The Scholomance (15 page)

Horuseps threw
back his head and laughed.

“This is part of
your sinister plot to force your students to learn magic, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is.” His
head cocked. “I must say, for someone who came here without any intention of
seeking sorcery, you are proving remarkably amenable to its utilitarian uses.”

“All part of my
charm,” Mara said distractedly, scraping her bare foot across the floor. It
remained very hard stone. “If I ingratiate myself enough, perhaps I’ll wheedle
a better bed out of you.”

“I? Not likely. Yet
there are always beds for those who seek them ardently. And now, if you’ve no
other questions—”

“One, actually.”

“Oh?” He’d
already been walking away, but he turned back now, ingenuously cordial on the
surface and distinctly wary on the inside. The lights of his eyes had drawn
together, like wagons circling against Cherokee attack, she thought. “Pray tell
me, child. Ever I am at your service.”

“Do you meet
with everyone who enters the Scholomance?”

“I do.” Polite
puzzlement held him a moment more before comprehension smoothed it away. ‘Her
Connie,’ he thought, and said, “You ask if I recall the friend you’ve come to
find? Sadly, you are yourself the only applicant of note in many, oh, many
dreary years. Perhaps she has indeed passed under my watchful eye, and
certainly if she’s been harrowed, I spoke to her, yet I have not marked her.”

“I haven’t even
told you what she looks like.”

“Dearest, were
you to paint her image in the air before me and give me the day and hour of her
entry, still I couldn’t tell you better. Time is all the same here, you’ll
discover that for yourself, and human faces change as often as the moon’s. I
cannot help you, to my regret.”

She studied him,
his gracious smile, his slick and oilsome manners, and found them to be
disturbingly sincere. When he spread his hands in a courtly gesture of honesty,
she seized on it, boldly thrusting a part of herself into his mind while
keeping a greater part back, hidden and quiet, to see how he dealt with her.

He was not
without defenses and he brought them up fast, but before he shoved her out, she
sensed he was actually telling the truth. Maybe Connie was here and maybe not,
he wasn’t in the habit of paying attention to students. Nor was he in the habit
of doing mental battle with telepaths. She was very briefly tempted to wrestle
her way back in, if only because she sensed she could do it, but in the end,
that was a secret too precious to give up so early in the game. She let herself
be rebuffed and looked evenly up into his furious face.

“I
misunderstood,” she said, mimicking his open-hands gesture of a second ago. “I
thought you were offering to let me look, to see for myself if you’d seen her,
since she’s so far beneath your notice.”

His eyes
narrowed coldly, but only for an instant. Then he pretended to believe her,
relaxing the set of his pale shoulders and giving a cavalier wave of one hand,
although his mind stayed tightly armored. “Perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I could
have been. A mistake I’ll not make twice, child. I trust you’ll do the same.”

“My apologies,
Master Horuseps.”

“Hm.” A smile
cracked at the corners of his lips. “It’s going to be quite interesting to have
you among us…for however short a time. I wish you luck in your search.”

“Do you?” she
asked, raising her voice as he moved away down the hall.

“Oh yes,” he
called back to her. She could hear the smile in his words, even though he did
not turn. “After so many ages, even the worst difficulties can only be a
passing entertainment, and I think we shall not see the worst from you, Bitter
Waters. Luck to you and to your Connie, wherever she might be. No doubt we
shall meet again.”

“No doubt,” Mara
murmured, watching until the darkness and the rock swallowed him. She stood
awhile in the hall, letting the silence settle around her, the reality of it
all growing louder. With the demon out of sight, she no longer felt that eerie
sense of displacement, of the Scholomance brooding over her like some dark and
hungry djinn, and the urge was on her all at once to take a long step back and
disbelieve in some or all of it. This place couldn’t exist. Hundreds of people
did not disappear to live inside a mountain, and have nobody know about it. To
live inside a mountain with demons, no less.

