His voice had been rising throughout this terrible speech so that his last words were delivered at a bellow. Now his bedroom door banged open, spilling out half a dozen pikemen who all slid to an uncertain halt as they saw their Master, naked, erect and furious over his chained captive. Azrael threw them a snarl of dismissal and stalked away to the furthest point of the room while they bowed themselves out.
“Now they will wait in the hall all day,” he spat once the door had finally closed, “straining to hear my command to have you executed.”
“It doesn’t appear to be dampening your mood.”
He glared at her, then gave his undiminished erection a contemptuous half-wave. “Flesh has its own priorities. One learns to endure.” He eyed her sourly for a long span of uncomfortable quiet and then, with an air of one who knows better, said, “Are we done with this pointless game of yours?”
“I’m not playing one.”
“You are. You know that you will never win me to show mercy. You act the hero’s role surprisingly well, but if you know how it will end, you know also that it is an act. How long must we play it?”
“End the war. Take back your Eaters and let us die.”
“No.”
“Then I guess we keep playing until you kill me.”
“A particularly wasted move in the game, since no one is here to witness your sacrifice. Besides which, you cannot be a martyr to your fool’s cause unless I allow you to die.” He glanced at his stubbornly insistent cock. “You are losing my good humor. Now come, what is it you truly desire? You could have the meat of my table, the wine of my cup. You could have rooms of your own within these walls, servants to attend you, privilege beyond your most reckless imaginings. And you will have had worse lovers, I assure you. I have no pity, but I do know passion.”
“I want nothing but for you to end the war.”
“Never will I allow Man to take back his dominion over this earth. What bejeweled chalice,” he said suddenly, with more than an edge of frustration, “do you hold between your thighs that my sipping from it is worth so many lives?”
It was not clear whether he referred to the value of human lives, or the mindless residue possessed by the screaming Eaters. “I’ll do—”
“Whatever I ask,” he finished for her. “Do you imagine I have never had a willing woman? I have had five at once in that very bed, each of them vying for the privilege I offer you now. You’ve a mouth that I’m sure has paid for many, many bottles of water in the world outside, but here, it is just another mouth.”
“You’re interrupting me.”
His eyes narrowed. In pointed silence, he drew up his arms and folded them across his chest, staring down at her.
At last, she had to say it: “I’ll do whatever you ask.”
He let that weak conclusion sit awhile, making absolutely certain she was done before dryly saying, “My apologies. I did not realize the damage my interruption would do.” He glanced at his cock, then suddenly turned away, bellowing for his chamberlain.
The doors opened. A dead man bowed his way inside and began unobtrusively to collect Azrael’s discarded garments from the bath and select fresh ones from the wardrobe in the corner. 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 patrolling guards, at the city of Haven, whose residents were just stirring—waking, if the dead slept—to go about whatever they had instead of lives. She watched for a while, but could never quite pretend it was a city like the ones in old magazines, or that it could ever go back to being one.