The Scholomance (33 page)

She caught his
shoulder, shoved him back the other way, and firmly swept his hand aside. She
stared for a long time.

“Oh come on!” he
groaned, embarrassment shooting out spikes of resignation all around him. Now
she would make fun of him. Everyone always did. “I was high, okay? You never
made a mistake when you were fucked up?”

“You’ve got a
bunny on your back,” Mara stated, and started to smile.

“It’s a rabbit,”
Devlin insisted weakly.

“It’s a bunny.” It
would be more accurate to say it was a marshmallow with floppy ears,
rainbow-shaped eyes, and outflung arms that radiated lunatic joy to the whole
damn universe, but it was definitely a bunny.

“Rabbits were
worshipped in ancient cultures as symbols of cunning and vitality, okay? Like,
for thousands of years, people didn’t see a man in the moon, they saw a rabbit,
okay, and they thought all rabbits could travel back and forth running messages
for the gods. Even today, the concept of the rabbit as the magical trickster—”

“It’s a bunny,
Devlin. Christ, that thing looks like it could have its own cartoon show in
Japan.”

“It does,” he
said glumly. “I was high, for God’s sake. We did, like, a whole bag of dusted
grass and then that guy I told you about? My mentor? He took us on this
bullshit Indian totem quest and mine was a rabbit.” He gave her a hopeful sort
of glance. “Lots of people say I remind them of a rabbit.”

“Really? I
always saw you as more of a goat.”

He hunched his
shoulders and stared down at the water. “Yeah, well. We all went to get tattoos
to celebrate our bullshit totems and mine was supposed to be a rabbit except I
was fried out of my mind. To this day I don’t know whether I asked for that stupid
thing or if the tattoo guy just fucked with a bunch of stoners. You should have
seen my guru, seriously. He went in for a panther and came out with Hello Kitty
on his ass.”

“That needs to
be on a DARE poster.”

He snorted. She
let him go and he went back to his hair, deliberately not looking at her.

Well, she wasn’t
a sadist. She rinsed herself off under one of the heavier overhead falls and
reclaimed her robe. Devlin became infinitely more comfortable after she was
dressed. Honestly, it wasn’t like he never thought about her naked.

Mara put her
soap back and found a dry bench to sit on while she combed her hair. Now and
then, Devlin threw a glance her way, as if to reassure himself that she was
still dressed and not thinking up new bunny-jokes. Eventually, he splashed out
into the pool to find a calmer patch of water for his mirror, and it was only
then that Mara noticed he was still wearing his sandals.

“It’s just the
smart thing to do,” he said when she commented. “So if I have to, you know, run…I
don’t leave them behind. Same principle as this,” he added, tugging at the
hanging drape of his robe. “It’s not like we can just run down to the store and
get another one. Besides, I’m kinda hoping they’ll shrink.”

“Where did you
get them anyway?”

Devlin glanced
down and his expression clouded over. “From a guy,” he said evasively.

Mara gave him a
tap, which brought her a face and the name of Variden, but nothing more. “Is he
still around?”

“No. He
graduated a little while after I got mine.”

“Well, where did
he get them?”

“From…” Devlin’s
toes curled, a minute representation of his self-conscious turtle-tuck. “From
me, actually.”

She looked at
him. He bent down and took a sandal off, holding it out to her pinched between
two fingers like a dead rat. She didn’t take it.

“It’s skin,”
said Devlin. “It’s my skin.”

She didn’t move.
After a while, he shrugged and put the sandal back on.

“Variden kind of
pulled it out of me and did something to it, I don’t know exactly what, Transmuted
it or something to make it tougher, you know, so it wouldn’t just rot. Then he
cut it up into sandals. I gave him my aspirant’s robe. Like a trade.”

“Did it hurt?”

“No.” His
expression clouded over again and he went back to his hair. “It felt…pulled,
that’s all. Nasty, like…like he was pulling a worm or something out of me. But
it didn’t hurt. I’m sure there’s someone else around here making sandals if you
really want a pair.”

“I don’t think I
do.”

