The Scholomance (46 page)

**Does that mean
you intend to stop me from leaving when I find Connie?** Mara asked. Her inner
voice stayed calm, but hard. She wanted him to see steel, and by his sudden,
well-guarded silence, knew that he had.

The second bell
rang, and still Horuseps said nothing.

**Another time,
then,** she sent, as students began their roaring exodus out into the Nave. **But
you had better decide what you are going to do about it, because the time is
coming.**

‘You sound very
fierce, as always, sweetling, but stop and think. Are you really prepared to
fight your way free of us?’ Horuseps asked, his silent words pulsing with
humor.

**I think the
better question is, are you really prepared to have all your groveling students
see someone fight?**

Mara got up from
the empty table and headed for the door, where Devlin waited for her, somewhat
bruised from the breakfast battle. She didn’t get an answer, and she didn’t
expect one. She supposed it would probably get back to Kazuul, and then he’d
have another reason to want her in chains, but she’d deal with that when and if
it happened. For now, it mattered more that the question had finally been
asked: What were they prepared to do when she finally had what she came for? They
had to think about it, because it was only by knowing what they were thinking
that she’d ever be able to plan a way around it.

*
         
*
         
*

Mara went back
down into the ephebeum, still hungry and now restless as well. She had begun to
think there was no point in continuing her search until she had some means of
accessing the forbidden areas and there was only one person who could give it. She
doubted like hell he’d let her just because she showed up to ask. He was going
to know she needed him when she came back and he was going to want to see her
crawl first. The time for granting requests would come after the lord of the
Scholomance finished the fucking the respect back into her.

Bastard.

She could deal
with it if she had to, but she was just too angry to do it now. So she went to
the ephebeum. She would take a bath, she decided, maybe wash her robes once the
other students took themselves to class, and she would spend her day reminding
herself how to be cool, how to be calm.

Unfortunately,
it seemed everyone had the same idea. When first-bell rang in the Scholomance,
the goal of every student was to get to the dining hall and get fed. That was
what made it the best time to find privacy in the garderobe. It was now, after
second-bell, that the body’s other needs took priority, and while a person
could snatch a bath in the lyceum as easily as here, there was only the one
garderobe in the whole damn mountain.

Never mind. She
would wait them all out in her room. Sooner or later, they’d all go to cla—

Halfway across
the ephebeum, someone shoved her. Not maliciously, but she still had to grab at
the neck of Devlin’s robe to keep from dropping and falling under the tromping
feet of a few hundred indifferent students. She straightened, a psychic attack
at the ready, but the shover was already five steps ahead and worming his way
deeper into the crowd, oblivious to her. She tapped at him instead, and felt
the young, disconnected mind-print of the boy from the dining hall. He kept his
head down and moved fast, trying to lose himself amid all the other white
robes. He thought he was being followed.

Was he? Mara
moved quickly out of the unprotected open, dragging Devlin with her almost
without noticing him. She lost sight of the boy, but sent his image out,
hunting for resonance.

And found it.

Loki was at the
top of the stairs, making his way down slow, giggling. He was obvious enough,
but the obvious threat wasn’t always the most dangerous. Loki was indeed
chasing the boy, but just to make him run, not to catch him. Catching him was
for—

La Danse sprang out
from around a jut of rock and caught the boy in a textbook full nelson. Instantly,
the boy set out screaming and struggling, but Danse was bigger, stronger, and
had his arms wrenched high behind his back in seconds, his head shoved down
right against his chest. Students scattered back from them in a flurry of
panic, then came carefully back and began to add their jeers and laughter to La
Danse’s as he dragged his quarry out of the garderobe’s tunnel mouth and into
the open. He did it slow, making sure everyone had a chance to poke, slap, or
spit at his prize.

It wasn’t very
violent, but the hostility was shocking, so much more than what she would have
thought a fruitless play in the dining hall deserved. They were tearing at him
like a pack of a wild dogs, even people who hadn’t seen him make his foolish
dive for a handful of acolyte’s breakfast.

This was not a
safe place to be.

“Do you know
him?” Mara asked, releasing her grip on Devlin’s robe.

