Land of the Beautiful Dead
- Автор: Smith R. Lee
- Год: 2019
- Язык: английский
- Год: Independently Published
- ISBN: 9781798923528
- Жанр: Любовно-фантастические романы
Электронная книга - «Land of the Beautiful Dead». Краткое содержание книги:
He caught her staring and smiled behind his mask. “Such is my mercy. Come. Join me.”
A soft scraping sound behind her drew her eye. The nearest servants had left off clearing the tables of dirty plates and come to clear the body instead. His boots were dragging on the tiles. Azrael’s steward rushed over and knelt down to remove them. So they wouldn’t scuff the floor, she thought dimly, but her eyes remained fixed on the body’s bare feet. She could see them two ways: knobby and soft and pink, as they were in front of her now, and as she remembered them, scratched and muddy.
For a moment, she smelled smoke and peaches…
“Lan.”
She looked around. Azrael had stood and was holding up his hand again, ready to signal a guard if she needed to be carried to him.
“Are we going to do it here?” she asked, walking toward him. The first step was the hardest, but it got easier when she heard the door close and knew the bare-footed body was gone.
“It?”
“You know what I mean.”
He studied her a moment, then uttered a short laugh and cut his hand through the air in negation. “It,” he said pointedly, “will wait for my private chambers. Eat with me.”
“Again?”
“There was a time not too long distant that two meals each day would have been thought too few. And Norwood’s harvests this past year would not seem to have been bountiful,” he added, running an eye over her.
“It’s the corset. I’m not really this skinny.”
“I have never known so contentious a peacemaker.” He beckoned her toward the chair where she’d sat that morning. A clean plate awaited her there, along with several platters heaped with food and a full bottle of wine. When she picked the latter up and looked at him, he shrugged. “Even my most willing concubines prefer to soften their first night with me. Drink. I’m not offended.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I get stupid when I drink.” Lan put the bottle down, then picked up the chair. It was a lot heavier than she thought it would be. As Azrael watched, his head tipped and eyes glinting, she dragged it with her to the dais and up the short stair to push it against the imperial table opposite his own throne. She sat, a little out of breath, pretending she could not hear the running boots of at least a dozen pikemen behind her.
“Contentious,” said Azrael, smiling. “And presumptive.”
“It’s so we can talk.”
“Ah.” He waved the pikemen back and beckoned to a servant, who came to move the many dishes that made up Lan’s meal.
“That isn’t necessary. We can share a plate, can’t we?”
“It might be poisoned,” he said, with obvious amusement. “Attempts are made, from time to time.”
“I trust you to raise me up again if I die, at least long enough to finish the audience you promised me.”
“Now I must have honor as well as mercy? Is there no end to your high esteem of me? Go on, then. Eat with me.”
“What is this?” asked Lan, tearing some meat off the carved breast of some kind of bird. “Chicken?”
“Hawk.”
“I didn’t think you could eat hawk.”
“You can eat anything.” He watched her chew and swallow, his eyes glowing dimly in the shadows of his mask’s sockets, then picked up one of the forks flanking his plate and held it out to her. “And do you favor hawk, now that you’ve had it?”
“That’s a joke, right? How do you have a favorite food?”
He smiled.
“That’s like…like having favorite air. It seems silly to use this thing,” she added, frowning at the fork. “Why do I have to gaff my food when I can just pick it up and eat normally?”
“The idea is to keep your hands clean.”
“I can just—” Lan started to wipe her fingers on her jeans, only to remember the fine dress she was instead wearing. “I can wash my hands,” she said after some thought. “Afterwards.”
“Could you?” His smile broadened, a smile that told her he could read just how it had felt to sit in Batuuli’s bath and know that now no one would ever drink any of that clean water.
“I could get used to it, I suppose,” mumbled Lan, making a stab at a grape. The points of the fork just slipped off.
“How did you find my daughter?”
Lan shrugged, still fighting fruit. “The guards took me right to her.”
“Her company, I mean.”
“Oh.” She had to think awhile before she could fit together an answer that was both tactful and true. “She received me.”
“And my son? I’m told he was visiting,” he said, catching her wary glance.
“All right, I suppose. They have a…a close relationship, don’t they?”
“They used to,” he said noncommittally. “Now it is just one more means by which to provoke me. It doesn’t. Indeed, if I thought they genuinely cared for one another, I would give them my blessing, but it is only a mutual hatred expressed with flesh.” His claw tapped at the tabletop three times, slowly, as he watched her. “They may seek to involve you in their games.”
“Yeah, I heard about the last girl they involved.”
His eyes flickered. “He told you.”
“He laughed about it.”
Azrael looked away.
“What happened to her?” Lan asked.
“No more than what she wished to happen. I will speak no more of such bleak matters in such winning company.” He waved the wine-girl over and took the bottle from her, filling his own cup, drinking it off, and filling it again. “How like you your gown?”
Lan thought, ‘It’s cold and it makes me look like a whore. Or a peacock. A peacock-whore, maybe. I can barely breathe in this corset and the shoes are too slippery. The sleeves are scratchy and it pinches under my arms.’
Lan said, “Fine, I guess.”
“Faint praise,” he mused. “You don’t like it.”
“It’s fine,” she insisted, trying once again to get a damned grape on her fork. “How do you like it? Seems like that’s the real question.”
“And the color?”
Lan succeeded in threading a grape stem between the points of her fork, plucking it from the bunch with careful twist, but it immediately fell and bounced away off the edge of the table. “What about it?”
“Do you favor the color?”
“Are you teasing me?” Her frustration with the fork and the fruits sharpened her tone more than was perhaps wise. “How the hell do you have a favorite color?”
He rolled his shoulders and plucked a grape himself…using his fingers. “I think it suits you.”
Lan gave up on the grapes and stabbed an apple. “It may be pretty, but the cloth is too thin.”
“It isn’t meant for warmth.”
“Then why make a dress out of it?”
“For the pleasure of taking it off. I have removed that gown from several women in the past,” he added, knuckling idly through a tray of sweetmeats for one worthy of his appetite. “But never with such anticipation as I confess I feel seeing it now on you.”
She spared him a quizzical glance as she sawed her apple into clumsy wedges. “You say that like it’s a compliment.”
“It was meant as one.”
“Even though it just compared me to all your other dollies?”
“Not all, merely those who have worn that particular gown. And I did set you above them in the comparison, did I not?”
“Which only means you’re going to set the next girl who wears it above me.”
He watched her eat, his thumbclaw scratching slowly back and forth along the rim of his cup. “You should wear jewels,” he said at last.
She rolled her eyes. “I’ll wear nothing but a dog collar and a diamond tiara if that’s what you want, but I’m not going to come all over giggly just because you offer.”