Land of the Beautiful Dead (45 page)

With some effort, Lan took another sip of coffee, but it was a long time before she could swallow it. “What happened to them?”

“He raised them to rot.” Master Wickham shrugged with his hands. “He let them. But he pushed them out beyond the wall, where he didn’t have to listen. To my knowledge, no matter how angered, he has never raised their like again. And I, for one, am grateful. Memory is not a comfort to the dead.”

“That’s what he said.”

“Is it?” He looked away, then shook his head. “Well, I like to think I’d believe it anyway.”

“So you don’t remember anything from before you died? Nothing at all?” She hesitated, then said, “Not even your name?”

He gave her a quizzical glance that bloomed into one of understanding. He smiled, nodding at her as if to award a point. “No, I don’t remember Wickham, but I’m quite sure I am he. Ask me why.”

“Why?” asked Lan obediently.

“I am a tidy man in this incarnation and I’ve reason to believe I was a tidy man in life. Apparently, I changed clothes regularly in a public setting, but so meticulous were my habits that I wrote my name in the linings of my garments so as to be certain no other man mistook them for his own.”

“Maybe you stole the real Wickham’s togs.”

“I acknowledge the possibility, but I strongly doubt it, for two reasons. First, it would have left the hypothetically ‘real’ Wickham naked as a jaybird somewhere in the world while I scampered about in his full attire. I find that sort of thing, those…pranks,” he said, as if to rhyme the word with ‘feces’, “to be the entertainment of low minds and a cruel nature. Second, as I say, I am a tidy man. When I was raised, I wore a suit. The pockets were emptied, of course, but the tie was still properly knotted. The shoes were neatly laced. I wore sock suspenders. And, making no assumptions as to my former self’s private life, I say such a man would never wear another man’s underpants under any circumstances.”

“Nice detective work,” Lan said with real admiration. “None of the other deadheads seem the least bit curious who they used to be.”

“Don’t call me that, please. I find it offensive. Anyway, I was something of an early specimen. Perhaps he hadn’t yet perfected his technique.”

“So do you still teach him?”

“Oh no. No, I rarely see him anymore. Every so often, he takes a notion to discuss a particular subject—philosophy, theology, art—but he hasn’t done so for several years. I suspect I make him uncomfortable.”

“Why?”

He studied her for a moment, oddly reserved. “Do you honestly want to know?”

“Sure.”

“Honestly.”

His reluctance…but that wasn’t the right word, was it? There was no uncertainty about his question, no hesitance in his hesitation. Looking at him, Lan had the unreasoning and unshakeable sense that he was ready to tell her, if—and only if—she wanted to know.

And if she didn’t before, she really did now.

“Yes,” she said.

“I was raised to be his teacher,” he said again. “To that end, I had to retain some of my previous knowledge, else how could I teach him? And although I have no clear memory of my former life, there are impressions, very indistinct, that resonate now and then. His voice…a room with white walls…I’m quite certain I knew him in life, worked with him in an—” He gestured to the closed book on the table between them. “—intermediary capacity.”

“What happened?”

“Something foolish, I should think. I’m not a very likely looking assassin,” he added, almost as if apologizing, “but then, I should think few of them would be. If one went skulking about in a perfidious manner all the time, it might draw undesirable attention. Shall I tell you a secret?”

“I can keep one.”

He leaned a little closer and dropped his voice to something that was not quite a whisper, only a breath that took the vague shape of words. “I can only surmise I tried to kill him, although I’ve no idea how I went about it. But I do know, as near as one can come to knowing, that he killed me. Himself.”

“How did you—How do you reckon?”

Master Wickham hooked two fingers under the collar of his suit jacket and pulled it and the crisp white collar of the shirt he wore beneath down maybe two inches. There, after a moment’s squint, Lan saw two white specks, almost perfectly rounded and slightly indented from the rest of his skin. Her first thought, bubbling up from the deep well of childhood, was vampires. Which was silly, but how much sillier than any other walking undead?

