Land of the Beautiful Dead (63 page)

He pulled the door open anyway, as if he too were determined to play out a part, and like her, gave up on it. His head bent. With a sigh, he shut the door and faced her. “What would you have me do? Forgive them all their treason and wait for the next attack? I know you do not consider the lives of those within Haven to be lives deserving of peace or protection…or indeed, to be lives at all…”

She could not muster even the pretense of an argument.

“But I brought them into this existence, however much I may regret it now,” he continued after her silence had stretched out long enough to hurt, “and I owe them better than to abandon them to human violence, simply because they cannot die. Whether you agree with it or not, my hungering dead are all that keep the living from my borders, and even in that, they are not wholly effective, as your presence attests. So tell me, Lan, how many deathless torments would you have my loyal dead endure as your people revenge themselves for a war they began? And how many will you share?” he demanded. “Or do you think the living will know you for a hero and not the Devil’s dollygirl?”

“I don’t care what happens to me,” she insisted.

“You should. Look around.” He took two long strides forward, gesturing toward the window with a sweep of his arm to bring the whole world into the tower with them. “See the boundless imagination and ability of man to realize his imaginings and understand that he is
never
so creative as when he sets another being to suffer. I was protecting you as much as any of my risen.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t use me as your excuse for killing all those innocent people.”

“Innocent? An army!”

“You keep saying that, but there are no armies out there anymore, not really. Just scared people who only want to live. And if they act like an army sometimes, maybe you need to understand it’s because they think they’re still at war.” She stood up and met him halfway across the floor before he could pace away. “And you can’t change their minds by killing everyone who’s against you.”

“I will never change their minds,” he said, then softened just a little. “Nor yours, I see. You would not be the Lan I…the Lan I know, if you could forgive what I am about to do. I will not ask. But for what I have already done, for that one night…and that one life…” He raised a hand, but did not quite touch her cheek. “Lan, I am so sorry.”

“So am I.” She turned into his waiting hand, pressing her cheek to his cool palm, and closed her eyes. “If I said I could forgive you…would you pay for it?”

He took his hand back and returned to the window. He did not speak, but made room for her when she joined him.

They stood together, not touching, watching the night. The lights were on in Haven, shining blue and gold and white. All the world used to look like that. But that world was dead and the one that had been raised up in its place was so much darker.

At last, he said, “Would you mean it?”

She took a breath that still, after all these hours, tasted of smoke and blood, and whispered, “Yes.”

“And your price?”

“Don’t do this.”

“Lan—”

“If I promise not to ask about the Eaters unless we have a formal audience? If I made you another garden or built you a building? If I begged…” Lan took a breath, then knelt down on the blood-colored planks while he watched, not quite impassive. She put her hands together, like she’d seen in some of the colored windows around the palace, and turned her face up to his. “I’m begging you. If I’m not doing it right, if I’m not sorry enough, then tell me what to do and I’ll do it and we’ll never talk about this again, I swear. Please. I’ll do anything, but please…don’t do this.”

He looked at her and for a long time, it was only the rain, the weight in her heart and the ache in her knees.

“So be it,” he said at last. “For now. I will speak to Deimos.” He offered his hand.

She took it and let him help her back to her feet. “I’ll dress for dinner.”

“You really are quite a formidable negotiator at times.” He took his lamp and went to open the door, only to close it softly. Without turning, he said, “No. I would not have saved her.”

The wind blew cold between them.

“But I would not have let her suffer eight days, if I but had another hand’s span of reach. I could not save her, but I would have ended it. And as much as you may regret the killing of that boy, it was a mercy you did, not a murder.” He seemed about to say more, then shook his head and opened the door.

“Can I come to bed with you tonight?”

He looked back with a tired sort of smile. “It is a very red room, isn’t it?”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak without saying something stupid, something he wouldn’t even believe.

“Yes, you may. And be welcome. I missed you.”

He closed the door softly on his last word. She listened to his footsteps recede until the rain drowned them out.

“I missed you, too,” she said.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

O
f all the rooms in Azrael’s palace, or at least those where Lan had been, if she had to choose a favorite, it could only be the library. She could remember thinking of it as wasted space once, but now the sheer size of it only physically represented the immensity of the knowledge it contained. Every surface was in some way beautiful, from the rich carpets over the polished floors to the elaborate tiles and cornices on the ceiling and everything in-between. She could stare at just the windows all day, imagining stories to go with the pictures that had been set so colorfully inside them, and if she ever got bored doing that, she could always ride the ladders.

The library was the only place that made Lan glad Haven existed, because it meant that room had been spared when all the rest of the world had fallen down. It made her happy, a little, to think it might survive even if humanity did not, and at the same time, it made her sad for the same reason, because no one else would ever look at those windows the same way, with the same wonder.

