Land of the Beautiful Dead (73 page)

Azrael was the God of all that remained of this world, God and Devil both. His was the only power. His was the only law. He was immoveable, impervious, eternal. He did not need Lan, half in her sickbed and half in dreams of Norwood, to defend him.

Still, she said, “It’s not his fault he’s scarred.”

“It’s not the scars and you know it! It’s him! Leaving aside everything he
does
, look at what he
is
!”

“He’s what we made him.”

“Nothing made him. He just is.” The flute player looked at her—the strained, hot stare of someone who knows she will never convince a fool—and said, “Near Wodicote, there’s a little valley where the sheep won’t graze. There, the grass grows in funny knots and makes a funny hiss when the wind blows. We call it Blue Golly, always have, but it’s the Blood Gully, really. Hundreds of years ago, it was a normal place and the old villages could take their sheep there just fine, but one day, there was a strange wind and a storm with no rain, and the next morning, when they took their sheep out to graze, they found heaps of  jellied blood all over the ground.”

“Yeah, right, and in Norwood, there’s an elf-ring in the forest and if you stand in it, you can see the old cities lit up with lights and watch the shadows of the old people walking around like ghosts.”

“No, it’s true. Blood. In great, curdled heaps, still steaming in the morning frost. They had to scrape it all up with shovels and it took all day. They said the stink was so bad, grown men fainted and had to be stacked up in the church like cordwood. The jelly was sticky, like tar. They couldn’t scrape it all up, so they dug up the grass wherever it fell and threw the whole mess into the old, dry well, then filled it in and boarded it over. They thought it would be all right then, but the grass grew back strange and the sheep wouldn’t go near it. They still don’t.”

“Why are you telling me this? What’s this got to do with Azrael?”

“They’re the same thing. Blood fell in the valley, but that doesn’t make it rain and the ground where it sat will never be right. And
him
…he may look like a man, but he’ll never be one. He can live in a fine palace and drink from a cup and fuck his dollies on a fancy bed, but he’ll always be a
thing
pretending to be a man.”

“So go home,” Lan said with all the heat her bloodless body could muster. “He’ll let you. He’ll miss your music—”

The flute player flinched just a little, but didn’t drop her eyes.

“—but he’ll let you go. He’ll get Deimos to drive you there safe and I bet he’ll even send you off with plenty of food and blankets and all if you ask. Even a spare flute for when your father breaks that one, because Azrael at least would be sorry if the world ran out of music. And maybe that doesn’t make him a man, but who said a man was such a great thing to be anyway? I’ve known lots of men and let me tell you, drinking from a cup isn’t what makes one good.”

The other woman continued to hold her stare as Lan dropped exhausted back into her bed. After a few moments of expressionless silence, she reached up and plucked a shockingly long needle from her arm, severing the connection between them. Unfolding her long legs, she rose from her bed and moved to stand at the foot of Lan’s, paying no attention whatever to the blood trickling down her arm, off her fingers, onto the floor. “I fucked him too,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’m not pretending I didn’t, but at least I’m ashamed. I may have been his dolly, but never a traitor.”

Outrage gave her a brief blush of strength, enough to say, “Who are you calling traitor? Everything I’ve done, I’ve done to—”

“Yeah, yeah, end the Eaters and save the world. You’re a liar. You don’t even believe that swill anymore. I see you with him, the way you smile when he’s chatting you up, even the way you fight. You’re in love with him. He doesn’t ask for that,” she said with a contempt that transformed her pretty features into something haglike. “You do it on your own. You turned your slag back on the whole human race and everything that’s natural and alive. You make me sick.”

Lan groped through her churning thoughts for a rational argument and found one: “Fuck you.”

The machine squatting between their two beds suddenly let out a shrill bleep, as though to signal a point-penalty and end the round, then followed it with a blinking light and a few even louder bleeps. The sound of running feet came from the hall a short time before a dead man and a living woman wrestled each other through the door—her doctors. The dead man won, pushing the flute player rudely aside on his way to Lan. The woman came after, giving the flute player’s bloody arm a speculative stare before going to the machine. One touch silenced its noise and then she, too, was bent over the bed, competing with the dead man to see who could pry at Lan’s eyes and pinch her wrists and tug at the most bandages.

“What is it?” And that was Deimos, although Lan couldn’t see him through the wall of doctor-coats and it didn’t sound as though he came any closer than the doorway. “Is she waking?”

Both doctors exchanged a harried glance as they loomed over her. The dead one said, “No, no,” looking right at Lan’s open eyes. “The needle came loose, that’s all.”

“Get her out of here,” added the live one, jerking her chin toward the place where the flute player stood against the wall with her instrument in both hands, dripping blood down her side. “You might slap a bandage on her, there’s a good nurse, and if we need her back, I’ll let you know.”

As soon as he was gone, the doctors satisfied themselves with whatever they were doing and both leaned back, almost in perfect sync, to frown at one another.

“What do you think?” the dead man murmured.

“She could use another drop and a dram, but I think she looks pretty good,” the woman replied in that rough, no-rubbish voice so much like Lan’s mother’s. “And I think she could still have a reaction to the blood any time over the next half-night, so if we tell your lord she’s improved and she decides to get a fever, even if it isn’t serious…” She let that trail off, raising a questioning brow. “What do you think?”

“I think you have a valid point, but a warning: Our lord’s very insistence on her recovery is baffling to all who know of it. He’s not been very predictable about the patient at the best of times and this…this has made him angrier than I’ve ever seen him.”

Lan’s heart sank, although the words themselves were hardly surprising. “It has?”

They both ignored her.

“Is there a protocol in place for how to survive his lordship’s wrath?”

