The Scholomance (74 page)

“Dear child, no—”

“One of them
tried to sue him after she realized she wasn’t getting promoted like she’d
planned,” Mara said, watching that stolen memory play out across her internal
monitor. “My father destroyed her case in court, and then fired her, and then
made sure no one else would ever hire her, and then he had her beat up a few
times, and then he never thought of her again. Not with guilt. Not with
pleasure. Not at all. She was a dog. She bit him. He put her down.”

Horuseps bent
his head. His pale hair fell across his face, hiding his expression from view,
but she knew that he was listening. He was always listening.

“Lots of girls
told my mother about the affairs,” Mara said, shrugging. “She cried, but she
never talked to him about it. She used to hire girls to take care of me,
knowing he’d end up fucking them, and when he did, she’d cry and fire them and
hire a new one for him. It was annoying to have to live with that, but there
wasn’t any point in getting angry at her. In getting angry at either of them,
really. He saw them all as dogs, you see. Not just pets, but dogs. Do you know
what sets dogs apart from every other domestic animal?”

“They want to
please their master,” Horuseps said quietly.

“That’s right,”
she said, looking at him. She hadn’t really expected him to answer. “They don’t
always know how, but that is all that they do. They want to please their
master. And a dog doesn’t care whether he’s a good man or not, just like a dog
doesn’t care if you pet it or kick it. A dog will always come crawling back.”

Horuseps started
to say her name again, then simply closed his mouth and waited.

“You’re very
handsome when you don’t smile,” she told him, frowning into his solemn face.

“I know.”

“Do you think of
me often? That day on the stairs?”

“Yes.” The
question provoked no surprise in him. The answer was no lie.

“I don’t,” she
said, and looked back at the lamp light. “I never thought of my father as a bad
person. I still don’t. He was true to his nature, just the way you say. He had
hundreds of women during my lifetime, and hundreds more before I knew him, but
he never once took a woman and turned her into a dog. They did that themselves.
I’m doing that…myself.”

Mara got up and
opened her cell door. She turned around, holding it, bringing the lamp in to
shine its sickly light everywhere but on Horuseps himself. The demon remained
as pale and pure as moonlight. “This is not a calm and rational decision,” she
told him. “I’m aware of that. But I’m not going back this time. When I walk out
of this mountain, it will be as Mara as not another in a long, long line of
dogs for Kazuul to fuck and forget about. I’m ready to die if I have to, but
he’s never touching me again. The Stanford prison experiment is over. Now
please leave.”

Horuseps sat for
another moment or two in silence, his eyes glittering with movement, and then
he sighed and stood up. “It’s been a long time in coming,” he commented on his
way out, “but that might actually put him in his place. Then again, it might
bring him here in a murderous rage. We’ll have to wait and see. But there is
just one thing I would like to say, child, and I ask that you hear me out.”

Mara waited
while Horuseps bent his head, selecting his words with great care. When he had
them, he didn’t look at her, just stood in the passage with water dripping onto
his shoulder and lamp light bleeding all around him. He said, softly, “You seem
to expect our lord to show you something akin to patience and respect after his
lifetime of conquest and devotion, all without the inconvenience of
reciprocating it. And when he isn’t abject enough in
his
devotion, you
walk away. And when you do go back to him, it is for sex. Not for the presents
he could surely give you, and not for the power he would willingly lay at your
feet, but only sex. And so it occurs to me, precious, that you are very much
your father’s daughter.”

“Is that all?”
Mara asked stiffly.

“Yes. I’ll leave
you be, if you like, although you’re welcome to call on me at any hour. I miss
you.”

He walked away
without ever looking at her again. Mara stood there long after he was gone, and
when the blister-lamp again began to die, she let it and just went in and shut
the door. She lay down on the hard stone floor beside her empty bed and put
herself to sleep. She didn’t think about anyone and she didn’t watch her
dreams.

*
         
*
         
*

First-bell woke
her, just as it always did. She stared up into the absolute black of her cell
until the bells rang again, then lit the lamp outside with a thought and got
up. She didn’t see the point in searching for Connie, but she had nothing else
to do.

