Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  Azrael raked his eyes across the table, then stabbed the roasted hawk off its platter and transferred it to his plate. He began to carve it, somewhat forcefully.

  “It was only dumb luck it didn’t get her instead of the little girl it did get. It dragged her down and tore her open while she was still screaming and my mom saw her guts coming out. The little girl’s name was Sharon. My mother remembers that because she was wearing a nametag. It said, Hello, my name is Sharon. If I’m alone, please help me find an adult.”

  Azrael put down his knife and fork and tore the leg off the hawk with his hands.

  “All the other kids ran, but my mom grabbed an axe—don’t ask me what an axe was doing lying around, because I don’t know—and hit him in the back. She severed his spine and no, he didn’t die, but he couldn’t get up either. He lay there and writhed instead, snapping his teeth while Mom tried to drag him off of Sharon. And when she finally rolled him over, Sharon got up. The rest of her guts fell out, but she still got up. Mom had to cut her head off to stop her. Would you like to know how my mother lost her coat?”

  “Not especially.”

  “She took it off because she couldn’t get the blood out. That’s how young she was—she left behind her only coat just because it got bloody. She’d have slapped me if I’d done that, six years old or not. There’s no excuse for that kind of stupid in this world.”

  Azrael ate. His musicians finished their song and began another.

  “She got another coat the next night, in some empty house down the street. She ate out of their cupboards and slept in their attics She learned all the ways to get around your benign Eaters and you’re right,” she said, nodding. “They’re not too bright. She lived right there in that town by the sea until summer, all by herself. Five years old, maybe six or seven. She never saw another living person after that first night, so she moved on when the weather warmed up. She scavenged when she could and then she learned how to make weapons and hunt. She learned how to find places to sleep between the towns and how to make them if there weren’t any to find. She learned how to sell her body for a bottle of water. She lived eleven years in the open country before Norwood took her in. Eleven years, alone.”

  “A resourceful woman,” he said. “I suppose my hungering dead must have ultimately run her down.”

  “No. She was killed for her boots. I was working in the orchards when she went out hunting. I didn’t see it happen, so do you know how I know?”

  He tossed the bird’s bones onto the platter and helped himself to a peach.

  “When she came back, she was barefoot,” said Lan. The effort of keeping her voice low and even caused it to tremble. She made herself take a few breaths before continuing. The air ached in her lungs, caught like hooks in her throat. “There were leaves and dirt in her hair, all matted in with blood. They’d stabbed her over and over before they cut her throat. Her clothes were…torn…too bad to be worth stealing, but they took her boots and left her there to get up again. They left her there so she had to come back, barefoot in the fucking mud. And she didn’t even know it. She didn’t even know she’d lost her boots.”

  “My condolences.” Azrael carved out a slice of peach, but he didn’t eat it. He set it on his plate and carved another. “Yet I would observe here that my Eaters, as you call them, have no use for shoes. I may have robbed your mother of her childhood, however obliquely.” Another slice, uneaten, joined the first. “I may have robbed her of her home and family. I shall even grant that I robbed her of hope and innocence and happiness, as if such are qualities of a world that has never known me.” He carved a third and fourth wedge out of the peach, then put the whole thing down and pushed the plate aside. “But not even by the acts of my hungering dead have I robbed her of life.”

  “You ruined her life. You ruined her death.” Tears broke her voice even though they didn’t fall from her eyes. She tried to breathe herself quiet and couldn’t, tried to blink her vision clear and couldn’t do that either. “I couldn’t even bury her. She doesn’t have a grave. They burned her with all the rest of them and I have nothing left. My last memory of my mother is the stink of her smoke.”

  “I’ve smelled that smoke,” he remarked, now reaching for his cup. “It is a terrible smell and it does linger.”

  “Stop trying to one-up me.”

  “I’m not. I’m sympathizing.”

  “You…” She fought with it, but the tight heat choking the breath from her body coiled and coiled and suddenly erupted. “You don’t get to sympathize, you son of a bitch! You’re the reason she had to burn! Because she was out there! Because she was dead and walking around and trying to get at us! She was my mother and you turned her into an Eater that someone had to chop up and burn!”

  “Someone.” Light reflected in the eye he turned on her, making it glow gold in the shadow of his mask. “But not you.”

  She should have known he would ask, but she didn’t. She should have refused to answer, but she didn’t do that either. “I tried,” she said. Two words and they still cracked.

  “But…?”

  “She was my mother.”

  His eyes sparked in the sockets of his mask. “Not anymore.”

  “Yes, damn it! Always! That’s what you don’t get! They’re all someone’s mother or brother or friend! They’re all someone that someone else wants to grieve for and can’t! If you were really capable of any kind of feeling—”

  He slammed his cup down hard enough to dent it.

  “—you’d know that when someone you love dies, you’d do anything, anything, to see them again.” Tears shook free of her voice and trickled down her cheek as she glared at him. “And when we see them, they’re trying to eat us. And that’s your fault. That’s entirely…your…fault.”

  The music played. Otherwise, there was silence. At last, Azrael picked up his cup, put it down again without drinking and snapped, “How is it that you have so much more venom for me, a hundred miles from your mother, than for her murderers? Where is your sense of justice?”

