She had one foot on the bottom stair of the dais before she could seem to focus beyond her own oddly swollen head and when she did, her body recognized the danger before her brain did. She froze, not immediately understanding why, only that there was danger here.
“I know I’m late,” said Lan, just on the off-chance that was what this was about.
Azrael ignored her. His plate had been cleared. The meal was nearly over. He sat with his cup of wine, looking right through her to the stage where his musicians played. She couldn’t say with any certainty it was Tempo he was staring at, but all things considered, it was a safe bet.
Lan moved her foot back off the stair. “So, you…you probably heard I had a…a bit of trouble at the music appointment. Things got a bit…smacky.”
He did not reply or in any way acknowledge she was there. He didn’t look angry, but he was.
“I shouldn’t have done it,” she went on. “I keep forgetting, I’m your dolly. If you want me to take music—”
“Spare me this pretense,” he interrupted, cutting across her words before they could limp all the way to an apology. “It’s clear you’ve not enough familiarity with penitence to imitate it.”
“I don’t…penny-what? Look, maybe I shouldn’t have hit him,” Lan admitted crossly, “but he was asking for it and if he told you any different, then he didn’t tell you the whole story.”
Azrael’s eyes flashed. “But you are, are you?”
“Give a girl a chance! I just got here! You can’t accuse me of lying before I’ve even had a chance to talk!”
He grunted, tapping at the rim of his cup, then went back to watching his musicians. After a silent second or two, he beckoned.
She climbed the stairs, but no more than that, keeping the imperial table between them. “Do you want me to go?”
“I am not shy about expressing my desires, as you ought well to know.” He indicated the chair beside him. “Join me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sit, Lan,” he said, like she was a dog and not a well-trained one at that.
She sat, perched like a vulture on the very edge of her seat, with the metal boning of her corset digging into her pelvis, and waited for the storm to break.
A few years passed. Azrael listened to the music and occasionally sipped at his wine. Determined as she was to wait him out, she just couldn’t deal with the quiet.
“Do you want me to apologize to him?” she asked at last.
His gaze shifted to her, narrowed but not without humor. “You’ve not yet apologized to me.”
“For what? I mean,” she corrected herself, “sorry.”
“For?” he inquired. His tone was deceptively mild; his eyes were very bright.
“Hitting that Tempo guy,” she answered, bewildered.
“Is that all?”
“O-okay, I guess for breaking the whatsis I used to hit him. That can’t be easy to come by these days.”
“And?”
“And?” she echoed. “Look, the blokes in your greenhouses started that whole noise and I got out of it without hardly any fuss at all.”
“Lan—”
“Wasn’t that right? What the hell else…? Serafina? Is it the Serafina thing?”
Now he looked directly at her, head cocked to an ironic angle, saying, “You have led an interesting day, haven’t you?”
“Just tell me then!”
“Where were you today?”
The question seemed to have come from a completely different fight. Lan blinked at him a few times, but the image never changed. He waited.
“Master Wickham took me to look at old pubs.”
His expression through the mask was broken by something that was almost a flinch, replaced at once by a piercing stare. “Who?”
“My lessons master.”
“Wickham.” He leaned back against the arm of his throne and just stared at her. “Why do you call him that?”
That drunken feeling grew and slumped even further out of focus. “That’s his name, isn’t it? Oh balls, no, he had another one. Uh…Larry, was it?”
“Wickham,” he said in a low, thoughtful tone. His thumbclaw scraped at his cup. “I wonder how he knew.”
“Why wouldn’t he know his own name?”
The question hung in the air several seconds before Azrael seemed to notice it, only to dismiss it almost at once. “Memory is not a comfort to the dead,” he said, then paused and almost smiled. “Nor especially to the living. I see no reason why my risen should suffer the residue of their former lives, so I grant them release of it.”
“You…steal their memories.”
“Steal, no. What use have I for the detritus of mortal thought? I would not steal them even if I had that power.” He took a swallow of wine and set his cup aside. “I destroy them. Utterly, or so I have always believed. And yet you say he knows his name.”
Lan did not like the way he said that. “Maybe he found it.”
“Found.”
“Folk used to carry cards with all their names and such on them. Maybe he found his after you raised him up.”
Azrael tipped his head, disregarding her suggestion to consider her instead. “You’re defending him.”
“No I’m not,” she said automatically and blushed. “I’m just saying, if you didn’t search the man’s pockets when you killed him—”
Azrael’s eyes narrowed. “He knows I killed him?”
“What? No, I just…” Whatever half-formed thoughts she might have had faded out of grasp. “You killed Master Wickham?”
Azrael leaned back in his throne again and looked away, thinking.
“He never said that,” said Lan, too late. “All he ever talks about is lessons.”
He grunted and scraped his thumb back and forth along the rim of his cup. “And he took you…?”