She was
recognized when she came out into the ephebeum, not with surprise as much as
alarm, although they all remembered to bow. Some of them had stripped her cell,
after all, but she didn’t try to fool herself into thinking that was why they
were all looking at her the way they did. They’d thought she was gone for good
when she went away with Kazuul, that they’d only have to avoid her from time to
time like any other Master. They didn’t want her living with them anymore. Rejection
didn’t hurt…but something did. She went to the garderobe to pee, stood awhile
over the hole, and then went upstairs.

The lyceum
emptied when she entered, students bowing themselves back into the Nave and avoiding
her eyes as they hurried away. Mara glanced upwards as she crossed to the small
pool, but the winding stair was empty, even at the very top. She wasn’t sure
what she expected, really. It was early yet. Kazuul might still be taking his
first meal—

Mara cupped her
hands under the icy spray that poured from the wall and splashed water over her
face. She didn’t care what Kazuul was doing.

A sharp whine
drew her attention. She looked up just as Suti’ok stepped out from one of the
tunnels and onto the stair. He glanced down in the worn, incurious way of any
man walking home after a difficult day, and saw her. He stopped, and so did the
four hounds following at his heels, but the one at his side came trotting
forward, grinning nervously and arching its long neck as it came down the steps
to meet her. Mara put out her hand just as though it were a strange dog she
expected to sniff it. The hound rubbed its cringing face over her palm and then
rose up on its hind legs to laugh its high, crazed laughter and dance its
strange, shuffling dance.

“
Ska
!”
snapped Suti’ok. “
Nodan
! To me, thou rogue!”

The four hounds
behind him dropped and lay flat. The hound gamboling for Mara merely laughed
again, eyes rolling happily in its misshapen skull.

“Always thee,”
he muttered, and started stomping down the stairs as his rebellious hound
dropped to rub himself back and forth against Mara’s thigh.

“Did someone
die?” Mara asked. It was all she could think of to say.

“Aye.” He
scowled at the hound who only now came scampering back to him, then at Mara as
she too came up to meet him. “But not thy Ka-nee.”

“Are you sure?”

“Aye, for t’was
the unfortunate favorite of Letha’s harem. ‘A small matter,’ she said to me,
but who would have thought so small a matter to have so much blood in him?” He
gave her a sour glance as she fell into step beside him, but that was all. The
laughing hound squeezed itself in between them, panting and drooling and
licking at one or the other of them as it kept pace. It wasn’t long before
Suti’ok thawed enough to stroke its horrible head, and to grumble, “Her
chambers, rank with sex and blood, hath required my hand since moonrise. T’was
as if she painted it all solely to see me at labors. Such are the amusements of
the high-born.”

He said this
last without looking at her, but with pointed bitterness. She couldn’t read
him, but didn’t need psychic powers to know he wasn’t just talking about Letha
anymore.

“I shouldn’t
have done it,” she said finally, not looking at him.

He barked
laughter at her like a blow. “Nay! What pangs of conscience are these? Thou
didst press me to thy will more deftly than any of thy kind before thee. T’was
near an honor to be so plied, and for certain t’was a pleasure. Takest thou satisfaction
of it, for thou hast learned in so short a time to kill with thy lips…and with
thy cunt. Letha herself could do no better.”

That stung. “No
one has to know,” she said.

“Tis already
known
,”
he shot back scornfully. “Not even thou art fool enough to believe otherwise,
surely. It taketh but one human—one!—whose unguarded mind might carry our tale
and t’was carried far.”

“But—”

“‘Where took
thou thy clay-born pleasures?’ she said to me.” Suti’ok gave Mara a withering
glance. “‘Whose bitter waters didst thou sip, and from what stolen chalice?’ Then
she left me to clean the leavings of her envy, and if she did not go then to
drip her honeyed poison in our lord’s ear, I know not where.”

He threw an
especially black stare at the ground then, and Mara realized they had come to
the scene of their shared crime. The hounds, every one of them, slipped aside
to sniff and lick along the stone where their Master had lain, but he moved on
without stopping.

