Р. Смит - Land of the Beautiful Dead

“I’ve come to see Azrael,” said Lan.

The two guards eyed one another with obvious uncertainty, a hesitation she was sure they would not have had if they’d caught her running through these fine halls or attempting to hide in these beautiful rooms. Lan decided to press the advantage as if it really was one.

She stepped forward, lifting her chin in what she hoped was a confident manner. “Take me to him immediately.”

The guards exchanged a second lingering glance.

“If you can’t take me to Azrael, find someone who can,” Lan ordered, adding in a kind of reckless inspiration, “I’m late.”

That was what seemed to finally decide them. Being late to see Azrael implied he was expecting her and really, how else could she have entered the city and penetrated so far into the royal palace without his permission? The guards conferred another minute or so, but Lan already knew, miraculously, she’d won. Soon she was walking again, with a guard at either side, leading her in grimly pretty-faced silence deeper into the palace.

They passed through rooms as large as some houses Lan had lived in, under glittering lights like diamond explosions frozen in the air, past paintings and sculptures and even furniture that could have just as easily been art to Lan’s eyes. She wondered if the whole world used to look like this, before Azrael. She wondered if it could ever go back.

They took her to a tall set of doors, but there stopped, muttering at each other in an air of uncertainty while Lan waited a short ways behind them. Before they came to any decision, however, the doors swung open.

Standing on the other side with a few of her courtiers was Lady Batuuli. Lan knew her at once, without effort. The royal family were the only celebrities left in the world. Her picture did not hang on the wall in the sheriff’s office, but there were plenty of them in the old newssheets and magazines the sheriff kept, and when Lan’s mother was in the other room, paying their month’s rent, little Lan would sit and look at all those old papers. Yes, she knew Batuuli.

Where the guards and courtiers were all pretty in death, Lady Batuuli was beautiful. She dressed in white, which stood out magnificently against her dark skin, draping a flawless figure in some kind of goddessy gauze designed to make a man wonder what lay beneath. Her face, dark porcelain, might have been truly breath-taking if not for her eyes, which shone out of her perfection like chips of crystallized hate. They did not look at Lan as much as impale her. When she finished seeing whatever ugly thing she saw in Lan, Lady Batuuli turned that same stare on her guards. “Explain this.”

“Lord Azrael summoned her,” one guard said, which he no doubt thought a safe presumption, one Lan did not correct.

Lady Batuuli sneered (even that, she could not help but do with grace) and turned away, beckoning contemptuously and in silence for them to follow. Her courtiers echoed both the sneer and the retreat. Lan trailed after them with her guards toward the golden light and distant music of the royal dining hall.

Here, the corridors were lined with heavy curtains, works of art, and a hundred armed guards. When they came to a set of heavy, carved doors trimmed in gold and guarded by dozens of paired pikemen, a wave of Lady Batuuli’s elegant hand was all it took to admit them.

The music she’d heard from the hall now swelled the air, played by the dead on an elevated stage in the center of this huge room. Mostly dead, she amended privately; the woman with the flute might be alive, although she was pretty enough to be dead. She tried to get a better look, but her eyes couldn’t seem to focus. There was just so much to see and it was all so clean and sparkly and fancied up that none of it looked real. The light was too bright. The colors, too garish. Two rows of tables ran down the length of the hall, leaving a wide aisle between them, wide enough that the whole of Norwood’s common lodge could have fit in it. Likewise, the dead men and women seated there were pressed together, elbow-to-elbow, but only along the outer side, like dolls laid out for an appraising eye.

Like dolls. An idle thought, but a fitting one. They were dressed like dolls, immaculately made up and trimmed out. Most wore uniforms of some sort, men and women both, many of them still proudly displaying the medals awarded them by armies and governments that did not, for all intents and purposes, exist. With few exceptions, they were neither young nor attractive, facts emphasized rather than disguised by the elaborate care that had gone into preserving them.

This was Haven’s infamous dead court. It was said they had been the leaders of the last rebellion in the final days of Azrael’s ascension, the faces and voices of a people who had sworn they would never surrender. Once, they had stood in ruins and made speeches about the sanctity of British soil and a human spirit that would never die. Now they were here, laughing at jokes no one was telling and eating food they no longer needed…

The food.

Suddenly, it was everywhere Lan looked, more food than all of Norwood could eat in a year. Whole roasted birds decorated with gold-dusted feathers. Long platters where cooked eels ‘swam’ in sauce. Pies baked in the shape of the animals whose meat stuffed them. Hot soups and cold ones. Glazed onions and stuffed mushrooms and buttered carrots and for what? For who? Even the Eaters had only been made to feel hunger, not succumb to it. None of the dead needed to eat and yet, here they were, eating it. Was there another room just as grand elsewhere in the palace where they could go to sick up their fine dinners? Could the dead even be sick or did they have to stick a hose down their gullets and suck it up mechanically? What if they ate too much? If a dead man accidentally burst his bowels, was that a medical emergency or was it just rude?

She knew she was staring, and at first, she thought they were looking at her too, but quickly realized their averted eyes and little nods were for Batuuli, who did not acknowledge them in the slightest. And when she had swept past, they merely returned to their conversations and their unnecessary meals. Now and then, a dead eye might linger, but only as an idle curiosity, the same as if Lan were a dog that had nosed the door open and come slinking in. She ought not to be here, was the unspoken consensus, but one did not scold dogs when at another man’s table, even muddy strays.

Once upon a time, Lan would have been the reason these same people claimed the fight was so important. Now she was a dog in the dining room and they were Azrael’s court.

Batuuli’s long strides had not slowed. Lan followed her around the stage—the flute-player’s hanging sleeve brushed at Lan’s cheek like a spiderweb—and there he was, alone at the imperial table upon a raised dais. Azrael himself.

He did not deign to notice her yet. All his attention remained fixed on the musicians. This gave her the chance to stare at him, but the room was so big and there was still so much space between them that she could see nothing but what she’d seen already in pictures: the figure of a man, a god of men, his body carved to appear at once gaunt and grotesquely muscled. He wore few coverings and most of these were plunder—a collar made of slabs of gold resting heavily over his broad chest, a jeweled band high on one arm, a plated belt and long, many-layered loincloth weighted with gold rings. And the mask, of course. In all the pictures she’d ever seen, he was masked, usually the golden one with horns he’d worn during his ascension (he was wearing that one in the picture that hung on the sheriff’s wall), but today, his mask was made of stone and largely featureless—a smooth darkish oval with sockets for eyes, a bump of a nose, a lipless suggestion of a mouth. If anyone had ever seen the true face of Azrael, Lan had never heard about it.