“Yeah, it’s
weird. I’m not sure why. Variden says it’s just like wearing cow leather, but
that’s not how it feels. It feels like, I don’t know, cannibalism.” The word
hung in the air like the tolling of a tribunal bell. He tried to laugh it away,
but his laughter wasn’t half as honest as the word. “Auto-cannibalism, if you
can dig it.”

“You are what
you eat, they say,” said Mara. She wasn’t good at jokes.

“Yeah, and we’re
all cannibals here,” Devlin muttered, sawing at himself. “This place…It’s not
that
it’s
so horrible as much as that it makes everyone inside it so
horrible. Everybody here, you know, they were all normal once. You ever hear
about the Stanford prison experiment?”

“No,” she said,
uninterested.

“Okay, so in
1971, this professor at Stanford University gets the wise idea to study the
psychological effects of becoming a prisoner as opposed to a prison guard. He
gets a bunch of college kids, none of whom have any criminal history or mental
issues so he can stay as neutral as possible, and randomly assigns them roles
as either prisoners or guards. He sets them up in a fake jail rigged with
cameras and just lets them go, right? And for a while, everything is fine, all
laughing and joking, first-name basis, you know?”

“Then it broke
down,” Mara said.

“Oh, it was
nuts! Guards started taking things way too seriously. Throwing their weight
around, shoving people, shouting, cursing…acting like the fake prisoners had
really been found guilty of something. The second day, there was a riot to
protest their treatment, and the guards actually beat on them with fire
extinguishers! The second day! And it just got worse and worse, and pretty soon
prisoners are having full-scale nervous breakdowns, guards are torturing
people, and the professor is just writing it all up, you know? It actually took
his girlfriend being all shocked and, I don’t know, probably threatening to
tell the school board or something before he suddenly decides to shut the whole
thing down. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that someone was probably
damned close to getting killed in there and do you know how long it all took?”

“Tell me,” said
Mara.

“Six days.” Devlin
shuddered, looked at his knife, and resumed hacking at his hair with even
greater vigor. “In six days, twenty-four kids went from ground-zero normal to
total psychos. That’s this place, Mara. We’re all these nice, normal kids after
the laughing and joking wears off, and it starts to sink in that it’s okay to
tie people up and strip them and make them crawl around on the floor. That no
one’s going to stop you if you just, oh, bend someone’s arms and legs backwards
so they look like a crab and make them scuttle around while you and your
friends pitch pebbles at their bellybuttons. Nobody here started out evil, you
know? We’re all normal!”

Mara nodded
distractedly, knowing as she had known all her life that normal people were
never very nice, deep down. “You’re still okay.”

“Yeah, right. I’m
the guy wearing sandals made out of human skin.”

“At least it’s
your own human skin.”

“Yeah.” But he
didn’t sound very convinced. “So what’s next in your search?”

Mara scowled,
fixing her attention once more on Connie, missing Connie. “I haven’t seen her
in the dining hall. I haven’t seen her here, where the students live. I haven’t
found her in the lyceum, but—”

“Not all the
doors are open,” Devlin said, nodding. “You have to know some of the arts in
order to take some of the lessons. You know, like, Advanced Transmutation 201.”

“I thought once
you’d mastered something—”

“In the
beginning, all you really master is the Word, but you still can’t use it. Most
people still can’t use it,” he amended, glancing at her. “The other Masters
teach you how to specialize. How to combine arts. That sort of thing. But you
can’t do anything until you know the Words, so they keep the doors closed.”

“Connie might
still be—”

“Sure, she
might, but she’d still have to eat, wouldn’t she?”

“Stop
interrupting me, Devlin, it is pissing me off.”

Devlin shut his
mouth and tucked his head, sawing a little faster at his hair and shooting
swift, nervous glances at her over his hunched shoulders.

“Connie might
still be taking lessons,” Mara said again. “And hiding from the other
students.”

“Hiding where?”

That was the
question, wasn’t it? A lot of tunnels went unexplored in the Scholomance, a lot
of doors only opened for demons. If she was hiding, she couldn’t be doing it
without help. Assuming that she was hiding and not being held against her will
(the image of Malavan’s faceless, twitching Pretty Doll rose in her mind and
had to be pushed ruthlessly away), she had to have an arrangement with one of
the Masters.

