Land of the Beautiful Dead (62 page)

She’d never told Lan she loved her. Lan never told her either. She’d missed…so much.

Heavy footsteps on the stairs. The guards, coming to fetch her down for dinner. Lan brushed at her eyes, which were dry but smarting, and pulled the blanket up over her shoulders. Light splashed across the wall when the door opened, but Lan did not move. “Sod off,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”

“No one in the dining hall is hungry,” Azrael’s voice replied. “But they attend when summoned and so will you.”

Lan stared at the wall as he entered and crossed the very limited space between them to set his lamp down next to her unlit one on the vanity.

“Does it really help so much to do your suffering in the dark?” he asked, lighting it.

She did not answer.

“It makes a far more impressive picture if one were to see your silhouette at the window throughout the night and know you neither slept nor ate for grief’s sake.” He picked up the coffee pot and shook it so she could hear how empty it was.

She stayed silent.

“If you meant to convince me you were sleeping, you shouldn’t have spoken. I don’t know how you could sleep in here in any event,” he added in a more thoughtful tone. “It’s so…red.”

“It’s the Red Room. And you put me here.”

“I did. If your argument follows that my will is absolute, please recall I put you in my bedchamber also.”

“I don’t want to see you.”

A beat of silence, followed by his impassive, “Then you will pass an unhappy night, but you are coming to dinner even if you must come in chains.”

“Go get them.”

He was silent. So was she. Outside, it rained harder. Memory: her own voice like a third person in this room, saying, ‘It should rain on bad days.’

“I waited for you all night,” he said.

Lan frowned and curled up smaller.

“In your absence, I relived every regrettable word that passed between us. They cannot be unmade, but even so, I think you should know that if you had begged me for their lives, or even for their deaths, I would not have granted it. I said it…because I knew nothing would hurt you more.”

“Yeah, well…I’m sorry I called you titless. I know I said more than that, but that’s all I remember for sure.” Lan sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, facing him. “Take your mask off.”

He raised his chin. “You wish to strike me?”

“No, I’m just not going to talk at your fake face. Take it off.”

After a moment, he did, setting it aside on the vanity between the two lamps. Despite their light, against the white canvas, the gold mask had no luster. Everything in this room looked like it had been abandoned for years, she realized. Including him. Including her.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about it,” she said, staring into the eyes of his mask. “And I think I know when they got here, those boys.”

“Do you?”

“It was the night I invited myself to dinner, wasn’t it? The night I got drunk because you were so late?”

No answer. No sound.

“You brought those boys in. You put them in your dungeon. I don’t think you interrogated them that night, you would have wanted them to get a little hungrier first, but you started sharpening the poles that would be their pikes…and then you came to dinner with me.”

“I didn’t know you’d be there.”

“But the rest is right.”

“More or less.”

“And the next day,” Lan mused. “And the next and the next…and every day until you planted them in your garden…you starved them and tortured them how many hours? Before you met me for dinner. And took me to bed.”

He did not reply.

“You put your hands on me when you knew they were bloody.”

“Ah. Is that the act that bloodied them? I had no idea I had retained so much of my innocence.”

“You sell it in pieces,” she reminded him. “And you sold mine too, you son of a bitch.”

Azrael went to the window and stared out over his city. His hands were clasped, relaxed, behind his back. He could have been painted just this way and hung in the gallery downstairs, and apart from the exposed knobs of his vertebrae, grey skin and unconventional attire, he would have fit right in. “Nearly ten thousand people reside in Haven,” he said at last, sweeping his gaze across its walls. “Perhaps I cannot claim they live here…but they do reside. It is their home. I do what I must to defend it.”

“Don’t. Don’t even try. They were kids. And what did they have,
guns
?! What possible harm could they have done? Maybe they could have put a few holes in some of your beautiful people, but so what? You could have just thrown them out.”

He rubbed at his face.

“Well, you could have! Instead, you butchered everyone they knew and then pinned them out in the garden to die! All they wanted to do was eat!”

His fist struck the window’s frame with a flat, undramatic sound that nevertheless made her jump. “No,” he said after a long pause. He did not raise his voice. His hand on the windowsill was still clenched tight, but that was the only sign of his continued anger he allowed to show. “Say what you will of the quality of life outside these walls, but you and I both know they were fed, and that damned recently, so that is not all they wanted. That is not even part of what they wanted. Their wants began and ended with violence.”

“You don’t know that.”

“They admitted as much.”

“Before or after you impaled them?” The word alone brought it all back. She fought not to remember, but it wormed in—the ease of it, the sounds he made, the taste of blood in her mouth. Her stomach rolled. She pressed the back of her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes, concentrating on taking deep breaths so she wouldn’t be sick. “They would have said anything,” she said, once she was more or less sure the danger was past. “They were boys.”

He took a few deep breaths, motionless but for the minute flexing of his muscles, and said, “They fancied themselves men enough to do murder in Haven. They were men enough to die here.”

“Sure, go ahead. Tell me how they deserved it. Tell me—Tell me about that little girl,” she said suddenly. “The one that lived eight days. Hip-high, you said. What made her grown up enough that you had to defend yourself by impaling a little girl?”

“She wasn’t mine.” He spoke no louder—if anything, he spoke more quietly—but every word struck with its own weight. “She was caught up in some forgettable squabble between opposing landowners. She and her entire family, executed the same as witches and poisoners for the unpardonable crime of being in the way of another lord’s encroachment. Those were human hands that set that pike, human hands that set her on it.”

“So you, what? Just watched? You saw a little girl impaled, a girl you knew did nothing wrong, and all you did was count the days? What the hell is wrong with you? Get out of my room!”

