Land of the Beautiful Dead (16 page)

Azrael said nothing.

“The ocean was cold. That’s all she remembered of the trip across. It took a long time and she mostly stayed in her room with the other kids. Sometimes, they were let out on the deck, but the wind was so cold and sometimes it snowed, so even if they were let out, she mostly stayed in her room. All she had was what she was wearing: her pajamas, her rubber boots, and her coat. There wasn’t time to pack others or even to really get dressed. And it was so cold that she hardly ever took the coat off, even indoors. It was pink, with white fuzz on the edges like fur, but not really. When the boat came close to the shore, they called all the kids up onto the deck. It was dark and it was snowing. All the kids were trying to stand in the middle of other kids because it was warmer there, but my mom was so little, she got shoved to the outside. She was right next to the rails in the very front of the boat. So she saw everything. She could see fires burning in the city, but no lights on. And the boat was going to dock anyway,” said Lan, shaking her head. “How could anyone see that and just dock anyway? How could they not know?”

“What would you have had them do?” Azrael asked quietly. “Sail the Earth forever? Perhaps they were out of food. Perhaps they thought…at least it would end quickly.”

“Nothing ends. That’s the point, isn’t it? They all but fed those kids to your Eaters and, quick or not, that’s a fucking awful way to go.”

He did not answer that.

“It was dark,” said Lan, after a few calming breaths and a drink of water. “But my mother could see shapes moving on the shore. She thought they were people, their new moms and dads, coming to get them. But they didn’t stop when they reached the end of the pier. They fell into the water, she said, and they kept coming until she could see this white, churning wave coming right at them. The boat never even had the chance to dock. The Eaters hit the side of the boat and kept piling up. It wasn’t quick, but it was…inevitable, she called it. Like the sun setting. They piled up higher and came over the rails and suddenly everyone was screaming. The boat kept going. It broke through the pier and crashed into the whatsis, the docking place. The hull stoved in and the boat started to flip over. The waves came over the side and kids were being washed overboard, right into the Eaters in the water. My mother fell too, but a wave picked her up. She grabbed hands with a boy in the water and the wave took them both to the pier. It put her down on top of the boards. It slammed him into the side and crushed him dead. That was how my mother came to England.”

“She lost her coat in the water, one assumes.”

“No, she still had it then. It was a big, puffy coat. She used to say it was what saved her, actually. It was full of air, like a life-vest. Anyway, there was no one left of the crew on the boat. No one to meet them on shore. Eaters bloody everywhere and no one to help. All she could see of the city was burning buildings and the boat sinking off the pier. All she could hear was sirens and screams. The kids all scattered as soon as they reached shore and most of them got taken down by Eaters pretty much right off. My mother was one of a group that climbed in through the window of a dockside warehouse or something. Understand, this place was in sight of the boat she’d come in on. She could have thrown a rock and hit it. But she thought she was safe, like a child who thinks pulling the blankets up over her head at night will keep the monsters out. She slept that night with her hood pulled up, the hood on her coat, for just that reason. It was a big, puffy coat,” Lan said again. “She couldn’t hear through it very well. She never heard the Eater come in through the window.”

Azrael raked his eyes across the table, then stabbed the roasted hawk off its platter and transferred it to his plate. He began to carve it, somewhat forcefully.

“It was only dumb luck it didn’t get her instead of the little girl it did get. It dragged her down and tore her open while she was still screaming and my mom saw her guts coming out. The little girl’s name was Sharon. My mother remembers that because she was wearing a nametag. It said,
Hello, my name is Sharon. If I’m alone, please help me find an adult
.”

Azrael put down his knife and fork and tore the leg off the hawk with his hands.

“All the other kids ran, but my mom grabbed an axe—don’t ask me what an axe was doing lying around, because I don’t know—and hit him in the back. She severed his spine and no, he didn’t die, but he couldn’t get up either. He lay there and writhed instead, snapping his teeth while Mom tried to drag him off of Sharon. And when she finally rolled him over, Sharon got up. The rest of her guts fell out, but she still got up. Mom had to cut her head off to stop her. Would you like to know how my mother lost her coat?”

“Not especially.”

“She took it off because she couldn’t get the blood out. That’s how young she was—she left behind her only coat just because it got bloody. She’d have slapped me if I’d done that, six years old or not. There’s no excuse for that kind of stupid in this world.”

Azrael ate. His musicians finished their song and began another.

“She got another coat the next night, in some empty house down the street. She ate out of their cupboards and slept in their attics She learned all the ways to get around your
benign
Eaters and you’re right,” she said, nodding. “They’re not too bright. She lived right there in that town by the sea until summer, all by herself. Five years old, maybe six or seven. She never saw another living person after that first night, so she moved on when the weather warmed up. She scavenged when she could and then she learned how to make weapons and hunt. She learned how to find places to sleep between the towns and how to make them if there weren’t any to find. She learned how to sell her body for a bottle of water. She lived eleven years in the open country before Norwood took her in. Eleven years, alone.”

“A resourceful woman,” he said. “I suppose my hungering dead must have ultimately run her down.”

“No. She was killed for her boots. I was working in the orchards when she went out hunting. I didn’t see it happen, so do you know how I know?”

He tossed the bird’s bones onto the platter and helped himself to a peach.

“When she came back, she was barefoot,” said Lan. The effort of keeping her voice low and even caused it to tremble. She made herself take a few breaths before continuing. The air ached in her lungs, caught like hooks in her throat. “There were leaves and dirt in her hair, all matted in with blood. They’d stabbed her over and over before they cut her throat. Her clothes were…torn…too bad to be worth stealing, but they took her boots and left her there to get up again. They left her there so she had to come back, barefoot in the fucking mud. And she didn’t even know it. She didn’t even know she’d lost her boots.”

