“I’m sure I meant no offense,” said the woman, now very subdued.
“I’m sure you mean exactly what you say, which is the only reason I’m willing to forgive it. Captain.”
Deimos, whose presence had been unguessed at all this time, answered from the foot of Lan’s bed, close enough that she should have heard him breathing, if only the dead bastard breathed. She supposed he had been posted there to keep an eye on the doctor. Or to stand ready to act if Lan died. Couldn’t have Eaters running through the palace, leaving bits all over and smelling the place up with rot.
“See to it the doctor has whatsoever she requires. I wish to be informed at once should her condition change…to any degree.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Azrael bent over the bed. She felt him before she heard him, although he never touched her. She had often thought his moods had substance; here was the proof. She could feel, not his inhuman cold or the stirring of his breath, but an ominous weight in the air itself, staining the blackness of her inner mind even darker. “Rest now,” he growled, his mouth against her ear. “Rest while you can. Do not trouble yourself yet to think of all the ways I might repay your offense.”
Before she could answer (and she would have. She just needed more time to work up the strength and focus necessary to form words), he kissed her. His scar-roughened lips pressed down firmly over hers, parting them to breathe into her. It was like swallowing a live coal, so much hotter than she remembered his kisses to be. Reflexively, she gasped, pulling that heat all the way into her lungs, where it bloomed huge and slowly, slowly cooled.
When he pulled away at last, she managed to tip back her head, seeking blindly after him like a flower following the sun, but he left her and she fell back into her pillow, dizzied by the effort.
“Right,” said the not-mother, emboldened now that Azrael was gone to her previous edged tone. “With that out of the way, we can get to work. What do I call you?”
“Captain will do,” Deimos said coolly.
“Well, I don’t need a captain. For the moment, I need a driver, after which, I’ll need a nurse. So be a good boy and fetch us something we can move her in. As for you, my lovey,” she went on as the crisp rapport of bootheels receded. “This will be much easier for both of us if you’re not squirming about, so we’ll just start off with one of these.”
A sharp pinching sensation high on Lan’s arm, followed by a spreading heat and more of that squeezing pressure. Lan tried again to speak, but managed only a fussy little cry like the squeaking of a poisoned rat. Then, nothing.
* * *
The first time Lan opened her eyes after that, she thought she was dreaming of the dining hall. She could see a thousand glinting lights and hear Azrael’s flute player piping away at something soft and sad. She listened, uncomfortably aware that she was wearing nothing but a sheet, until the lack of food-smells finally permeated her sleep-thick brain. As her vision cleared, she realized the lights she saw were not crystal goblets and candlesticks, but only a little light coming in through the open hall door and reflecting off the small forest of metal poles surrounding the bed. The poles supported machines whose colorful faces displayed lights, wavy lines and numbers in constant flux, none of which had any relevance that Lan could see.
But the flute player was real. She sat cross-legged on a bed next to Lan’s own, her eyes shut and brow furrowed, solemnly playing to a blank wall. Stretching between them, black in the borrowed light, was what at first glance appeared to be a ribbon. It grew from the flute player’s arm, falling in an elegant curve until it reached a machine of sorts. It entered one side of that softly humming device and exited the other side, climbing up in another gentle loop until it burrowed into Lan’s wrist at the epicenter of that throbbing, vise-like pressure.
Lan lifted her arm an inch or two in its leather restraints and frowned at it, seeing red and brown smears under the clear tape that held that plastic tube to her, and slowly understood what she was seeing.
The music stopped abruptly. Lan looked over and saw the other girl looking back at her. She lowered her flute, expressionless. Pale light outlined the tubing that took her blood…and gave it to Lan.
“Are you okay?” Lan croaked.
The flute player glanced at her arm, where the tube bit into her. She said nothing.
“I’m sorry.”
“Sorry, are you?” The girl’s voice was like her instrument, silvery and a bit too shrill. Her eyes flashed, then dropped. “Suppose I should be grateful he had more than me to dip from, seeing as I’m nothing more to him now than a cow he can milk for you.”
“Oh now,” Lan said lamely. “He wouldn’t—”
“He wouldn’t, eh? He did! At least, his doctors did, the deadhead and the breather both. He didn’t even bother to be there. He was still in here, holding your hand, most like. It’s so unfair,” she grumbled, twisting the segments of her flute back and forth, back and forth. It squeaked with every revolution, scarcely audible, like a dying rat. “I told him one time—one time!—I couldn’t and he put me out. You cut your throat to get away from him and see what he does!” She waved her tapped arm, then winced and gripped at it. “Just for you.”
Lan’s head was already swimming and the other woman’s accusatory stare and resentful tone only made it worse. She tried to sit up, but the restraints held no more than an inch or two of slack and all she could manage was to crane her neck a little. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Do you…want him back?”
“I don’t want him! No one comes here because they want to feel that awful…deadalive thing—” She broke off, flushed and scornful, to go on the attack. “Did you come here for him, eh? Is this whole fool crusade of yours just a ploy to get in his bed? No. So don’t turn this on me like I’m some jealous chavvy. You’re no better than me.”
