The Scholomance (76 page)

And still he
left her alone.

When last-bell
rang on the fifth day, she went to her cell to find a deep drift of furs and
blankets waiting in the middle of her bed, as well as a golden platter
overfilled with roasted hawk set in a ring of glazed fruit and stuffed with
fragrant bread and onions. Never in a thousand years, Horuseps had said, so she
supposed she knew who she had to thank for fine food now…but the fruits were
apricots.

It didn’t
matter. She was hungry. She ate and then she slept. She dreamt of Kazuul and
Connie both, and woke not knowing which one she wanted anymore.

There was a new
gown laying across the foot of the bed when she woke, and pot of tea beside her
on the floor, still warm if not still steaming. And her cup, the cup she’d last
seen sitting before her throne at Kazuul’s table, waiting beside it. Mara dressed,
drank, and left her cell.

The dining hall
was predictably filled with noise. She let it lead her in as far as the
doorway, where she stood and watched students shove, slap and throttle each
other for a handful of cold, greasy gruel. She realized in a distant way that
it didn’t even disgust her now, no more than watching pigs at a trough. It
wasn’t like looking at people, not even starving or desperate people. They were
different somehow. Or she was.

‘Welcome,’
thought Horuseps. She saw his silhouette raise a hand and beckon to her. ‘We’ve
saved out a seat for you.’

Malavan’s seat,
he meant, empty since the night she’d first stolen it, but that had been a very
different night.

**Everyone will
see,** she sent, and felt the demon smile inside her mind.

‘Would we be
showing them anything they have not guessed for themselves?’ he asked, his
thoughts like gentle, stroking fingers. ‘You ordered them to their knees for
you, precious, and they knelt. You can never go back among them now. Come, and
take your place among us.’

She knew it. She’d
had days walking to and from her pillaged cell to feel their watchful eyes and
unquiet thoughts, their human dread of an inhuman thing.

Connie would
feel the same way, eventually.

Kazuul wouldn’t.

Mara retreated,
one hand gripping at her head as if she thought she could reach in and pull her
confusion out. She walked, not seeing where she was going or who she passed,
until she looked up and found herself halfway up the winding stair in the
lyceum.

Halfway to him.

“No,” she said,
because if she didn’t say it, she was going to shout it. There was no psychic
seed in her, no demon’s trick to bring her in under his dominion. There was no
reason for her to be here!

She made herself
turn around, plunging blindly into the tunnels that opened off the lyceum’s
central cavern. She knew she’d go if he came to her again, but she wasn’t so
far gone that she’d go crawling back.

Not yet.

The tunnel was
empty, dark and still. Her questing hand found a blister-lamp bulging out of
the wall. She lit it with a tap of mental effort and took her bearings, such as
they were. She could see only two theaters as the passage stretched out into
blackness, and both doors were closed, either against the hour or against
students of insufficient skill. She was alone for the moment, alone with its
sickly yellow light.

She had nowhere
else to go, nothing to think about. It was easy to become fascinated by its
not-so steady glow, by the shadows that seemed to drift inside it, by the sheer
incongruity of its very existence. She approached it, touched it, and was again
vaguely repelled by the weirdly plastic feel of its bulging surface, by the
elasticity it seemed to have when she pressed on it just a little.

What were these
things anyway? It was one thing to say, ‘Oh, it’s magic,’ but she’d been here
long enough to know that even magic followed rules. Nothing—with the possible
exception of the Masters themselves—was truly supernatural, even in the
Scholomance. However fantastic things seemed on the surface, they were all
rooted in reality. So what were the lamps?

If they only
glowed, she’d have never paid them a second thought. She was familiar with the
concept of phosphorescence, even knew it could a natural property of certain
minerals, so why not here? Magic would then explain how those minerals could
have been collected into a single lump, focused as it were, and shaped for
aesthetic appeal. End of mystery. But the lamps didn’t just glow, did they? They
were dark where the halls lay long empty or unused; they gave off warmth, but
only a little; they flickered.

