Land of the Beautiful Dead

by Smith, R. Lee

  “There it is.” His voice was stone as much as the splinters she picked out of his flesh. “And there is the only reason I have left not to reap the world.”

  She opened her mouth to say some silly shit about life and the world and all the reasons better than her to want to preserve either one of them…

  …and left it hanging open as a thought, dark and unwelcome as death itself, stole into her heart.

  Azrael did not see it. The pale light of his eyes remained fixed on her hand, which had gone still. “You…want me,” he told her. “And I know why and I know it won’t last, but I don’t care.” He was quiet a moment, then said in a soft, intense rush, “You cannot know how many times I have had to pretend I believed that. Such is the curse of my memory that I am denied even self-delusion. I have known many woman who were willing, but you…you want me. And I…”

  “You don’t want to lose me,” Lan heard herself say.

  His expression changed, although it was impossible to say how, the way that shadows moving over a familiar shape can make something unchanging seem new. “I will not lay down my dead to keep you. Do not ask me. Not tonight.”

  Lan shook her head, shook it hard, her hand fluttering up as if to push that all away like the insignificant thing it was in this moment. “You don’t want to lose me,” she said again, because that was what mattered, that was the seed of the thing planting itself so painfully in her heart. “Say it. I need to hear you say it if you mean it.”

  His eyes flickered. Pulling his hand from her slack grip, he stood and just looked at her for a while.

  And then he kissed her.

  He didn’t speak, didn’t hold her, scarcely moved at all. He just kissed her. Even with his eyes as dim as they were, she could feel the heat of those unearthly fires, but she didn’t flinch away. He did, but he kept coming back, his scarred mouth brushing hers in little sips before finally pressing home. He breathed into her body and his breath was hot and bitter. His tongue flicked at hers, too timid to possibly be Azrael, whose tongue had explored every other part of her thoroughly, boldly.

  He put his hands on her and she could feel the blood now, the blood she’d always known stained him, feel it hot and wet through her gown as he undressed her and still her body responded, because she did want him. She wanted this touch, even when it left a stain, like she wanted eyelight burning on her skin and the taste of him on her tongue. She wanted to feel the familiar ravages of his body every time she reached out her hand in the night. God help her, she wanted to lick every scar.

  He lifted her like it was easy, lay her down like it was natural and right. He hid nothing from her—not the chill of his flesh or the points of his claws, not ten thousand years and more of memories, or even the ghost of the girl she knew was still standing somewhere in his mind with her shirt open and her small body ready to be bought. He gave her all he was and she embraced him gladly and brought him home.

  It was too naked to be fucking, too desperate to be lovemaking. Sex was supposed to be something someone did to someone else, but whatever this was, they did it together. He hurt and she hurt with him. She was lost and he was with her in the dark. It was terrible and beautiful, shining with pleasure and clouded with pain, and that was how she came, torn open and full of light.

  It held for a moment and then she was Lan again, falling back into her separate self and wearing the person she had been like clothes that had been tailored to someone else. Azrael lay atop her, cool and unpleasant, far too heavy to hold, and kissed her one more time.

  “Did you hear me?” he whispered, there against her lips.

  She could only stare up at him, her eyes open wide, feeling small and impossibly fragile, like the spiraling ice that sometimes formed on the eaves, needing only a single touch to shatter. There were no words, no capacity to form them, but there were thoughts swelling huge in her head and he was in every one of them, even deeper than he was in her body, because he didn’t want to lose her.

  He didn’t want to lose her.

  And maybe, that death-dark voice whispered to her aching heart, maybe he should.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Lan did nothing to further the idea that had come to her in the night, but neither did she forget it. It had planted itself in her heart like a seed and, like a seed, even when she could not see it growing, day by day, it did. At last, it broke through the soil into something that could not be ignored, an idea no longer but a plan.

