The Scholomance (32 page)

“What, now? The
bells haven’t rung.”

The bells rang.

“Come to
dinner,” Horuseps said again, when Mara finally looked at him after giving the
rock above her a scathing stare.

“No,” she said. “And
you can tell Kazuul for me that if he wants to replant his adolescent suggestion,
he can come do it in person instead of shooting me in the back in a crowded
room like the consummate coward that he is.”

Horuseps
twitched his long eyebrows almost straight out, but smiled. “I’ll tell him no
such thing. I like my innards where they are. And he didn’t send me.”

“Liar.”

“You are
altogether too free with that word. And the caution that holds you to your
cell, though commendable, is wasted for the moment. He isn’t lurking outside
the dining hall this time, dearest. Believing his adolescent suggestion to be
undetected, he is content to await your inevitable surrender in his chambers. It
is my will alone to invite you to dinner.”

“Why?”

“Because you
haven’t eaten what would feed a flea in all the time you’ve been here. It worries
me.”

Mara laughed at
him.

He sighed and
waved one hand theatrically through the air. “Because I wish to ply you with
wine and then ravish your insensible body before a thousand reveling witnesses,
do you like that better? Honestly. Suspicious little creature.”

“I don’t like
crowds.”

“That’s
understandable. But the alternative, my dear, is the gradual weakening of your
body, mind, and will through slow starvation. You have already begun to feel
its effects, whether you want to admit it or not. You are not a fool. Surely
you grasp the danger inherent in your stubborn refusal to eat.”

“I don’t refuse
to eat, I just refuse to fight over pig swill for the amusement of you and your
friends.” She looked at him, showing a hint of frustration, a hint of humor, both
genuine. “You used to offer to feed me in your quarters.”

“Tastes change.”

Mara nodded,
holding his mild, smiling gaze. Then she said, “Malavan approached me over the
little matter of his harem today.”

“
Little
matter?”

“He put me on my
knees.”

The demon’s
smile vanished. It returned swiftly, but not soon enough to escape her notice. “Oh?”

“One of the
other Masters came along and, I’m sure you’ll find this funny, actually stopped
him from going any further, which was a relief.” She measured out a deliberate
pause. “Of course, I was grateful, which meant I wasn’t quite as interested in
stopping
him
from going any further.”

Horuseps did not
reply. His lips stayed curved, docile, but his eyes were cold and the lights of
his distant galaxies looked on her without humor.

“Kazuul has been
trying all day to get me to come to him by the novel tactic of overwhelming me
with erotic impulses. Apparently, he never imagined that I could be overwhelmed
by someone other than himself.”

His expression
did not change, but the lights in his eyes burst outwards like fireworks, a
visual aide to the spike of alarm that shot through him. Then he armored
himself again and said, “You lie,” quite distinctly.

“Are you sure?”

“No one would
dare defy him so.”

“No one besides
Malavan, you mean? Please.” She laughed. “Morality, dear Horuseps, is
mortality. You are not human. You have no morality, but only privilege.”

His eyes flashed
again. “And there are oaths we have sworn, o my bittersweetness. We are all
beholden to his law, and for now, his law states you are for him alone.”

“He made you all
swear upon your immortal lives to obey every word he ever said?”

The lights of
his eyes dimmed and narrowed. “He made it clear he was our lord and Master.”

“I’ve been here
long enough to know that semantics matter,” Mara said. “And making it clear is
not the same as swearing an oath. You’re thinking about it now, aren’t you?”
she went on, and Horuseps took a long step back and stared at her. “He made you
all swear not to kill each other for any reason…not to use arts on each other…and
something else I’m not getting…”

“Do not provoke
me, Mara!” he said sharply, one of the few times he had ever used her name, and
he used it now like a knife. “You are not welcome in my mind!”

“I’m not in your
mind,” she countered. “Learn to control your thoughts.”

He locked them
down in blackness so complete, it seemed to leave a vacuum in the air around
him. Even his eyes were entirely lightless. His hands on his shoulders were clenched.