But the rock was
real. it rippled over the ceiling like endless rows of elephant teeth, dripped
out countless jagged claws and melted-wax ribbons. She could touch it and feel
its slick, craggy reality cold under her fingers. She could hear it breathing
in the way of caves, taste its musky minerals in the air. She’d never been
spelunking before, didn’t know that a person could feel a mountain creeping in
on you with all of its weight behind it, all that weight above you. Demons,
magic, and hundreds of people had a way of fading in and out of a person’s
grasp, but you sure couldn’t argue with rock.

Mara walked into
her cell and stared at it for a bit. In a weird way, it was cozy. If she stood
with her back to the door, she could almost be back in her first Panic Room,
back in the Basement. ‘Welcome to the Scholomance,’ she thought. She’d done it.
She was in.

Now what?

CHAPTER SEVEN

M
ara slept. It was impossible to say how long,
with neither a watch nor a window at her disposal. Her sleep had been a fitful
thing, easily broken and difficult to recapture, interrupted by moments of
half-awake states in which the psychic quiet and colorful Mindstorm made her
think she’d fallen asleep in her body and was now part of her dream, dreaming
of being in the Panic Room. She began to feel more and more as though she’d
spent the night in a drunken stupor.

The robe which was
her only clothing was also her only bedding, and the stone cell was cramped and
damp and cold in addition to being very hard. Far more damaging to her night’s
rest was the strange muffling effect of the mountain’s enclosing rock, which
all but silenced the chatter of stranger’s minds and made her feel deceptively
isolated, although she knew she was surrounded. Even in the Panic Room, the
Mindstorm was washed-out and smudgy in appearance. Now and then, some burst of
noise and clarity betrayed the presence of some other student wandering close
by in the hall, but that was all. It was strange and deeply unsettling, but Mara
was exhausted and eventually, she slept.

When she did
fully awaken, stiff and drowsy, it was to the sound of tolling bells. Not
merely one or two peals, as she’d heard in the library, but a discordant mash
of many keys and tempos, similar to the traditional songs of church bells. Similar,
yes, but only on the surface. The song these dark bells told was somber enough,
but the timing was bad, rushed, giving the impression of a sly, unpleasant
giggle running through a eulogy.

Mara got up,
doing her best to walk out the aches and pains of her night on the floor as she
followed the sound out into the winding, sparsely-lit passages. Horuseps had really
put her in the outskirts. It was some time before she saw another student and
he was also moving towards the bells. As she kept unobtrusively at his back, he
led her out of the tunnels, through the ephebeum, and into the heart of the
mountain, picking up more and more people as they went. All the Scholomance was
gathering, it seemed, and where they gathered was in the Nave, before the Black
Door.

Acclimating to
the crush and pulse of so many minds after her night of unnatural quiet was not
difficult, but it wasn’t pleasant either. She found a place far back along the
wall from which to view the proceedings, where she could be dizzy without being
obvious about it.

“Ah, you came!”

Robed figures
bowed aside for Horuseps. He paid them no mind, as careless in his step as if
he were walking through fields of corn. All his attention—his glittering,
starlit eyes and easy smile—was for Mara. He lifted one long hand from its
resting place on his own shoulder to cup hers, bringing her with him away from
the wall and back through the gathered students. “I thought of fetching you out
personally, but of course, that would hardly be proper for either one of us. Not
that there are no Masters here who show favor to one above the others, but I
have a reputation to maintain, you understand.”

She didn’t, but
accepted his rambling words at face-value, meaningless as they were to her
ultimate goal. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Shall you have
a guess?”

Mara looked
thoughtfully at the crowd of shifting, muttering students, and then ahead,
where the knot of them had thinned out and a few demons stood instead, watching
Horuseps escort her towards them. She could feel her scalp crawling the closer
she came, as if their cast-off excitement were setting a static charge in the
air, but it was a very strange sort of anticipation.

“It isn’t a
graduation,” she said finally.

“No?”

