Land of the Beautiful Dead (25 page)

‘This is not my fault,’ she told herself fiercely. ‘She hated him since before I was even born!’

So what was this feeling, this ominous pressure that built and built, not inside her but all around her? She was not imagining the unease she saw flickering like shadows on dead faces as Azrael’s court resumed their feasting, no more than she was imagining the Revenants in the room, their hands on weapons and cold eyes fixed on their lord’s own Children. No, it wasn’t her fault, how could it be? But she was part of it all the same.

The servants returned with a chair. The back was high, the seat padded, the feet had claws and the whole thing was brushed with gold. Not a chair, then. Another throne. And although it was difficult to tell through his mask, she thought Azrael saw it that way too. Still, he pointed when she hesitated, so she sat.

The musicians filed in and started up their unobtrusive song, every instrument in perfect harmony with every other, every note a knife on Lan’s ear. Otherwise, the hall was very quiet. Azrael’s court still feasted, or pretended to, but without the usual affectation of revelry. They were not watching their lord, but they were waiting, like she was, for some awful thing to happen and the collective force of all that waiting made it impossible to eat.

“You haven’t much appetite,” Azrael observed, watching her cut a ham steak into smaller and smaller portions.

“Neither have you.”

“I was poisoned recently. You weren’t.”

They were not speaking loudly, but such was the quiet that Batuuli answered for her with a cool, “I did my best. She wouldn’t eat.”

“You would do well not to remind me of your presence here,” said Azrael without looking at her. To Lan, in much the same tone, he said, “And you will not refuse my hospitality.”

“I’m not. I’m just…” She looked out at the hall, but the only one who would look back at her was Lady Tehya and as Lan locked eyes on her, Tehya reached up with her carving knife and drew a bloodless gash across her throat. “I’m not hungry.”

Azrael’s attention had wandered briefly toward his masked daughter, but now it came back, hard. “Am I here to bow before your wishes? I say you will not refuse me!”

“How am I supposed to eat when—”

At her lonely table, Tehya had reached into her wound and found a scarf. It came out and out and out, winding around her graceful hand, shiny wet and bright crimson, like blood woven into cloth.

“How am I supposed to eat?” Lan finished sickly.

“Think of all the starving children in Norwood.”

She rocked back, her mouth dropping open, but she couldn’t really believe he’d said that until she saw him smile. “You think that’s funny?” she demanded. “After everything I told you, you think that’s a fucking joke?”

A few heads turned.

“I take it you don’t.”

“What the hell is wrong with you? You…If you weren’t wearing that mask, I’d smack you!”

He leaned back, not quite laughing, then reached up and took it off.

The music came to a discordant halt. Servants scattered back and at least three people dropped their cups, but the shock of seeing their lord’s true face was nothing compared to the chaos when Lan punched it right in his smirking mouth.

His head rocked back. Every pikeman in the room came running, every Revenant drew a sword and Deimos leapt over the imperial table and threw Lan to the floor. She heard the shrill howl of his blade cut the air and then she heard Azrael bellow, “
Stand down
!”

A beat of silence and then boots retreated and chairs were retaken. Lan pushed herself to her hands and knees; Deimos hauled her the rest of the way to her feet and gave her a shove toward her seat. He kept his naked sword in his hand and his eyes, cold, on her.

Azrael watched her resettle. His lower lip had split slightly. She admired it, her heart burning with ugly pride.

“You didn’t think I’d do it, did you?”

“No.” He smiled; a bead of black blood welled up from his lip and dropped onto his chin. “Not when you knew all the ways I might be revenged, the very least of them being to throw you out with your purpose unmet.”

Her heart chilled at once and sank. She lifted her chin anyway. “Impale me, then. Go on. Stick me in your garden. You’ll never make me sorry.”

“Can’t I? But I am still enjoying
you
, child. If I choose to plant fresh flowers in my meditation garden—” Azrael leaned close to smile at her. “—I’ll pluck them in Norwood.”

She could only stare at him. This was the man she’d been waiting on all these days. This was the man she’d been thinking about, felt
sorry
for! This was the man…but he wasn’t a man. He was—

“You’re a monster.”

His smile opened into a blood-smeared grin.

Lan leapt up and Deimos immediately caught her by both arms. She scarcely noticed, although she needed the support. Her legs were shaking, not with terror but with a rage so powerful, it had seemed to rob her of her bones. “I don’t give a
fuck
what you look like, not one cold fuck! You’re a monster because you
want
to be!”

He stopped smiling.

Somewhere in that silent hall, Batuuli laughed.

Azrael put his mask back on. “Release her, Captain,” he said, picking up his cup. “Sit down, Lan.”

“Piss off.” She shook free of the Revenant and stormed from the dais.

The tables rippled with half-raised hands and turning heads, followed by a deafening stillness in which all that moved in the whole of the hall was Lan, marching for the door. Pikemen raised their weapons, sending uncertain glances toward the throne, but no one moved to stop her.

“I have not dismissed you.”

She kept going.

“You came here for a cause,” he reminded her. “Will you abandon it now for the sake of your pride?”

“My pride?” She swung around to face him, flinging out both hands. “Do I look like I’ve still got
pride
? After you put me in chains and you put me in bed and you put this stupid shit on me—” She scrubbed savagely at her face, taking smears of whore-paint off on her hands. “—I’m fresh out of fucking pride, but I’m not going to sit there and laugh along while you make jokes about my people dying!”

“I apologize.”

“Fuck you!” She stormed another two steps toward the door and turned belatedly back. “Wait, what?”

“They were cruel words and I apologize for them.” Azrael ignored the openly gaping faces aimed up at him and gestured to the empty chair beside him. “Come. Sit with me.”

“No,” said Lan, but not with the same force and she did not leave after she said it.