“What should I have done, hanging there beside her?” His voice roughened, but only a little. He remained at the window, very still, by all appearances, calm. “I could not spare myself that fate. How should I spare her?”

Lan’s stomach rolled again. “You…?”

“I had been caught in a trap set for wolves and by the time I was found, I was too weak from cold and hunger to resist the men who thought me a demon. They dragged me by my bloodied leg to the carrion fields, and there six men held me—among them, the girl’s father, the Ox—while a seventh set the pike in me. I had never been impaled before,” he mused. “I had thought there was no new suffering. But I was to hang sixteen days more before the lord rode through and did his work, and I learned much in that time of the limitless scope of suffering.”

Lan shut her eyes again, this time pulling the memory of the meditation garden brutally close as a shield against the sympathy trying to rise.

“Sixteen days…and if not for that fellow tyrant, I might have hung years in that high, dry air. Instead, I watched the smoke above the trees and heard the distant cries as he punished an entire settlement for daring to exist on the lands he coveted. The following dawn, some forty men, women and children were brought to the field to keep me company. The girl was set beside me by men who believed me—” Azrael spread his arms and looked down at his own grey flesh, weathered and scarred, open to the bone. “—already a corpse. A rare rain brought her swallows of water and my body shielded her from the worst of the wind. Too, my flesh is abhorrent to all living things, Man, beast and bird, so while crows feasted on the eyes of living and dead alike and the village dogs came to gnaw at dangling feet, none came too near me to have at that girl. And so she lived eight days and yes,” he said savagely, “I counted them. I count every day, Lan. Ask me how many days you have passed in Haven, how many times your body has seized on mine in pleasure or how often the word ‘monster’ has slipped your mouth. I hold every accounting.”

She said nothing.

Azrael took several breaths and finally said, “When she died, the lord’s men came to take her body, intending to strip and bury it upside down in a single grave with all her village, her face pressed in disgrace to the bare buttocks of someone who had known her in life, perhaps loved her. As they reached for her, I raised my head and cursed them. They fled. But they returned. For six days more, they watched me. On the seventh, they gathered wood and set it around me to my knees. They fetched a priest to pray at me while they set the fire. There had been much rain, but at last…”

Azrael glanced at the lamp’s flame, away, and then back again. He gazed into its small light while his eyes flashed and flared. “My flesh does not burn,” he said distractedly, almost disinterestedly. “But the pike did. Ultimately, it broke beneath me and I fell into the coals. I breathed in hot ash and retched smoke, my body closed in by burning. Then I reached back—” He raised a hand, still staring into the lamp, and closed it lightly over his left collarbone. “—and caught the point of the thing that pinned me. I drew it out, inch by inch, tearing the hole of its passage wider and wider until I had it out, stained black where my blood had baked into the wood. Then I stood and staggered from my pyre. Again, they fled, all but their priest, who threw himself on his knees before me and vowed to serve ‘my’ lord Satan if only I would spare him.” Azrael returned his stare to the window. “I did not.”

“And the girl?”

“She was dead. I left her.”

“Hanging there?”

“She was dead,” he said again, without expression.

“Then why did you care what they did with her corpse? Why try to stop them from posing her with all the others?”

He did not answer.

“Would you have saved her, if you could?”

“Saved her for what?” he asked harshly. “What could she have become, an orphan in that land, that age, but a beggar and a whore? Should I have saved her only to die, made ancient before her twentieth year, in the land where the man who had her people butchered ruled, free of all consequence?”

“Why not?” Lan asked. “Isn’t that what you’re doing now?”

He recoiled. His jaw clenched. He turned his back on her.

“Say what you want about the lord in your story, but at least it was just one village, not the whole world. And he only killed them, he didn’t raise them up again. And he didn’t make you help.”

The steady rhythm of his breath broke. He turned fast and paced away from her, rubbing at his scarred face.

“You made me help, Azrael.” Each word cracked and bled in the air. “You made me a part of it.”

“You wrote yourself into this tale,” he spat over his shoulder, moving on to the next wall. “You made the bargain. I fed
your
people at
your
behest. If it had brought a lasting peace, I’ve no doubt you’d have claimed the credit, so do not attempt to slip the blame.”

“That has nothing to do—”

“It is
everything
!” he roared. “Everything! You made me think there could be an end to the war! You made me think I could show mercy and see tolerance returned! You…” He turned back to the window, gripping at the ledge with claws that scored grooves in the old stone. “But at the first slackening of my
cruelty
, this.”

“This was a few dumb kids and a lot of angry talk in some mudlump of a village and what did you do about it? You killed those boys for a crime they hadn’t committed yet to make an example no one saw and then slaughtered everyone in Mallowton to avenge an attack that hadn’t happened! You could have handled it a thousand ways! You’re
making
them fight back, don’t you see that?”

“Do you think I do not realize the evil that I do?” He waited for a reply and, hearing none, turned around. His eyes left tracers in the air, their brightness belying the quiet of his tone. “Do you think I do not feel its weight? And have I not done a lifetime’s penance before I ever committed the sin?”

“I’m sorry you were hurt. Believe it or not, I really am. But this is not how to end it.”

“I don’t care how it ends anymore. I just want it done.” He turned away from the window and went to retrieve his mask from the vanity. “Go below and dress for dinner. I will wait service half an hour. Do not force me to collect you.”

She tried to let him go the way it would have been done if she were the hero of this story, in silence, unmoved by him except to defiance, but when his hand touched the door, she broke and said, “Please don’t do this.”