Solveig, dancing her across the floor. His hand squeezing her ass in that smirking way. His sparkling eyes when he’d spoken of the little French girl, the one who thought she was seducing him. The wet mark on Batuuli’s breast. Apparatuses.
She’d heard it said that if you fell in a well and looked up from the very bottom, you could see stars even at high noon. Well, Lan was in so far over her head that she couldn’t even see the stars.
She had left Norwood with the single thought of coming here, but beyond meeting him and making her small stand, she had no further plan. She knew he’d never let the Eaters die. If she hadn’t known it when she left Norwood (but she had), she’d known from the moment she first stood in his hall and felt his inhuman gaze move over her. Dollying for him only prolonged the inevitable. He would toy with her for as long as it amused him and then it would be over, nothing ended but her last hope, nothing changed.
She cried. A little. Then she stopped because she didn’t want her eyes to be red and swollen when he sent for her. And then she went back to the window because, really, what else was there to do?
The shadows lengthened. The day began to fail. Haven’s lights came on in gradual, glittering waves, but not in the Red Room. As it grew darker, the cold came on stronger and Lan’s dress was no proof against it. She walked for warmth, hugging herself in a futile effort to hide from the wind that blew through the window and under her thin skirt. Her freshly-shaven skin tingled at each gust, over-sensitive to the cold. It made her wonder if she would feel his cold as intensely.
The chill that swept through her then had nothing to do with the wind.
At last, she heard boots on the stairs. Lan groped her way to the door in near-total blackness, thereby earning herself a stubbed toe when the guard flung it open on her useless pretty shoes, so that her greeting was an explosive, “Bugger-fuck!”
The guard startled, then pinched his pretty lips together and stood aside.
“What?” Lan snapped, limping past him with a glower. “You already knew I was vulgar.”
He did not reply.
Down they went and out into the lamplit halls of the palace, where Lan was confronted almost at once by her reflection in a pane of glass.
She had known, of course, that the bodice was tight—during the long hours of her confinement, her eyes had often traveled down and with some awe over the bared swells of her breasts, made mountainous in this costume—but she had somehow not realized how her figure would be exaggerated, made voluptuous and even wanton. Her skirts clung to every curve, accentuating the fullness of her hips and thighs with shimmers and shadow. The corset came to a point in front, like a crude arrow pointing between her legs. She had been less naked than this in the bath.
The guard gave her a none-too-gentle shove, putting an abrupt end to her fascination. She walked, dazed, stealing glances in every window, mirror and polished surface they passed, as if to reassure herself that, yes, that woman was still her. That painted woman. That bare-legged, nearly bare-breasted woman.
That stranger.
Although she had now been to his dining hall twice, she nearly walked right past it, so absorbed was she in catching these intermittent and somehow reproving glances of herself. Her guard had to catch her arm, which was unexpected enough that, although he surely only meant to give her another terse shove toward the door, he instead hurled her through it. She might have been able to catch herself under ordinary circumstances, but the long skirt of her dress, her soft slippers and that very smooth formal floor conspired to send her crashing to the ground and over it until she banged into someone’s chair and lay in a heap with her dress hiked up around her sprawling legs and the wind knocked out of her.
There weren’t many to witness this demonstration of her grace; once again, the banquet tables were empty apart from Azrael himself, although the half-cleared leavings of a sumptuous feast suggested the guests had only just left. There were servants in abundance along the walls, some of whom had fluttered forward as if to help Lan up, only to retake their positions, casting uncertain glances at the throne.
Azrael himself had stood, either to greet her or in surprise at her violent entry. Now he seated himself again and pointed a casual claw at Lan’s escort. “Impale him.”
“My lord,” the guard stammered, even as other guards stepped up to take his pike. “Forgive…I didn’t—”
“I tripped,” said Lan, struggling to right herself. The corset would not allow her to bend, making even the simple act of standing into an awkward mess. “It wasn’t his fault.”
“If I have compassion, child, surely it cannot be in such abundance that you can beg it on behalf of the living and the dead.”
“But he didn’t do anything wrong!”
“Did you?” Azrael countered. “Did I? Fate strikes where it wills, not where it is deserved.”
“You’re not fate!”
Azrael drummed his fingers once on the edge of the table as the guard was pulled toward the door, then raised a hand to halt them. “So be it,” he said. “If it moves you to be appreciative, so I am moved to be merciful.”
When his hand dropped again, so did the guard, dead before he smacked into the ground.
But of course, thought Lan, flustered, he had been dead to begin with. She looked at him, at Azrael—Devil, God, Death—and wondered when and how she could have forgotten what he was.
He caught her staring and smiled behind his mask. “Such is my mercy. Come. Join me.”
A soft scraping sound behind her drew her eye. The nearest servants had left off clearing the tables of dirty plates and come to clear the body instead. His boots were dragging on the tiles. Azrael’s steward rushed over and knelt down to remove them. So they wouldn’t scuff the floor, she thought dimly, but her eyes remained fixed on the body’s bare feet. She could see them two ways: knobby and soft and pink, as they were in front of her now, and as she remembered them, scratched and muddy.