“I’m afraid not. He’s a remarkably even-tempered man, all things being equal, particularly considering your kind’s never-ending harassment.”

“We were egged on a bit, wouldn’t you say, by the end of the bloody world?!”

“Our lord’s demands upon his ascension were modest ones. If he had not been betrayed and viciously attacked—”

“He raised the bloody dead and wiped out billions of people practically overnight!”

“Do you have to fight about this right now?” Lan asked.

“Well then, maybe you should have given him what he asked for,” the dead doctor concluded with a little sniff. “My only point being, he must have some reason for wanting her made well and I think it would be prudent if we assume it is so that he can exact his own vengeance for injuring herself in the first place. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. To any of us, really.”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that myself,” said the living doctor, giving Lan’s hand an idle pat. “As a doctor, I can’t say that I approve, but speaking on a strictly personal level, I’m not exactly willing to take her place.”

“Nor am I, which is why I also think if we
don’t
tell our lord she’s awake and he wanders in as he’s been doing in his odd moments to find her up and well and him not there to see it happen, he might consider himself deprived of an elemental component of some greater plan and we could both find ourselves out in the garden with a pike in our nethers for not keeping him informed.”

“As long as it’s been since I’ve had something hard between my legs, that does not appeal,” the woman said wryly. She looked at Lan. “Right. I say we split the difference, my dear. Keep a watch on her blood pressure and if it holds steady and she stays clear of complications, we’ll bring him in, oh, an hour before dawn. People tend to appreciate news of this sort better when it comes at an inconvenient time.”

“How devious. And until then—” The dead doctor leaned out to a side table and came back with a syringe. “—we see to it that if he pops in, she’s in a convincingly unresponsive, yet recuperative, sleep.”

“You could just ask me to pretend to be asleep if he comes,” Lan said crossly.

“It’s difficult for me to trust your judgment when you’re lying there with a slashed throat,” the woman told her. “Dr. Deadhead, if you please.”

“Certainly, Dr. Warmblood.” The dead man caught Lan’s restrained arm in an even firmer grip and stabbed the needle into her before she could make another argument. “Count to ten,” he suggested, emptying its heavy contents into her with sadistic slowness.

“One,” said Lan.

And that was all.

* * *

She woke as something lifted her arm and slipped a kind of short, coarse sleeve around it, high on her bicep. There was a sense of familiarity in this touch, a kind of ominous foreknowledge that came without memory, only a sense that something was about to happen. Something that hurt. There followed a series of wheezy breaths, reminding Lan so uncomfortably of a poisoned rat that she opened her eyes, but the room was too bright. The light stabbed in through just a slit, turning her vision to a watery white in which no details could be made out, only a very blurry face that could have belonged to anyone. She gave up the effort, sinking back into the dark. The wheezing whatnot wheezed on, and with each exhalation, her arm got pinched tighter and tighter. She tried to pull away. But whatever had her, had her good.

“Get off me,” Lan said. Or tried to. “Grrmfee,” was perhaps a better representation of her efforts.

Something thumped her on the forehead. “Hush,” said a man.

“Leggo.”

Thump. “I said, hush. Don’t you move or I’ll have you back in the cuffs.”

Lan thought that over and concluded that threatening to put her ‘back’ in them meant she was out of them now. She tried to open her eyes and confirm this theory, but all she got for her pains was a swimmy glimpse of the ceiling before her leaden eyelids fell again.

The wheezing stopped. The squeeze was now horrific, like having her arm bit off at the elbow. At length, with a great exhaling hiss, she was released. “Eighty-eight over sixty. Not good, but certainly better than it was.”

“Bassa,” said Lan irritably.

“She’s getting awfully chatty, isn’t she?”

“She’s waking up,” someone else said. Woman’s voice. Not her mother. The other doctor. “For real, this time. We’d better fetch his lordship. Oh nurse!”

Lan winced without opening her eyes at the unexpected shout, like a hammer on her fuzzy brain, then winced again when she deciphered the sound that soon followed as those of a Revenant’s bootheels approaching in a familiar stride. “Don’t call him that,” she tried to say, but the mumble she managed to push out was more a snore than real words.

“Doctor.” Deimos did not bother to disguise his dislike—that one word held whole symphonies of it, in all its varying colors and strains—but if he had comments to make on the subject of his new title, he kept them to himself.

“Go tell your master my patient is coming around. If he wants to see her, I’ll allow it.”

There was the briefest of pauses before the boots walked away, just time enough for Lan, and possibly Deimos as well, to reflect on the audacity of ‘allowing’ Azrael to do anything. And it seemed no sooner had the hard tak-tak of his heels retreated than it returned, bring with it the heavier, softer stride of Azrael in his bare feet. Lan roused herself enough to raise her head, but it was too heavy to hold up.

“Just a few minutes,” the woman said. “It’s important that she rest as much as possible.”

“Leave us.”

The room emptied. Lan tried again to work her eyes open and finally succeeded, only to see Azrael above her, his eyes blazing from the sockets of his horned mask. He was, as the doctor had said, very angry.

They stared at each other in silence as Lan’s head and vision slowly cleared.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I didn’t want to.”

His hand slashed sidelong through the air. “I am not in the mood to hear your lies now, Lan. Whatever your story was, whatever chain of unfortunate accidents you’ve dreamed up to explain yourself—”

“I meant to,” said Lan. “I planned it. You wouldn’t believe how much planning I did. But I didn’t want to.”

His jaw tightened. He walked away, not toward the door but to the window, clasping his hands behind his back. She could see every muscle standing out in sharp relief, coiled too tight, destroying all the sense of calm he intended to convey with this pose.

“Did you get my note?” Lan asked.

“Yes.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to read it…with all the blood.”

He gave that no answer, not even a glance.