“Just watch.” Batuuli patted her hand, but her eyes never left the stumbling figure of the woman, reeling from one side of the wide center space to the other. “It’s all in fun.”
The dining hall doors opened again, this time to admit five dead men, dressed in artistically tattered shirts and trousers, all clean but in muddy colors—Haven’s idea of village attire. Their faces were painted pale, with their eyes and mouths outlined in black, so that their leers could be seen even by those sitting furthest away.
“Lovely,” someone said. Someone else called for more wine.
The woman backed away as the five men came forward, then turned and tried to run, but the scenery closed her in. She pushed at them, scratching and slapping from panel to panel, and all the while, the men came closer.
“Stop it!” Lan shouted. She jumped up, only to be caught and forced back into her chair. Batuuli leaned over to twine their arms together, like sisters or like lovers.
“Isn’t this exciting?” she murmured. “Isn’t this just how you imagined it?”
The men were almost on her now, so the woman turned to fight, producing a hunting knife in an instant from the sheath strapped under her shirt. She slashed, silent, keeping her movements small and conserving her strength. She’d fought like this before and won. But these men were already dead.
The room cheered as they took her down, their many hands pressing her limbs to the polished tiles and splaying her open. One of them took the knife and began to saw through her many layers of shirts. Another straddled her thigh backwards and began to wrestle with her boot.
He was stealing her boots.
All at once, Lan knew what she was watching, what Batuuli had meant all along for her to see.
Lan screamed, tried to throw herself at them, but she was held just as much as the woman on the ground. She was held and had to watch as the woman’s trousers were pried down and devices produced and fit around dead members to make fitting weapons. One boot was off. The other was being unlaced and Lan never heard anything but the laughter and applause and her own self screaming until Azrael’s roar:
“What the hell goes on in here?”
Silence from the court. There was no apology offered, only a wary confusion from the performers and their audience. Azrael strode forward, shoving painted trees and costumed men aside until he could see the woman at their center, gulping air and struggling to pull her trousers up as she lay on her back.
He did not need a long look to know what he was seeing. He swung on Batuuli, his eyes blazing, then turned his back to her and aimed his arm like a reaping scythe at the servants and guards lining the walls. “Who was it?” he demanded. “Who carried tales out of this hall?”
Below him, shivering, the woman gathered her feet beneath her, skittish as a young hare who hears the hounds, but she did not run. Her eyes darted to her hunting knife, still in the hand of one of the performers, then to the nearest table.
“I say you will stand forward!” Azrael bellowed.
Exchanging nervous glances, two of the servants stepped forward, followed a beat later by a third.
“My lord, the lady Batuuli—” one of them began.
“Impale them! And you!” He reached out and seized the nearest actor, pulling him entirely off the ground and giving him a shake that would have snapped a living man’s neck. “Where came you by this woman?”
“I don’t know, my lord,” the man stammered. “She was provided with the script.”
“Mine is the law here! Not my daughter’s! Traffic of the living is forbidden in Haven! Who among you does not know this?” Azrael threw the man into a table and turned on Batuuli, but before he could speak, the woman lunged out, yanked the carving fork from a capon and leapt. Lan let out a shout of alarm that held perhaps half Azrael’s name. He turned toward her and the fork that might have otherwise been buried in his back instead stabbed hilt-deep into his left eye.
Lan screamed—a hoarse, unlovely, dog-like baying. Azrael staggered, slapping his assassin to the ground as the sound still hung in the air and then there were pikemen on every side, breaking around him like black waves. Lan had not heard their running boots, but she heard the sound it made when a body is pierced—it is a quiet sound—and she heard it over and over and over. Batuuli applauded and Solveig joined in, as if the execution of their father’s attacker were just another act in the play, but not even their fawning courtiers dared to follow along.
Lan twisted free of the hands that held her and ran forward, only to be seized and thrown down beside the other woman with a boot in her back and a pike digging into the side of her neck. From that vantage, with Azrael a thousand feet tall above her, she saw his hand close around the fork imbedded in his head. He pulled it out, inch by slow inch, as if it had been sunk in tar, and like tar, it came burning, dripping white fire in clots that turned grey in the open air and burned away before they hit the ground. Fresh flame sparked in his smoldering socket. He looked at the fork, the tines now bent and charred black, and threw it away.
He lunged, batting pikemen aside like curtains to seize the woman on the floor and lift her by her throat high over his head. There was blood all down her chest, blood still pouring out of her, streaming down his arm, spattering his face—more blood than anyone could lose and live, and Lan could see her dying, see the terrified, trembling smile as she looked down past the clawed hand that held her and spat onto his golden mask.
Azrael did not flinch. He let her defiance trickle down his false face and merely said, “I would have let you live, human. And now…I will not let you die.”
There was a sound, but Lan didn’t hear it with her ears. It struck just once, charging the air like lightning, and then Azrael let her drop.
She struck the floor and lay weakly kicking and writhing for as long as it took her to die—not long—and then was still.
And then, slowly, she sat up. One of her hands rose and made weak scratching motions over her chest. Her mouth gaped. She shook her head twice side to side, like an unbroken ox trying to throw its yoke, then heaved up a tremendous amount of blood and fell back again. She lay choking, her lungs too full of blood for air, and Lan had to see that awful confusion fill her eyes as she began to realize she didn’t need air after all. She wasn’t dying; she was dead.
“No!” Lan cried.
“No?” Azrael swung around and advanced on her as the pikeman hurriedly pulled her to her feet. “You tell me no? Am I the villain here? I, the murderer? How can that be?” he demanded, his voice rising to a deafening roar. “She will never die! Get her out of here!”
The pikeman at her back caught Lan’s arm and dragged her away at what was nearly a run.
“And you,” Azrael said.
Batuuli’s voice, calm and smiling: “I?”
“Have you nothing to say?”
“Now that you mention it, you’ve ruined my play.”
“Have I? That can be amended.”
Lan looked back, just in time to see Azrael seize Batuuli by her braids and pull her across the table, smearing her fine white gown with pork grease and wine as she gasped and even struggled in a small, startled way.
“You seem to be missing a player,” Azrael snarled and threw his daughter at the lead actor. “Proceed.”
And then, thankfully, Lan was out and the dining hall doors slammed shut on the first of Batuuli’s outraged screams.
CHAPTER SIX
Every night that Lan had so far spent in Haven was the worst, but the night that followed Batuuli’s play was as far above the previous worst as the stars were above the Earth. In the Red Room, removed from the sights and sounds, she tortured herself with an endless cycle of memories and imagination, until they began to blur together.