“What am I looking at?” Lan asked, touching one. It didn’t feel like skin at all, not even Azrael’s skin.

“Scars. Of a sort. Left by his claws. When I was raised, I could even see the mark of his hand, but it faded after a year or so. The dead don’t heal of their own power,” he added, covering himself up again. “And those like me don’t decay. Truthfully, I’m not certain of the physiology at work, but even though the worst bruises break down over time, our wounds never close unless our lord himself sees to it. There are yet a number of mortuary cosmeticians on staff who tend, ah…formerly tended to Lady Tehya, but I hardly think this little matter requires their expertise. I find a little wax keeps them nicely sealed.”

“Wax,” Lan echoed. Her fingernail pricked at one of the marks and she felt it pry up a little. “May I?”

“Certainly. It doesn’t hurt.”

Lan pinched the thing out, watching with queasy fascination as its true depth revealed itself. It was as long as her thumb-knuckle, much longer and far, far sharper than Azrael kept his claws now.

“It was an impassioned grip,” Master Wickham remarked, studying the white, waxy thorn in Lan’s palm as she peered into the dark, dry opening left in his neck. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he meant to kill me.”

Lan started to nod, only to twitch back in the first double-take of her entire life. When Master Wickham cocked a brow at her, she tried out a laugh that dispelled none of the shock she was still feeling (and had to be showing) and said, “That’s got to be the first time I’ve ever heard anyone here suggest Haven’s ‘glorious lord’ could even make mistakes.”

“Has he not peopled this city with them?”

She double-taked…double-took? She rocked back and stared at him again. “Wow. I don’t believe you said that. Couldn’t you get in trouble if someone heard you? Someone else, I mean.”

He smiled at her. “I can trust you, can’t I?”

“Sure. We’re intermedi-mates. But it’s still a pretty daring thing to say out loud. Seems like that’s exactly the kind of talk that can get a dead man killed.”

“The evidence is suggestive. I have never known him to kill solely for amusement, therefore it was a punishment. If he were of a mind to execute me, I would have been impaled or dismembered or dispatched in some other manner by a third party. He very rarely takes a personal hand, so to speak, in executions, unless he was himself provoked to rage. Even if so, the damage done to me was minimal. My larynx, trachea, thyroidal cartilage—all intact. He could have broken my neck easily, yet did not. This suggests a certain element of restraint. Yet his claws punctured my flesh, which again points to rage.” He spread his empty hands with a smile. “I can only conclude my death was, if not entirely an accident, at least unintended.”

“You think he’s sorry he did it?”

“Perhaps. He raised me, after all, and set me to serve him in a position of some importance. He’s always treated me fairly. Some might even say with respect.” He seemed to think it over, only to shrug it off. “It’s a moot point, but in any event, it’s all over now.”

“Moot as a boot,” Lan agreed, because she really did not want to know what moot meant or how to spell it. She handed the bit of wax back, thinking he might fit it into the hole again like a cork in a bottle, but he simply dropped it in the bin he kept under the table. “So you don’t miss him at all?”

“Him? No. When I have no student, I miss that. And I miss talking,” he said in a tone of some surprise. “He didn’t require much in the way of teaching. Mostly, we’d just talk. I enjoyed that.”

“What did you and him talk about the most?”

“You and he,” he corrected. “This is the subjective form, used when the people referred to are doing the action in the sentence. ‘You and him’ would only be used when the people referred to are the object of the action.”

Lan covered her eyes. “Fine, yeah, whatever…”

“When in doubt, remove the ‘you’ from the sentence and consider again. ‘What did him talk about?’ or ‘What did he talk about?’”

“I’m not even sure I care anymore.”

He opened his book to make another note, then gave her hand a pat. “We’ll have plenty of time to study nominative and accusative case during our lessons. To answer your question, we frequently discussed architecture. As you know, I’m quite taken with the subject, so much so that I suspect he inadvertently imbued me with the interest.”

“Again with that accidental stuff. That’s subversive, that is.”

