The Scholomance (80 page)

She felt damned.

Devlin flailed on
top of her, choking and clawing blindly, until a second creature slammed into
her from the side, its teeth savaging her shoulder. Mara dropped into the fetid
swamp and came up retching in a tangle of fighting, snarling monsters. A third
banged into her from behind, knocking her into a monster’s bucking back and
nearly into Devlin’s snapping jaws. The third pounced again, crushing her in
the middle of the mess, humping hard at her even as he savaged her robe in his
effort to get at her flesh.

Mara lashed out
in all directions with a mind-slap, to no response. They ignored the physical
pain of combat and they ignored her. All their thoughts were red with blood. Nothing
penetrated.

A Word. Mara made
the monster under her hands malleable and pulled his upper jaw over his head,
cementing his skull to his spine. She shoved him down into the muck. With no
mouth to close, it filled itself with cess in a single sick gulp and dropped
away, madly thrashing. Now she fell forward, driven down by the pumping, biting
weight of the thing on top of her, kicked and battered by Devlin as he hunted
for his adversary. ‘His power, not mine,’ she thought, and tried to focus.
Blood
to salt
, she willed, and reached back to slap a hand against the thrusting
flanks of the monster that rode her. It was her Word, but his energy that
fueled the Transmutation, and he scrambled away in the next instant, ripping up
the air with animal shrieks. The others fell on him in a frenzy, leaving Mara
to stagger up and away, both hands before her, searching for the wall.

She tripped over
the dead thing she’d drowned and went down again, came up puking so violently
she nearly blacked out, and folded onto her knees. Furiously, she ducked to the
Panic Room, pulled herself back to consciousness, and dropped back into the
body before it lost its balance. She came to in time to see a monster slam into
her, see the teeth that closed over her face. “Bone to blood!” she screamed,
and the bite that should have taken her eye and opened her skull instead became
a sluice of hot, coppery gore. The creature dropped, mewling. Mara climbed over
it and banged into the wall at last. She could hear the fighting sounds turn to
feeding and could only hope that was it as she worked her way noisily around
the perimeter, because she didn’t have it in her to turn around and look.

Her head smacked
stone before her hands found the jutting lip of rock that marked the threshold.
There were no stairs. Even from the Panic Room, it was impossible to chin
herself up. Mara stripped away the saturant weight of her queenly gown and
tried again. She got her arms up and her breasts, badly scraped, then hung
there, gasping. One of her kicking feet brushed the slimy back of a prowling
creature, but it passed on, fed now and complacent. Nevertheless, its
unexpected pressure gave her the adrenal boost she needed to heave herself up
onto the landing, where she huddled small and panting, until her pulse slowed
to something approaching normal.

A door. There
was a door. She touched it, found it dead/alive like the doors in the
Oubliette, and ordered it open. Light rushed in, and like every other hero ever
to escape Hell, her eyes rolled back and she looked behind her.

Devlin floated
face-down in the cesspit, still weakly undulating the best he could without
bones, the brown tide of swampy shit slowly closing in over that white, happy,
cheering bunny tattoo.

Mara tumbled
backwards into the room behind her and kicked the door shut on the horrors of
that place. She wasn’t going back that way and she didn’t care anymore what the
alternative was. Even lost and suffocated in the heart of the mountain would be
better. She’d get over it someday, she guessed—she got over everything—but
right now, today, there simply better be another way.

Light, golden
and guttering, surrounded her where she lay on the floor. The lamps of the
Scholomance, responding to her presence here, came to life, revealing more of
the simple room she inhabited. She stared around at it dully as she gained her
feet. A part of her had hoped for floors tiled in human bone, perhaps walls
pulsing with veins, and writhing tentacles dripping down from the ceiling—the
true face of the Scholomance, in other words, the blackened bones beneath the
flesh. But if anything, things were plainer here, with straighter edges and
brighter light. It looked disturbingly sane, far more so than the school above
her.

