The Scholomance (7 page)

Mara lowered her
hands, glaring into the brilliance, but she did not see the man who regarded
her with such disdain (regarded all of them, really). No, her eyes were yanked
violently to one side, yanked and held, by the sight of something inhuman.

The Scholomance
was run by demons, Connie had said. Run by the Devil Himself. Mara’s very
limited and mildly condescending expectation had been of more people in robes,
perhaps more garish ones. Her equally limited and condescending experience of
demons depicted in the media were always rather cartoonish to her mind: red
skin or maybe black, yellow or red contact lenses, pasted-on horns, a computer-generated
tail and wings dubbed on in the final edit. Comic-book demons, in other words. Men
in costumes.

This was not a
costume. Nor was it a man.

Oh, but he might
have been. He stood very much like a man, on two legs. He had two arms, very
long and thin, but arms for all of that, folded across his chest so that his
bony, blackened hands rested on opposite shoulders. He had the features of a
man—a pretty face with two eyes, a mouth, a nose, even eyebrows, although they
hung well out in silky lengths so as to frame his sharp cheekbones. He had
hair, fine strands as pale as spiderwebs that dropped straight and shining over
his shoulders, with just one errant tress that cut playfully across his black
and glittering eyes. A man could maybe dress up like this thing in a movie. People
watching that movie may even laugh at the costume. But this, this was not a
man.

He wore no
clothes, although at first glance, he seemed to. From the hips down, he seemed
to be covered in layers of black, plated armor of some alien design, with odd
serrations and grooves over each snugly-fit seam and joint. On closer
inspection, one could see those seams moving slightly, just slightly, with each
minute movement of his body, and one realized it was skin. Those heavy, shiny,
armored plates were him, his shell, from which his moon-white upper body grew
like blown glass somehow affixed to obsidian. He had no nipples, no navel. His
chest had all the sculpted look of muscles (in a slender, slightly effeminate
way), but no hint of bones beneath—no ribs, no sternum, not even collarbones. His
demon’s face was thin, beautiful, smiling welcome as he waited for them, and
his eyes were the eyes of an insect—ovid and black, shining as with many
facets, but these were in fact lights. Lights not reflected from somewhere
else, but generated inside him and moving around. He had galaxies in his eyes. His
mind…

Mara slammed her
own away, not with a jerk and a bang, but softly, unhurriedly. Things that run
are the first to attract the hunter’s eye. He did not seem to see her as she
made herself fast against him, except as he saw all of them. His eyes moved
over her and moved on.

Somewhere in
this room, the man who had been waiting for them began to speak. Again and
again, in different languages, sounding both impatient and bored in all of
them. After a while, one of the arrivals flinched and stared around. The robed
man beckoned him closer to where he sat behind his imposing desk and
interrogated him in that other language. After a while, one of the robed
watchers from the cliff-side stepped up and took the newcomer away and the man
began his droning call again. The demon watched their numbers dwindle without
speaking. His smile never changed.

“Are you
English? Are you American? Canadian? Who among you is of this tongue?”

“I am,” said the
goth-girl, and Mara raised her hand without looking away from the demon or the
lights swirling in his eyes.

The man behind
the desk blew out a breath, one more richly stained with derision than the
others. The demon looked at the girl behind her, his mild expression unchanged,
and then at Mara, at her and into her, past the storm of outer thoughts which
assailed and surrounded her even here, to bump up against the little sanctuary
she had constructed for herself.

His pale brows
rose and twitched once.

“Over here,
then. Over here!” Snapping fingers, summoning her as if she were a dog. Mara
moved toward the desk, but her eyes stayed with the demon. “I’ll have your
names now. You first. Give me your hand.”

The girl behind
her uttered a sudden little yelp. Mara tapped at her without turning away from
the demon and saw blood welling from tip of a dirty finger.