Horuseps had
promised to check every Master’s harem and the promise had been so painful that
she had to believe him when he said she hadn’t been there.

Maybe she’d been
moved. Malavan could have easily warned whatever passed for his friends that
Horuseps was making inspections. If he thought that one of his friends really
had Connie, he might have even hidden her himself. But now that the search was
over, she might have been moved back.

Maybe. Could
have. Might. God damn it all, where was she?

“The advanced
theaters are the same as the basic ones, right?” Mara asked. “The Masters who
teach there have to live there too?”

“I guess. Why?” And
then he looked at her, half-smiling but faintly alarmed. “She’s not going to be
down in one of their
rooms
! Students aren’t allowed!”

“I happen to
know for a fact that sometimes they are.”

A puzzled stare
was her only answer.

“When the demons
want to fuck—” Mara began patiently.

He blushed and
untied his robe’s sleeves, covering himself up in quick, self-conscious jerks. “They
do it right out in the halls.”

“You aren’t
aware that sometimes they keep harems?”

“No! Well…I
don’t know. Maybe.” He was thinking about it now, so Mara tapped restlessly at
his thoughts and took whatever seemed relevant for herself. He’d never seen a
student go up or down the dark stair at the back of any theater, but he had
seen Masters ask this or that one to stay behind after class. For how long, he
didn’t know. It wasn’t as if roll were called, and Devlin was very good at
keeping his head down. In the end, all he could do was shrug at her. “Whatever
they do here…you can’t stop it.”

“We’ll see.”

She felt another
flare of emotion out of him, but this time, it was anger. “You know, you’re not
one of them, no matter how hard you try to be!”

She stared at
him.

“And if you’re
not trying to be, then…then that’s even worse, because that’s what it looks
like.” He shoved his comb and his knife into his sleeve and glared back at her,
his stomach in knots. “Not just to me, to everyone!”

“Do you honestly
think I care what I look like to
you
?” she snapped.

“I don’t think
you care about anything,” he said, dropping his eyes. “Not even her. You just
don’t want anyone else to have her. It’s all about winning.”

She did not lose
her temper. She stayed calm, she stayed cool.

“This is pretty
tough talk for a man with a bunny tattoo,” she remarked. “And I really have to
wonder if you’d still be saying it if I’d come here to find
you
.”

He flinched,
inside and out, and kept his eyes averted. His hands drew up into fists, and
then opened again. He stared at his sandals and didn’t dare to speak.

“You’re fine,”
Mara said with a short sigh. She headed for the door. “Go on up. Get some
breakfast before they ring the bells on you.”

And Devlin, of
course, followed her. “Where are you going?”

“To do that
thing I mentioned before I talk myself out of it.” She glanced at him. “And I
don’t want a witness.”

“Are you going
to kill someone?” he asked in a hushed voice.

“I don’t kill
people,” she said crossly, and walked faster.

“But you could
if you wanted to!” he insisted, trotting after her.

Mara stopped on
the stair and swung on him. “Want to know who I’d start with?”

He drew up fast,
trapped in her hot stare, then sidled around her and fled for the dining hall.

“Idiot,”
muttered Mara, and let him go.

She passed
several students as she made her way across the Nave and into the hive-like
open cavern of the lyceum, including a few who bathed with a complete lack of
self-consciousness in the fountain there. Some just wanted a place to eat their
hard-won breakfast outside the noise and confusion of the dining hall. Others
gathered in small groups to practice a particular art or gossip about their
instructors. They all saw her, recognized her, and paid her no mind as she
climbed the spiraling stair to the top. She was just another student to them,
attempting an early start on some lesson or another.

True enough, she
supposed. And the lesson for today was how to balance deception with need.

More and more,
she was certain that she needed Kazuul. She wasn’t sure yet just why, but she
was used to trusting her instincts. And until she figured it out, it couldn’t
hurt her cause to bask in the king’s favor while she continued searching his
kingdom.

But if Kazuul
knew or even suspected how essential he had become to her plans, any advantage
she might have over him was gone. And Kazuul was a telepath. A telepath who
would be touching her in a very short time, flesh to flesh.