But there was a
series of shallow pools cascading in a fountain down one side of the room, and
a little dish of perfectly recognizable soap beside it. Doubtless there was
always some backwash when the demons threw another monster into the cesspit. Mara
limped over and began to wash, leaving scummy footprints behind her to dry on
the stone. There was no sound but the playful splash of water. In the Panic
Room, no flash of color interrupted the murky clouds of the Mindstorm. She
would seem to be alone. For now.

Her skin
scrubbed raw and red with cold, Mara replaced the soap and moved away from her
bath. Almost directly across from her, on the other side of this well-lit
space, was a wide stairwell leading up into darkness. She tried to think of
where it must lead in relation to the garderobe beside her, but all she could
picture was the Black Door. She could go up and look at it to be sure, but standing
here, realized she didn’t need to. It all made no difference now.

Several tunnels
led out from this chamber, none of them marked in any special way. Mara chose
the one nearest to her, leaving a sudsy puddle on the stone where she’d had her
bath. She could have Malleated the floor up to swallow it, and perhaps she
should—she hated leaving so obvious a trail behind her—but her power was
finite, and the end wasn’t yet in sight.

The lamps
continued to light up as she moved into the tunnel, illuminating the passage to
a deeper and deeper degree, until it seemed impossible to her straining eyes:
miles long and still growing, a funhouse reflection, pocked with seemingly
hundreds of narrow doors shut against her. Cell doors, with slivers of windows
to ventilate them for their unknown prisoners.

Mara went to the
first of them, feeling through it as best she could. Something was in there,
sure, but like the creatures of the cesspit, ‘something’ was the best that she
could do. She took her pulse, found it slightly elevated but essentially okay,
and put her hand on the dead/alive door, bracing herself for a fight. It opened
readily at her command, and Mara looked inside.

A face floated
in the darkness, a face just at eye level, staring back at her. Naked breasts and
a moon-white torso hovered in the black.

“Connie?”

No response. The
mind within was no louder, no more aware than the door itself.

Mara shifted to
one side, trying to let a little more light in around her. She thought at first
the person in the cell might be wearing boots and gloves, then realized the
person was as naked as she herself. The illusion of clothing was due to the
fact that the person’s arms and legs were sunk in stone. Neither was she—for it
was definitely a she—standing up as she’d first appeared. Instead, she’d been
suspended atop a kind of cradle, her hips and back supported, her thighs spread
wide. There was a pisspot between them now, but that clearly wasn’t the primary
reason for her position. The woman was pregnant.

Mara eased a
step inside the cell and reached out a hand to touch the hard-swollen belly. Something
inside moved. Squirmed. The woman’s eyes slowly blinked but did not focus. She was
gone as far as she could go while anchored here in stone.

How many cells were
there?

Mara backed into
the hall and looked again at double rows of doors stretching out to eternity. Realistically,
she knew the depth of the hall to be deceptive, that there could not be more
than a hundred, maybe two hundred doors, and certainly she had no reason to
suspect a pregnant prisoner behind each one, but—

She moved on
wooden legs to the next door and opened it on a swollen stomach and pendulous
breasts. It wasn’t Connie either, but neither was it wholly human anymore. The
fundamental factor, the living mind, the human soul, had been shut away as
effectively as the incubator it inhabited.

No heaps of
skulls. No writhing tentacles. But the true face of the Scholomance was just as
ugly as she’d imagined.

Mara ran to the
next cell. Then the next. And the next. Soon, she was careening wildly from one
side of the hall to the other, ripping open doors and staring into the glazed
thoughtless eyes of the woman trapped inside. She wasn’t really seeing them by
the end, just their bellies. She didn’t tap at their emptied minds so much as
stab at them with Connie’s name, demanding an answer that never came.