“I never said—”
“Oh, I’m sure you say plenty. I see you sitting beside him every night, acting like the lady of the bloody manor when you’re just another dolly. Who says your reasons are so much better than mine? End the Eaters,” she sneered. “You know you just say that to sound grand about getting on your knees for him, like you’re saving more than your own skin. You’re not fooling anyone.” The woman looked down at her flute. “There’s no one else left out there who knows how to play this. Leastwise, no one I’ve met. The ferryman who sold it to me didn’t even know what it was. He was taking it to the smithy to be melted down. That’s all it is now…scrap. In a hundred years, no one will even know what it was called.”
Lan could say nothing. The whole conversation had begun to take on an oddly dreamlike quality. She closed her eyes, counting (not without some difficulty) to ten before opening them again, expecting to find the room empty. Instead, she saw the flute player with the wet shine of tears on her cheeks, still gazing at her flute.
“I taught myself to play it,” she was saying. “It has its own language, did you know? A whole kind of writing just for music. No one else in Wodicote could read it, nor wanted to. Wodicote is all sheep and dye.” Her face puckered up with shaky scorn, even as her eyes dripped tears. “My Da’ beat me when he found out. Said every second I wasted on it was a penny I stole from the family pocket. I had to hide to do my learning. Over the walls, in the woods, where the Eaters could have come at any time, just to play. When did you ever risk so much?”
“I…” That sense of unreality grew. She’d risked everything…everything she hadn’t already lost. She’d walked from Norwood to Ashcroft, like her mother walking eleven years of roads in the strange dead land to which she’d been sent, alone. She’d walked with nothing but a hunting knife and rucksack full of peaches…or had she? Had she even left? Could she still be in Norwood, dreaming all this from her bed in the Women’s Lodge with the smoke from her mother’s fire matting up her hair and old Mother Muggs going stealthily through her pockets for loose ‘slip? How much easier it was to believe that than to believe she was here, in this clean white room, be
cause Azrael wanted her life saved.
The flute player did not seem to notice her silence. She was still talking, shooting anger like bullets into every word. “When the baby died, it was my fault, he said, because I was away piping instead of, what? Home to watch? He got it away from me and beat me with it until it bent and then he turned me out. He made me a beggar on the streets of my own town while you were picking peaches with your mum and living high in Norwood. I went away with the next ferry to come through and I was years going town to town, looking for another flute in a world that couldn’t see the need for them. I came here because I had to, because he’s the only one left who can give me music…the only one left who wants to hear it. Well, it’s beautiful!” she insisted, almost hissing it, clutching the flute in both hands as though she thought Lan would leap from her bed and snatch it away. “It’s beautiful and it’s worth saving!”
“It is,” said Lan. “I know it is.”
“You don’t know! I see you, the way you look at me when I play! I…I…I’m the best musician alive in the whole world and you just hear noise!” Her mouth worked, the corners grotesquely downturned, so that she looked like a talking-doll in the hands of a bad puppeteer. “I’m the best musician alive in the whole world,” she said again. “The rest are all deadheads. Don’t you get it? Don’t you see? That’s nothing to be proud of at all. That’s awful.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. I play…” The other woman brought her flute to her lips and blew a ripple of complicated sound while her eyes flashed defiantly above her dancing fingers. When she was done, she held the flute up in her fist and shook it like a spear. “I play just as good as any deadhead he raised. They don’t eat or sleep or look after stupid, stinking sheep. They do nothing but practice all day and all night, ever since his ascension. Thirty years, that’s what Cello says. Thirty years and I play with them and I never slip a note. And he listens.” Her eyes shifted, staring into the featureless, white wall over Lan’s head. The anger bled away from her body, leaving her slumped and small on the bed. “He told me it was my voice…my true voice. And when he said it, I believed it. He could make me say things with music I could never say with words. And when I played for him…I knew he really listened…and I could forget what he was.” Her lip curled ever so slightly in an unconscious moue of revulsion. “But then he’d touch me.”
Protests rose in Lan’s throat like bile. She couldn’t quite swallow them. “He’s not so bad as that.”
The flute player looked at her, shook her head, looked away. “Sure. That’s why you cut your throat. Because it felt so good to have him on you. In you.” She shuddered, her grip tightening on her flute. “That dead skin…pressing up on me…and the sounds it made! That slithery, dead, dry sound. You couldn’t touch him anywhere, not anywhere, that you didn’t touch his scars. They felt like worms, dried-up worms, eating at him, eating at me! And sometimes, he’d move so I could feel his bones! His bones! Rubbing on me!” She let go her flute to clap a hand over her mouth, twisting aside to lean out over the edge of the bed, where she held herself in that hunched, stiff and trembling posture of a person struggling not to be sick.
Azrael was the God of all that remained of this world, God and Devil both. His was the only power. His was the only law. He was immoveable, impervious, eternal. He did not need Lan, half in her sickbed and half in dreams of Norwood, to defend him.
Still, she said, “It’s not his fault he’s scarred.”
“It’s not the scars and you know it! It’s him! Leaving aside everything he does, look at what he is!”
“He’s what we made him.”