“Sign here,” the
man said. Mara tapped at him as well. Gamaliel, he called himself. The archivist.
Summoned once each year from his studies to bring the applicants through the portcullis
and into the school. Gamaliel, but that was not his name. His name was Kaspar
Cortoreal, whose only talent had been with words and whose favorite vice had
been with women, and who had fled Portugal in the stillness and the heat of
that long-ago night with blood pooling out over the streets. She should not
have laughed, should not have threatened to scream, but she did and it was her
own fault, all her own, and he had taken her watch and her money and the book,
her journal, the little book where he first read in fevered wonder of the
Scholomance.

“Take her. Go! And
you. You! Come here!” Snapping fingers again. Mara put out her hand without
looking to see what he did with it. She kept the demon in front of her and
watched through the archivist’s eyes as he took up his pen and pierced her
naked finger. Blood welled. He took her hand and pressed the wound to a fresh
line in the ancient page, drawing a bar of wet red to dry below the other names
of applicants before her, applicants far more worthy. “Give me your name,” he
said, releasing her. He wiped his pen and dipped it in ink. “Name! Now! Have I
all day to spend ungluing the slack lips of foolish sluts who cannot even speak
their names? Give me your name!”

“Kaspar
Cortoreal,” she said, and the archivist cut a black gash of shock through the
page.

The demon’s head
tipped, regarding her from an angle, like a bird will do, or a bug. His hair
moved, rippling as if in the wind, but there was no breeze here.

“What are you?”
Mara asked.

The lights in
the demon’s eyes sparked and faded, like fireflies in a field. He did not
reply.

“Here,” said the
archivist, quietly now, subdued. “Take her.”

A hand touched
her arm. One of the plain-robed watchers, one of the women, waiting to lead her
away, but going meant turning her back on the demon and Mara wasn’t ready to do
that yet.

“What is he?”
she demanded, turning on the woman who held her.

“He is a Master
of the Scholomance,” the woman said. She tried to sound haughty, as if the
question were beneath contempt, but inside, she was taken aback by this
pale-eyed stranger who asked questions as with ignorance, but without fear.

That was all the
answer Mara was going to get, but she guessed it was answer enough. The women
believed what she said, believed they were in the Scholomance, that place of
evil legend, and she believed this creature in Man’s image was one of its
inhuman Masters. Nowhere in the mind yawning open before her was even a hint of
doubt or disbelief.

The archivist
had moved on to other languages, trying to ignore her, to ignore the fears and
memories stirred up by the sound of his name in the stranger’s mouth. He waved
them away, the woman who held her more than Mara herself, cursing them both in
another tongue. The woman, recovered and embarrassed, grabbed Mara’s wrist and
wrenched it, trying to pull her away, to make her stumble after like an errant
child in a schoolroom. Mara sensed it coming, got moving in time to rob her of
the worst of it, so that her arm got a good yank and that was all. She looked
at the demon once more as she was towed to a passageway and he looked back at
her, still smiling as he inclined his head for farewell.

One of the
Masters, the woman had said. There were more.

Mara was taken
to a small chamber, lit by another of those grossly-swollen blisters of glowing
light, and bare except for a large wooden box on the floor, opened and empty.

“Remove your
clothing. Put everything in here. All the things you wear. All that you
possess.” The woman rolled her eyes at Mara’s hesitation. “You will have it all
back when you leave this place.”

“Not everyone
leaves,” Mara said.

The woman smiled
unpleasantly. “Then we’ll burn it for you. Hurry up. I have better things to do
than herd stubborn sheep like you.”

Mara undressed. She
watched her body bare itself through the woman’s eyes and tasted a little envy,
which she was used to, and a little nervousness, which struck her as odd. ‘Beautiful,’
she was thinking, not quite fearfully. ‘Already so beautiful.’

Mara inspected
herself from this new perspective as the clothes went into the box. Beautiful,
yes, why not? She’d been an object of desire since she turned thirteen, even
younger in certain cases. Hers was a body of unreal beauty, the sort other
women could not hope to achieve without paying for it, or at least working at
it. Her hips were full, her buttocks shapely and toned, her belly flat, her
legs firm and long and perfectly curved. Her woman’s sex was hairless, smooth,
plump and taut at once. Her breasts were heavy, youthfully buoyant, and even. The
chill in here made her nipples hard. Her pale hair, disheveled by the climb,
fell in fine, wavy strands down her back. The sickly light shining out of the walls
turned it orange in places, made her too-pale skin seem to glow. Her lack of
embarrassment about her own nudity unnerved the woman further, spurning on that
strange envy. ‘Another pet for them,’ she was thinking. Aloud, she said only, “Everything.”