“Hm. If you will not allow me to take my words back, perhaps I could buy them. In pieces. Sit with me,” he said again, “and I will send what remains of tonight’s meal to Norwood.”

Lan’s eyes went to the table next to her by their own accord, seeing mountains of bread, slabs of pink salmon longer than her arm, whole roasted swans, towers of fruit glazed in honey and wine.

“I will even refrain from reminding you that I could have you back in chains at a word.” Azrael retook his throne and pointed at hers. “Such is the depth of my remorse.”

She scowled and returned to her seat under the Revenant captain’s icy stare. A servant poured her another cup of wine. After an awkward moment, the musicians resumed playing. Azrael watched them, ignoring her, and gradually, the others at the lower tables took up the pretense of eating again.

“It was a lousy thing to say,” Lan muttered, stabbing at her bread with her fork.

“It was.”

“Don’t think I’ve forgiven you, either.”

“I don’t.”

She glanced at him. He stared straight ahead at the flutist, one claw tapping out time against the edge of his untouched plate. His other hand was beneath the table, she saw, pressed to his side. Suddenly, it moved to his thigh; she raised her eyes to see him staring back at her.

Much as she tried to hold on to her anger, Lan could feel it slip away. Not entirely. Like the colored glass in the library, she could look at it or look through it and for now, she chose the latter. “You’re not all right, are you?”

His mouth twisted behind his mask. “I’ll live.”

Lan frowned. “That’s not funny, either.”

His smile, if it could be called that, faded. He returned his gaze to the musicians. “I am in considerable pain. Perhaps you like to hear that better.”

“No, I don’t like to hear that!” she snapped. “Why the hell would I? I didn’t want you to be poisoned!”

“I did,” Batuuli remarked. “I love to see him poisoned. I particularly love to see him try to pretend he doesn’t mind afterwards, just because he can survive it.”

“Well, you’re a bitch,” Lan said crossly.

“And you’re mortal.” Batuuli toyed with the hilt of the bloody knife that had already slit one throat this evening. “You should remember that, particularly since there are alternatives.”

“Enough,” said Azrael.

Batuuli smirked. “You see? My father’s preference is for the living—or rather, his perversion. I can sever you from his favor as easily as severing a vein.”

“I said, enough!” Azrael aimed his hand down at his daughter, silencing the entire hall, so that his voice, uncontested, was as good as a shout. “You threaten no one in my house, least of all in my presence. Mind your tongue or lose it!”

Batuuli’s hand rose to flutter at her throat, a theatrical gesture that nevertheless seemed genuine. “You were talking to me?”

Her courtiers went very still.

“Let it be, sister,” Solveig sighed, sipping at his wine. “He’s in a mood.”

But Batuuli ignored him, her beautiful surprise turning beautifully angry. “Mind my tongue?” she echoed. “Mine? But because hers has been at your cock, you let your mud-farming little whore scold me before the whole of your court?” She paused, then smiled. “Why, Father, if those are the rules, I can play. I’ll happily fuck you.”

Azrael recoiled.

Batuuli laughed at him, raising a hand to toy at the lacings of her bodice. “Why take pale satisfaction from your endless chain of warmblood whores when I am here to service you? Was that not your plan from the very start?”

“No.” The word seemed to leave him as the last breath of a stabbed man. His arm dropped. He lifted it again, palm open. “How can you…? Daughter!”

“Father,” Batuuli purred, her throat arched with sensual abandon. “Ah,
Father
! Fuck me, Father!”

“Stop this!”

Solveig laughed, a bit wonderingly. “That’s so disturbing and I can’t even say why.”

“Yes, why? Is this not the body you desired to be made eternal at your side, Father?” Batuuli caressed her graceful curves, then gripped at them crudely and leered. “Are these not the breasts you wished for me? Is this not the cunt?”

“Get out,” Azrael said hoarsely. “Guards!”

“Calm yourself, dear Father, I’ll go. But first, just let me ask, to satisfy my own curiosity…” She turned to the pikemen who had come to collect her. “If he desired to fuck me…would that be wrong?”

“Oh, well put,” Solveig murmured.

“Would you call the lust obscene that set our great lord’s cock inside me?” Batuuli pressed, smiling over her shoulder at her father. “Would you stop him if it was his will to have me? My brother? My sister? All of us together?”

The pikemen glanced at each other, then up at the imperial table, but Azrael gave no orders. He waited with the rest of the room, the rest of the world. “Our lord does no wrong,” one of them said at last.

Azrael leaned back into his throne and raised a hand to cover his eyes.

“So if it was his pleasure to set me on my knees before him and suck his cock, would you then allow it?” Batuuli took an ewer of cream from her table and stroked its long neck, licking and kissing at the opening, stealing kittenish sips with the very tip of her tongue as she slowly poured it out. “Would you smile to see me bathed in his blessing?” Cream overspilled her lips, trickled down her chin, splashed the swells of her breasts. She caught the last drop on her tongue and tossed the ewer indifferently away to shatter. “Would you not be honored to bear such a sight your witness?”

The dead man looked nervously up at the imperial table, but Azrael gave him no sign of his thoughts. “If it is my lord’s pleasure,” he said slowly.

Batuuli feigned bewildered hurt. “And why would I not give him pleasure?”

“I…yes.”

“But you hesitate! Am I not ten thousand times more comely than that creature who sits beside him? Should it not be me who embraces our glorious lord, the living god over all this dead Earth?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Tell him so.” Batuuli stepped back, extending her arm toward the imperial table and raising her voice to fill the hall. “Show him your love and devotion are greater than any petty laws of Men! His is the only law in Haven and if it is his will to take me, shall you not praise him for it? Shall you not applaud?”

And they did. Just one at first, tentative, then another and another, until the whole court was on their feet and cheering.