Land of the Beautiful Dead (79 page)

“I’m sure you’re very good at what you do.”

“I am. I have laid waste to entire settlements single-handedly and killed hundreds of the living without ever taking a scar where one could be seen. I was among those who broke the siege and I did it by going over the wall and engaging those who surrounded us in close combat. There were thousands of them, not even one full hundred of us, and still we prevailed. True, many of them attempted to flee or surrender, but most fought first and I am yet untouched. I took eighteen of their so-called officers and set hundreds of the pikes you saw out there myself.”

“Let’s stop talking,” said Lan softly.

He glanced at her after the manner of one who knows he has been perhaps a bit insensitive, but only in relation to one who is prone to be over-sensitive in the first place. “Forgive me. I was made to take pride in work done well, but I should have recalled that you likely had friends among the rebels. I don’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s all right.”

“If it comes as any comfort to you, we tortured none of them.”

“Apart from being impaled alive, you mean.”

“Yes, apart from that,” he agreed, with no trace of irony. “And most died within a few hours. It’s very unlikely you knew anyone personally who suffered.”

They did not talk again until they had reached the palace. He drove past flowering gardens and servants scrubbing down statuary, through the imposing iron gate and across the inner courtyard, right to the white steps that climbed to the formal front doors where Deimos stood waiting, along with a dozen or so matched pairs of pikemen. But not Azrael.

Lan let herself out of the van, searching the empty windows that overlooked the courtyard for a familiar silhouette and finding only curtains. “Where is he?”

The Revenant did not answer, nor should she have expected him to. It wasn’t his business to know.

“I kind of thought he’d come to meet me,” she said, as if justifying her reason for asking would make any difference. Then, since she was already embarrassing herself, she looked back at him and said, “Does he ever talk about me?”

The dead man looked back at her, his thoughts cool behind his staring eyes, and finally said, “He doesn’t talk to us. You remarked on that yourself.” Then he reached across the seat and pulled her door shut.

Lan stepped back as the van drove away. She could hear its engine long after it had passed the gate and vanished from sight. The empty courtyard and tall, straight walls of the palace caught and amplified every sound. Deimos’s boots walking up behind her might as well have been gunshots.

“I’d forgotten how quiet it is here,” Lan said, without turning. She could see glimpses of movement just over the courtyard wall, where dozens of servants tended the grounds in silence. The dead didn’t gossip or complain or conspire to advance beyond their position. They just did what they were made to do. “It’s hard to believe thousands of people occupy this city.”

“Thousands of people occupy cemeteries, too,” Deimos replied.

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Wasn’t it? An odd choice of word to use, occupy. Far more natural to say people live in a city.” His tone was not accusatory, but there was something off about it, enough to make her look at him at last. His face was just as cold and creepily handsome as she remembered, but that same offness was there to be seen just as clearly as she’d heard it. He waited while she studied him in vain for some clue as to what she was looking at, or for, and after a moment, he put his hand out. “It’s good to see you.”

“It is?”

“I hoped you’d come back.”

“You did?”

“To spare me the trouble of coming to get you.” Since she hadn’t taken his hand, he used it to gesture toward the palace, then started up the stairs, trusting her to follow. “I wouldn’t have waited much longer.”

“If he wanted to see me sooner, maybe he shouldn’t have made returning to England punishable by death.”

“There is no more England.”

“There will always be an England. And its displaced people will always come home. You—hang on, you said
you
wouldn’t have waited.”

“Did I?” Deimos crossed over from the courtyard to the palace floors; his boots stopped tak-takking on stone and instead clump-clumped on carpet.

“You know you did. What does that mean? Why would you wait at all if Azrael ordered you after me…and if he didn’t, why would you come get me?”

Deimos just kept walking, forcing her to keep pace at his side or be left behind. Lan stopped at the threshold to indulge a moment’s frustration, which meant she then had to run to catch him up before he disappeared around a corner. The pikemen stationed at the doors showed no reaction when she raced past, but as soon as she was over the threshold, they shut her in and crossed their pikes. Lan skidded to a stop, Deimos momentarily forgotten as she looked back, but they were faceless once again, staring through her down the wide hall.

Lan could not deny a twinge of apprehension, but she didn’t bother with questions she knew they wouldn’t acknowledge. Instead, she went after Deimos, who wasn’t very likely to answer either, but who could take her to the one man who damn well would.

“Where is he?” she demanded, falling into step at the Revenant’s side. Irritation had a way of lengthening her stride, so that she had to make a conscious effort not to overtake him. “I won’t be his prisoner until he at least has the courtesy to say so himself.”

“You are no one’s prisoner.”

“I don’t appear to be free to leave either.”

“Did you think you would be?”

“Well…no,” she admitted, and because she knew exactly how silly that made her look, even if he didn’t smile, she had to recover herself with a forceful, “I still want to see Azrael. He doesn’t want to see me? That’s too damn bad. Take me to him right now.”

Deimos took a breath and blew it out again in a dead man’s frustrated sigh. “I wish Lareow were here,” he said. “He knew how to talk to the living. He knew how to talk to you.”

Lan’s heart sank down into her knotted stomach. Knew. That was the past tense use of those words. It was Master Wickham himself who’d taught her that, patiently and politely, over and over because she so rarely listened at lessons. Oh, she’d made his job so hard, and now that she thought about it, why hadn’t Wickham come to meet her instead of Deimos? Wasn’t that really more in line with an intermediary’s line of work than a Revenant’s?

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she said. “I don’t mean…damn it, you know what I mean. He’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“Is he…in the garden?”

“No.”

“But he’s dead.”