  “Stopping them only stops them. Stopping you stops all of it.”

  “Ah. Well.” He gestured toward his chest. “Stop me, then.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “By making me angry?” he demanded incredulously.

  “By making you feel.”

  “Feel what? Pity? For whom? You admit that even though the living rarely venture beyond their town’s walls and so have nothing to do with me, still they revile me for my cruelty! My tyranny!”

  “You are cruel!” Lan shouted. “You are a tyrant!”

  “How dare you!”

  “People starve in Norwood while you waste tables full of food every night on people who don’t even need to eat! You don’t think that’s cruel? You sent an army of Revenants to raze Norwood just because you like peaches and when I begged you for their lives, you threw me in chains for the night! But you don’t call yourself a tyrant? You killed a man for being in the same room when I fell down and called it mercy because you didn’t impale him first! Well, my goodness, you’re just an angel of compassion, aren’t you?!”

  “Point,” said Azrael tightly, thrusting up one black-clawed thumb. “My Revenants are under strict orders never to kill unless attacked and they are incapable of disobedience. They razed nothing of Norwood—not a hovel, not a field, not a fence. They were met with resistance and they quelled it. That is all. Point.” His index finger stabbed out. “You did not beg. You said, exactly, ‘Stop. You can’t kill them,’ followed in due course by, ‘Murderer.’ I have no doubt your memory casts you in the part of the noble victim, but you have begged for nothing in my court. You have made demands. Point.” He raised another finger. “I did not kill a man. I let the dead die. And is that not after all why you came seeking me?” Without warning, his hand became a fist and crashed down on the table, upending his cup and collapsing the decorative tower of fruits between them. “If I want her dead, I’ll kill her myself!” he roared. “Get back
to your posts or I’ll pin you there and let you rot!”

  Lan looked around to see his pikemen retreat across the room. She hadn’t heard them approach this time, but Azrael surely had to have seen them coming and he’d let them get awfully close before ordering them away. “Do you?” she asked after a moment.

  “Do I what?” he snarled, righting his cup with a bang and filling it.

  “Want me dead.”

  “Quiet, yes. Dead, no.” He raised his cup, glaring at her over the rim and scraping his thumbclaw back and forth across the dented place. “I don’t even particularly want you quiet. This has been nothing if not stimulating conversation. There was a time—” He broke off, then uttered a bitter-sounding laugh and finally drank. “I believe our meal is concluded,” he said. “And as you seem impatient to begin your fruitless audience, let us be about it.”

  “There was a time?” Lan prompted, not moving.

  He shoved his chair back and stood, thrusting out his open hand for hers. “No more stalling, child. You agreed to this price.”

  “There was a time?”

  His jaw clenched, causing the scars along his throat to flex and strain. He glared down at her, his open hand aimed like a sword at her heart.

  She waited.

  In a low, emotionless voice, he said, “There was a time I would have given anything just to have someone talk to me. But that time is over.” He moved around the table to seize her arm in a grip like iron, edged in claws. “Are you ready?”

  “No,” said Lan, and raised her chin. “But I’m paid for. So do what you want with me. I don’t care.”

  His eyes flickered. The hand digging at her arm loosened…and tightened again. He turned, grimly silent, and pulled her away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After the splendor of Batuuli’s rooms, Azrael’s own, which had seemed so luxuriant when Lan first saw it, now appeared grim and sparse by comparison. The wooden panels lining the walls made the windowless room appear much smaller than it was and it was too dark to make out the beauty of their craftsmanship. Here were no glittering chandeliers, no works of art displayed on polished pedestals, no fine carpets to soften the floor. The bed was as impressive as she remembered, but being the only decoration in the room made it almost seem a separate thing—a stage within an abandoned theater.

  Lan stroked the coverlet, listening with half an ear as Azrael ordered his guards in the hall outside to stay at their posts unless he specifically summoned them, no matter what they heard. “Are you anticipating a fight?” she asked when the heavy door was shut.

  “Our past encounters illustrate an annoying tendency.” He threw her a pointed scowl as he headed for the bath.

  She raised her eyebrows. “And you’re blaming me?”

  “You suggest you’re blameless?”

  “I’m not the one who trained them to come running every time you raise your voice.”

  “I don’t raise my voice in daily course. How else should they respond?” He unbuckled his belt and pulled his loincloth away. “Attuning oneself to the moods of one’s lord is a sign of loyal service. I can hardly condemn them for it. What are you doing?” he asked sharply.

  Lan froze in the awkward contortion of trying to find the corset stays behind her back. “Getting undressed?”

  “I will have that pleasure.” He removed his collar and one arm brace. “And I will attend to it soon enough.”

  “Oh. Okay. Do I…” She looked around the room, seeing nothing to do, nothing to distract the eye. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Wait quietly.” Stepping behind the screen, he reached up to unfasten his mask. His silhouette removed it, rubbed his face. He set it aside and stepped down into the bath. “Savor this time. No doubt you think you have no innocence left to lose, but you are wrong.”