Mara didn’t have
much to divest herself of: shoes, socks, jeans, sweater, sunglasses, climbing
gear, flashlights. The cab driver’s little cross, of course, which the robed
woman laughed at. Her wallet and passport, along with a good wad of Romanian
cash and traveler’s checks, so that when she got out of here, she’d have the
means to get herself and Connie back to the States. She put it all into the box
without resistance; she’d deal with the problem of getting it all back when
that time came. Soon she stood over it in nothing but her skin and Connie’s
heart-shaped locket.

“Everything,”
the woman said again.

“I’m not taking
this off.”

Heaving a curt
sigh, the woman moved to snatch it.

Mara slapped,
not with her hand, but with her mind. The woman staggered back violently, both
arms flying uselessly up as her head snapped back. She overbalanced and fell,
her short cry of alarm cut into a grunt of impact. She sat there, sprawled,
looking up at Mara and clearly wondering what had just happened.

“Nobody touches
this,” Mara said softly.

“Who do you
think you are?” Up came the woman, her hands closing into fists of frustration,
but she didn’t raise them. “You don’t make the rules here, little cow! You’re
not different! You’re not special! Take it off immediately!”

“No.”

“Leave us,” said
a voice. An awful, quiet, scuttling sort of voice. The demon’s voice.

He came in from
the darkness of the passageway, gliding through it like ripples over tar. His
legs were invisible until he was nearly on top of her, but his upper half
seemed almost to glow. The yellow light from the blisters on the wall, Mara
saw, did not touch him.

The robed woman
bowed in a cringing, angry fashion. She left by backing out around the demon
and into the hall, her head down and eyes shut the whole way.

Alone with him,
Mara stood naked and waited.

The demon came
no nearer. His hands rested comfortably on his shoulders. They were black to
the wrists, like badly-painted gloves. One of his fingers twitched off and on,
as though keeping time to music only he could hear. He looked at her, all of
her, but began and ended with her eyes.

“Are you here to
make trouble?” he asked finally, smiling. He spoke English very well, only
slightly accented, and not in any way she recognized. His voice had a hissing
quality, even without any sibilants.

“I’ve never
taken this off,” Mara said. “Never since it was given to me. I won’t start now.”

He raised a hand
and brought it around to her face, brushing back her hair to slide the very tip
of his finger along her earlobe. His touch was too smooth, too cool. He had no
fingernails, no claws, nothing but smoothness. “You think you alone come here
with treasure? Do you think no other woman ever hesitated to part with her
trinkets? A wedding ring? A child’s birthstone? A bible or…” His eyes drifted
to the cabbie’s gift, shining in the top of Mara’s trunk. “…blessed cross?”

“I won’t take it
off,” Mara said again.

“Such is the
price of admission.”

“Then I’ll
leave.”

“That door is
closed.”

“Then kill me,”
Mara snapped. “But I’m not taking it off!”

The lights of
his eyes swam, clustering together for a heartbeat before spinning apart. He
lowered his hand from her cheek.

She reached up
fast and closed a protective fist around Connie’s locket, glaring at him defiantly.

His smile
broadened, but only on one side. “Many things I am, young one, or have been in
my time, but never a thief. Open to me.”

“But maybe a
liar,” Mara said, tight-lipped. “No.”

“I will see this
thing that engenders such unwise devotion.” The demon’s hand closed gently
around her wrist. His thumb pressed on her and suddenly it was as if he had
punched a spike through the back of her hand and detonated it somehow. The pain
was like nothing she’d known in her life. Entirely focused in her hand, it
nevertheless took the bones right out of her knees. Mara dropped, hoarsely
howling, slapping at his restraining grip, but did not release the locket.

“Stubborn child,”
the demon said, almost fondly. “You tempt me to indulge you, and I should never
hear the end of that.”