The Scholomance (20 page)

“Just! Ha!” But
he was mollified, some. He hunkered low, shifting his weight from his claws to
his knuckles as he glowered at her, and finally tried to smile again. “Mine is
a valuable art. You would do well to remain, though I know you will not. Perhaps
it is for the best. My students must earn their successes.” His eyes wandered
to a bleeding, crouching student in the first riser, a broad-faced girl with a
half-sprouted walnut clutched in each white-knuckled hand. “Such as they are.”

“I’ll leave you
to it, then.”

“As you wish.” The
theater doors opened at his distracted nod. All his attention remained fixed on
the dazed student before him, at her feet, bare beneath her hiked-up robe. His
thoughts colored with the first stains of his strange, black desire. “Yet
return whenever you will. My door is always open. Almost always. Akiri, is it? Akiri…come
here.”

Mara left. A few
cowled heads turned as she passed by, but not many and no one at all moved to
follow her. As exciting as the morning lesson had been, it was over now and
class was still in session. Students who had managed to grow the life-saving
trees wanted to stay and bask a little while in their own adrenaline and the
envy of those who hadn’t. Students who had failed now shuffled back to their
seats, newly determined to learn from their failures and so be one of the
privileged few when the next test came around. If they thought anything at all
of her leaving, it was only the peevish pleasure of seeing someone else slink
away from what they themselves resolutely faced. No one, not even
hate-mongering La Danse and his little laughing henchman, even bothered to
catcall her.

*
         
*
         
*

Empty tunnels
opened on a silent cavern. Mara stood awhile, feeling out in futility for some
sign of life in the lyceum. The Mindstorm belied the quiet. Through the
overcast haze of its cover came the muted shrieks and flashes of surrounding
thought, but all of it proved untouchable. It was a new experience for her to
be so blind to others, and she didn’t like it.

Light flickered
deep in another passageway, away from the hive-like central room. Mara moved
toward it instinctively, then caught herself. This had to be the first time in
her life she’d ever voluntarily sought out the company of another person, or at
least, the first since Connie. She couldn’t conceive of being lonely after so
many years of avoiding other people, and so she told herself that she was here
to ask questions, and walked a little faster.

She saw no one. The
hall coiled out in front of her, dark and empty. The light was only one of
those glowing blisters just on the corner where the tunnel curved away. The
flickering, nothing more than shadows moving over its surface. Or under it.

Mara moved
closer, staring into the core of the thing where the bulge was deepest. The
shadows, when they moved at all, did almost seem to be cast from within. Nor
did they seem to be exactly random, come to think of it.

Not without a
due sense of trepidation, Mara reached out her hand. Nothing stopped her. Nothing
would, in this place.

Her fingertips
brushed over something repulsive—leathery and hard, faintly warm, something
with just a little give to it. ‘Like a mummy,’ she thought, and was annoyed
with herself for putting the image in her own mind. She kept her hand on the
light to punish herself, daring it to come to life, to slap some monstrous hand
up against the other side of the blister’s surface and grope for hers.

Nothing
happened. The shadows moved, but without intelligence. Nevertheless, the longer
Mara stood with her palm flat over the bulbous light, the more certain she
became that it was skin, not tanned to leather, but calcified and gone to rot. That
it was alive, in the same idiot manner as the doors of the Oubliette, and
worse, that it was aware of her in some vague and helpless way. Even if it
couldn’t touch her in return, some part of it was twisting torpidly around to
look at her, perhaps to warn her, and some part of it was screaming.

‘I’m giving
myself the heebie-jeebies,’ Mara thought, and scowled. Of all the things she’d
seen in this mountain, that she picked the light fixtures to go all girly and
squeamish over genuinely embarrassed her, but embarrassment did not remove the
conviction that the lights were horribly, horribly wrong.

Determinedly,
Mara kept her hand where it was, and through that contact, she opened her mind.

“What are you
doing?”

