The Scholomance (26 page)

“Oh but it is. We
Masters are very nearly in the same predicament, to a much smaller ratio, of
course. Nevertheless, we are as trapped, and often as frustrated, and we have
had many centuries to learn that long after our students have left us, we
remain with one another. Yes, I want you. But Kazuul has claimed you.”

Mara felt her
eyes narrow. “Oh he has, has he?”

“And the sooner
you resign yourself to it, the better for all.”

“Why? Are you
hoping for his leftovers?”

“Ha! Kazuul does
not share his spoils. Great bone-headed brute,” he murmured, drawing aside into
another passageway. “And if you think he’ll tire of the pursuit and move on to
simpler prey, he’ll never. Your fate was sealed when you entered his lair. Embrace
him and despair, little one.”

Mara snorted.

“Ah, she doesn’t
wish to be thought of as the plaything of another,” Horuseps said lightly. “And
yet she came here, where all students are at the questionable mercy of those
who teach.”

“Kazuul doesn’t
teach,” Mara pointed out.

“Even so. It is
unwise to provoke him. And besides, were you not just lamenting your lack of
fucking? One wonders why
you
are restraining yourself.”

“What is his big
fascination with me?” she asked, genuine frustration bleeding into her voice
and her thoughts. “And why is he being so damned persistent when all he has to
do is just order me on my back?”

Horuseps walked
in silence, his mind black to her.

Scowling, she
changed the subject. “What did Solomon make his cup to do?”

“Among other
things, he used it to display the soul-stone of his favorite enslaved djinn. Breaking
that great race and binding them to mortal service was what he wished to be his
ultimate legacy.” Horuseps walked for a while. “Is it?”

“Not really. I
guess he’s best known for threatening to cut a baby in half.”

He kept his back
to her and his thoughts cloaked, but she could see his eyebrows twitch. “Oddly,
I’m not so much surprised by that as perhaps I should be. In any event, merely
holding the cup was said, by Solomon himself of course, to give him ultimate
power over any demon. He believed it to be the reason we acceded to his wishes
when he entered here.”

“Was it?”

“Certainly not. It
was just a cup.”

“But you kept
it.”

“We did. Solomon,
however, kept the djinn.”

The tunnel ended
in a rock formation like a frozen waterfall, but Horuseps scarcely paused. He
touched the wall and rock bubbled back from his hand at once, opening without sound
on a room whose only source of light came, not from a blister-lamp, but from a
round mirror propped haphazardly on a jut of rock where the pale light of its
glass eye could illuminate the small chamber in its entirety.

“Our Reliquary,”
Horuseps said, and stepped inside.

No effort had
been made to organize the contents of the room. Where there was space, a ledge
or shelf had been pulled out of the wall and made only as level as needed to
keep the artifacts it carried from falling. No two were exactly alike in width
or depth; no two were exactly aligned to any other. The anarchy of it hurt the
eyes, distracting her from the objects themselves.

There were a
handful of idols—animals mostly, some abstract, and many plainly meant to mimic
the forms of demons from the Scholomance itself—and even fewer body parts—a
withered hand, a very small skull whose eyes were filled with gold, a fetish of
hair-wrapped bones, and a whole pile of irregular lumps which were either dried
organs or gall bladder stones—but most were rather ordinary. There were many
mirrors, ranging from polished rock to silver-backed glass to ornately-molded
brass, and with the exception of the one radiating feebly above her, all were
dark, their reflections warped by age and neglect. There were knives of every
shape and substance. There were stone spheres by the dozen, heaps of rings and
crowns, and many, many cups.

She got no sense
at all that she might be surrounded on every side by mystical talismans. There
were a few here or there she might expect to see in a museum, but the rest of
them were, at best, gift-shop fodder for a medieval faire, and at worst, utter
junk. This was something of a disappointment, and she let him feel it.

