Free Land of the Beautiful Dead by R. Lee Smith Page B

When it was opened, she could see flashes of firelight reflected. There had been mirrors affixed to the doors once, but they had been broken and never replaced.
    “Are you getting dressed?” Lan asked.
    “Ha! And is there some reason I should not?”
    “I’m willing—”
    “So you’ve said. And said. And said. Indeed, I’ve heard so much talk of your willingness that I must take some time to ponder it lest some vital point slip my consideration. Guard! My guest would seem to prefer the meditation garden to my bedchamber. Escort her.”
    “Wait—”
    “It’s certain to be a cold day,” Azrael overrode her, “but there should still be a fire by which you might warm yourself. If it’s gone out, I’ll have another lit for you.”
    To watch another man burn…from the beginning this time…in full daylight. She would have to see hair melt and skin blacken, smell fat as it popped and crackled, and hear him scream until his lungs charred and split.
    Her mother, writhing in flames…screaming…for hours…
    “No,” Lan heard herself say.
    The pikeman seized Lan’s arm and pulled her to her feet, forcing her either to stumble along beside him or be dragged.
    “No!” Lan struggled to turn around, ducking her head in a futile attempt to evade her guard’s cuffs. “Please!”
    The guard swung his pike around and raised the butt of it for a blow, only to just as suddenly lower it and step back with a bow. Lan staggered free of him, turning to see Azrael with his hand upraised, regarding her while his chamberlain continued silently to dress him.
    “So you can beg,” he mused. “Although I note you do even that with an unwarranted sense of entitlement. Do you think you can refuse my table, refuse my bed, refuse even my garden, all with impunity? My hospitality is finite, child, and unless you can convince me otherwise, you have reached the end of it.”
    “Please.”
    “You’ll have to do better than that,” he warned her with a mocking smile. “Come, come. You cannot have run dry of stirring speeches already! Why, you’ve only just arrived.”
    “I’ve seen so many fires,” she said, pushing the words through a throat much too small for them. “Please don’t make me. You can chain me up. You can do anything, just…please…no more fires.”
    He gazed at her without moving for what seemed a long time as the pikeman held her in his dead grip, then said, “Take her to the Red Room,” and turned away.
     
    * * *
     
    The Red Room was at once the most opulent and least comfortable room in which Lan had ever slept, and that after all the hostel cells, ferry vans, abandoned city ruins and of course, the Women’s Lodge at Norwood, her home, and home to all the women and girls of the settlement who were unmarried and therefore vulnerable. There, only a few filthy curtains had separated the thin mattress where Lan and her mother slept from the others and each night’s sleep had been broken by the snores, whispers and errant kicks of her thrashing neighbors. Compared to that, the Red Room, even at scarcely ten paces wall to wall, was luxurious indeed, but it was not restful.
    She could not guess what the room might have been back when humans lived here, but having spent so many recent nights in hostels, it had the look of a prison to Lan, even though it was situated high in one of the towers of Azrael’s palace and not underground, where she was accustomed to seeing prisons. The walls were bare stone, painted a deep, unrestful red. The ceiling was made of square tiles, also red. The floor had been laid with a red, patternless rug over red-painted boards. The bed, red-lacquered posts, fine red sheets, plush red blankets, red cushions. Even the chamberpot was enameled in red. The effect was that of a room soaked in blood.
    The only light came through a narrow slit of a window, glassless, that admitted a welcome, if chill, breeze and allowed her to look out over the high palace wall, beyond Azrael’s