“Looking at old pubs,” she said again, glad to change the subject. “It was my idea, but let me just say that if I never see another original etched glass mirror or hand-carved mahogany bar, I’ll die happy.”
“Why?”
“It was just boring, is all. I knew better than to think there was going to be booze after all this time, but still, only thing worse than being sober in a pub is being sober in ten of them.”
“You mistake my meaning. Why did he take you to see them at all?”
“Oh.” She would have sighed, but the corset wouldn’t let her. She could only cough a little as she plucked up her napkin and used it to blot at her lips in an exaggerated imitation of her etiquette tutor. “Because I spit at the table this morning and various other criminal acts which needed a lot of switching to correct. The woman you’ve got looking after all that is a right bitch, you know that.”
Azrael’s gaze shifted behind her.
Too late, Lan thought to look around and sure enough, there she was, glowering out of the shadows like a bloody grim.
“Oh bugger,” Lan said and clapped a hand over her face. The movement pulled her sleeve too tight against her shoulder; she heard the low purr of a seam splitting. “Oh bugger!” she cried again, looking at it in dismay.
“It doesn’t fit you,” Azrael observed, watching her.
“Tell me about it, but it’s the only ‘dinner dress’ you had down there and I was already so late, she couldn’t go fetch another one. I can’t wait for you to cut me out of this damn thing.”
Azrael set his cup down, reached out and hooked one of the laces with a claw. She felt it pull even tighter for a split second before the infinite relief as it snapped and everything loosened, if only a little.
Lan sucked in a breath—not a deep one, by any means, but deeper than they’d been—and managed to smile at him. “Thank you.”
“Mm.” He gestured at her empty plate. “Will you eat?”
“I think the question is, can I eat, and no, not yet.”
He cut another lace. “Are you hungry?”
“Not really.”
His claws passed lightly up
the remaining laces, plucking at them without cutting through. “Shall we adjourn?”
“If you want to.”
He nodded once, but made no move to rise. Instead, he took up his cup again with the hand that was not playing along her spine and sipped at it. “Tell me about your day.”
“What’s left to tell?” she asked, honestly confused. “Unless you mean that music business. And I am sorry it turned out like it did, but even if he hadn’t called me a whore, I mean, really? Music?”
“I like music,” he said after rather a long pause. “And I had the foolish thought it might be a fair thing, upon some future night, to hear you play only for my pleasure. But never mind. We have other pursuits to engage us. You visited my greenhouses, did you say?”
“Yeah, the ones here in the yard.”
“Your thoughts?”
“They’re the finest I’ve ever seen, but you know that.” She tried to think of something nice to say about the greenhouses. All she could seem to remember was being pushed down and called a whore again, but damned if she’d say that. “It smelled good in there. That was new. All earthy and green, but none of the sweat. How was your day?” she asked, not without some desperation.
“And your lessons?”
“Bunked off on ‘em,” she admitted. “But I don’t mind them, not really. It was the etiquette thing I was trying to slip. So we went off to look at pubs.”
“And…?”
“They were pretty, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“Everything in Haven is pretty. After a while, it gets hard to notice. And they weren’t, you know…” She waved up at the walls and windows of the dining hall. “Maybe pretty isn’t even the right word, but the ones I’d use are wrong.”
His head tipped. “What words would you use?”
Lan shrugged, looking away.
“Tell me.”
“Come on.” She played with her napkin a little, wishing she hadn’t said anything. “Can’t we talk about something else where I don’t have to sound like a fool?”
He merely waited, his fingers sliding up and down the same few laces of her corset. They weren’t as tight as they’d been, but they were still taut and made a dull thrumming sound whenever his claw hooked at one. It was almost musical, like she was an instrument he was playing. Not even really playing, but only plucking at. Tuning up, maybe.
“They were built,” she said finally. “They were…planned. They all are, I know that. But those were like…like someone knew they were going to last a hundred years. Like they knew someday I’d be walking there and they wanted me to know how proud they were of what they’d done. No, they weren’t pretty. Pretty’s good enough for looking at, but it’s not supposed to last. Pretty’s precious because it’s fragile. These were…some other word.”
“Timeless.”
“No, they had time. They’d soaked up more time than beer and you could still smell that in the boards.” Lan thought about it. It took some doing to think past what he was doing with her back. She wasn’t used to being touched. It wasn’t unpleasant…but she thought it probably should have been and that was more distracting than anything else. “They weren’t timeless, they were time-full. Not old. It’s different from just being old. I don’t know how, but it is.”
“Yes,” he said and he said it like he really understood and wasn’t just agreeing.
Lan played with her napkin, only half in the dining hall. The rest was back in the streets of Haven, not in one of Master Wickham’s pubs, but out front. Out front and looking up. “They had signs,” she said. “Time-full, like they were. Some of them were carved and some were painted with pictures. Master Wickham wanted me to see all the doings inside, but it was the signs I looked at most.”
“Did you like them?”
