The Scholomance (49 page)

There, against
the wall with sunlight painting her right side and demon’s darkness at her
left, they met in clawing, slashing, snarling, oddly-restrained little fits,
interrupted by equally strange patches of mutual surrender. She slapped and
gouged at him as he fought his tongue inside her, then arched as he relaxed to
feel his claw-tipped hand cupping and kneading at her breast, only to kick and
bite brutally five seconds or even ten, before riding the hand he thrust
between her thighs to a slow and stabbing climax. She didn’t like him, but she
wanted him. ‘Just an itch,’ she thought, reaching between them to grip the
searing brand of his erection and feel it throbbing in her hand. Her own sex
cramped in rhythm, and it was not sensuality as much as
sickness
.

“You did this to
me!” she hissed, clenching her fist, writhing on his thrusting fingers.

“Have I? Then
come,” he snarled into her mouth, into her soul. “Reap of my labors! Come and
reap and sow again, but be with me!”

Her hand on him
shook. She arched up, grabbing at his spikes for leverage, ready to be impaled,
ready to be consumed. She locked her thighs around his hand, entirely
suspended, and screamed when she came, screamed like a cat, screamed and
stabbed at him with her own savage pleasure. She felt it strike, resonate, and
then felt both the hot splash of his seed on her thigh and the hotter roar of
his fury. She bit him purely by instinct, guided by that roar in ways she could
not, in her throes, decipher. He came again, stabbing right back at her, and
back and forth it went, ebbing a little at each echo, until they lay together
in a damp heap on the floor, arms and legs entwined but bodies ruthlessly
separate, feeling sun and shadow in icy unity, all panting breath and bloody
lips.

The first bell
rang.

Kazuul’s hand,
resting possessively across her hip, turned to claws. He growled softly.

She started to
shift away from him, to stand.

With an
ear-splitting bellow, he seized her and threw her down on the floor, rolling
over her, crushing her, panting into her face.

They stared at
each other.

“
Piss
!”
he spat, and flung himself aside, cracking two of his larger spikes without
even seeming to notice. He got up and stalked to the aerie, dropping into a
fuming crouch as the sun fell out of the darkening sky.

Mara collected
her robe on the way out and left him without speaking.

*
         
*
         
*

She took a quick
bath in the fountain of the lyceum, scrubbing away all proof of the encounter
in just a minute or two, then ran down to the dining hall in good appetite. Devlin
waved at her from the fringes of the farthest table. She ignored him and went
to the central one, where the acolytes were concentrated, along with the most
food. They tried—as any scavengers to any interloper—to shut her out, but a
Mara fresh from sexual combat was not a Mara easily shut out. Her mindslap
blasted half a dozen black-robes to the floor and she reached in to help
herself to a stale loaf of brown bread and a crumbling block of cheese. There
was meat as well. She left that and sat down at the end of the table to eat.

‘And good
morning to you,’ thought Horuseps loudly, in tones that were faintly marveling.
‘Are you quite all right?’

**Shouldn’t I
be?**

‘You look as
though you’ve taken rather a nasty tumble.’

Mara started to
laugh, realized there had been no double entendre in his words, and gave her
tooth-bruised arms a thoughtful look. “Malleate,” she said in that ancient
tongue, and, oblivious to the shocked quiet rolling out around her, restored
her torn and tingling flesh. It wasn’t quite the same as healing, and if the
bites were destined for infection, they were now set to be some nasty
abscesses, but she looked better and that was the what mattered now. She bit
into her cheese. It was hard and tart and wonderful.

Too late, she
remembered that arts were not allowed in the dining hall. She swept her mind
across the Master’s table, but felt no complaint (surprise from some, both
pleased and otherwise, but no complaint), and settled down with her bread. It
was still tough, still gritty, still packed with seeds, but good for all that. ‘Hunger
is the greatest spice,’ she reminded herself, one of her mother’s many sayings
in the days before she’d taken to compulsively nibbling Lunchsnax, and good sex
made a hell of an appetizer.