It was the
flicker that bothered her the most. That deepset, arrhythmic flicker, caused by
the shadows moving just under the surface, not often and not always in the same
way. She tried to puzzle out just why this bothered her, and saw only the slow
opening and closing of a dead man’s mouth.

Second-bell
rang, ending the breakfast meal. The hall stayed empty. There were never enough
students to fill it. Unless, she supposed, they were all called out of classes
to watch someone graduate. Or die.

Alone,
unwitnessed, Mara stroked the ugly swell of the blister down to where it met
the darker rock. She ran her fingers along that seam until she reached the
underswell of its lowest point. There she picked at it, glanced once more at
the empty tunnel, and finally spoke the Word of Malleation and pulled the rough
stone back like wet clay.

There was more
of the blister underneath. She guessed she wasn’t surprised. There would have
to be a rim of sorts under the rock in order to anchor something of the lamp’s
size, to keep it from dropping out and landing on some hapless student’s head. The
parts of the lamp meant to be buried did not glow, but it was the same sallow
color, had the same sick-smooth texture. All of that, yes, but the shape of
what lay beneath was not a logical extension of the round bulge above it. Rather,
it was a lumpy mass, wrinkled, distended, and thickly creased down the middle. She
found the edges at each side, but the bottom of the thing just continued
downwards into rock, gradually tapering and smoothing, but always with that
central groove at the point of symmetry. Soon, she was on her knees and still
searching for the place where it ended. It—

Mara’s mother
had taken her on many outings as a little girl, in part because her innate
indifference to those around her made her seem quite polite and civilized to
the sort of people her mother associated with. When other little girls had gone
on playdates for tea parties, or tried out for soccer, or just gone to the
movies, little Kimara had been dressed in scratchy, miniature cocktail gowns to
attend theatrical debuts and gallery openings.

It was a gallery
opening she remembered now, filled with up-and-coming artists whose work often
defied description, yet which was still somehow easily criticized and priced. Mara,
left to her own devices, had gone quietly around the room, studying each piece
on display as she sipped her ginger ale, and had been quite taken by a series
there—a string of black-and-white photographs of commonplace objects, magnified
out of all recognition. This colorless rainbow, a fingernail. This ocean of
alien pods, the inside of an orange slice. She’d looked so charming there, with
her little fluted glass and her serious frown, that her mother had offered to
buy her one, and Mara chose the last of them: a heavily-shadowed mesa rising
over a pock-marked and hostile landscape, which had in fact been an erect
nipple. When the artist, whose bitter commercialism appealed to her precisely
because he didn’t bother to disguise it, asked her what she liked best about
the piece, she’d honestly answered, “It’s ugly,” a reply which made print in
the next day’s Arts & Leisure section of the city newspaper, and which
caused the artist himself no small amount of private joy.

That print still
hung in Mara’s bedroom and she still studied it upon occasion, and found new
ugliness to ponder, and that print was what she thought of now as she realized
she was looking at the grossly distended chest and belly of a man, a man whose
shrunken genitals and dangling legs were exposed by her curiosity, while his
arms and face remained gloved in the enclosing rock, a man whose beating heart and
torpidly drifting blood showed only as a flicker through the lampshade of his
skin.

“What have you
done?”

Mara stumbled
back and was shouldered roughly aside by a squat, powerful body. Malavan threw
her a scathing glare as he spat out the Malleating Word, doing what he could to
knuckle the rock more or less back into place with his two, over-sized fingers.
The harder he worked to restore the cave wall, the clumsier his efforts
appeared.

“Where is she?”
Mara asked hoarsely.

“Little fool! Get
back to your—”

“
Where is she
?”
She grabbed him, yanked him away from the lumpy mass of leg and stone he was
attempting to marry, and shook him in the air. His teeth snapped together on
his own tongue; blood sprayed her face in sputters. “Where’s Connie? You take
me right to her, right now, or I’ll
kill
you!”

