The Scholomance (48 page)

He bowed to her,
his hands together at heart’s height, then turned and left.

The silence was
ghastly, the whispers that broke it even worse.

“Mara…” Devlin
raised his hand and dropped it again without touching her. He was afraid to
touch her.

‘He should be,’
Mara thought wearily, looking down at the woman sobbing on the stone floor. ‘Look
what I do when I touch people.’

She knelt. The
woman shrieked and pulled away. Mara slapped her without emotion, stepped on
her to keep her still, and spoke that intoxicating Word.

All around,
students stared.

Mara returned
the arm to its normal dimensions and let her go. The woman ran. Gazelles will
do that. Mara moved past the silent, gaping figures of her fellow students and
went back to her cell alone. The race was still being run. She ignored it. There
were worse things.

*
         
*
         
*

That night, she
dreamt of Connie and what she did to Connie’s arms.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

M
ara woke. She reached out in the darkness and
touched the wall beside her poor bed. That was all for a long time. The stone
was very cool and hard and rough under her hand. Grounding. Comforting, even,
particularly after the nasty spate of dreams she’d had. She could have switched
the monitors off and remained asleep, but just knowing what horrific images
were birthing themselves in her subconscious made her abandon the Panic Room
and wake. She wasn’t tired anyway. She wanted, oh, she just wanted to lie here.

Her fingers
drifted over the rock. ‘Close thy useless eyes,’ she thought, and felt the
mountain open around her. She Saw her cell through her fingertips, and Saw the
space beyond its cramped dimensions. The Word for Malleation poured through her
mind. Her lips moved to give it voice, and then the walls rolled back. It was
easy, as easy as turning a woman’s arms to wings.

Mara sat up at
the center of her new cell. She’d made the walls too smooth and now her breath
echoed. She raised a bed beneath her, a bed like Kazuul’s, wide and rounded
with a great bat-winged headboard behind her, but it was hard, hard as stone.

And why this
bed, she wondered? A flex of mental effort stole the headboard back and squared
out some of the curves, but the resemblance remained, at least to her mind. She
wanted to go to him, right now. She didn’t trust the urge, but close inspection
showed her no tampering in her thoughts, no trespassers in the Mindstorm. She
just didn’t want to be alone.

And his bed was
soft, not like this stone copy. She remembered suddenly, clearly, how it had
felt when he lay her down—the first comforts since leaving home, the first
gentle touches. She remembered how he’d arranged her across his tattered
bedding, how his hands had rasped across her skin, and the hot ribbon of his
tongue slipping inside her.

Right. And then
he’d called her a wretched, loveless creature and laughed her out of his
chambers. The insult didn’t bother her—all right, it bothered her, but she’d
live—but the laughter did. She’d been wrong to give in to him once, and she
hated knowing that she had to go back. He had nothing to tell her, nothing to
give her. He had nothing.

But oh, his
breath on her belly when he called her beautiful…the smoldering heat of his
eyes as he lay beneath her, smiling as he watched her ride him.

Her loins
throbbed. No, that was too gentle. She cramped with need, her sex already hot
and aching, her womb an empty furnace. Mara drew her knees up and stared into
the black as she touched herself. Her pussy felt swollen already, silky with
dew.

‘I’m restless,
that’s all,’ she thought. ‘I’m restless and I need to get laid.’

She put her
hands on the bed—her empty bed—and Malleated through it to raise shelves on the
wall. She had no books, but she couldn’t think of any other way to make the
room look like a room. She could put her cup up there, she supposed. And her
comb.

Mara got up and
put her robe on. It wasn’t surrender, it was just…well, it wasn’t surrender. She
was scratching an itch, that was all, no different than any other time she’d
prowled out to find a man and make him take her home. Anyone would do, it
didn’t have to be Kazuul…and it wouldn’t be. Not yet. Not until she had to.

