Lan looked around to see his pikemen retreat across the room. She hadn’t heard them approach this time, but Azrael surely had to have seen them coming and he’d let them get awfully close before ordering them away. “Do you?” she asked after a moment.
“Do I what?” he snarled, righting his cup with a bang and filling it.
“Want me dead.”
“Quiet, yes. Dead, no.” He raised his cup, glaring at her over the rim and scraping his thumbclaw back and forth across the dented place. “I don’t even particularly want you quiet. This has been nothing if not stimulating conversation. There was a time—” He broke off, then uttered a bitter-sounding laugh and finally drank. “I believe our meal is concluded,” he said. “And as you seem impatient to begin your fruitless audience, let us be about it.”
“There was a time?” Lan prompted, not moving.
He shoved his chair back and stood, thrusting out his open hand for hers. “No more stalling, child. You agreed to this price.”
“There was a time?”
His jaw clenched, causing the scars along his throat to flex and strain. He glared down at her, his open hand aimed like a sword at her heart.
She waited.
In a low, emotionless voice, he said, “There was a time I would have given anything just to have someone talk to me. But that time is over.” He moved around the table to seize her arm in a grip like iron, edged in claws. “Are you ready?”
“No,” said Lan, and raised her chin. “But I’m paid for. So do what you want with me. I don’t care.”
His eyes flickered. The hand digging at her arm loosened…and tightened again. He turned, grimly silent, and pulled her away.
CHAPTER FIVE
After the splendor of Batuuli’s rooms, Azrael’s own, which had seemed so luxuriant when Lan first saw it, now appeared grim and sparse by comparison. The wooden panels lining the walls made the windowless room appear much smaller than it was and it was too dark to make out the beauty of their craftsmanship. Here were no glittering chandeliers, no works of art displayed on polished pedestals, no fine carpets to soften the floor. The bed was as impressive as she remembered, but being the only decoration in the room made it almost seem a separate thing—a stage within an abandoned theater.
Lan stroked the coverlet, listening with half an ear as Azrael ordered his guards in the hall outside to stay at their posts unless he specifically summoned them, no matter what they heard. “Are you anticipating a fight?” she asked when the heavy door was shut.
“Our past encounters illustrate an annoying tendency.” He threw her a pointed scowl as he headed for the bath.
She raised her eyebrows. “And you’re blaming me?”
“You suggest you’re blameless?”
“I’m not the one who trained them to come running every time you raise your voice.”
“I don’t raise my voice in daily course. How else should they respond?” He unbuckled his belt and pulled his loincloth away. “Attuning oneself to the moods of one’s lord is a sign of loyal service. I can hardly condemn them for it. What are you doing?” he asked sharply.
Lan froze in the awkward contortion of trying to find the corset stays behind her back. “Getting undressed?”
“I will have that pleasure.” He removed his collar and one arm brace. “And I will attend to it soon enough.”
“Oh. Okay. Do I…” She looked around the room, seeing nothing to do, nothing to distract the eye. “What do you want me to do?”
“Wait quietly.” Stepping behind the screen, he reached up to unfasten his mask. His silhouette removed it, rubbed his face. He set it aside and stepped down into the bath. “Savor this time. No doubt you think you have no innocence left to lose, but you are wrong.”
Lan’s belly tightened. She took a breath and let it out slowly, forcing herself to relax. “Is that a threat?”
“A warning.” He covered one side of his face and submerged, coming up with a broad splash, shaking himself dry like an animal. “My touch, I’m told, is loathsome and I am in something of a temper tonight.”
Lan stepped away from the bed, watching the screen. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Ha! You think I will not bed a liar?”
“I’m not.”
“Then you are a fool as well as a liar,” he told her. His silhouette reached out for a bottle of something to one side of the bath. He poured it into his hand and rubbed them together, then dabbed at himself in curiously precise points. Tending his scars, she realized. “Instead of seeking to impress me with your courage, you should perhaps consider the very real possibility that there is a reason to fear.”
Lan walked around the screen and looked down into the bath. Azrael looked up at her. The water alone moved.
Horror, like lightning, was the first and brightest strike inside her, but like lightning, its flash quickly faded. It was not a man’s face, no, but it wasn’t so bad. Untold years behind a mask had left his skin with a waxen, uncanny appearance even where it was not damaged…and the damage was so great…and it was maybe that surreal quality that enabled her to look at the face he hid from the rest of the world, from his own Children, without fear.
There were no deformities, no monstrous features, no decay. All the same, it was hard to look and see a living person. His nose was gone, just splinters of exposed bone above an open cavity to mark its place, but with a suggestion of regrowth about the skin building up around it. His brow was broad and sloping, cleaved open to the bone in the center, but mostly healed. Below his left eye, there were cracks that opened wider as they spilled down his cheek, becoming gaps that exposed his teeth and the white gleam of his jawbone before merging with the keloided mess over his throat and sealing again. And over all of it, every inch, was the silvery shine of old scars, a filigree of pain he could hide but never completely heal.
How long she stood staring, Lan could not know. The moment lasted however long it did, breaking only when Azrael finally moved. Lan backed away as he climbed out of his bath, but he simply walked past her and over to the fire to dry himself by its warmth.
“Have you a preference?” he inquired, gesturing toward his rack of masks. “It seems only fitting you should choose the face you shall see over you.”
“No,” said Lan, then said it again with greater confidence. “No. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t wear any of them.”
He grunted and looked away, watching embers flicker and char. “There’s flattery I’ve not heard before.”
“It’s not flattery. What I’ve imagined is so much worse.”
He glanced at her and then, without warning, suddenly leapt at her, crossing the considerable space between them in a single predatory lunge. He seized her in his claws, doubtless sparing her a tumble back into the bath she had entirely forgotten, and yanked her off the ground as he thrust his face right into hers. Her eyes throbbed with the baking heat of his; bloodless hollows, runneled flesh and dry bone filled her vision. “What is there worse than this?” he snarled, his sharp teeth almost touching her lips.
Lan braced herself, then reached up and queasily touched his cheek, her fingertips rasping over cracked flesh until it split and became cool bone. She could feel dry muscle and threads of tendons jump beneath her palm…as if he’d flinched. Then he pulled away.