For a moment, she smelled smoke and peaches…
“Lan.”
She looked around. Azrael had stood and was holding up his hand again, ready to signal a guard if she needed to be carried to him.
“Are we going to do it here?” she asked, walking toward him. The first step was the hardest, but it got easier when she heard the door close and knew the bare-footed body was gone.
“It?”
“You know what I mean.”
He studied her a moment, then uttered a short laugh and cut his hand through the air in negation. “It,” he said pointedly, “will wait for my private chambers. Eat with me.”
“Again?”
“There was a time not too long distant that two meals each day would have been thought too few. And Norwood’s harvests this past year would not seem to have been bountiful,” he added, running an eye over her.
“It’s the corset. I’m not really this skinny.”
“I have never known so contentious a peacemaker.” He beckoned her toward the chair where she’d sat that morning. A clean plate awaited her there, along with several platters heaped with food and a full bottle of wine. When she picked the latter up and looked at him, he shrugged. “Even my most willing concubines prefer to soften their first night with me. Drink. I’m not offended.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I get stupid when I drink.” Lan put the bottle down, then picked up the chair. It was a lot heavier than she thought it would be. As Azrael watched, his head tipped and eyes glinting, she dragged it with her to the dais and up the short stair to push it against the imperial table opposite his own throne. She sat, a little out of breath, pretending she could not hear the running boots of at least a dozen pikemen behind her.
“Contentious,” said Azrael, smiling. “And presumptive.”
“It’s so we can talk.”
“Ah.” He waved the pikemen back and beckoned to a servant, who came to move the many dishes that made up Lan’s meal.
“That isn’t necessary. We can share a
plate, can’t we?”
“It might be poisoned,” he said, with obvious amusement. “Attempts are made, from time to time.”
“I trust you to raise me up again if I die, at least long enough to finish the audience you promised me.”
“Now I must have honor as well as mercy? Is there no end to your high esteem of me? Go on, then. Eat with me.”
“What is this?” asked Lan, tearing some meat off the carved breast of some kind of bird. “Chicken?”
“Hawk.”
“I didn’t think you could eat hawk.”
“You can eat anything.” He watched her chew and swallow, his eyes glowing dimly in the shadows of his mask’s sockets, then picked up one of the forks flanking his plate and held it out to her. “And do you favor hawk, now that you’ve had it?”
“That’s a joke, right? How do you have a favorite food?”
He smiled.
“That’s like…like having favorite air. It seems silly to use this thing,” she added, frowning at the fork. “Why do I have to gaff my food when I can just pick it up and eat normally?”
“The idea is to keep your hands clean.”
“I can just—” Lan started to wipe her fingers on her jeans, only to remember the fine dress she was instead wearing. “I can wash my hands,” she said after some thought. “Afterwards.”
“Could you?” His smile broadened, a smile that told her he could read just how it had felt to sit in Batuuli’s bath and know that now no one would ever drink any of that clean water.
“I could get used to it, I suppose,” mumbled Lan, making a stab at a grape. The points of the fork just slipped off.
“How did you find my daughter?”
Lan shrugged, still fighting fruit. “The guards took me right to her.”
“Her company, I mean.”
“Oh.” She had to think awhile before she could fit together an answer that was both tactful and true. “She received me.”
“And my son? I’m told he was visiting,” he said, catching her wary glance.
“All right, I suppose. They have a…a close relationship, don’t they?”
“They used to,” he said noncommittally. “Now it is just one more means by which to provoke me. It doesn’t. Indeed, if I thought they genuinely cared for one another, I would give them my blessing, but it is only a mutual hatred expressed with flesh.” His claw tapped at the tabletop three times, slowly, as he watched her. “They may seek to involve you in their games.”
“Yeah, I heard about the last girl they involved.”
His eyes flickered. “He told you.”
“He laughed about it.”
Azrael looked away.
“What happened to her?” Lan asked.
“No more than what she wished to happen. I will speak no more of such bleak matters in such winning company.” He waved the wine-girl over and took the bottle from her, filling his own cup, drinking it off, and filling it again. “How like you your gown?”
Lan thought, ‘It’s cold and it makes me look like a whore. Or a peacock. A peacock-whore, maybe. I can barely breathe in this corset and the shoes are too slippery. The sleeves are scratchy and it pinches under my arms.’
Lan said, “Fine, I guess.”
“Faint praise,” he mused. “You don’t like it.”
“It’s fine,” she insisted, trying once again to get a damned grape on her fork. “How do you like it? Seems like that’s the real question.”
“And the color?”
Lan succeeded in threading a grape stem between the points of her fork, plucking it from the bunch with careful twist, but it immediately fell and bounced away off the edge of the table. “What about it?”
“Do you favor the color?”
“Are you teasing me?” Her frustration with the fork and the fruits sharpened her tone more than was perhaps wise. “How the hell do you have a favorite color?”
