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 s
aid 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.”
“Thanks. Leave my handmaiden alone.”
Azrael threw an unforgiving glance at Serafina, who bowed herself swiftly from the room.
“She’s not so bad,” Lan said after an uncomfortable minute. “She’s just a little tetchy because I’m so late. She takes her responsibilities seriously.”
“Stop defending her.” His sharp tone softened. “She does not require defense.”
She nodded, fussing with her gloves. They didn’t feel right—too tight on the fingers, too loose on the wrists, not long enough. Tailored for someone else, she thought. It made her feel…something. “Did you actually come all the way down here just to walk me to dinner?” she asked lightly, loudly. “That’s kind of dovey.”
“No.”
She tugged at her glove some more. “Oh.”
“I saw you running through the halls and thought something had upset you.” His head tipped. “Shall I?”
“Shall you what, upset me? No, let’s give that a miss for tonight. For the novelty of it.”
“Shall I walk you to dinner?” he asked patiently. “If it charms you so.”
She could feel herself blush and to hide it, she headed for the door. “I don’t know about that, it’s just that no one ever has before.”
“In Norwood, you mean.”
“Yeah.” She tossed out a shrug. “To be honest, I think it’s silly. The dovey stuff people do.”
“Do you?” He fell into step beside her, idly acknowledging the salutes and bows of the guards they passed. “I find that when people feel it necessary to preface their words with an avowal of honesty, they are usually lying.”
“I’m not,” she said, annoyed.
“I said usually, not always.”
“Why would you even mention it if you didn’t think I was lying?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You just did!”
He gave her a minute to work that out.
“You’re an ass,” she told him, nettled. “Notice I didn’t say, ‘To be honest,’ first.”
“You must not mean it.”
“I can never tell whether you’re picking a fight or just in a good mood when you get like this,” she remarked. “How long were you standing there before we saw you?”
His smile went out like the sun behind a cloud, taking light and warmth with it. “Long enough.”
She walked beside him, stealing glances from the corner of her eye, trying to see through the damn mask to gauge the mood beneath. “We were talking about the sky. The old sky, I mean. Do you remember it?”
“I remember everything.” Still cold. Still dark.
“What color was it? For real?”
“All of them. A different color every hour of every day.”
“You’re funning me.” A thought struck. “Did you have a favorite sky color?”
His lip twitched. “White.”
“Still white.”
“The habits of a lifetime make all men predictable and mine has been longer than most.”
“Why a white sky?”
“Because I saw it so rarely, I suppose. And because it made the world seem empty. It was best in winter, with snow on the ground…and the mist close on every side, blotting out all but this tree, this jut of rock…al
l scarcely there, as if sketched in by the hand of an idle painter and then abandoned. I could stand for hours under a white sky, imagining I were all that was left.”
Lan tried not to say it, she really did. “That sounds awful.”
He shrugged. “Wait and see. The sky will clear. You will see its limitless design for yourself and develop your own preference.”
“That’s going to be so weird,” she mused, looking out a window as they passed it, imagining a blue sky in place of the bilious yellow that had always been there. Although now that she thought about it, it did change a little. On foggy mornings, it was more greyish than yellow. At dusk and dawn, it had a rosier tint. The stars had been out all Lan’s life, but she remembered her mother telling her they hadn’t been visible for first few years after the ascension. So maybe she would see a blue sky someday. And orange. And purple. And white. A different color every hour of every day.
“Do you suppose we’ll get it all back eventually?” she asked. “Cinemas and zoos and sports and all that?”
“Some,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Not all. The world turns back on itself more often than people realize, but never all the way.”
“Just as well, I guess. I don’t think I could ever live in a city like they show in the books. Norwood was about as big as I could handle.”
“And Haven?” he inquired, beginning to smile again.
“Dead people don’t live the same way. You know what I mean,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve got enough people to be a real city, but you don’t have the city stuff.”
“Cinemas,” he guessed.
“Because they don’t want them. Do you want them?”
“I have learned to live without them.”
“That isn’t what I asked. Haven’t you ever wanted to see a zoo?”
“No.”
“Bad example. I forgot you don’t like animals.”
“They don’t like me,” he corrected. “I’m fond enough of them that I don’t enjoy seeing them made captive for my own viewing pleasure.”
“I think I’d like to see one anyway. The only animals I ever saw were the kind you eat. And rats.”
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 52