“Why art thou
shadowed at my side?” he demanded, summoning them back with a few curt
gestures. “Thou art in no danger, and I would not defend thee from him e’er
thou wert.”

“I’m not afraid
of him,” Mara said, and it may have still been the truth, but it had a
mechanical feel.

“Nor shouldst
thou be, yet I cannot fuck him to forgiveness, so pardon me that I do not share
thy courage.
Vraka
!” he spat suddenly, sending his hounds skittering
back, unnoticed. “I dared to think thee might be different, but thou art proven
the daughter of thy line, and I curse the day—”

He stopped—his
feet, his words, his thoughts. He stood rigid at the open door of his theatre
for a moment, no more time than it took her heart to beat once, and then the
Mindstorm came alive like lightning and struck her with all the unreadable
force of his emotion. She staggered, catching at her head. He ran, and he
screamed as he ran, and the sound was worse even than the hammer of his
thoughts had been: “
Ah God, let it not be
!”

Mara
straightened up, her head throbbing with cast-off horror, fear, and pain. His
hounds huddled together at the doorway, but none of them crossed the threshold,
and even his laughing rebel crouched low, shivering in the intensity of animal
confusion that easily turned to attack. Mara stepped forward and Suti’ok let
out a wordless, keening howl, and whether they moved for her or for him, the
hounds sidled back and lay still. They watched, whining, as Mara moved among
them, but she too stopped at the threshold.

She stood
stunned, not so much by the sight as by the sound. What she saw littering the
gore-slick floor could not have been much worse than what she’d left in the ephebeum
the day of the attack—a dozen bodies, maybe twice that, skinless and twisted
with the agonies of their death-throes—but it was not until she also saw the
demon on his knees, weeping as he clutched one to his chest, that she really
knew what she was looking at.

She was pulled
forward, feeling no emotion apart from freezing disbelief, her bare feet taking
her across the sticky floor to the nearest corpse. No flayed and contorted
student after all, but dead all the same, its throat torn open by one deep,
sure stroke of a clawed hand. The hound’s jaws gaped. Its tongue, swollen and
black, lay like a slug in a puddle of clotting blood nearly the same color as
its lifeless hide. Elsewhere in this chamber, Suti’ok wailed and wept, badly
unnerving her. Death was everywhere in the Scholomance; mourning, unknown.

“I’m sorry,” she
said, and was disturbed to realize she was. She touched the hound and felt it
cool and wet as clay, unpleasant to feel.

“
Sorry
?!”
the demon choked, and raised his head to stab at her with his eyes. “Thou art
sorry
?
What is the blood of nephalim compared to thine enjoyment? Nay! Thou hast had
thy game of me! I’ll give thee nothing more and no forgiveness!”

“I didn’t know—”

“Lying
bitch
!”
He struggled to his feet with the body hanging from his arms. “Didst thou think
he would come for me as he did for Horuseps? Nay, how could he stab me deeper
than this? Than this!” He looked down at the dead hound he held and folded over
onto his knees again, pressing his face to the bloody gash in the creature’s
side and sobbing.

Mara backed
away, unable to combat this battery of grief and pain. She’d never known how to
deal with that, even when it came from humans. To feel it now in demonic force
was an assault upon her senses. She owned this too, every bit as much as she
owned nine deaths in the ephebeum, but by God, she wasn’t going to own it
alone.

She started out
walking. She started cool, calm. She started that way, but there was blood on
her hand where she’d touched the dead hound, blood on her robe where she’d
knelt beside it. She walked faster and faster with the stink of death in her
nostrils and by the time she was halfway up the lyceum’s spiral stair, she was
running. She ran, even down the unlit stairs to his bedchamber, returning to
Kazuul as blind by rage as she’d been on leaving him, and when she reached the
bottom, she seized a chunk of stone from the doorway, made it malleable even as
she pulled it free, and threw it all in one furious movement.

The stone sailed
across the cavern and cracked into Kazuul’s shoulder as he stood brooding out
of his aerie. He whirled, roaring, blasting her with psychic shockwaves
powerful enough to knock her sprawling, but then saw her and drew back,
confused.