Land of the Beautiful Dead (14 page)

For a moment, she smelled smoke and peaches…

“Lan.”

She looked around. Azrael had stood and was holding up his hand again, ready to signal a guard if she needed to be carried to him.

“Are we going to do it here?” she asked, walking toward him. The first step was the hardest, but it got easier when she heard the door close and knew the bare-footed body was gone.

“It?”

“You know what I mean.”

He studied her a moment, then uttered a short laugh and cut his hand through the air in negation. “It,” he said pointedly, “will wait for my private chambers. Eat with me.”

“Again?”

“There was a time not too long distant that two meals each day would have been thought too few. And Norwood’s harvests this past year would not seem to have been bountiful,” he added, running an eye over her.

“It’s the corset. I’m not really this skinny.”

“I have never known so contentious a peacemaker.” He beckoned her toward the chair where she’d sat that morning. A clean plate awaited her there, along with several platters heaped with food and a full bottle of wine. When she picked the latter up and looked at him, he shrugged. “Even my most willing concubines prefer to soften their first night with me. Drink. I’m not offended.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I get stupid when I drink.” Lan put the bottle down, then picked up the chair. It was a lot heavier than she thought it would be. As Azrael watched, his head tipped and eyes glinting, she dragged it with her to the dais and up the short stair to push it against the imperial table opposite his own throne. She sat, a little out of breath, pretending she could not hear the running boots of at least a dozen pikemen behind her.

“Contentious,” said Azrael, smiling. “And presumptive.”

“It’s so we can talk.”

“Ah.” He waved the pikemen back and beckoned to a servant, who came to move the many dishes that made up Lan’s meal.

“That isn’t necessary. We can share a plate, can’t we?”

“It might be poisoned,” he said, with obvious amusement. “Attempts are made, from time to time.”

“I trust you to raise me up again if I die, at least long enough to finish the audience you promised me.”

“Now I must have honor as well as mercy? Is there no end to your high esteem of me? Go on, then. Eat with me.”

“What is this?” asked Lan, tearing some meat off the carved breast of some kind of bird. “Chicken?”

“Hawk.”

“I didn’t think you could eat hawk.”

“You can eat anything.” He watched her chew and swallow, his eyes glowing dimly in the shadows of his mask’s sockets, then picked up one of the forks flanking his plate and held it out to her. “And do you favor hawk, now that you’ve had it?”

“That’s a joke, right? How do you have a favorite food?”

He smiled.

“That’s like…like having favorite air. It seems silly to use this thing,” she added, frowning at the fork. “Why do I have to gaff my food when I can just pick it up and eat normally?”

“The idea is to keep your hands clean.”

“I can just—” Lan started to wipe her fingers on her jeans, only to remember the fine dress she was instead wearing. “I can wash my hands,” she said after some thought. “Afterwards.”

“Could you?” His smile broadened, a smile that told her he could read just how it had felt to sit in Batuuli’s bath and know that now no one would ever drink any of that clean water.

“I could get used to it, I suppose,” mumbled Lan, making a stab at a grape. The points of the fork just slipped off.

“How did you find my daughter?”

Lan shrugged, still fighting fruit. “The guards took me right to her.”

“Her company, I mean.”

“Oh.” She had to think awhile before she could fit together an answer that was both tactful and true. “She received me.”

“And my son? I’m told he was visiting,” he said, catching her wary glance.

“All right, I suppose. They have a…a close relationship, don’t they?”

“They used to,” he said noncommittally. “Now it is just one more means by which to provoke me. It doesn’t. Indeed, if I thought they genuinely cared for one another, I would give them my blessing, but it is only a mutual hatred expressed with flesh.” His claw tapped at the tabletop three times, slowly, as he watched her. “They may seek to involve you in their games.”

“Yeah, I heard about the last girl they involved.”

His eyes flickered. “He told you.”

“He laughed about it.”

Azrael looked away.

“What happened to her?” Lan asked.

“No more than what she wished to happen. I will speak no more of such bleak matters in such winning company.” He waved the wine-girl over and took the bottle from her, filling his own cup, drinking it off, and filling it again. “How like you your gown?”

Lan thought, ‘It’s cold and it makes me look like a whore. Or a peacock. A peacock-whore, maybe. I can barely breathe in this corset and the shoes are too slippery. The sleeves are scratchy and it pinches under my arms.’

Lan said, “Fine, I guess.”

“Faint praise,” he mused. “You don’t like it.”

“It’s fine,” she insisted, trying once again to get a damned grape on her fork. “How do you like it? Seems like that’s the real question.”

“And the color?”

Lan succeeded in threading a grape stem between the points of her fork, plucking it from the bunch with careful twist, but it immediately fell and bounced away off the edge of the table. “What about it?”

“Do you favor the color?”

“Are you teasing me?” Her frustration with the fork and the fruits sharpened her tone more than was perhaps wise. “How the hell do you have a favorite
color
?”

He rolled his shoulders and plucked a grape himself…using his fingers. “I think it suits you.”

Lan gave up on the grapes and stabbed an apple. “It may be pretty, but the cloth is too thin.”

“It isn’t meant for warmth.”

“Then why make a dress out of it?”

“For the pleasure of taking it off. I have removed that gown from several women in the past,” he added, knuckling idly through a tray of sweetmeats for one worthy of his appetite. “But never with such anticipation as I confess I feel seeing it now on you.”