“Let us examine the evidence. I may have been raised before the taking of Haven, but there was never any real doubt it would be taken. He would have known, long before he began his last march, that any holding he seized would need defending the rest of his days…or Man’s. Such a city could not merely be inhabited, it must be built. These are among my first thoughts upon awakening to this existence, and yet, he instead made me his teacher. He never asked me to conduct research or put me to any use whatever, apart from this one. Why would he deliberately imbue me with an interest of which he never intended to take advantage? I say again it was a mistake. I say further, he is unaware he made it. Even in our discussions of the subject, he seldom invited my opinion and never asked for advice.” He paused, then said with a tentativeness that Lan found almost poignant, “Which is a pity. I had opinions. And I did my own research.”

“Why? I mean, if you’re not doing anything with it, why bother?”

“Why does anyone indulge a hobby? And for whatever reason, I find the subject fascinating. Haven’s architecture is uniquely diverse, you see. One can find examples of Gothic, Classical, Jacobean, Elizabethan, Georgian and numerous other styles all within walking distance of each other.” Crooking a finger at her in a ‘come with me’ gesture, he went to the wall, catching a ladder on the way and rolling it along with him to a particular set of shelves. He climbed up and began to thumb through the spines there, pulling this or that book out for closer examination. “So many accomplishments of the modern age have been made obsolete by…well, circumstances…but architecture is as vital today as it was fifty years or even fifty thousand years ago. And the more one understands it, the more one appreciates just how far we’ve come.” He passed her a book, smiling. “And how far we’ve fallen.”

“What is this?” she asked, taking it.

“What does it say?”

Lan glared at the runic scrawl across the cover, forcing the lines and loops to join together in that magical way that made sounds. “A wuh…wor…World. A World h…hiss…tor…yuh. Ya? What’s the sound a ‘y’ makes again?”

“At the end of a word, usually the same as a hard ‘e’.”

“Histor…ee? History. A World History of aaar…chuh…Archery?”

He tsked at her distractedly, picking out a few more books. “Try again.”

“Arch…Archer…damn it.” Lan took the book to a table and banged it down so she could use both hands to frame each letter at a time. “Aaaar…Oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s architecture, isn’t it?”

“I’d rather you sound it out than guess,” he told her reprovingly. “And this one?”

Heaving a sigh, Lan went over and took the book he held out. The first word was impossibly long, so she skipped over to the next one and hoped he wouldn’t notice. “The f…Four…el…Elephant? Is it elephants?”

“No, Lan. Elephants had surprisingly little to do with the founding of the British Empire. Excepting India, I suppose,” he remarked to himself in a thoughtful way, before returning his attention to her. “Try again.”

She looked at the book, running her eyes over and over the same word, but still could only untangle the first three letters before it all broke apart. “Oh give over, won’t you? There’s, like, a thousand letters! Just tell me!”

“Understanding,” he said with a meaningful stare over the tops of those glasses he wasn’t wearing. “Understanding the Four Elements of Design.”

“Only four, huh? Let me guess. Windows, walls, roof and floor?”

“Close, actually. And you’ll like this one, I think. From the Ground Up. It focuses on pre-industrial methods of construction and is very relatable in our present era. And finally, one of my favorites.” The last book he pulled was bigger and heavier than the other three combined and, unlike the others, which were mostly words with some drawings, this one was all photographs with hardly any words at all. He also didn’t pass it down to her right away, but opened it up and began to flip through it, speaking in a slow, distracted manner as he studied each page. “It’s a pity so many of the modern landmarks are gone, because some of them were really very interesting…in their own way. Our lord has gone to considerable pains to preserve and restore areas of historical interest, including a number of cathedrals and estates…ah, the Royal Exchange and Old Bailey…several museums and, ah, monuments of note. I’m afraid he didn’t have much of an eye for what we would consider modern movements…but what one so often fails to take into measure is that, to him, they’re all modern movements. He has no more frame of reference for Tower Bridge than he has for City Hall.”