“Humans,” said
Horuseps, picking up one of the cups, “are of limitless imagination. If you
knew me better, you would better appreciate my admiration. Nevertheless, when
it comes to arming themselves against the supernatural, there is something in
them that screams for practicality of form. It is as if…” He turned the cup
over in his hands, his expression growing distant as the lights of his eyes
focused into a single bright point. “…as if even they cannot believe in what
they are making, or in what they are making it to combat, and so they must be
certain of a dual purpose. To fall back on, as it were.” He looked at her. “Would
you like to see my favorite?”

Mara shrugged.

Horuseps handed
her the cup and picked up the fetish. He handled it with touching care,
arranging it in the center of his palm where he could trace the flow of hair as
it wrapped around and through the bones. “It pretends to be nothing but what it
is. Even the most innocent child need only look at it to know its business is
not with this world.”

“What was it
supposed to do?”

“What else? Protect
its bearer from the will of demons. Useless, of course. Still, I like it.”

“Do any of these
things work? Besides that,” she added, thumbing up at the glowing mirror.

“Even that isn’t
doing what it was intended to. Oh, some of them might have had some small
ability once upon a time, but most of these are merely foci for ignorant minds
that once believed themselves sorcerers. Scrying stones and pointing sticks…toys
for infant magicians.”

“And this?” Mara
raised the cup he’d given her. “I assume it’s Solomon’s.”

“It was indeed. But
it’s quite powerless now, my dear.”

She studied it
in silence. Finely made and gilt with gold, it had a deep well and thick stem,
every inch of it a vehicle for the gems fixed to its surface, but the largest
setting was empty. A place-marker for the imprisoned djinn, she supposed, but
it still didn’t look much like a magical artifact, just a really gaudy cup. “Among
other things,” she murmured.

“Yes, Solomon
often claimed that the cup protected him from all poisons, restored his youth
and vigor, and that if he caught the reflection of the sun inside it as he
drank, he was able to see and speak with God. A great liar, even for his time. An
excellent quality of kings.” Horuseps reached out a finger to run along the
cup’s rim, but didn’t take it from her. “Cut a babe in half, did he?”

“Threatened to.”

“Ah.”

To her mild
astonishment, the idea seemed to sincerely repel him. He was a demon, wasn’t
he?

“There are
degrees of evil,” Horuseps said distractedly, and glanced up with a thin smile.
“I have, of course, seen many infants murdered in my lifetime, by parents who
believed they could not spare its food, by priests who believed it would curry
divine favor, and by fools, who hoped to curry mine.”

His tone was
light enough and his expression seemed benign, but the mood behind his mental
armor blackened and churned. Any reply might be dangerous. Mara said nothing.

“I shouldn’t
take it so seriously, I know. Humans can so easily replace the young they dash
upon the altar, and really, it doesn’t matter whether you kill them at thirty
years of age or thirty days…or even thirty minutes. Human lives are tenuous at
the best of times. All the same…” His attention drifted. He gazed without
expression at the small skull on its stone shelf. “I can imagine no God who
could reward the bloodletting of babes. Only Man could rationalize such a
thing, try to use it to give him power. Small wonder we kill them with
impunity.”

Mara busied
herself with the cup.

“I suppose
there’s a paradox in that,” Horuseps said after a while.

“A small one,
maybe. Like Kazuul, who wanted to know how old I was.” She half-smiled at the
memory. “He said he wouldn’t lie with children, and him all of four thousand
years old.”

“And yourself,”
Horuseps remarked. “To dare even this dark place for want of one true friend. The
longer I live, the more I think there is no absolute evil, no absolute good…only
the little fancies of those with power, exercising it over those without.”

 
“Do you believe in God?” Mara asked.

He cast her a
glance and an acerbic smile. “I rather have to, being what I am. Shadows cannot
exist apart from light.”

“Oh, so today
you’re a biblical demon. The last time I asked, that was just a word ignorant
people used for any inhuman being. What’ll it be next time?”

“Hm. I’ve passed
myself off quite successfully as an alien before.” He checked her, found her
unsmiling, and rolled one shoulder in his boneless shrug.

Neither of them
spoke for a time. He gazed around the Reliquary, playing idly with the objects
within easy reach—all but the skull, which, though it sat right beside him, he
neither looked at nor touched. Seemingly unbothered by the silence, the way in
which he armored his mind told her that his serenity was, like so many things
about him, a facade.