He rolled his shoulders and plucked a grape himself…using his fingers. “I think it suits you.”
Lan gave up on the grapes and stabbed an apple. “It may be pretty, but the cloth is too thin.”
“It isn’t meant for warmth.”
“Then why make a dress out of it?”
“For the pleasure of taking it off. I have removed that gown from several women in the past,” he added, knuckling idly through a tray of sweetmeats for one worthy of his appetite. “But never with such anticipation as I confess I feel seeing it now on you.”
She spared him a quizzical glance as she sawed her apple into clumsy wedges. “You say that like it’s a compliment.”
“It was meant as one.”
“Even though it just compared me to all your other dollies?”
“Not all, merely those who have worn that particular gown. And I did set you above them in the comparison, did I not?”
“Which only means you’re going to set the next girl who wears it above me.”
He watched her eat, his thumbclaw scratching slowly back and forth along the rim of his cup. “You should wear jewels,” he said at last.
She rolled her eyes. “I’ll wear nothing but a dog collar and a diamond tiara if that’s what you want, but I’m not going to come all over giggly just because you offer.”
“Ah. And after all I’ve done to foster trust between us.”
“Like send Revenants to my home and put me in chains in your meditation garden.”
“You wore them well.” He tipped his cup toward her, one glowing eye flickering in a wink. “That was also a compliment.”
Her lips twitched, wanting to smile in spite of herself. She turned her attention to cutting her apple apart with knife and fork, forcing herself to imagine the clear juice that welled up around the blade as blood. Norwood had bled. The whole world had bled for Azrael. He was not charming and this was not dinner. He was the enemy and this was battle.
“You promised me an audience,” she said, hacking the meat of her apple into smaller and smaller bits.
“And you’ll have it when it’s paid for. Until then, no more talk of the hungering dead. It dampens the romantic mood.”
“Is that what you think this is? A romance?”
“I concede the point,” he said wryly, “but it is no greater farce than to think it an endeavor to end war, surely.”
“Is that what we’re doing tonight? Competing to see who’s the most deluded?”
“Not all, I trust.” He let his gaze wander with obvious relish over the front of her dress. “That would be a low trick after whetting my appetite so with your splendid entrance.”
She thought he was only making fun of her for falling down, and then she remembered the position in which she’d ultimately fetched up—legs spread wide and skirts hiked up to her waist.
As if her thoughts were an old movie playing in the air above her head for him to see, Azrael’s smile broadened into a grin, showing a hint of sharp teeth behind the slit of his mask’s mouth.
“It was an accident,” she mumbled, blushing and furious with herself for letting him see her blush.
“I believe it and yet, a pity it is true, for if it had been a plot, it would have been a winning one. And what more fitting way to begin a meal than with an appetizer? I can hardly eat for thoughts of the final course.”
“Because you caught me with my skirt up? Have I got something you’ve never seen before, after all your other dollies?”
“It is not what I saw but what I did not see that intrigues me most.”
Lan clenched her jaw and stabbed at her apple. “They didn’t give me knickers or I would have worn them.”
“You mistake me.”
“What then?”
“Artifice.”
“I don’t know what that word means.”
“No matter. Eat. Or shall we adjourn to satiate our other appetites?”
“Is that sex talk?” she asked uncertainly.
“It is.”
“Why don’t you just say sex then? It’s always chali
ce and appetite and artifice with you. I never know what the hell you’re saying.”
“Are you resigned to fuck me?”
She looked at him, startled.
He gazed evenly back at her, cup in hand, head slightly at an angle. “Was that not plain enough?”
“I said I would. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“For an audience. And when it proves fruitless, will you elect once more to leave me wanting? For as much as I enjoy our little talks, I will not content myself with talk alone tonight. Neither will I be made a brute in my own bedchamber. What is your intent?”
“To pay for my audience and then get one.”
“Hm.” He brooded over his cup, then set it aside. “You know my answer already. Perhaps we would both be better served to end this now.”
“Perhaps. You have lots of willing women, I hear. And I have a long road back to Norwood.” Lan picked up her fork and bit off another chunk of apple.
He watched her eat, frowning. “We’ll talk,” he said at length. “But find you some other subject than my hungering dead or the war your kind began.”
“Another subject…Like you?”
“I require no adulation.”
“I don’t know what that means. Can we talk about you?”
“My tyranny?” he guessed, his eyes narrowing.
“Just you. Where are you from?”
His mask showed her no emotion, only stillness and the steady glow of his stare. “Originally?”
She shrugged and nodded.
“Why?”
“I just want to know you, that’s all.”
His jaw clenched, but he said, “The land of my birth had no name. Nor did my mother’s people. If you ask where I began, I can tell you only south of here.”
“How far south? Someone showed me the ocean once. On a map. Did you have to cross it to get here?”
“I did, although I’m not certain where the ocean lay in the days of my youth. The land was different then.”
“When was that?”
“Before Time was,” he said, stabbing the words at her like a knife. “Have you any other pointless questions?”
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 11