Mara held his
empty stare for a long time in silence, and then let go her breath and dropped
her eyes. “I don’t want you to be angry with me,” she said.

“You express it
oddly.”

“Kazuul…
dreamed
on me all day. All day!” She threw herself against the wall and crossed her
arms, staring blackly straight ahead of her and not at him at all. “Malavan
came after me…and what happened after Malavan…I shouldn’t take it out on you,
but you are starting to feel like a part of it.”

“Am I?”

“What does he
want? You know, don’t you?”

“He wants to
fuck you.”

“Besides that!”
she snapped.

And Horuseps
smiled. “There’s nothing besides that, dearest. He wants to fuck you, he
doesn’t want anyone else to fuck you, and he doesn’t want to wait. If you were
looking for profundity, you were badly misled.”

“So was he, if
he thinks he can make me stupid-drunk on his secondhand lust and trust his
fellow demons not to take advantage of me.”

“Thinking things
through has never been among the strengths of his kind,” Horuseps said. “But
there are exceptions. Perhaps his intent was not to bring you to him, but to make
you uncomfortable enough to drive you away from the others.”

“Then why does
he want me at dinner?”

Horuseps heaved
a sigh. “He doesn’t, child. I do. Never in a thousand years would it occur to
Kazuul simply to woo you over fine food and drink.”

“Is that what
you’re trying to do?”

“If it was, I
wouldn’t be asking you to the dining hall. You really are too suspicious. Will
you come?”

“No.”

“So be it. I leave
you to your thoughts.” Horuseps turned around, but paused just beyond the
doorway. His head bent. After a minute or two, he faced her again. “I suppose
you know that when I grow tired of merely encouraging you to eat, I shall
simply command you to do so, and like as not command you to gorge until you
vomit and gorge again. So it has also occurred to you that the same is true of
Kazuul’s desire for carnal intercourse. He will command,” he said calmly as
Mara’s smile slipped into a thoughtful frown, “and you will gorge. Until you
vomit. And gorge again. I like you, darling heart, and so against my better
judgment, I am compelled to warn you: This is not the way to play the game. Do
have a pleasant sleep.” He bowed, turned, and took himself away.

Mara closed the
cell door, and then just stood there with her hand on it, deep in thought. Her
life’s experience told her the surest way to secure a man’s devotion was
through carefully-orchestrated scorn and capitulation, but then, her life’s
experience was with humans, and all of it together didn’t add up to one blink
of a demon’s eye. She was going to have to adjust her plan of attack.

She’d never been
one for pulling plans out of her pockets at a moment’s notice. She’d sleep and
maybe inspiration would strike her in the Panic Room. If not, well, she’d just
blunder ahead and hope for the best. Mara thought, without any sense of sarcasm
whatever, that this tactic had served her pretty well so far.

Then she took
off her neophyte’s robe and lay down in her cell to sleep in the heart of the
Devil’s School.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

S
he slept on it for two days, but wandering the
Scholomance’s halls all night while demons preyed on students and students
preyed on each other gave her no new ideas, and brooding in the Panic Room all
day while her body dreamed lost-Connie dreams failed to improve her outlook. Mara
woke on the third day at the tolling of the bell, and knew she had to stop
stalling. After scowling at her ceiling for a few minutes, she got up,
collected her comb, and went to get a bath. As hard as Kazuul had been trying,
she doubted she needed to look her best, but she still had some shreds of
pride. She was a telepath, and the last thing she wanted to hear when she gave
herself to this arrogant son of a bitch was him thinking she smelled.

Most of the
students were already upstairs when Mara came out of the tunnels into the
ephebeum. She could hear the stragglers on the wide stair, running to catch up
to this or that one before they waged war in the dining hall. Mara was hungry
too, but she could ignore it for a shot at privacy when she had to get naked,
not a foregone conclusion when several hundred students shared the same crude
facilities.