His fingers were
too long to get at her crushed up close like this. She could feel his limbs
battering at her shoulders, but the distraction was negligible. He kicked at
her, toe-claws tangling in her robe and shredding it open. If they’d been
longer, or perhaps only sharper, the moment would have come to a swift and
nasty end. As it was, Mara swung him around and beat his squawking, draconian
head against the wall beside the petrified man’s glowing belly until he
stopped. Malavan opened his mouth—Mara felt the Word he meant to shape flashing
star-bright in the instant before he spoke it—and she closed it for him without
thinking, smearing his features together into a mute, grotesque muddle. She did
it while screaming Connie’s name at him. She did it without a Word of her own,
but she would not realize this until much, much later. All her attention was
directed on Malavan, on beating the truth from him. She did not know that
people were pouring into the halls, drawn by the commotion. She did not know
anyone at all was there until the hand closed around her throat.

Another caught
Malavan around his scrawny chest, prying them apart as impersonally as if they
were squabbling dogs. Malavan was then flung to the ground and Mara given a
good, crisp shake.

“Kill her!”
Malavan sprang up, carving at his face with both fingers to make a bleeding
mouth for this strangled command. His skin was blotching up with crimson,
putting his emotions on display for anyone to see. “Crush her! I’ll eat her
guts!”

“Thou wilt do
nothing, thou worm,” Master Ruk said calmly. It was his hand, Mara realized,
and when he saw that she knew him, he placed her on her feet and released her. “Thou
knowest well our lord’s law.”

“She struck me!”
the smaller demon shrieked, shiny red and actually pulsing with the intensity
of his rage. “She made blood in my mouth! My face! She used arts on me! Kill
her! Kill her or I will!”

“So it may
someday pass that all the worlds are made barren, save for Man and lessers such
as thee, vermin. Until then—” Ruk swung one elephantine foot and knocked
Malavan solidly into the wall. “—know thy place. Mara, child, no student may ever
strike a Master.”

“Where is she?”
she shouted at him. “Where is Connie? Don’t you lie to me!”

Ruk glanced at
her hands, drawn into fists and raised against him, then reached out in a
distracted manner and smoothed stone over the exposed legs of the dead/alive
man in the wall. “Thou hast misunderstood the import of what thou hast seen.”

“Don’t you bullshit
me, I’m through! Give me my Connie!”

Ruk heaved a
breath that almost seemed a sigh and lifted his gaze away from her. “Leave us,
all of thee,” he said meditatively, and Mara was very vaguely aware of a
shuffling sound as the hall emptied of what few students had been drawn by this
outburst. “And thee, worm. Lick thy wounds elsewhere.”

Malavan hissed,
running both claws rapidly over his face. He could shape it no better than he
could the wall.

“Leave,” Ruk
rumbled, now fixing a narrowed and faintly-glowing eye upon his fellow demon. “Or
I will finish what she hath begun.”

Malavan limped
off, muttering threats and sneezing blood. Ruk watched him go and when they
were quite alone, he turned back and gazed at Mara from his great height,
unmoved by her anger, thoughtful. Then he reached out, took her wrist, and bent
to touch her hand to his brow.

Contact brought
her to him, and deeper still, because he had opened for her, opened wide, so
that all his unnatural honesty came screaming out of him. “Demon, so humankind
hath named us, yet we are not of the making of Man’s great enemy. We know no
devil, have dwelt in no hell save this of our own devising. Souls are of no
value to us, nor virgin blood, nor hearts, nor hope, nor flesh of any kind. Yet
one of ten we claim and this even thou hast agreed to.”

“I don’t care!” Mara
tried to yank her hand back, but Ruk held it fast in his grip, holding her to
him, pinioning her with truth. “Take me to Connie, right now!”

“Those we cull
serve the Scholomance,” he said, gazing into her hot, furious eyes. “In this
way, in many ways. All who enter here accept this price.”

“You tell me
where she is!” Mara stopped struggling and dug her fingers in like claws, binding
her will to him and honing it for attack. “Or I’ll kill you!”

He did not
flinch. He didn’t doubt her, either. “Thou hast seen how few daughters of the
line of Adam come to us. I would have marked it if such a one had passed the threshold
in recent years. There have been none in the three prior to thy coming. If she
entered here within that time, then here, surely, she remains.”

He was telling
the truth.