  It wasn’t complicated. The rough idea was just the same as it had been the night it had made itself so unwelcomely known, but the individual elements still took some time to identify. Point, as he would say: Azrael alone could put an end to the Eaters. Point: Azrael alone had never been hurt by one or seen someone he cared for become one. Point: Azrael cared about Lan and not just with that possessive and largely absent-minded affection with which so many men came to care about their dollies. Just as she had become his lover, he had somehow become hers. So. Point: If Lan died, if she came back an Eater, Azrael would finally know what that meant. And he’d end them.

  Really, the only trick was going to be dying without him finding out about it, so she had time to come back as an Eater. On the other hand, she couldn’t hide herself away too well, because she needed him to see her and, as he had already observed, even a closed door would confound an Eater forever.

  The more she struggled with the problem of where, the more she became aware of the problem of how. Each potential location offered only so many suitable methods of suicide. His bedchamber provided the least risk of premature discovery, but even so, her options were limited to two: drown herself in the bath or twist a bedsheet or something into a crude noose and hang from a bed post, and both required that she sit down and do nothing as she died…and she just didn’t think she could do that.

  There were other places better suited for hanging, but she would have to first find or craft a rope and then carry it through the palace undetected to reach her makeshift gallows. There were plenty of stairs she could throw herself down, but she’d be far more likely to break an arm or a leg than do herself any mortal injury. Better yet, she could go for a walk on the palace wall and jump off, which required only a moment’s courage, but some patrolling pikeman would almost certainly see her do it, assuming she didn’t actually land on one. That brought to mind landing pike-first, which in turn opened whole avenues of possible blood-lettings, all of which she considered in torturous detail before disregarding. Weapons were not left lying around in Haven. She would either have to find the armory—doubtless close to the garrison, with Deimos and his Revenants keeping tireless watch—or steal a knife out from under Azrael’s own eyes at the imperial table. And then, of course, she’d have to cut.

  Poison, then. But she couldn’t even think the word without feeling her stomach knot and fists clench. Poison could be easily concealed, but it was seldom quick and never painless. Again and again, she saw herself steep some bitter tea and swallow, but even in her imaginings, she did not lie down and die. The cramps would come, turning her bowels to razors. She would vomit, spewing up precious poison, but by then, it would be too late to stop the events already set in motion. She would just keep vomiting until bile turned to blood. Her organs would fail; she would sweat her own piss. She would scream until her throat bled and even after she fell into the dying sleep, there would be convulsions, her body seizing and tightening until bones broke and joints popped free. Even then, it might be hours. Or days.

  No poison. Anything but poison.

  But if not, then what? When Serafina made up her bed, Lan contemplated smothering herself with a pillow. When she happened to pass by a window that overlooked the meditation garden, all she wondered was where they kept the stuff they used to douse the corpses to make them burn and if it was kept under watch. In her mind, she was strangled, crushed, boiled, disemboweled, burnt, bled, even eaten by pigs (in spite of the fact that Azrael’s pigs were far too fat and comfortable to bother themselves eating a perso
n when there were troughs full of porridge and veg in easy reach). It occupied all her waking thoughts and perhaps her dreams as well, because Azrael woke her nearly every night to soothe away either tears or screams. It helped that she genuinely could not recall her nightmares once they were shattered, because he always asked and with such a narrow stare that she knew he was looking for the lie.

  He may not have found one, but he knew something was wrong. He dealt with it in his usual way—seemingly ignoring it, but arranging for things he thought would please her. Her favorite foods had a way of appearing at nearly every meal, even more fancied up than usual. When she went to the tea house for lessons in what she still thought of as Tehya’s garden, she discovered a doe and her fawn drinking at the banks of the pond, which admittedly made a better present than one of Felicity’s secondhand shitbirds. He tried giving her the care of the girl, Heather, but that made for such a thoroughly uncomfortable span of days for both of them that eventually, he turned Heather over to Lan’s old etiquette tutor. Now and then, Lan would catch a glimpse of them in the halls—the girl sprinting away with her skirts up around her waist and the hated switch in her hand, whooping it up while the dead woman chased after her—and it would give her a smile, but not for long.