“No.”
She sensed more than saw his frown.
“Master Wickham said all the old shops and such used to have signs like that. He said back in the bygone, people hung pictures up because they were mostly…ill…illum…inated?”
One of the servants waiting on the imperial table snickered.
“Illiterate,” said Azrael, with a dark glance in that direction.
“Like me.” Lan played with her napkin a little more, unconsciously leaning back into his hand so she could feel it better through the layers of her gown. “Not many folk could read, so they used pictures for signs, he said. We went to this place today called The Bell and there was a big gold bell on the sign, right? The Swan had a swan. The Three Princes had three crowns. The Dirty Dick…not what you’d think. But they were all like that and not just the pubs. He said the butchers used to hang pictures of meat and bakers used to hang pictures of bread. And he said there were places called barbers where people would go just to cut their hair and they all used red and white striped poles because hundreds of years ago, the barbers were also surgeons, I guess, and the red and white stripes were meant to represent blood and bandages. Hardly anybody still knew that, he said, but they kept it on the signs. He said they were hanging signs outside of shops thousands of years ago, in Roman times, even. That they were the…something stone. Cornerstone? Of modern marketing. He said even after pretty much everyone could read, logos and brand recognition were more important to a company than the products they sold. That’s what he said. And it had been that way for thousands of years.” Lan folded her napkin over and unfolded it again. “But we don’t do it anymore.”
It was a strangely hard thing to say, but once it was out, she felt a little better. It was almost like another corset, one on the inside rather than the outside, and she’d just cut one of the laces. Not all of them. Just one. She had to stop a moment to work out how to cut the next one.
“I can’t even imagine it,” she said at last, feeling around for the knot. “Hardly anyone in Norwood can read, but we don’t hang a bunch of silly pictures out. There’s no wooden anvil over the smithy. There’s no barrel or bottles hanging over the twins’ door when they brew their beer. There’s not even any pictures of peaches on the village gate and it’s what we’re famous for. Everyone just knows what everyone does. We don’t need signs.” There, pulled tight. She cut. “We had them for thousands of years and we lost them that fast.”
“Take care, child,” said Azrael in a hard voice. “One missed word and you’ll lose the right to feed a town without ever buying one.”
“It’s nothing to do with that,” said Lan, shaking her head. “It’s nothing to do with you at all. If it had been something else that happened, like a…a meteor hit the Earth or just some old regular war, we’d have still lost it, don’t you see? We lost it, not you. And if you went away tomorrow, I…I don’t know if we’d ever get them back. I don’t know…” Her voice caught. She took a breath and cut through it. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get any of it back. We’ll never build buildings like these again. We’ll never have so many bakers and butchers that they’ll all need different names. We’ll never…We’ll never…be who we were. Never again. I felt…” She looked at him at last and found him gazing out into the room. “I felt like I was dead today. I felt like we all were.”
He said nothing, but he took his hand back.
“Because of a bunch of old pub signs.” She tried to laugh. It wasn’t very successful. “So, what did you do today?”
He shook his head, silent.
Lan picked up her napkin.
He took it away from her and set it down out of her reach.
They sat together, watching the dead court eat and drink.
“Are you angry with me?” Lan asked finally.
“No.”
“You look angry.”
“It’s the mask.”
“Take it off then.”
He glanced at her, and for a moment, she thought he might, but in the end, he only looked away again. He tapped his thumbclaw against the edge of his cup and said nothing.
Lan picked at the arm of her chair, then reached over and lay her hand on his t
high.
The white light of his eyes flickered. He set his cup down, hesitated, then rested his hand over hers. Just for a moment. Then he stood and called for his steward. “Have this packed and readied for delivery,” he ordered and looked back at Lan. “Have you a preference as to who shall receive it?”
“That’s not the deal,” she said warily. “We’re supposed to go to bed first.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“I said I was sorry. What…” She raised her hands and let them drop down on the table, rattling dishes and upsetting the perfect row of forks and spoons. “What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me the name of a village.”
“I don’t know! New Aylesbury!” she said, for no other reason than it was the last she’d been through, discounting the waystation where her ferryman had stopped to feed her. “Why are you—”
“Are you eating?”
“What?”
“Will you be eating?” he asked, enunciating each word clearly. He waited and when she only sat vainly seeking his gaze, he beckoned to a pikeman. “Escort her to her room. Her room,” he emphasized. “Go.”
“What did I do?” Lan asked.
Azrael did not answer. His pikeman stood at the foot of the dais for a second or two, then came up to get her, and Azrael did not do or say one bloody thing as Lan was pulled from her chair. Lan shook him off, but her sleeve, already torn at the seam, tore even more. She ripped the whole damn thing off and threw it on her empty plate, then shouldered past the pikeman and took herself away. Azrael did nothing except to turn so that he kept his back to her as she passed by, and that was fine, because she had nothing to say to him anyway.
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