Land of the Beautiful Dead

She had left Norwood with the single thought of coming here, but beyond meeting him and making her small stand, she had no further plan. She knew he’d never let the Eaters die. If she hadn’t known it when she left Norwood (but she had), she’d known from the moment she first stood in his hall and felt his inhuman gaze move over her. Dollying for him only prolonged the inevitable. He would toy with her for as long as it amused him and then it would be over, nothing ended but her last hope, nothing changed.

She cried. A little. Then she stopped because she didn’t want her eyes to be red and swollen when he sent for her. And then she went back to the window because, really, what else was there to do?

The shadows lengthened. The day began to fail. Haven’s lights came on in gradual, glittering waves, but not in the Red Room. As it grew darker, the cold came on stronger and Lan’s dress was no proof against it. She walked for warmth, hugging herself in a futile effort to hide from the wind that blew through the window and under her thin skirt. Her freshly-shaven skin tingled at each gust, over-sensitive to the cold. It made her wonder if she would feel his cold as intensely.

The chill that swept through her then had nothing to do with the wind.

At last, she heard boots on the stairs. Lan groped her way to the door in near-total blackness, thereby earning herself a stubbed toe when the guard flung it open on her useless pretty shoes, so that her greeting was an explosive, “Bugger-fuck!”

The guard startled, then pinched his pretty lips together and stood aside.

“What?” Lan snapped, limping past him with a glower. “You already knew I was vulgar.”

He did not reply.

Down they went and out into the lamplit halls of the palace, where Lan was confronted almost at once by her reflection in a pane of glass.

She had known, of course, that the bodice was tight—during the long hours of her confinement, her eyes had often traveled down and with some awe over the bared swells of her breasts, made mountainous in this costume—but she had somehow not realized how her figure would be exaggerated, made voluptuous and even wanton. Her skirts clung to every curve, accentuating the fullness of her hips and thighs with shimmers and shadow. The corset came to a point in front, like a crude arrow pointing between her legs. She had been less naked than this in the bath.

The guard gave her a none-too-gentle shove, putting an abrupt end to her fascination. She walked, dazed, stealing glances in every window, mirror and polished surface they passed, as if to reassure herself that, yes, that woman was still her. That painted woman. That bare-legged, nearly bare-breasted woman.

That stranger.

Although she had now been to his dining hall twice, she nearly walked right past it, so absorbed was she in catching these intermittent and somehow reproving glances of herself. Her guard had to catch her arm, which was unexpected enough that, although he surely only meant to give her another terse shove toward the door, he instead hurled her through it. She might have been able to catch herself under ordinary circumstances, but the long skirt of her dress, her soft slippers and that very smooth formal floor conspired to send her crashing to the ground and over it until she banged into someone’s chair and lay in a heap with her dress hiked up around her sprawling legs and the wind knocked out of her.

There weren’t many to witness this demonstration of her grace; once again, the banquet tables were empty apart from Azrael himself, although the half-cleared leavings of a sumptuous feast suggested the guests had only just left. There were servants in abundance along the walls, some of whom had fluttered forward as if to help Lan up, only to retake their positions, casting uncertain glances at the throne.

Azrael himself had stood, either to greet her or in surprise at her violent entry. Now he seated himself again and pointed a casual claw at Lan’s escort. “Impale him.”

“My lord,” the guard stammered, even as other guards stepped up to take his pike. “Forgive…I didn’t—”

“I tripped,” said Lan, struggling to right herself. The corset would not allow her to bend, making even the simple act of standing into an awkward mess. “It wasn’t his fault.”

“If I have compassion, child, surely it cannot be in such abundance that you can beg it on behalf of the living and the dead.”

“But he didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Did you?” Azrael countered. “Did I? Fate strikes where it wills, not where it is deserved.”

“You’re not fate!”

Azrael drummed his fingers once on the edge of the table as the guard was pulled toward the door, then raised a hand to halt them. “So be it,” he said. “If it moves you to be appreciative, so I am moved to be merciful.”

When his hand dropped again, so did the guard, dead before he smacked into the ground.

But of course, thought Lan, flustered, he had been dead to begin with. She looked at him, at Azrael—Devil, God, Death—and wondered when and how she could have forgotten what he was.