Horuseps sipped
at his wine, watching her. ‘When did you learn that, Bittersweet?’

**What?** she
asked, distracted, chewing. **Malleate?**

Horuseps set
down his cup with a loud bang, one black hand flying up to press at his pale
brow. Pain radiated out of him briefly; he looked at her through the slits of
his star-studded eyes, his lips pulled thin and unsmiling.

Mara let her
bread lower. **What did I just do to you?**

‘You damned near
gave my brains a stir,’ he replied, each word riding a wry throb of agony. ‘Magic
is will, my dearest one. Mentalism is also magic, of a simpler sort. You—’

He stopped
there, frowning.

Mara stood up,
ignoring the rest of her breakfast as she approached the table. **You mean all
I have to do is think an art at you? Even one like—**

‘Must you?’ he
interrupted, pretending almost as much horror as he actually felt.

**I wouldn’t
have used the real Word. I just can’t believe it’s that easy.**

‘Mentalism is
not ‘easy’, my heart.’ He sat quietly enough while she touched his forehead,
accepted her silent and somewhat belated apology with a nod, and then caught
her hand before she withdrew it. ‘You never answered me. When did you learn
that Word?’

**Yesterday. From
Master Ruk.**

 
‘You went to class then?’

**I met him in
the hall.** She reached up to rub her smooth brow, as if she could feel the
indelible marks he’d spoken of when he’d tried to explain about truancy in the
Scholomance. **Does that count? Am I marked?**

‘Your marks come
from a far greater hand, my darling, and they are not for our accounting. But I
am so pleased to see you studying, and with such success. There are no easy arts…and
Malleation is among the more complex.’ He released her with a wave and she
retreated across the dining hall, helping herself to another loaf of bread as
she went. She had almost reached her place at the acolyte’s table when he
struck again, a question as pointed and precisely aimed as any arrow: ‘Did you
cheat it out of another student…or did you cheat it out of Ruk?’

The teeth of
that trap were all around her. A lie was risky—sending thoughts wasn’t like
speaking words, where lies were effortless—and silence would tell the truth for
her. And the truth was terrible, she grasped that perfectly. Masters were set
well above the students and there must never be even one of them opened and
invaded. She had touched Ruk’s mind, and knew that all his weirdly genuine
pride and ghost-pale affection for her would go up like so much flash-paper if
he ever guessed she’d been inside him and pulled his art out for her own.

All this
flickered through Mara’s mind, fully formed and brilliantly illuminated behind
the Panic Room’s walls, in an unstudied instant. Without a pause, she thought
back, **Whether you cheat or not, you still win. I told you that once already. I
wanted a bigger room. Now I have it. And I want a softer bed.** She sat down at
the table and looked at him, meeting his narrow eyes without flinching. **Tell
me where to go.**

He didn’t believe
her. He was himself too adept at sidestepping questions not to see it when it
happened in front of him.

And he did
believe her. Thoughts did not lie as easily as words, and she was young, far
too young and simple, to deceive him so adroitly in the quiet of her mind.

Horuseps brooded
on the dilemma, his long fingers picking his morning haunch of meat into
bite-sized shreds which he did not eat. Perhaps she was not so simple, he
thought, down deep where he believed he could think freely. Her kind did not breed
cleverness, but once in a great while, there could be spawned a kind of dark
cunning. The possibility intrigued him and aroused him. He thought of her in
his theater, stealing in mere moments what took others years to grasp, what had
taken even him many days in the bygone ages of his youth. He imagined her and
the hulking Ruk together, bent over some faceless boy in a robe, he pouring
power into her hands and never thinking that she might, while his great eye
wandered, bring those hands to her lips and drink.

Not a single art
was taught here that at least one human did not understand. Horuseps mused on
this, dissecting his meat, and thought that she could have them all in a single
day if she wanted.