She reached the
last door and stood shaking, nearly as numb to it all as to the chill of the
mountain. They didn’t allow fornications between students. That made sense. They
had to be sure, had to know the baby was their own if they were going to take
the trouble to care for its mother. Because they were cared for, clearly. The
skin she saw was smooth and free of sores, glowing with good health and excellent
nutrition. They took away the hair, of course, hair being a nuisance to keep
brushed and clean, but they did care for the body. Because it was making a baby
for them.

She was still
standing there, locked in these thoughts, when the hand closed gently over her
shoulder.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“I
s she here?” Mara asked hoarsely. She did not
look around. “Is this what you did to her?”

“I’ve no doubt
we tried if indeed we brought her below.” Horuseps released her and stepped
around to pull the door softly shut. “But is she? I honestly do not know. I’ve
looked for her in my odd hours…so many of us have since your arrival…but there
are a thousand doors, young Mara, and the faces behind them are not always what
they should be. We have come to suspect she was caught out of her cell
after-hours, brought here by one of the nephalim…precious, she could be
anywhere.”

“This is the
point, isn’t it? Every woman comes here.”

“Yes.”

“And every man
feeds the school.”

“Yes.”

“There are no
graduates.”

“No. Well, a
handful, now and then. To keep our rumor alive. Solomon. Rangard. Von
Brukenthal. No one of consequence.”

“One out of ten.”
Mara shook her head. “What was the point of that? Why not make it free?”

Horuseps
shrugged. “Humans have a tendency to disbelieve in the things which come
without cost, even as they covet them. The idea of risk was essential to the
lie.”

“Well, Connie’s
leaving.”

“Yes.” Horuseps
sighed and returned his hands to their usual resting place on his shoulders. “We’re
all agreed to that.”

“And so am I.”

He gave her a
crooked smile and said nothing.

Mara put her
back to the wall and half raised her hands. Anyone looking at them might
believe it a pose of badly-acted horror, but Mara was not afraid and this was
not a defensive posture. “I really don’t think you can stop me, Horuseps,” she
said.

“I’m quite
certain I can’t,” he replied, still smiling. “In fact, I’m well aware that you
could kill me without either hesitation, effort, or remorse. But you are not
leaving this mountain, my dear, and truthfully, it is for the best.”

“The best?” Mara
laughed, a high and humorless sound. “I’m sure you think imprisoning all these
women and murdering all those men is for the best too!”

“It is.”

She laughed
again. She had to. The opportunity to kill him hadn’t come yet.

“I’ll admit it’s
only best for us, but then, we are no different in that regard from humans.” The
lights in his eyes swung out into a starry ring, then drew together in a tight
cluster. “Humans, who believed it was best the that other eleven tribes who
shared this world should be eradicated so that their dominance might be
assured. So great was this belief that they felt it
best
that there be a
Devil named as our creator, a great master of purest evil, so that the
religious hatred stirred against us never be allowed to die. Even today, five
thousand years after the dissolution of the Twelve, the name of Horuseps is
unknown and I am only ‘demon’. Demon! Who but Man in his arrogance would dare
to name another disparate to the love of God?”

“You’re pretty
sanctimonious for a guy who is mutilating, raping, and murdering people.”

“I haven’t
always,” he said quietly. “But now I am the last of my tribe and my children
are impure. I have not seen another face like mine in better than three
thousand years. I think that I am doomed, young Mara, but perhaps I am wrong. There
are seventeen females here seeded of my matings. I will not let loose even one
of them while a chance remains, however slight, that I shall see another
Horuspex.”

“Are you afraid
I’ll tell your secret, is that it? You think if I leave, I’ll bring a new
Crusade on you?”

“No.” He paused,
his head tilting to regard her from a new angle. “No,” he said again. “But will
you walk with me, child?”

“Where?”

“To the Hall of
the Twelve.”

“Why?”

“Would you leave
without seeing everything?”

“You’ve already
said I’m not leaving. Why should I walk with you to my prison?”