  These diversions, as pleasant as they were, only made her other thoughts—Cut or hang? Jump or drown?—so much bleaker, so that she lost herself in them even deeper. One morning, after breakfast, she came back to Azrael’s chambers to change into her gardening clothes and got so caught up trying to determine the best place to jump to a certain death—not a broken leg or, worse, broken neck or back, but absolutely certain death—that she sat on his bed with one boot on and one in her hands until Serafina came to dress her for dinner. Another day, she stood staring out a window so long that when she finally came out of it and looked down, she realized a servant had been by and polished the entire hall, except for the perfectly round dull patch where she stood. She got so tired of saying she was fine that when a servant leaned in at dinner one night to ask if she wanted a fresh pot of coffee (since she’d been staring into her cup for some time, apparently), she snapped at him to quit badgering her, then spent the next several minutes hanging off Azrael’s arm, convincing him not to impale the poor bastard.

  “What can I do, my Lan?” he asked her one night, as she lay sleeplessly beside him in his bed, going over and over and over where to get the rope, where to tie it, how to climb up to tie it in the first place and did she really want to hang at all? If she broke her neck, she wouldn’t be able to walk. If she didn’t break her neck, she’d have to strangle and that would take so long. “How can I make you happy?”

  “I’m happy,” she said mechanically, staring into darkness.

  “If that were true, I should hate to see you sorrowing, but it is a lie and we both know it.”

  “Sometimes I’m happy.”

  “Yes,” he said after a moment. “Sometimes, I believe it. But not for many days now. You’ve been distant. Evasive.”

  “Have I?”

  He pointed at her. “Just so.”

  “Maybe…” She groped for a plausible explanation and came up with, “I have a headache.”

  The flames of his eyes leapt and turned as he rolled them. “Maybe? You don’t know?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “When I have a headache, I’m aware.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “So it would seem.”

  She rolled over and looked at him, reaching up to trace his scars where the light from his eyes dimly revealed them. “I’m fine,” she told him. “I know I’m acting weird, but…I’ve just got to figure a few things out.”

  “Can I do nothing?”

  “End the Eaters,” she said with a humorless smile. “That would solve everything.”

  He sat up with a hard sigh, but allowed her to pull him back down. He even put an arm around her so she could curl up against his side and pillow her head on his chest.

  “You asked,” she reminded him, idly flicking at the silver rings along his side. “I don’t know why you keep expecting a different answer.”

  “That’s amusing, coming from you.” He lay quiet while her hands explored the familiar territory of his broken flesh, neither guiding nor discouraging her, but only feeling. When she reached the place his heart ought to be, she stopped and left her hand resting there, as if she could feel it beating. There was something there, some unnatural machinery at work, sloshing and thumping beneath her hand, but it wasn’t a human heart. She didn’t like to touch it, but like a scab she just couldn’t help picking at, she always came back to it in the end. And when she finally fell still, he said, “Tell me the trouble, my Lan. Let me mend it.”

  “There’s no trouble. There’s nothing to mend.”

  “Please don’t lie to me.”

  “Then please stop asking. You can’t fix everything with swans.”

  It was a bitchy thing to say and she regretted it immediately, but Azrael merely chuckled and stroked her arm. “Would that I possessed penguins.”

  She couldn’t take the feel of him anymore. She squirmed back, but took his hand and put it on her breast to let him know he was welcome there. “What about you? What can I do to make you happy?”

  “I require nothing more,” he said, caressing. “Only this.”

  “You give me all this stuff…lessons and dresses and fancy dinners…and all I do is sleep with you. It isn’t fair.”

  “No, it is not. I give you a portion of my stolen wealth. You give me all you have.”