So it should have been a good thing that Lan had to go to the library every day, except that the reason she had to go was to have lessons. It wasn’t just because she was bad at them—she would never admit that, anyway, not even to herself—but because Master Wickham taught her absolutely nothing she needed to know. Numbers, thrown together and broke apart in quantities and variations that would never,
ever
exist outside of a textbook. Science, which was equal parts irrelevant and unintelligible, and which even Master Wickham confessed was mostly made up of theories. And reading. Reading was still, even after all this time, the very worst. Anytime she started to feel the least little bit confident about reading, Master Wickham found a new way to muddle it up. It wasn’t enough anymore just to know what the words meant, she had to know why and how to make them mean other things by changing the bits at the beginnings and the ends, how to make things into actions and how to make stuff that had happened into stuff that only might happen or stuff that was still happening.

With every new lesson, Lan only felt her nerves pulled tighter and thinner, so when she arrived in the library one morning to discover a fountain pen and inkwell on her side of the desk, she snapped. A pencil was the only damned thing she was absolutely the master of, and she wasn’t giving it up without a fight.

Wickham let her say everything she wanted to say on that subject, but when she came to the end of her rambling, incoherent tirade, he simply uncapped the inkwell, put the fountain pen in her hand and told her all complaints with the curriculum had to be submitted in writing. She was fairly sure that wasn’t true, but she was angry enough to plop herself down and spend the hours necessary to learn how to use the bloody thing so she could painstakingly write out
Lessons is a load of useless shit
. Master Wickham read it, corrected it and made her write it out a hundred times because she apparently misspelled everything except ‘a’. This took so long that by the time she showed up to dress for dinner, Serafina was in a slappy mood and it did not improve when she saw the ink smudged across Lan’s hands.

Lan spent several excruciating minutes gritting her teeth while Serafina tried to get the stains off with soap, a brush, a pumice stone and finally a slap to Lan’s face.

“What do I have to do to earn a day without your fucking attitude?” Lan demanded as her faithful servant stomped off to find a pair of gloves in the wardrobe. “Haven’t I been nice to you? All this time and you still treat me like I’m something you can’t quite scrape off your shoes!”

“Just get in the bath and don’t get your hair wet. There’s not time enough to dry it. What have you done with your blue gown?” she asked accusingly.

Lan waded over to look around the screen. “It’s right there. You’re practically touching it.”

“Not the sky blue, the deep blue! Evening colors!”

“Oh, that one. It’s being restrung or something.”

Serafina gave a disapproving sniff.

“Hey, you keep putting me in corsets, he’s going to keep cutting them off. It’s not my fault.” Lan rubbed some soap between her palms and scrubbed her face, then splashed it clean. “Why do they call it ‘sky blue’ anyway? The sky’s not blue.”

“It was once. I’m sure even you have seen pictures of the sky before.”

“Yeah, but they’re not real.”

Serafina laughed and shook her head.

“Come on, they’re not just blue in the pictures, they’re crazy colors. Red and orange and purple and pink…Are you trying to tell me the sky changed colors?”

Serafina laughed again, but the sound was forced.

Lan gave herself a last hasty splash to rinse off and climbed out of the water. “Do you really remember the old sky? None of the other dead people seem to remember anything from when they were alive.”

“There is nothing worth remembering before the ascension of our great lord.”

“Not even the color of the sky? How is that remotely disloyal to Azrael’s rule? He says he didn’t even change it.”

“He didn’t. It was your kind,” she said contemptuously, “demonstrating their humanity—burning millions, poisoning tens of millions more and souring the whole of the world they bequeathed to future generations rather than allow our great lord to live in peace with his Children.”

“So you do remember it.”

“Oh, I remember well enough the day the sky changed. I was bathing my mistress…There was no palace then,” she added in a wistful aside. “And the fine place where he so briefly stayed with his newborn Children was far behind us, but he had brought us back to the cave where he had been confined and made us a home. There was a fall, no bigger than this one,” she said, glancing at the fountain, “and it poured into a pool just so. And there, I bathed my mistress and plaited her hair while she wept for her slain sisters and brothers, when the ships first appeared. They passed over us, trailing foul streams of poison behind them. Back and forth, filling the sky with the stink, until the cloud of it was all we could see. Our lord ordered us into the cave, as deep as we could go, but we had not gone deep at all when the sky ignited.

“Flame came spilling in,” Serafina said softly, still standing at the wardrobe, but no longer rummaging through the gowns that hung there. The mirrored inner panel reflected her face in a dozen pieces. “I had never seen such flame…and never saw such again. It seemed to have a weight, rolling as it moved. It filled the cave as water fills a jar, swirling and funneling and pouring down into every hollow and channel. It should have found us, if it had been any other cave, but as I say, this was the cave of our lord’s imprisonment and he had made it his home. There was a door. He shut it against the fires as they came toward us and he held it shut, even as flames licked through every crack and turned the door beneath his hands a glowing gold. He held it and when those awful sounds and that awful light faded, he opened it and we went out together to see the sky, as black as starless night, and all the lush forest that had been our walls and roof charred away. The very rock had melted. There was nothing. Nothing.”

She fell silent. Even Lan had stopped moving. The water continued its cheerful babble, but Serafina did not seem to hear. She was far away, at the charred ruin of another bath.