“Nothing made him. He just is.” The flute player looked at her—the strained, hot stare of someone who knows she will never convince a fool—and said, “Near Wodicote, there’s a little valley where the sheep won’t graze. There, the grass grows in funny knots and makes a funny hiss when the wind blows. We call it Blue Golly, always have, but it’s the Blood Gully, really. Hundreds of years ago, it was a normal place and the old villages could take their sheep there just fine, but one day, there was a strange wind and a storm with no rain, and the next morning, when they took their sheep out to graze, they found heaps of jellied blood all over the ground.”
“Yeah, right, and in Norwood, there’s an elf-ring in the forest and if you stand in it, you can see the old cities lit up with lights and watch the shadows of the old people walking around like ghosts.”
“No, it’s true. Blood. In great, curdled heaps, still steaming in the morning frost. They had to scrape it all up with shovels and it took all day. They said the stink was so bad, grown men fainted and had to be stacked up in the church like cordwood. The jelly was sticky, like tar. They couldn’t scrape it all up, so they dug up the grass wherever it fell and threw the whole mess into the old, dry well, then filled it in and boarded it over. They thought it would be all right then, but the grass grew back strange and the sheep wouldn’t go near it. They still don’t.”
“Why are you telling me this? What’s this got to do with Azrael?”
“They’re the same thing. Blood fell in the valley, but that doesn’t make it rain and the ground where it sat will never be right. And him…he may look like a man, but he’ll never be one. He can live in a fine palace and drink from a cup and fuck his dollies on a fancy bed, but he’ll always be a thing pretending to be a man.”
“So go home,” Lan said with all the heat her bloodless body could muster. “He’ll let you. He’ll miss your music—”
The flute player flinched just a little, but didn’t drop her eyes.
“—but he’ll let you go. He’ll get Deimos to drive you there safe and I bet he’ll even send you off with plenty of food and blankets and all if you ask. Even a spare flute for when your father breaks that one, because Azrael at least would be sorry if the world ran out of music. And maybe that doesn’t make him a man, but who said a man was such a great thing to be anyway? I’ve known lots of men and let me tell you, drinking from a cup isn’t what makes one good.”
The other woman continued to hold her stare as Lan dropped exhausted back into her bed. After a few moments of expressionless silence, she reached up and plucked a shockingly long needle from her arm, severing the connection between them. Unfolding her long legs, she rose from her bed and moved to stand at the foot of Lan’s, paying no attention whatever to the blood trickling down her arm, off her fingers, onto the floor. “I fucked him too,” she said, lifting her chin. “I’m not pretending I didn’t, but at least I’m ashamed. I may have been his dolly, but never a traitor.”
Outrage gave her a brief blush of strength, enough to say, “Who are you calling traitor? Everything I’ve done, I’ve done to—”
“Yeah, yeah, end the Eaters and save the world. You’re a liar. You don’t even believe that swill anymore. I see you with him, the way you smile when he’s chatting you up, even the way you fight. You’re in love with him. He doesn’t ask for that,” she said with a contempt that transformed her pretty features into something haglike. “You do it on your own. You turned your slag back on the whole human race and everything that’s natural and alive. You make me sick.”
Lan groped through her churning thoughts for a rational argument and found one: “Fuck you.”
The machine squatting between their two beds suddenly let out a shrill bleep, as though to signal a point-penalty and end the round, then followed it with a blinking light and a few even louder bleeps. The sound of running feet came from the hall a short time before a dead man and a living woman wrestled each other through the door—her doctors. The dead man won, pushing the flute player rudely aside on his way to Lan. The woman came after, giving the flute player’s bloody arm a speculative stare before going to the machine. One touch silenced its noise and then she, too, was bent over the bed, competing with the dead man to see who could pry at Lan’s eyes and pinch her wrists and tug at the most bandages.
“What is it?” And that was Deimos, alth
ough Lan couldn’t see him through the wall of doctor-coats and it didn’t sound as though he came any closer than the doorway. “Is she waking?”
Both doctors exchanged a harried glance as they loomed over her. The dead one said, “No, no,” looking right at Lan’s open eyes. “The needle came loose, that’s all.”
“Get her out of here,” added the live one, jerking her chin toward the place where the flute player stood against the wall with her instrument in both hands, dripping blood down her side. “You might slap a bandage on her, there’s a good nurse, and if we need her back, I’ll let you know.”
As soon as he was gone, the doctors satisfied themselves with whatever they were doing and both leaned back, almost in perfect sync, to frown at one another.
“What do you think?” the dead man murmured.
“She could use another drop and a dram, but I think she looks pretty good,” the woman replied in that rough, no-rubbish voice so much like Lan’s mother’s. “And I think she could still have a reaction to the blood any time over the next half-night, so if we tell your lord she’s improved and she decides to get a fever, even if it isn’t serious…” She let that trail off, raising a questioning brow. “What do you think?”
“I think you have a valid point, but a warning: Our lord’s very insistence on her recovery is baffling to all who know of it. He’s not been very predictable about the patient at the best of times and this…this has made him angrier than I’ve ever seen him.”
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 60