Mara snatched
her hand back fast—fast enough to disguise her gasping flinch, she hoped—and spun
around. She’d been so fixed on the lamp, she’d been blind to anyone else and
now there was a man in the hall with her, a tall man with his hood back so that
she could see his earnest, acne-scarred face and his squinting, heavy-browed
eyes. His hair was a thatchy mess of no particular color, in that awkward stage
of growing-out that was not quite long enough to reach his shoulders but to
long too lie flat against his head. He did not grow a beard well, but neither
had he figured out how to shave. The overall effect was that of a hornless,
excitable young goat.

Since he didn’t
get an answer out of her, the man walked up to the light (moving in that
bent-knee, bobbing way of some self-consciously tall men and all ostriches),
and touched it himself. His manner was first wary, then perplexed. “What am I
doing?” he asked.

“Acting like an
idiot.”

He withdrew his
hand, looking wounded. “I’m just doing what you did.”

“I knew what I
was doing.” She hated being caught by surprise, and knowing that she’d exposed
herself didn’t make it any easier to bear. Mara started walking deeper into the
hall, hoping he would take the hint and leave her alone. Instead, not
surprisingly, he came after her.

“How come when
you do it—”

“What are you,
twelve?” she snapped. “Get away from me.”

He did stop, but
only for a few seconds. Then he ran to catch up with her. He’d made sandals for
himself somehow, but he’d made them too big and the flapping sound as he
hurried over the stone floor was like a physical blow to her ears after all the
quiet.

She tried a
different tactic. “Why are you following me?”

He shrugged,
avoiding her eyes. “People say you’re somebody to know. They say Master
Horuseps took you through the halls after your harrowing.” He squinted at her,
but she gave him nothing to read. As if this were encouragement, he pressed on
with greater enthusiasm. “They say you were only in the Oubliette, like, an
hour.”

She shrugged
that away. It hadn’t felt like an hour in the Oubliette, but then, perfect
blackness came with a time all its own. “How long were you there?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He
looked away again, watching the featureless walls roll by. “A few days, at
least.”

Longer than
that, Mara decided, tapping at his mind. A week, maybe two. There had been a
pool in his Oubliette. Towards the end, something had crawled out of it.

“A few days,”
Mara echoed, listening to the sound of trickling water and his own ragged
breathing as it faded into the here and now. “Does that make you someone I
should know?”

He stopped again,
longer this time, but again squared himself up and came after her. “What’s your
name?” he asked.

“Mara.”

“See, you
shouldn’t tell people that. Names are sacred, and you can use them to do magic
on people once you know how. Did you ever read, um,
A Wizard of Earthsea
?
Or—”

“What’s yours?”

“Huh? Oh. Astregon,”
he said proudly.

Mara shot him a
withering glance. “I didn’t ask for the name of your main on World of fucking
Warcraft, I asked for yours.”

He hunched in on
himself and stayed that way, even if he did keep walking. “Devlin,” he mumbled.

She gave him a
tap. It was. “That’s ironic, in a way.”

“I know,” he
said glumly.

They walked. The
corridor looped back around and into the lyceum. Mara, with no particular
agenda, chose another to explore. Devlin stayed with her.

“Who are you
looking for?” he asked finally. “I know where all the Masters teach. I could
show you around.”

“I’m just
getting my bearings.”

“Oh. Yeah. This
place.” Devlin tipped his head back and gave the rock formations above them a
brooding sigh. “You never know how essential windows are to finding your way
around until you don’t have any. I was lost once for four days. Days! I could
hear the bells ringing, but I couldn’t get to them. I don’t even know where the
ringing comes from, you know? Because nothing else carries very far in these
tunnels, that’s for sure. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen the bells, come to
think of it. Much as I’d like to believe they’ve got speakers hidden in the
corners here—like at the zoo, you know?—it’s probably resonating through the
rock through some—”

“Why are you
still talking to me?” Mara demanded.

He hunched
again, just like a turtle tucking into his shell. “Just making conversation,”
he mumbled.

“No, you’re
chewing my damn ear off. Go away.”

He dropped back
half a step. That was all.

They walked,
returned to the lyceum, chose another tunnel.

“Can I ask you a
question?” Devlin called.