She spared him a quizzical glance as she sawed her apple into clumsy wedges. “You say that like it’s a compliment.”

“It was meant as one.”

“Even though it just compared me to all your other dollies?”

“Not all, merely those who have worn that particular gown. And I did set you above them in the comparison, did I not?”

“Which only means you’re going to set the next girl who wears it above me.”

He watched her eat, his thumbclaw scratching slowly back and forth along the rim of his cup. “You should wear jewels,” he said at last.

She rolled her eyes. “I’ll wear nothing but a dog collar and a diamond tiara if that’s what you want, but I’m not going to come all over giggly just because you offer.”

“Ah. And after all I’ve done to foster trust between us.”

“Like send Revenants to my home and put me in chains in your meditation garden.”

“You wore them well.” He tipped his cup toward her, one glowing eye flickering in a wink. “That was also a compliment.”

Her lips twitched, wanting to smile in spite of herself. She turned her attention to cutting her apple apart with knife and fork, forcing herself to imagine the clear juice that welled up around the blade as blood. Norwood had bled. The whole world had bled for Azrael. He was not charming and this was not dinner. He was the enemy and this was battle.

“You promised me an audience,” she said, hacking the meat of her apple into smaller and smaller bits.

“And you’ll have it when it’s paid for. Until then, no more talk of the hungering dead. It dampens the romantic mood.”

“Is that what you think this is? A romance?”

“I concede the point,” he said wryly, “but it is no greater farce than to think it an endeavor to end war, surely.”

“Is that what we’re doing tonight? Competing to see who’s the most deluded?”

“Not all, I trust.” He let his gaze wander with obvious relish over the front of her dress. “That would be a low trick after whetting my appetite so with your splendid entrance.”

She thought he was only making fun of her for falling down, and then she remembered the position in which she’d ultimately fetched up—legs spread wide and skirts hiked up to her waist.

As if her thoughts were an old movie playing in the air above her head for him to see, Azrael’s smile broadened into a grin, showing a hint of sharp teeth behind the slit of his mask’s mouth.

“It was an accident,” she mumbled, blushing and furious with herself for letting him see her blush.

“I believe it and yet, a pity it is true, for if it had been a plot, it would have been a winning one. And what more fitting way to begin a meal than with an appetizer? I can hardly eat for thoughts of the final course.”

“Because you caught me with my skirt up? Have I got something you’ve never seen before, after all your other dollies?”

“It is not what I saw but what I did not see that intrigues me most.”

Lan clenched her jaw and stabbed at her apple. “They didn’t give me knickers or I would have worn them.”

“You mistake me.”

“What then?”

“Artifice.”

“I don’t know what that word means.”

“No matter. Eat. Or shall we adjourn to satiate our other appetites?”

“Is that sex talk?” she asked uncertainly.

“It is.”

“Why don’t you just say sex then? It’s always chalice and appetite and artifice with you. I never know what the hell you’re saying.”

“Are you resigned to fuck me?”

She looked at him, startled.

He gazed evenly back at her, cup in hand, head slightly at an angle. “Was that not plain enough?”

“I said I would. I’m here, aren’t I?”

“For an audience. And when it proves fruitless, will you elect once more to leave me wanting? For as much as I enjoy our little talks, I will not content myself with talk alone tonight. Neither will I be made a brute in my own bedchamber. What is your intent?”

“To pay for my audience and then get one.”

“Hm.” He brooded over his cup, then set it aside. “You know my answer already. Perhaps we would both be better served to end this now.”

“Perhaps. You have lots of willing women, I hear. And I have a long road back to Norwood.” Lan picked up her fork and bit off another chunk of apple.

He watched her eat, frowning. “We’ll talk,” he said at length. “But find you some other subject than my hungering dead or the war your kind began.”

“Another subject…Like you?”

“I require no adulation.”

“I don’t know what that means. Can we talk about you?”

“My tyranny?” he guessed, his eyes narrowing.

“Just you. Where are you from?”

His mask showed her no emotion, only stillness and the steady glow of his stare. “Originally?”

She shrugged and nodded.

“Why?”

“I just want to know you, that’s all.”

His jaw clenched, but he said, “The land of my birth had no name. Nor did my mother’s people. If you ask where I began, I can tell you only south of here.”

“How far south? Someone showed me the ocean once. On a map. Did you have to cross it to get here?”

“I did, although I’m not certain where the ocean lay in the days of my youth. The land was different then.”

“When was that?”

“Before Time was,” he said, stabbing the words at her like a knife. “Have you any other pointless questions?”

“What’s your favorite color?”

The hard line of his mouth went crooked. He broke a loaf of herbed bread and gave her half. “White.”

She started to take a bite, then gave in with a little shiver of excess and buttered it first. “And when did you first know you had power over the dead?”

He glanced at her and away, immediately absorbed in his meal. “I told you of my first memory. It was then.”

“Does it bother you to talk about it?”

“I see no reason to talk about it.”

“I see no reason to sit here and stare at each other in silence.”

“Steward!” Azrael bellowed. “Musicians!”

“You make such a point of saying that people judge you without knowing anything about you, but how is anyone supposed to know you if you don’t talk about—”

“Enough!” Throwing the remains of his bread onto the platter, Azrael leaned back and glared at her. “What is this unwise game you play with me? How can you think it will help your cause to stir up the muck of these still memories? I realize you are very new to the diplomat’s arts, but even you must know you would be far better served to incur my favor than my wrath.”