“Yes,” Deimos said again. He glanced upward, hunting out his next words in the ceiling tiles, and awkwardly said, “My condolences. I know that doesn’t mean much, coming from me. But I also know Lareow was fond of you.”

“Is that what killed him?”

“I wasn’t there.”

“I’m not asking how it happened,” she interrupted. “I’m asking why.”

“No,” said Deimos, staring her down. “You’re asking me to tell you it wasn’t your fault. And I can’t. He liked you. Do you understand what that means? How…unnatural that is for us? You destroyed this place. You destroyed
him
, his purpose, his meaning. What happened between him and Lord Azrael was nothing but a report filed after the fact.”

To that, Lan could say nothing. In spite of the words themselves, there was no blame in the Revenant’s voice, not so much as a shadow of it on his handsome face, but Wickham was still dead. And she’d liked him, too.

Deimos glanced behind him at the mostly empty hall—a few pikemen stood at the crossways and there were servants at strategic points, cleaning windows and polishing floors—then raised his arm and indicated the first door on the left.

Lan knew she wasn’t going to see Azrael on the other side and she didn’t, but she gave Deimos the benefit of the doubt and waited for him to join her and close the door again before she laid it out. “I don’t want to make trouble for you, Captain, but you’d better tell Azrael—”

“He’s not here.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Go tell him…” The rest of that thought slipped away as a new one took its place. Lan looked inanely around the room, then at Deimos again. “You don’t mean he isn’t here, you mean…he isn’t
here
. Where is he? Wait, that’s a stupid question. How long has he been gone?”

“I can’t know for certain. I can only tell you that I last saw him when he gave the order to purge the living from his lands. He seemed distracted, but it was a difficult decision for him and I did not find his demeanor suspicious.”

There was an odd stress on the word ‘demeanor’. Not much, just enough to make Lan wonder if she’d heard it at all. “Something put your wind up,” she guessed.

Deimos nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on some point beyond her, as if he were looking right through her and watching that other scene play out. “His orders. I knew they weren’t…right.”

“The purge.”

“The purge?” He focused sharply in on her again. “No, not in and of itself, but…but how he went about it, yes.” He crossed the room in a long, soldierly stride, apparently solely to brace his arm on a tabletop, which was as close to fidgeting as Lan had ever seen any Revenant come. “Perhaps you know that virtually all the dead of Haven were originally raised to serve as his army during his ascension, but only out of the need of the moment. They were not soldiers in life and, as he himself had little knowledge of such matters, in death, they had no particular aptitude for it. His first efforts to create an effective military force were met with limited success and each new wave replaced the one before, until we Revenants were raised.” His chin lifted and shoulders squared, speaking with pride that, objectively, she knew to be justified. “We were the force that won the war. We tore through the armies of the living. We destroyed their best defenses and slaughtered their leaders in their lairs. We drove every last one of them out of Haven in days. We could have purged the living from this land at any time. We were more than enough for the task. All of which I say so that you understand the full impact of what I am about to tell you now.” Deimos leaned forward, cutting each word out separate from the rest and hammering it in place. “He mustered virtually all of Haven for the purge. Ten thousand untrained, unskilled, unarmed…
laborers
.”

“He emptied the city? The whole city?”

“Save only a small force in the palace to hold watch over the living, his former…companions. One would think he would use Revenants for that purpose at least,” he said with the barest hint of an edge to his voice. “But he chose instead a small group taken from those in domestic service. Now tell me, why would he do that?”

“To make absolutely certain he had only the most inept people on guard,” Lan said slowly.

Deimos pointed at her with grim satisfaction. “I’ve no doubt they were serving tea and biscuits when he left.”

“Are you absolutely sure he’s gone? I mean, this place…it has a lot of empty rooms. Hell, he could have shut himself up anywhere in Haven.”

“It is my business to know every room, every cupboard. My Revenants have made several discreet searches. I am confident he is nowhere in the city.”

“What about his steward or his chamberlain? Or surely a servant must have seen him go, even if they didn’t think much of it.”

“So one would think, but no. He has been prone to odd moods since your departure and it had become quite common for him to withdraw for days without contact of any kind. And when he did emerge…” Deimos drummed the fingers of one hand on the wrist of the other. “…it was best to keep out of his way. Some of the staff may have begun to suspect by now, but most are quite content within the confines of their duties.”

“No one’s the least bit curious where he’s been for the last year?”

“I am.” Deimos spared her a brief, yet intense glance. “But no. We are not, as a rule, overly imbued with curiosity. I confess, although I suspected his absence soon upon my return to Haven, I was loathe to make inquiries. No matter how well our lord’s other companions have been kept, I am not confident of their loyalty.”

“Yeah, that’s not the sort of thing you want getting out after the purge,” said Lan, disguising her alarm with a short laugh. “You’d have the rest of the living world on your doorstep in a day!”

“Not so many and not so soon, but yes, they’d come. And in the absence of orders to the contrary, we would be forced to kill them all to preserve Haven.” Deimos clasped his hands behind his back and sent a brooding scowl toward the window that would have done Azrael himself justice. “I am not at all certain the extermination of the living race can be avoided at this point, but I do not wish to set those events in motion without my lord’s approval.”

Lan bit back a few caustic remarks on the subject of compassion and the sanctity of life and said instead, “No one wants that.”

“No. So.” Deimos turned all the way around and looked at her. “Do you know where he is?”

Lan raised her eyebrows until they felt like they might lift right off her head. “Do
I
? How the hell would I? I’ve been in France! Why don’t you ask his new dolly?”

“He’s had none since you.” Deimos gave that an impatient moment to sink in, then said, “Think. Has he ever, during your…intimate hours…spoken of his past travels? Is there any place he might wish to revisit?”