  Lan’s belly tightened. She took a breath and let it out slowly, forcing herself to relax. “Is that a threat?”

  “A warning.” He covered one side of his face and submerged, coming up with a broad splash, shaking himself dry like an animal. “My touch, I’m told, is loathsome and I am in something of a temper tonight.”

  Lan stepped away from the bed, watching the screen. “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “Ha! You think I will not bed a liar?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then you are a fool as well as a liar,” he told her. His silhouette reached out for a bottle of something to one side of the bath. He poured it into his hand and rubbed them together, then dabbed at himself in curiously precise points. Tending his scars, she realized. “Instead of seeking to impress me with your courage, you should perhaps consider the very real possibility that there is a reason to fear.”

  Lan walked around the screen and looked down into the bath. Azrael looked up at her. The water alone moved.

  Horror, like lightning, was the first and brightest strike inside her, but like lightning, its flash quickly faded. It was not a man’s face, no, but it wasn’t so bad. Untold years behind a mask had left his skin with a waxen, uncanny appearance even where it was not damaged…and the damage was so great…and it was maybe that surreal quality that enabled her to look at the face he hid from the rest of the world, from his own Children, without fear.

  There were no deformities, no monstrous features, no decay. All the same, it was hard to look and see a living person. His nose was gone, just splinters of exposed bone above an open cavity to mark its place, but with a suggestion of regrowth about the skin building up around it. His brow was broad and sloping, cleaved open to the bone in the center, but mostly healed. Below his left eye, there were cracks that opened wider as they spilled down his cheek, becoming gaps that exposed his teeth and the white gleam of his jawbone before merging with the keloided mess over his throat and sealing again. And over all of it, every inch, was the silvery shine of old scars, a filigree of pain he could hide but never completely heal.

  How long she stood staring, Lan could not know. The moment lasted however long it did, breaking only when Azrael finally moved. Lan backed away as he climbed out of his bath, but he simply walked past her and over to the fire to dry himself by its warmth.

  “Have you a preference?” he inquired, gesturing toward his rack of masks. “It seems only fitting you should choose the face you shall see over you.”

  “No,” said Lan, then said it again with greater confidence. “No. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t wear any of them.”

  He grunted and looked away, watching embers flicker and char. “There’s flattery I’ve not heard before.”

  “It’s not flattery. What I’ve imagined is so much worse.”

  He glanced at her and then, without warning, suddenly leapt at her, crossing the considerable space between them in a single predatory lunge. He seized her in his claws, doubtless sparing her a tumble back into the bath she had entirely forgotten, and yanked her off the ground as he thrust his face right into hers. Her eyes throbbed with the baking heat of his; bloodless hollows, runneled flesh and dry bone filled her vision. “What is there worse than this?” he snarled, his sharp teeth almost touching her lips.

  Lan braced herself, then reached up and queasily touched his cheek, her fingertips rasping over cracked flesh until it split and became cool bone. She could feel dry muscle and threads of tendons jump beneath her palm…as if he’d flinched. Then he pulled away.

  For a moment, she was certain he’d hit her. Then he smiled. The ruin of the left side twisted it into a leer, but somehow it was the perfect right side that made the smile terrible. “This much I’ll say for you, diplomat. When you commit yourself to a course, you commit yourself wholly.”

  “What do you want from me, Azrael?” she asked, keeping her voice low and steady while trying to slow her racing heart. “You know how much I need you, so whatever it is, I’ll try.”

  His expression changed; she couldn’t quite tell how.

  “I can be quiet. I can be loud. I can kiss you. I can probably cry. I’m your dolly. I’ll fake it
any way you want me to.” Lan took a small step forward and touched him again, following the arch of his broken brow up over the curve of his skull and down along his scarred neck until she reached his chest. She watched her fingertips explore in and out of the bullet-holes she found there—most had healed over, which only made the bone she did find that much more jarring—and then she looked up into his eyes. “But I need you. I can’t afford to be scared of you and I won’t be.”

  “As simple as that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Turn around.”

  Lan hesitated, but he only gazed impassively down at her, giving no further instruction and no clue as to what to expect. She stepped back, letting her arms drop to her side. Still he did nothing, so she finally turned her back to him. All her body felt numb, except the space between her shoulderblades, which itched to the point of physical pain.

  She had time to take one breath, just one, and then he had her by the corset, lifting her right up to her tiptoes. Something slashed down her back—his hand, his claws—and she let out a whooshing little shout of pain before she realized it hadn’t hurt. The squeeze of the corset had loosened and that was all.

  Lan waited, her breath heaving in and out of her unfelt, staring straight ahead at the bed beyond the bathing screen. A sound, something between a growl and a purr, tickled her ear, but when she turned instinctively toward it, his hand closed over her face and turned her away. She found herself staring into the silent audience of his masks—the horned gold, the snarling wolf, the faceless stone, the fanged demon—as he cut her remaining corset stays one by one. When it finally fell away, he yanked her hard against him, his bare chest like ice against her bare back. His hand slipped beneath the fabric of her open dress, sweeping around to her belly and then up, caressing one breast briefly before moving between them. His fingers splayed.