Mara waited him
out, inspecting the mirrors one at a time.

“I do,” he said
suddenly, softly. He stared straight ahead, his face half in shadow. The
uncharacteristic gravity of his expression stole much of the haunting beauty
that made mistaking him for a female so easy for others, and gave him instead
an equally devastating handsomeness. “I believe in God.”

Of all the
answers he could have given, this was the one she’d least expected.

“Why?” she
asked.

“Ah well. I
consider myself an artist in the medium of cruelty,” he said, giving himself a
modest pat on the chest. The gesture could not even begin to cloak the
bitterness in his light tone, or the snapping hate in his eyes. “As such, I can
attest that the sheer spitefulness shown in the universe’s grand design simply
demands conscious direction.”

She had nothing
to say to that.

“No, child. I
have never seen Him, trembled before His awesome voice, or beheld His fiery
hand reached down to Earth, but I do believe.” He looked back into the opposite
wall, his thin jaw very hard. “And there are nights I stare into the heavens
and wonder what lies in store for me when at last I go to kneel before that
throne. We are not immortal, for all that we are ageless.”

Silence
descended again, broken swiftly by his dry chuckle. “And other times, I confess
I believe I will find that throne long vacant, tarnished by aeons of neglect. That
God has fled, or worse, remains and has been driven as mad by His divinity as
Man by his mortality. How fitting that would be. Still…the thought remains.” He
glanced at her. “And you?”

“I never thought
about it,” she answered honestly.

He nodded,
smiling again, as if this answer were only what he had expected to hear.
 
“Yet neither do you disbelieve.”

Mara shrugged. “I
never thought much about demons either, but here you are.” A stray memory
bubbled up, and she had to laugh. “I didn’t believe in the Scholomance.”

“The irony.”

“I don’t think
it’s ironic. I think it’s just an error.” Mara picked up Solomon’s cup again
and ran her thumb over the empty place where a djinn’s soul-stone had once
been. “Why do you keep these things if they don’t mean anything?”

“Dearest, if
they did mean something, they would be dangerous for us to keep. Therefore,
holding them is valuable as a show of power over our braver students. Besides—”
He took back the cup and admired it himself. “Some of them are pretty.”

“Have you ever
seen a real relic?”

“With the
existence of God in doubt, I must deny it, solely because a relic must be, by
definition, a holy object. If you ask, have I ever seen a magical object, why,
of course I have. The making of such things is even taught here, even the least
of which could put any of these to shame. I suppose you think it isn’t the same
thing.”

“Is it?”

“Magic bleeds,
dearest, and nothing natural may staunch its flow. Eventually, even the most
powerful talismans are rendered impotent. Without God, without eternity, can
something truly be said to be a relic?”

“Nothing
natural,” Mara echoed, frowning.

“Perhaps I
should have said nothing of Earth, where magic is itself not natural.” Horuseps
waved a hand dismissively and put the cup back on the shelf. “But there are
other worlds, dear Mara. Worlds beyond measure, beyond all imagining. There are
worlds were magic forms in pools as natural and as vital to life as seawater on
Earth, and there are worlds so blasted by the lack that any power ignited there
instantly is absorbed, as drops of water sprinkled over desert sand. Yet here
we are.” He looked around the cavern, his mouth twisted. “And my belief in God
must grow.”

“Why don’t you
leave?” Mara asked.

He turned on her
fast, hissing, “
I was born here!
” with violence enough to send her
leaping away, a mindslap aimed and trembling right at the cusp of being thrown.
“This is
my
world also and I have
every right
to—” He stopped
there and simply looked at her, perhaps sensing her defenses armed. The lights
of his eyes dimmed. He leaned back, waving a kind of apology at her as he said,
“A moot point now, Bitter Waters. The destinations may exist, yet
transportation, alas, has perished. Here we are. Here we remain. We have
learned, as you say, to deal.”

Mara could feel
herself frowning. Horuseps, although he did not look at her, made another of
those humorless half-smiles, and said, “Yet if we are such masters of magic,
why not simply remake the old Roads and go where we will?”