She got
half-lucky. The garderobe was empty when she used it, but there was a man
standing next to the bathing pool. He had his back to her and he wasn’t
bathing. He’d pulled his robe partway down, tying his sleeves around his waist
to hold it up, and was bent all the way over, attempting to give himself a
haircut with only the distorted reflection in the rippling water for a mirror
and a sharp shard of stone for a knife.

‘What kind of
idiot puts his back to the door in this place?’ Mara wondered, and tapped at
his mind.

It was Devlin,
of course.

Mara picked up a
sachet of soap from the wall and walked over. She waited until the knife he was
using was nowhere near his neck before patting his shoulder. “You’re an idiot,”
she said calmly, after he was done shrieking and splashing hysterically away
from her. “See? That wouldn’t have happened if you’d been able to see me
coming.”

“I can’t do this
anywhere but here,” Devlin said, dragging his arm nervously across his face. “It’s
the only place the water is, like, remotely calm.”

“And you can’t
turn around because…?”

“I need the
light,” he said, and pointed unnecessarily at the room’s only blister-lamp. That
gave Mara some pause, which Devlin interpreted oddly as encouragement. He
splashed back over to her, holding out his knife. “Can you do this for me?”

She recoiled. “Can
I cut your fucking hair?”

He flinched and
shied away. “Never mind then,” he mumbled.

“How ‘bout I
scrub your back and paint your fucking nails while I’m at it?”

“I said, never
mind!”

Mara stalked
away, yanking her robe off and throwing it out into the hall where it would
stay dry. It might also be stolen, but she’d deal with that if and when it
happened. Right now, the bath was what mattered. Kazuul was waiting.

She waded into
the frigid water and found a steady trickle from above to stand under. The soap
didn’t lather and it needed a lot of rinsing. She washed until that hot bloom
of anger had been sent back to whatever irrational place had spawned it and Devlin
never said one word.

“Sorry,” she
said finally. “That wasn’t about you. I’ve got to do something…I don’t
particularly want to do, and I think I need to do it today.”

“It’s cool.” He
didn’t ask questions and his suspicions were close enough to the truth that she
didn’t bother to correct them. He simply looked down, found his reflection
again, and continued cutting.

“Oh, give me
that,” Mara said, heading over with her hand out for the knife. “I’ll give it a
shot. You only want the—”

Devlin started
to hand it over and then screeched out something that sounded like, “Yarp!”

Mara stopped, bemused,
and tapped at his mind again.

Even he didn’t
know what he’d just said. All that he knew, every part of his functioning
brain, was occupied at the moment by her naked body. Pale and perfect, her wet
limbs gleaming and hair falling around her shoulders and over her breasts in
golden streams where the lamp light hit it, tarnished silver where it did not. She
was naked, completely naked, her…her…
everything
right there!

She looked down
at herself.

“I’ll do it,”
Devlin stammered. “It’s cool. It’s very cold—cool. You’re cold.”

“You see a hot
water tap around her somewhere, let me know,” said Mara, incredulous. “Don’t
act like you’ve never seen a naked lady before!”

“Of course I
have.” He grabbed a huge handful of hair and sawed at it vigorously. “I’m not,
you know, I’m not a virgin. I’ve had…women and…porn. I’ve had lots of porn!”

“And I’ve seen
more naked people since I got here than I ever saw on the outside, so what is
your problem?”

“No problem, I’m
fine.”

“Oh for God’s
sake.” Mara resumed washing, but after a few minutes of listening to him try
frantically not to stare at or think about her nudity, she went back and nudged
him again. “Seriously, you’re going to strain something,” she said. “Look all
you want, just don’t touch.”

“I’m not a
pervert!” he cried, grabbing more hair.

“There is nothing
is less perverted than a guy wanting to look at a wet naked woman. Knock
yourself out. I’m not offend—” She stopped and stared hard at his neck. “What
the hell did I just see?”

Devlin dropped
the handful of shaggy hair he’d been sawing at and clamped a hand over his
neck. “Nothing.” He started to turn around, suddenly desperate to face her,
even if it meant having to see her…her…everything.