She wanted to
tap at a few minds to make sure, but not with Horuseps here, not with his hand
on her shoulder, his naked thumb caressing her naked throat. Physical contact
always gave her an advantage when she was looking for a way into someone’s
head. The advantage may be mutual, and while she believed the Panic Room was
mind-tight, reaching out to tap someone just might expose her. She wouldn’t
risk that with Horuseps so obviously playing a trapdoor spider.

“No,” she said
instead. “If it was, there would be a few people dumb enough to want to be in
the front row, to catch a peek inside, thinking it would mean something when it
was their turn. Some of them want to see…but no one wants to be that close.”

“You sound very
certain.”

“Just look at
them.”

They weren’t
frightened, these watchers in robes. There were only a few with that pale, waxy
pallor that meant real nerves at work, but no matter how unsuccessfully they
played at stoicism, the Mindstorm was hot with dread. And no, they weren’t
jostling to get closer to the door or trying to count backwards through other
graduations they may have seen. If anything, they cringed back from it,
crushing at the walls in small groups to whisper at each other. The only
anticipation she could see flashing through the Mindstorm was of a low and
sadistic sort.

“What then?”

“I don’t know.” Mara
puzzled at the windows of the Panic Room for a few moments more, then shook her
head in defeat. “Have you come to watch newcomers like me doing a loyalty oath
or something? Am I supposed to cross my heart and kiss the door?”

“No, but what a
splendid idea.”

“What have you
there, Horuseps?” one of the demons asked. It was female, weirdly beautiful
despite hundreds of coral-like growths sprouting from the back of her head,
neck and shoulders, all tangling together and reaching upwards like the
branches of a dead tree. Her hands were uneven, gnarled things, dripping
fingers like roots, but they were graceful enough as they plaited together at
her smooth hip. She wore only a single length of plain white cloth, gossamer as
spider silk, that hung from her throat to the floor, held against her body only
by the strategic application of several tight belts. She came the last few
steps to meet them, eyeing Mara with the polite interest of a woman meeting a
good friend’s new dog. “I hadn’t realized your tastes had changed so,” she
said, smiling. “From red meat to candy.”

Horuseps
laughed. “No, Zyera, this is our newest student. Mara, she is called.”

“Bitter candy,”
the demoness mused. “Such an unusual face. Pretty, but very odd.” She reached
out to pet Mara’s hair, then rubbed some between her crooked fingers. “Do you
know, she almost reminds me of…well, it doesn’t matter.”

Horuseps just
smiled, his eyes narrowing ever so slightly.

“Such delightful
eyes…” Zyera dropped Mara’s hair and touched one of those ghastly fingers to
Mara’s cheek. Her mind was at once there, ripping through the Mindstorm in a
callous, clutching act, only to bounce off the Panic Room. Without thinking,
Mara reacted as if it were an attack, sending out a mindslap against the
intruder, and connecting, somewhat to her surprise. Zyera let out a glassy
shriek and stumbled back, both arms flying up and crossing before her face, all
her roots and branches quivering as she stared at Mara.

The students and
the demons both stopped any and all conversations mid-word and focused in on
them.

“You look
perfectly ridiculous,” Horuseps announced, his smile broadening. “Come, come
sister. She’s not apt to bite if you offer your hand and keep to low tones.”

Slowly, Zyera’s
arms dropped. On her face, a look of wonder spread, blanching the color out of
her coral-like ornaments. “This is unexpected,” she breathed.

“Isn’t it?”

“A very pretty
plaything.” Zyera looked at Horuseps, a solemn and matter-of-fact stare. “You’ll
never keep her secret.”

“I know it. But
before the sharing of my bitter wine—” He gave Mara’s shoulder a light squeeze.
“—we have this unpleasantness to endure.”

“Ah yes.” Zyera
gave Mara a long, considering stare. “You are new here,” she said at last. “And
I don’t imagine you frighten easily, if at all. So only keep very quiet and
learn what you can from what you are about to witness. What have you come to
learn?”