He immediately
and too casually slid behind her. “No. People don’t really get to know the
gazelles, you know.”

“Then why is
everyone laughing?”

“Because it
isn’t them,” Devlin said. “Yet.”

“A race!” La
Danse shouted, grinning like a skull over the top of the boy’s tossing head. “We
must have a race!”

Pandemonium. Some
of the acolytes quietly excused themselves and left for class, but most erupted
in cheers and lunged at white-robes. The neophytes were also sharply divided;
some, like laughing Loki, sprang up and joined in the hunt, but most were
runners, their panic bright as razor-shine in Mara’s mind.

Devlin slowly
sank down behind her. She glanced at him and up again in time to see an acolyte
coming at her. Her eyes narrowed. She readied a slap.

But the man
paused, recognition stealing the fervor from his little game. He lowered his
snatching hands, hesitated a glance at Devlin, then backed up and launched
himself at someone else.

“Thank you,”
Devlin whispered at her shoulder.

“Get out from
there,” she snapped, throwing an elbow into him.

“A race! A race!”
Rope belts were removed and captured neophytes dragged to opposite sides of the
cavern. At one end of the ephebeum’s central space, the collected neophytes
were stripped and bound at wrist and ankle with their hands before them. One of
the acolytes gaily produced a small pot of ink from his sleeve and began to
paint numbers on the victims’ naked backs. No longer trying to escape, the captured
neophytes stood for it, shivering with cold and humiliation. At the other end,
an equal number of neophytes were de-robed and stood in a row, penned in on all
sides by laughing, jeering students, but left unmarked. They were not the
participants, it seemed, although just what they were eluded her for the
moment.

“A triathlon, I
think,” Le Danse called, striding out into the center of the ephebeum.

Cheers.

“Does this
happen often?” Mara asked.

“What else are
they going to do, watch TV?”

A good point.

“For the first
leg, the worm-race!” More cheers, which Le Danse magnanimously waved down. “Contestants,
to your bellies and crawl. It is not so far, eh?”

Not so far. Perhaps
three hundred feet, end to end, naked, across a rough stone floor. Mara glanced
at the five men marked to compete, but saw no rebellion in them, only anger and
defeat.

“The second leg
must be…the swallow’s race!” Le Danse bowed to his cheering section, beaming
from ear to ear, then pointed to the silent row of naked neophytes held at the
far end of the ephebeum. “When you reach your partner, feel free to help
yourself to, ah, a little protein drink! As much as you like, they have plenty!”

Roars of
laughter. The neophytes in the distance kept their heads bent and their fists
at their sides, burning with humiliation.

“It must be to
the finish.” Danse wagged a chiding finger at the captive racers being pressed
to their bellies before him. “You must show proof to our judges before you
swallow or you will be required to begin again. No exceptions! And last…” A
dramatic pause while he thought, then Danse threw out his arms, crying, “The
piss-race!”

“Are they all
like this?” Mara wondered.

“They’re all
bad, if that’s what you mean. But it’s never exactly the same race.” And he’d
been in several over the years, as a racer or as a hurdle. Even now, he wanted
to throw up, just being here.

Shallow basins
were produced and passed among the acolytes and their white-robed flunkies, who
were only too happy to fill them.

“You may walk,
crawl, or slither,” Danse told the bound men generously, “bearing those upon
your back, until you return to your starting point. So easy! Unless you drop
your pisspot, in which case, you will be immediately disqualified.”

Boos. Jeers. Laughter.

“For the winner?
Release!” Le Danse held up his hands to control a disappointed crowd, and once
they’d quieted, he cried, “The losers shall be set into stocks!”

Mara half-turned
to ask Devlin what the stocks were, but he was cringing behind her again. She
took two long steps to the right and hauled him up by the hood of his robe. “Do
not
hide
from these people, you damned fool!” she hissed.

“From race’s end
until last-bell!” Danse was shouting, scarcely audible over the cheers. “For
the amusement and buggery of all!”