  “You should use that line on your other dollies too,” she said, smiling. “It’s a good one.”

  “I think so, but I fear it would only work on you.”

  “I won’t be around forever.”

  His hand’s motions stilled, but his eyes glowed out brighter for a long minute before dimming. “No,” he said quietly. “You won’t. Even you will beg to be released from me someday. Even you. But until then—” He bent to brush his lips across hers in his rough/gentle way. “—I will take all I can.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” she said, which was a lie and of course he saw it at once. “I don’t want to leave,” she said next, which was the truth and only troubled him more.

  “Ah Lan. You are already leaving me. Do you think I do not know what is happening? I have lost a hundred lovers.”

  “A hundred, huh?” She smiled a little. “I’ve only ever had the one.”

  To that, he seemed to have no answer.

  “Let me ask you something. No strings. If it was just you and me and nothing else entered into it, would you end the Eaters then?”

  His head tipped. “If it were only you and I and no one else…would you still ask?”

  “Yeah. Because I don’t want to stay here. Not to be brutal about it, but most days, all I think about is how much I want to get the hell out of Haven.”

  He frowned and looked away. “Norwood,” he muttered and his eyes flashed.

  “No, not Norwood,” she said, irritably mimicking the tone he insisted he didn’t have when he said the name of her hometown. “In fact, fuck Norwood. Fuck Norwood and Haven both with the same stick. You know what? This is a lousy place to live and I don’t guess anyplace else is better, but I want to see it for myself. I want to see the ocean, for real and not in books. I want to see mountains and canyons and those rocks that balance on other rocks and trees you can drive through. The world’s not what it was, but it’s still a good place, maybe. ”

  “Maybe.” He spoke the word oddly, as if it came with a taste he were trying to identify. Oleander, perhaps.

  “But until the Eaters are gone, it’s their world. Even if you were with me—”

  “Why would I be with you?”

  “Who wants to see the world alone?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Then you can show me around,” she said, undaunted. “End the Eaters, Azrael, and we’ll get dressed and bun
k off right now.”

  “You tempt me,” he said, stone-faced. “No.”

  They lay together, close but not touching. He’d left the fire on and the sound of it humming seemed too loud. So did his silence.

  “If I ask you something, will you promise not to get upset?” Lan said at last.

  “No.”

  She slipped an arm across his chest and a leg over his hip, anchoring him. “Will you try not to?”

  “Hm. I suppose I can make the effort.” His fingers brushed along her thigh. “Since you ask so persuasively.”

  “Do you like what you’ve done to the world?”

  His hand tightened, but he didn’t push her away. After a moment, his slow caresses continued. “I asked you once if you liked your life in Norwood, if you were happy within that world. I know, as I knew then, you were not and I know you hold me responsible. But the world existed before my ascension and Men have never been satisfied with their circumstances. I admit I make an attractive target—” He looked at her, his eyes throwing shadows across his scarred cheek. “—but I will not be blamed for all the injustices of life.”

  “Okay.” Lan shrugged as best she could while lying on her side. “Now answer the question.”

  “I never sought war. I never sought the ruin of this world.”

  “Do you like what you have done?” Lan asked, enunciating each word. “Is this the world you want to live in the rest of your life? Are you happy?”

  She didn’t think he’d answer. She could feel his muscles coiling and knew, however indifferently he might meet her challenging stare, she was making him angry. Later, she would wonder if she were trying to make him leave, so she wouldn’t have to keep answering his own questions, but if that was the case, he knew it before she did and parried the blow before she thrust.

  “No,” he said. He did not raise his voice, did not drop his eyes. “For ages, I have coveted the life that Men have. I have imagined myself among them a thousand, thousand hours and dreamed in my waking way of sharing in all the things they do. To dine in halls filled with music. To taste sweet wine on a woman’s lips. To live as one among many rather than one apart. I built Haven in memory of that world…but I built it on a foundation of bone. I have become Death.”