“He sent us back into the cave, but he did not join us there. He was gone many days. We could hear the sounds of war, even as deep as we were hidden. The bombs…the explosions….became as a beating heart in the rock around us. It became almost a comfort to hear it, to know that so long as the world’s heart still beat, our lord yet lived. And then, that heart began to slow…and slow…and finally stop. We waited in the darkness—truly, you cannot imagine the darkness. It is so much more than the absence of light. It is a living thing, a dead thing, closed in all around you. You can hear it. Feel it. It is every sense all at once.” Serafina shuddered and suddenly seemed to notice her hands again. She moved a few gowns around and picked one out. “We waited in that darkness until our lord returned. He brought us out into the light of that new sky and yes, it was an awful light, but it was still beautiful to our eyes because we thought it was the light of peace. It wasn’t, but we thought it was. How young we were.” Serafina turned away from the wardrobe with a manufactured sigh and immediately punched a hand into her hip. “You got your hair wet, you clumsy cow!”

“But this all happened after you were already dead.”

“After I was raised up, you mean.”

“Don’t you ever wonder who you were when you were alive?”

“I know who I am now. That is all that matters.” Serafina threw a towel over her and roughly rubbed her down. Very roughly.

“But he named you,” Lan said thoughtfully. “He doesn’t do that for everyone. You must have been special.”

“The Lady Batuuli named me. I was her handmaiden.” Serafina dropped the gown over Lan’s head and cinched up the beaded corset. The black gown, the one she always put out when she was most annoyed with Lan. Black made her look too pale, which meant lots of slapping to put color in her cheeks. There were cosmetics that would do the same thing, but those took time to apply.

“You’re my handmaiden now,” Lan pointed out. “Does that mean I get to name you?”

“No.” Out came the hairbrush, which she used to neaten hair primarily by ripping it out.

Lan showed no signs of pain, since that was the surest way to prolong the torture, but she couldn’t stop herself from muttering, “I think I’ll name you ‘Bitch’.”

Serafina brushed even harder. “Of course you would. My true mistress knew only angels were fit to serve her. You are content to be tended by dogs.” She turned away, reaching for the jeweled combs to pin her hair up and dropped the brush. She didn’t pick it up either, or finish setting Lan’s hair. She just stood there, silent.

“Hello, Azrael,” Lan guessed, putting her gloves on. “We didn’t hear you come in.”

“So it would seem.”

“I know I’m late, but my lessons went long and I still had to come back and get dollied up,” she said lightly. “I wouldn’t want to embarrass you.”

“Before whom?” His footsteps approached, unhurried. He gathered up a length of her hair and pinned it with a comb. “Whose approval are you seeking? Who among my court has made you feel my esteem is not enough?”

Lan sighed.

“Perhaps you know,” Azrael said ominously, his hands ever gentle. “A devoted handmaiden knows her mistress’s mind, surely.”

“I am your humble servant, my lord,” Serafina replied, bowing.

“Are you indeed?” He put the second comb in Lan’s hair and tucked a last rebel strand behind her ear. “I find your humility somewhat lacking this evening.”

“How do I look?” Lan asked, hoping to distract him. She turned in a small circle, stepping between him and Serafina.

He wasn’t fooled and he let her know it with a long stare, but he smiled at the end of it. “Beautiful, as ever. You are quite striking in black.”

“You think so?”

“It always seems to bring out the color in your cheek.” Azrael moved behind the bathing screen. In silhouette, he removed his golden mask and put on the black wolf one. Just to match her, maybe. “I’m not decided how I feel about the gloves.”

“I’m writing with a pen now. I got ink on my hands.”

“Ah. Your handmaiden should have tended to that.” Making a last adjustment to the fastens, Azrael came back out into the room and let his gaze fall on Serafina. “Perhaps I should appoint another to her position and give this one time to meditate upon the importance of one’s work.”

Lan drew back, her thoughts at once pinned—impaled—to the meditation garden as she’d seen it last. The smell of smoke. The taste of blood. The boy from Mallowton becoming an Eater right in front of her…reaching for her…

Azrael glanced at her, then took a longer look. “A poor choice of words,” he said after a moment. “I meant only to put her at work elsewhere.”

He did not say more than that. Although it had been nearly a month since the garden, the only time they had ever talked about it had been that night in the Red Room. She’d had a thousand opportunities to bring it up again, but she hadn’t and she’d let him change the subject every time one of them had stumbled, like now, into adjoining territory. She told herself more talk couldn’t rebuild Mallowton’s walls or bring dead boys to life, which was true. She also told herself she was a coward who did not want to think about how much blood and ash stained the hands that moved over her body at night, and that was true too.

All the same, she occasionally made an effort. In this world without graves, talk was all that kept memories alive. Without it, the past, as Azrael so often said, was dead.

“I’m not sure I believe that,” she said. “When you say ‘meditate’—”

“In any event, I mean it now,” he interrupted, a warning in his tone that quickly transferred itself to Serafina. “Although I confess to some confusion as to why you should concern yourself with one who can be readily replaced.”

“So can I, remember?”

That seemed to give him pause, but only for a moment. “I remember saying I would feel a lack.”

“And that you wouldn’t suffer it long. Plenty of sweeter fruit on the tree.”

“Hm.” He offered her his ‘charming’ smile through the fangs of his mask. “You really are beautiful in that dress.”