The tunnels were
empty where Mara wandered. First-bell had yet to ring and all the good and
faithful students either slept or did their forbidden skulking more secretly
than Mara. Tapping at dreams and fingering thoughts through narrow cell
windows, she made her silent way to and from the ephebeum maybe a dozen times,
until finally she walked up the center of the wide stair and across the Nave,
to sit on a long, low bench before the Black Door.

Her body,
stirred by movement, pulsed with need, but one would never know it to look into
her eyes, she thought. Her reflection gazed back at her from the Black Door’s
polished face, unmoved, untouched by any emotion. The gruesome nightmares that
had chased her out of sleep would seem to have left no mark on her, no dark and
sunken stare, no gaunt and shaken countenance…only Kimara Warner’s snowy-eyed
indifference.

Something moved
behind her. She heard nothing, but saw it in the door, something crawling up
the ornate stalactite/column at her back. Its eyes caught the sallow lamplight
and gleamed yellow. It watched her from its perching place near the vaulted
cavern ceiling, then leapt out—a scrawny, sag-fleshed thing that suddenly
flattened out into a shape like a shadowy manta ray—and glided across the Nave
to land against another column. She heard nothing, not even the scrape of its
claws as it faded into the black.

She felt no
menace from it, only a watchful hunger. It knew she wasn’t supposed to be here
just yet. It knew also about the ache between her thighs, belied by her cold
expression. Every breath it took brought it the musk of her aimless desire. Its
penis, a black stinger carried at the tip of its lashing tail, curled up
between its knobby legs where he could squeeze it. He thought of leaping out
again—a stoop, a strike, a struggle—and then stabbing upward between those
kicking thighs, and how hot and fine she would be…

Whatever it was
licked his palm, rubbing the swelling tip of his poisonous tail, then jumped
off the ceiling and soared silently away, to the Library, where prey could
wriggle but never run. Not a Master then, to come down and punish her for her
bold disobedience, but just another inhuman thing creeping about, like her,
without permission.

Mara’s hand
stole to her lap. She watched it in the dark mirror of the door as it slipped
down to the crux of her thighs. Her fingertips pressed, rested, burrowed
slightly, stroked twice, and lay still.

‘I’m lonely,’
thought Mara.

She stood up and
walked, not back down into the student’s level and the safety of her cell, but
onward, upward, and into the lyceum, where for all she knew, every demon was
out and about and eager to call a tribunal.

But none of them
were.

The open hive of
that central cavern was just as empty and still as the ephebeum below her. Mara
climbed the winding path past passageways filled with silent theaters,
thinking, ‘Not Kazuul. Anyone but him,’ right up until the very top, and even
into the ornate corridor that led to no one else but him. She told herself it
wasn’t surrender as she walked past orgiastic carvings all the way to the last
twinned pillars where his smiling/sneering face met her over his closed doors. ‘Not
Kazuul,’ she thought, and opened them. ‘Or at least, not
for
Kazuul. It
could even be a kind of torture for him, if I want it to be.’

And it was
torture, every step. She climbed down the dusty risers and down the drafty
stairs in distant agony, tugging at the neck and sleeves of her robe several
times as she went, finally pulling the whole heavy thing off just as she came
through the hanging curtains of his doorway. The sun was out—high noon, even
earlier than she’d thought—and he was on his aerie, comfortably hunkered with
half a loaf of dark bread in one hand, smeared with either blood or jam. He ate
at leisure, watching the clouds pass over the lake below him, impervious to the
bitter cold and howling wind, impervious to everything. She was halfway to him
before he knew she was there, and he swung fast, surprise becoming anger
becoming even greater surprise.

“Disrobe,” she
said impatiently, walking even faster now that her goal was in sight.

He straightened
at once, flinging his breakfast without looking at it out into the world, and
battled his plated belt open.

“Disrobe,” she
said again, angrily, grabbing at the complicated layers of leather and silk and
chain, and yanking them away in a single piece as soon as he’d worked out the
buckle. She threw it behind her, not caring where it landed or what it broke
when it did. She reached up and snatched at the golden clasp that kept his hair
back and pulled that away, too. His hair was too fine to catch in it, no matter
how rough she was; it fanned out eagerly in the breeze, lapping at her wrist,
swallowing her fingers. “Disrobe,” she whispered. He had nothing else to wear.

