of the dead needed to eat and yet, here they were, eating it. Was there another room just as grand elsewhere in the palace where they could go to sick up their fine dinners? Could the dead even be sick or did they have to stick a hose down their gullets and suck it up mechanically? What if they ate too much? If a dead man accidentally burst his bowels, was that a medical emergency or was it just rude?

She knew she was staring, and at first, she thought they were looking at her too, but quickly realized their averted eyes and little nods were for Batuuli, who did not acknowledge them in the slightest. And when she had swept past, they merely returned to their conversations and their unnecessary meals. Now and then, a dead eye might linger, but only as an idle curiosity, the same as if Lan were a dog that had nosed the door open and come slinking in. She ought not to be here, was the unspoken consensus, but one did not scold dogs when at another man’s table, even muddy strays.

Once upon a time, Lan would have been the reason these same people claimed the fight was so important. Now she was a dog in the dining room and they were Azrael’s court.

Batuuli’s long strides had not slowed. Lan followed her around the stage—the flute-player’s hanging sleeve brushed at Lan’s cheek like a spiderweb—and there he was, alone at the imperial table upon a raised dais. Azrael himself.

He did not deign to notice her yet. All his attention remained fixed on the musicians. This gave her the chance to stare at him, but the room was so big and there was still so much space between them that she could see nothing but what she’d seen already in pictures: the figure of a man, a god of men, his body carved to appear at once gaunt and grotesquely muscled. He wore few coverings and most of these were plunder—a collar made of slabs of gold resting heavily over his broad chest, a jeweled band high on one arm, a plated belt and long, many-layered loincloth weighted with gold rings. And the mask, of course. In all the pictures she’d ever seen, he was masked, usually the golden one with horns he’d worn during his ascension (he was wearing that one in the picture that hung on the sheriff’s wall), but today, his mask was made of stone and largely featureless—a smooth darkish oval with sockets for eyes, a bump of a nose, a lipless suggestion of a mouth. If anyone had ever seen the true face of Azrael, Lan had never heard about it.

She was not aware that she had somehow stopped walking until Batuuli came back for her, rousing her from her fascination by snapping her fingers before Lan’s face. She startled, one hand instinctively drawing back in a fist while the other twitched back, reaching for the knife under her shirt before she remembered herself. “Sorry,” she said, but Batuuli had already turned and was walking away.

Although her thoughtless gesture was not worthy of Batuuli’s attention, it had certainly drawn other eyes. Not Azrael’s, his never left the stage, but Lord Solveig raised a hand to silence the chatter at his table and smiled at her.

She knew him at once, as she’d known Batuuli. She had seen him many times, in the pages of magazines, before folk stopped printing them. He had been at Azrael’s right hand when his army had walked out of the Channel that winter’s day and first set foot on British soil; she had seen him with his clothes hanging damp and his hair slicked and dripping, puking his lungs empty as he pulled himself from the water. She had seen him on the streets of Haven, before it was Haven, on a mountain of rubble that used to be homes, stabbing a bayonet into some dark nook where a tiny arm reached blindly out for light. She had seen him on the day Azrael took the palace, years before she was even born, and he looked just the same.

Now he sat in a high-backed chair with one leg thrown carelessly over its gilded arm, surrounded by dead men and women as beautiful as he, eating food he didn’t need and drinking wine instead of boiled water, smiling at her, but he said nothing. He looked at his father and waited.

His was one of only three tables that lined the eastern wall, larger and more elaborately appointed than those they faced, which were themselves noticeably richer than those in the southern end of the hall. Odd that his Children should be seated here and not with him at the imperial table, where there was more than enough room, but then, where would their retinue sit? There were eight at Lord Solveig’s table and twelve at Batuuli’s, which table Lan identified not only by the empty chair at its center, but by Batuuli’s handmaidens taking up position behind it, making up a backdrop of lithesome bodies and filmy white tunics.

The last of Azrael’s three Children sat alone, neither pretending to eat the food nor enjoy the music. Lady Tehya had no companions to fill the empty chairs around her, although she had handmaidens of a sort—a half-dozen dead children painted white to look like statues. Like her father, she went masked, although hers was painted to look like a fine doll’s: bone white, with dark lining around the eyes, a perfect heart of a mouth, and two startling pink circles for cheeks. She raised her head as Lan walked by, and as their eyes met, Lady Tehya reached up and removed her porcelain mask; the face beneath was painted just the same, but cracked all over. And then she realized it wasn’t paint. Tehya’s face…was broken. Her skin, smooth and white and clean, had been shattered the same as one of the mayor’s fine plates and mended again, just like a plate, with glue.