And the fear she
felt from the contestants was not necessarily for that, but for the day of
class it meant they would miss. One precious day out of the ten allotted each
year, when exceeding one’s limit meant a Master’s hand dragging you out of
sleep up to the Black Door to the jangling, discordant pealing of the bells. And
that, Mara sensed, was half the fun for these jackals.

Sickening, all
of it. Mara left, cutting straight across the ephebeum with Devlin in his
flapping sandals right on her heels. Her exit delayed the start of the race,
but was not loudly booed. More than one person recognized her, it seemed.

“Aha! I didn’t
see you there, pretty bird!” Le Danse called. “But I thought I smelled sour
cunt. If you like, you and your little pet may take the place of any two
contestants you choose, but I warn you, you must restrict yourself to only one
partner in the swallow’s race! No fair drinking them all!”

Loki honked
laughter somewhere in the crowd.

Mara turned
around. “I’ve let this go as long as I’m going to,” she said calmly. “The next
time you speak to me, even to wish me a Merry Christmas, I am going to pop your
brain like a balloon. It won’t kill you. You want to think about what it will
mean for you to live the rest of your life here, entirely at the mercy of
others.”

He didn’t
believe her, and as the crowd around them ooo-ed and laughed and called mocking
warnings, he opened his mouth to call her bluff. And then he hesitated,
remembering a certain man in a white robe, the man who had been the first to
call her a pretty bird, what else, a swallow. She had turned and looked at him,
just looked, and the man had flinched and struck his head and…and had he only
flinched? Had he even struck his head? He had fallen into Danse’s lap, he
remembered that, and the next day he was still there on the ephebeum floor,
stripped of his robe and his hair, until the cold and the damp took him, and
then he was just gone.

Someone had even
taken his hair…

No, he did not
believe her, but there was no point in humoring her either. Le Danse turned away,
his arms up, ignoring her. “Let the triathlon begin!” he shouted, and everyone
applauded him.

Mara climbed the
wide stair to the Nave, and then to the lyceum, until their howling-ape minds
and their carnival cheers were behind her.

“Thanks,” Devlin
said again.

“You keep saying
that like you think I’m doing it for you.”

“It’s okay,” he
said. “I know you’ve got a reputation and everything. I won’t tell people how
you really are.”

Mara thought of
the boy stripped and tied on his belly, watching her walk away. “This is how I
really am, Devlin.”

“Right.” He
winked.

Oh, for God’s
sake. Mara walked a little faster, trying to lose herself in the knots of
students gathering in the central cavern outside the classrooms. It wasn’t
really crowded enough for that, but then, most of the acolytes were below,
watching the race.

“
Hold
.”

They stopped,
all of them. Mid-step, mid-word, motionless. Even Mara, in whom the habit had
no reason to be ingrained. She looked where the others looked, back down the
corridor at the Master coming toward them.

The ground did
not shake at his approach, but it should have. That was how he looked, the
first impression that he gave. He was a creature of stone, a creature to make
stone tremble. It was his size—half-again as tall as the tallest student here. It
was his skin—slate grey and pebbled as a heat-dried riverbed. It was his shape—slabs
of muscle slapped like clay over four thick legs and a barrel-body, the
inhumanly broad torso rising up to a domed, low-browed head.

“Bow not,” he
snarled, as students bobbed anxiously before him. “Show to me thy faces. Trial
enough it is to teach thee, pestilent ones, I’ll waste no more effort than I
must.
Hold, I say
!” he bellowed suddenly, rearing that massive, saurian
body and slamming his black hooves down again hard enough to crack the stone
under him. He aimed his hand like a hammer at a cringing man in a white robe,
his eyes blazing. “Aye, thee! Uncover thy head and show thy puling face! Ah, so
I thought. I’ve had thee already, and so thou wouldst run, eh? Thou wouldst
avoid me? Even me?” His voice kept rising, not higher and higher, but deeper
and darker, until it filled all the space in the hive-like caverns and in Mara’s
head. Sending, he was sending as he spoke, blasting these people with telepathy
they weren’t built to receive, just to make them scream and slap their hands
over their ears as he came for them. “Now I’ll have thee again, thou craven!”
he roared, already diving in to pluck the pleading man off the floor.