Mara waited,
patiently working through her bread. She could have told him she had no
interest in pursuing every art. She didn’t see the point. They were useful only
here, in the Scholomance, and only as weapons of fascination against other
students. Once outside, back in the real world, with Connie, they would all be
meaningless. What could she do with Malleation except maybe sit in some
basement and sculpt statues for touristy roadside stands? What good was eternal
youth after fifty years, when no one on Earth would ever believe she was that
Kimara Warner anyway? It was magic, sure it was, and it was good stuff, but at
the end of the day, what was magic but a handful of cheap tricks no one else
believed in? Unless she wanted to rampage through the streets, Malleating roads
and buildings and the bodies of screaming people as part of some quest to rule
the world, and it didn’t get much more meaningless than sitting on a
skull-covered throne, killing time while the world’s population stared up at
you and waited for instructions. All she wanted was a more comfortable cell.

‘Transmutation,’
Horuseps said, breaking Mara from her private reverie. ‘Master Dalziel teaches
the inexperienced. After you’ve cheated your way through what he has to offer,
I’m sure he’ll direct you onward.’

**Thank you,**
she told him.

‘You are always
very welcome,’ he answered. And then he clasped his hands into a cradle where
he could rest his aching head and look at her while she ate, wondering what she
knew, wondering what put that hard little smile on her lips, and wondering who
it was she softened her bed for…and if it were he…

*
         
*
         
*

Devlin knew Master
Dalziel and was only too happy to take her to the proper theater once the bell
had rung. In the hive-like front cavern of the lyceum, one mind swelled and
shadowed all the bustling clamor of the students. Mara looked up as she
followed Devlin up the stairs and there he was, at the very top, his clawed
hands all that were visible as they rested heavily on the rails. The rest of
him was lost in shadow, but she knew Kazuul was watching her. She glimpsed a
dizzying echo of what he saw bouncing back at her as she stared into the
heights—the cave spiraling up to him and back down to her, ringed all around
with white and black robes in motion.

His mind brushed
at hers cautiously, promising even greater pleasures, if only she would return
with him to his bedchamber and give him every will of her.

It was
disturbing just how tempting a thought that was. Mara ignored him, not even
bothering to refuse. The thought lingered, then shut itself away, and the next
time she looked up, the hands at the rails were gone, and he was lost back up
in the hidden reaches where his lair waited to take him in. And her, surely.

Would she go? She
thought so, when this day was done. An hour’s hard surrender to just keep him
on his toes, and then back to her own cell, and if she could make him roar
again when she left him, all the better. All the better, because she hated him.

But for now, a
pointed snub could only soften him toward her when she returned, and lessons were
as good a way to pass the time as any, even if the subject matter itself were
not particularly useful beyond her immediate needs.

Dalziel’s
theater was among the more accessible, reached by one of the first passageways,
where it was the first doorway. It seemed surprisingly crowded to Mara’s eye,
perhaps more so since each of the twenty or thirty students had brought some
kind of prop with them: crudely-cut hunks of stone, dried lengths of split
wood, long animal bones (she hoped they were animal), a small number of vases
or statuettes. The teacher was himself absent, but not long after Mara and
Devlin found a place in the highest riser to sit, he appeared.

Mara’s first
thought was that it was another woman, or at least, a female like Zyera or
Letha. It moved like one, hips and shoulders swaying in ways even real women
had to work at. Her second thought, without prejudice or emotion, was that it
was male and simply screamingly gay. Then it came all the way off the stairs
into the dais and she thought it might just be a regular straight male after
all, it was just a snake. That wasn’t right either, but it was probably closer
to the truth than either of her first two thoughts.

He was pale,
this demon, the yellowish not-quite-white of an albino python. He stood upright
and moved as though he were walking and not slithering, which was all the more
impressive since he had no legs. His body dropped down in a thick, ululating
trunk to about floor-level, where it diverged into dozens of tails or roots or
tentacles, all of them crawling over each other as they pushed and dragged him
along, and so he should have slithered, but no, he insisted on moving his hips,
on sashaying as close to human movement as he could manage. It was grotesque.