“My condolences.” Azrael carved out a slice of peach, but he didn’t eat it. He set it on his plate and carved another. “Yet I would observe here that my Eaters, as you call them, have no use for shoes. I may have robbed your mother of her childhood, however obliquely.” Another slice, uneaten, joined the first. “I may have robbed her of her home and family. I shall even grant that I robbed her of hope and innocence and happiness, as if such are qualities of a world that has never known me.” He carved a third and fourth wedge out of the peach, then put the whole thing down and pushed the plate aside. “But not even by the acts of my hungering dead have I robbed her of life.”

“You
ruined
her life. You ruined her
death
.” Tears broke her voice even though they didn’t fall from her eyes. She tried to breathe herself quiet and couldn’t, tried to blink her vision clear and couldn’t do that either. “I couldn’t even bury her. She doesn’t have a grave. They burned her with all the rest of them and I have nothing left. My last memory of my mother is the stink of her smoke.”

“I’ve smelled that smoke,” he remarked, now reaching for his cup. “It is a terrible smell and it does linger.”

“Stop trying to one-up me.”

“I’m not. I’m sympathizing.”

“You…” She fought with it, but the tight heat choking the breath from her body coiled and coiled and suddenly erupted. “You don’t get to sympathize, you son of a bitch! You’re the reason she had to burn! Because she was out there! Because she was dead and walking around and trying to get at us! She was my mother and you turned her into an Eater that someone had to chop up and burn!”

“Someone.” Light reflected in the eye he turned on her, making it glow gold in the shadow of his mask. “But not you.”

She should have known he would ask, but she didn’t. She should have refused to answer, but she didn’t do that either. “I tried,” she said. Two words and they still cracked.

“But…?”

“She was my mother.”

His eyes sparked in the sockets of his mask. “Not anymore.”

“Yes, damn it! Always! That’s what you don’t get! They’re all someone’s mother or brother or friend! They’re all someone that someone else wants to grieve for and can’t! If you were really capable of any kind of feeling—”

He slammed his cup down hard enough to dent it.

“—you’d know that when someone you love dies, you’d do anything,
anything
, to see them again.” Tears shook free of her voice and trickled down her cheek as she glared at him. “And when we see them, they’re trying to eat us. And that’s your fault. That’s
entirely
…your…
fault
.”

The music played. Otherwise, there was silence. At last, Azrael picked up his cup, put it down again without drinking and snapped, “How is it that you have so much more venom for me, a hundred miles from your mother, than for her murderers? Where is your sense of justice?”

“Stopping them only stops them. Stopping you stops all of it.”

“Ah. Well.” He gestured toward his chest. “Stop me, then.”

“I’m trying.”

“By making me angry?” he demanded incredulously.

“By making you feel.”

“Feel what?
Pity
? For whom? You admit that even though the living rarely venture beyond their town’s walls and so have nothing to do with me, still they revile me for my cruelty! My tyranny!”

“You
are
cruel!” Lan shouted. “You
are
a tyrant!”

“How dare you!”

“People starve in Norwood while you waste tables full of food every night on people who don’t even need to eat! You don’t think that’s cruel? You sent an army of Revenants to raze Norwood just because you like peaches and when I begged you for their lives, you threw me in chains for the night! But you don’t call yourself a tyrant? You killed a man for being in the same room when I fell down and called it mercy because you didn’t impale him first! Well, my goodness, you’re just an angel of compassion, aren’t you?!”

“Point,” said Azrael tightly, thrusting up one black-clawed thumb. “My Revenants are under strict orders never to kill unless attacked and they are incapable of disobedience. They razed nothing of Norwood—not a hovel, not a field, not a fence. They were met with resistance and they quelled it. That is all. Point.” His index finger stabbed out. “You did not beg. You said, exactly, ‘Stop. You can’t kill them,’ followed in due course by, ‘Murderer.’ I have no doubt your memory casts you in the part of the noble victim, but you have begged for nothing in my court. You have made demands. Point.” He raised another finger. “I did not kill a man. I let the dead die. And is that not after all why you came seeking me?” Without warning, his hand became a fist and crashed down on the table, upending his cup and collapsing the decorative tower of fruits between them. “
If I want her dead, I’ll kill her myself
!” he roared. “Get back to your posts or I’ll pin you there and let you rot!”

Lan looked around to see his pikemen retreat across the room. She hadn’t heard them approach this time, but Azrael surely had to have seen them coming and he’d let them get awfully close before ordering them away. “Do you?” she asked after a moment.

“Do I what?” he snarled, righting his cup with a bang and filling it.

“Want me dead.”

“Quiet, yes. Dead, no.” He raised his cup, glaring at her over the rim and scraping his thumbclaw back and forth across the dented place. “I don’t even particularly want you quiet. This has been nothing if not stimulating conversation. There was a time—” He broke off, then uttered a bitter-sounding laugh and finally drank. “I believe our meal is concluded,” he said. “And as you seem impatient to begin your fruitless audience, let us be about it.”

“There was a time?” Lan prompted, not moving.

He shoved his chair back and stood, thrusting out his open hand for hers. “No more stalling, child. You agreed to this price.”

“There was a time?”

His jaw clenched, causing the scars along his throat to flex and strain. He glared down at her, his open hand aimed like a sword at her heart.

She waited.

In a low, emotionless voice, he said, “There was a time I would have given anything just to have someone talk to me. But that time is over.” He moved around the table to seize her arm in a grip like iron, edged in claws. “Are you ready?”

“No,” said Lan, and raised her chin. “But I’m paid for. So do what you want with me. I don’t care.”

His eyes flickered. The hand digging at her arm loosened…and tightened again. He turned, grimly silent, and pulled her away.