He bent. She
turned her face away. He hesitated, then bit at the side of her throat, two
short nips and then a long bite, his breath scorching her skin. She could feel
in exquisite clarity the racing of her pulse as his sharp teeth pressed down,
as she could feel his hidden thoughts churning behind his defenses.

He lifted his
mouth, growled softly, then went to one knee. He bit at her belly, very gently,
his teeth scraping at the jumping muscles just below her navel. His hands
brushed over her thighs, gently opening her to him. He bit right at the crown
of her cleft, his tongue snaking in to rub back and forth across her clit. He
growled again. It wasn’t a sound of desire, not before and not now.

Mara fumbled
behind her for the wall and found it just at the edge of her reach. Bracing
herself awkwardly on one arm, she groped for a horn or a spike or something
with the other, anchoring himself to him. She lifted one leg, let him help her
find a way to bring it across his spiked shoulder, and rolled her hips forward
against his mouth. He growled a third time; his back was tense under her bare
foot, as hard as stone.

His tongue knew
where to go, what to do. His claws dug at her buttocks now and then, flexing as
with impatience or anger, as he pressed himself deeper. He explored all,
returning again and again to the chapel of her clitoris to tease it from its
silken sheath before plunging deep inside her to drink. He bit six times at her
thighs, twice drawing blood, which he licked away. Mara didn’t mind. She came
for him like the false tide that lapped at the lake’s shore, rolling in and out
by her own will and not by any moon’s direction. Still the cramping insistence
of her womb went on.

“Give thyself to
me,” he murmured. His voice was tight with restraint, trying to be seductive
through a timbre of frustration. “Beautiful Mara, lie beneath me. Open
thyself—” His tongue snaked along her sex and thrust once, as deep as he could
go, before he withdrew, seething. “—and admit me. I am thine, ever thine. I am
thy lord and Master.”

She couldn’t
answer him. It seemed to take all her willpower just to keep breathing. She
stared at the ceiling, her fingernails digging at his scalp. She hated him.

He waited,
breathing hard against her pussy, and each hot pant of air was a punishment.

“Let go of me,”
she said at last.

Snarling, his
claws clenched on her thighs.

She smacked at
the side of his face, shivering at the delicious way her slap had vibrated
through him and into her, and he snarled again and released her. Mara backed
up, leaned against his wall, and ached.

Kazuul didn’t
move. Hunkered low, spikes stiff and menacing, he lay his emptied arm over one
bent knee and glared at her, somewhat coarse of breath. A smear of her blood
darkened one cheek. She felt the light-headed and mercifully brief urge to lick
it off. His teeth were bared, glinting. Between his powerful thighs, lost in
shadows with the full sun behind him, his greatest weapon jutted toward her,
blackly gleaming at its eager tip.

She told herself
she hated him, hated him.

The dull green
coals of his eyes shifted. He glared at the locket that hung over her breasts
and his curled lip curled further. He looked at her again and the silent snarl
faded. He thought, and she could hear those thoughts howling behind their many
sound-proofed walls, unintelligible to her.

“I misspoke,” he
said at last, spitting the words like bile.

“The hell you
did!”

“I mocked thee
and she for spite.”

“Don’t patronize
me.”

He gave her half
a smile then, one bitter with understanding. “Tis ever easier to bite than to
make apology, aye, or to hear one.”

He stood up. She
stepped back, hit the wall, and came furiously away from it to meet him. He
caught her chin in a grip too quick and too tight to be the loving thing it
mimicked. She could feel his thumbclaw pushing deep at her cheek, deep enough
to threaten blood, if not quite enough to draw it. “Would that I could bite her
from thy mind,” he murmured, and bent, his teeth shining. He hesitated. His
mouth closed, firm but painless, over hers. He breathed into her. She groaned,
fought briefly, groaned again, and kissed him.