“Can I stop you?”

“Why did you
come here?”

She glanced back
at him. “Why did you?”

“Oh, you know. The
whole millennium thing.” He shrugged one shoulder, looking at his feet. “You
know how all the computers were going to reset because of how they weren’t
going to know 2000 from 1900 and it was going to destroy the world’s economy
and all that? I thought…you know…be a great time to hide out for a while. Guys
like me don’t do so well in post-apocalypse movies.” He peeked up at her, his
mouth twisted into a crookedly rueful smile. “It was one of those ‘Seemed like
a good idea at the time’ things. And I was pretty spaced back then, to tell you
the truth. I don’t know. I mean, the most I could have lost out there was a few
hundred bucks and I spent it all getting here anyway.”

They walked past
the open door of a theater and Mara looked in, as she had been doing through
every door they passed. She saw, as usual, a few dozen robed backs sparsely
scattered over the risers and a demon at the very bottom, watching them work. The
demon was a stranger to her, all feminine curves, gleaming bronze skin, and
tiny tooth-like quills rippling all over her body, short and sharp over her
belly, long and graceful down her back. The demon raised her eyes to meet Mara’s.
‘Tasty,’ drifted to her over the waves of studying minds, but Mara didn’t
explore whether it was Devlin the demoness fancied or Mara herself. She moved
on.

“That was Master
Letha,” Devlin supplied. “She teaches Allure. Just about everyone wants to
learn that. It’s, you know, sexy.”

Mara ignored
him, found another tunnel, kept walking.

“So what did
happen?” Devlin asked, after the silence apparently tore away his nerves. “Out
there, I mean. What happened with the millennium?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“Nothing. A
couple minor PC glitches, I think. Nothing huge. Nothing that hit the banks
anyway.”

“Oh.”

“Just ‘oh’?”
Mara prodded, trying for a teasing tone. She reminded herself that she’d been
restless just a few minutes ago, enough to feel up the light fixtures. “You
sound disappointed.”

“I traded my
life in,” Devlin said bluntly. “No, I didn’t exactly hope that civilization
would collapse, but Jesus, yeah, something would have been nice. Something to
justify…I mean…this.”

They passed a
few more doors. She recognized one, paused to look in. Horuseps was on his dais,
gesturing to what looked like an large terrarium half-filled with sand. A
nervous-looking student was on his knees before it, exposing one scrawny arm
preparatory to reaching reluctantly inside. Every watching student leaned
raptly forward. No one noticed her at all.

“How did you
hear about this place?” Devlin whispered. He hung further back in the corridor,
as if afraid to be seen loitering out of class. “You look awfully, you know,
young.”

“No younger than
most of this crowd.”

“Yeah, but they’re
faking it.” Devlin shrugged. “I told you Allure was popular. Also, you can use
the art of Growth to kind of reverse aging if you know how, and just about
everyone wants to learn how because otherwise, you don’t have enough time to
study what you want to know before, you know…you die.” He shifted on his feet,
scratched at his arm through the robe. “I tried,” he said, with a
self-depreciating little laugh. “But I could never get the hang of it and, you
know…it’s been ten years, I guess, because Master Malavan kicked me out. Well,
he didn’t actually
kick
me. Have you seen Master Malavan?”

“Be quiet for a
sec, would you?”

Horuseps glanced
up, smiling to let her know he was not just noticing her arrival, then returned
his attention to the student now easing his arm into the sand. The expression
on the man’s face as he felt around inside the tank was puckered and queasy,
but gave Mara no real clue as to what was happening. She tapped at a few
students; they didn’t know either. She sent out a silent inquiry for the demon
to read.

‘Come down then,’
he replied in kind. ‘I am at your service always.’

The touch of his
mind killed whatever curiosity she had with the sure knowledge that, no matter
what horrible secret lay buried under the sand, it wasn’t likely to end well
for the poor sap feeling around there. Mara moved off down the hall and Devlin
followed her. They’d taken about ten steps, far enough that she could no longer
get a grip on any of the minds in the demon’s theater, when she heard the
scream.