The Scholomance (13 page)

“Is that it?”
she asked, looking up at him. “Am I harrowed? Can I leave?”

“Traditionally,
one must follow my instructions.”

“Do you really
need to see me kiss a frog before I can leave this hellhole?”

His head tipped
on side. “Shall you truly hold your pride higher than your release?” The lights
of his eyes flashed and dimmed. He smiled. “Yet I must indulge you in your
every whim, precious one. You may, if you like, kiss my hand instead.”

He held it out,
palm up, fingers only slightly curled, waiting.

“I’d hate to
think of where that’s been too.” Mara turned the clay cup over and bent to
press her lips perfunctorily to the frog’s carved head.

“No student is
permitted to refuse the order of an instructor, were you not told?”

“You said, ‘If
you like.’ Is that the way you give orders?”

Horuseps tipped
his head the other way and lowered his hand. “I can see that you are determined
to give us trouble, child. So be it. Even troubles can prove amusing for a
time.” His smile thinned. “A very short time.”

Mara waited,
resisting mightily the temptation to squirm now that release was so near, and
at last Horuseps knelt before her. He gave her a sly glance as he cupped her
heel in his smooth palm and raised her leg just slightly. His eyes closed. He
drew in a slow breath and let it out with an oily chuckle before finally
touching his fingers to the iron ring around her ankle. It fell away with a
heavy clang, but Horuseps continued to kneel, in no great hurry to remove the
other.

“You are very
different from the others who seek this place,” he said, rubbing his thumb
lightly over the smooth, pink band where her shackle had chafed the worst. “Humans,
for all their stirring songs of freedom, take quite easily to captivity. Not
you.”

“Then why are
you prolonging it?” she asked.

“Ah well. I don’t
need to engender your favor, dear heart. You need to engender mine.” He raised
his gaze to hers; the lights of one eye flashed in a wink. “However shall you
engender mine?” he inquired, and slid one hand slowly up her leg.

“Is this really
where you want to do this?” Mara asked dryly. “Right here?”

He considered
it, but even if he hadn’t been touching her, she would know the answer. His mind
was mostly dark to her even here, where all things insisted on understanding,
but not entirely. He was not immune to the disturbing effects of the monster at
the room’s heart any more than she was, and as much as he would enjoy teasing
her with her imprisonment, he did not like to dwell in the Scrivener’s library.

Horuseps opened
the second shackle and stood up, gesturing to his waxen-faced assistant to take
the tray. ‘This day was bound to come,’ he was thinking, as he watched her cap
her inkwell and blot her last unfinished page. He didn’t have those thoughts
out in the open, either, but down deep, where he thought they were guarded from
her. ‘Bound to come, yes, but still my dawn to break. My secret…if only for one
more night.’ Aloud, he said only, “If you’re quite ready…?” and held out his
arm for her to take.

She took it and
let him lead her up the stairs, out of the heavy air that pooled in the Great
Library, giving him her very real relief to feel while secretly creeping about
in his own dark mind. His thoughts of her were covetous, perilous things she
did not dare to chase down or hold. Where he passed, students bowed to him. Where
his gaze fell, even for a moment, they gathered in expectant dread. Quite a few
lingered close enough that he had to wave them back in order to move through
without touching them. From the flutterings of their unguarded minds, Mara knew
they were trying to anticipate him, trying to come and collect Mara from him,
because that was the way it was done here, but Horuseps kept her for himself. This
was unusual, if not exactly shocking to the other students, and she supposed it
would not make her any friends.

That suited Mara
fine.

“Need you catch
your breath?” the demon asked, once they’d reached the top of the fourth and
last flight of stairs. The library lay beneath them now, the Scrivener and
those who served him mere toys strewn about a careless playroom. There was no
sign, here, of the Hell that held sway over every mind within.

“I can go on,”
Mara said, though her legs were watery from the climb. She’d always considered
herself fit enough, but fit meant something entirely different here. A lengthy
hike through the wooded wilderness, a hard midnight mountain climb, a few days
chained to a table, and then four flights of steep stairs after a diet of bread
and water left her not just tired but a little dizzy. “I’ll get used to it,”
she insisted.

“Will you? We
have always admired that quality in humankind. We do not adapt well, you see.” Horuseps
reached down to cup the railing over the short wall that separated the
stairwell’s landing from a damned deep drop onto the library’s stone floor. His
face was pensive, unsmiling. “And some of us, not at all. Still we survive.”

Mara waited him
out, controlling her breath and flexing her legs.

“Tell me your
name, young one,” Horuseps murmured, still gazing into the library. “I would
know you better.”

She thought
briefly of refusing—this wasn’t an order, and she still remembered how deftly
he’d shied away from giving his own name as he took her to the Oubliette—but in
the complicated ripples of his mind, she could see that evasiveness was just
what he expected of her, that he had a plan even, a way to wrest it from her. So
she said, “Mara.”

He looked at
her, brows raised so that they arched straight out from his head for an instant
before lying flat once more. Then he looked away again, laughing that mildly
unpleasant laugh of his. “Mara. You give your jewels too freely, and hoard the
most trivial coal.” He gave the locket at her throat a dismissive flick with
one fingertip.

She covered it
in her fist, scowling. “Try burning jewels some time. Value is relative.”

“How true.” He
considered her, making no attempt to hide his pleasure, either inside or out. “Yet
few there are who come here knowing no better than to guard their names. You
make it all too easy for me.”

She laughed
right back at him. “I love that you assume I told you the truth, and you this
supposed expert on the ways of wizards and deceit.”

Again, he showed
surprise, if not quite so deeply. He laughed with her, and his delight seemed
genuine. “Did you indeed, child? Did you look into my face and lie?”

“It’s not such a
scary face,” she said. “And no, not exactly. I just didn’t tell the whole
truth.”

One word—
precious
—pushed
in clarity outside the confusion of his hidden mind. He smiled at her. “Mara it
is then. She of the Bitter Waters. It suits you.”

She shrugged.

“Come then, if
you’ve quite recovered.” The demon took her arm again, and with that touch came
another deeply-set and covetous thought: ‘I’ll never keep her secret from him.’

But just who the
‘him’ of that thought might be, Mara could not dig for without risking
discovery. She let it go for now. She had time, after all, in which to dally
with the secrets and the politics of the Devil’s School, but one must learn to
prioritize. Connie came first.

There were
several doors set in the topmost ring around the library. Horuseps brought her
through one of them and into a narrow, winding hall choked with students. He
cleared them with waves of his hand, by all appearances absorbed with lofty
inner musings of his own, but Mara could feel him outside the Panic Room, where
he no doubt believed he skulked undetected, searching for a door that did not
exist. She let that go too, but she watched him closely.

“Why have you
come here?” he asked at last, abandoning the effort.

“Why would you
ask?”

“If I am to set
you on your way, I had ought to know. You have endured much, wouldn’t you say,
to languish now in ignorance.”

“I’d say that
would be my problem more than yours.”

“Oh my
bittersweetness, these games of yours do tempt me. Must I order you to answer?”

She laughed. “Would
you need to know that badly?”

“My dear, there
is no limit set upon a Master’s commands. I may make every one of them solely
to vex you.” He gave her chin a tickle, then just as playfully lashed out and
slapped a preoccupied student out of his path and into a jutting ledge on the
tunnel wall. As the robed man fell heavily to the ground, Horuseps blithely
continued, “So I do order you to answer. Why have you come?”

“I’m looking for
someone.”

“Oh? Who?” He
thought she meant a demon. He even wondered if it might be he.

“A friend of
mine.”

That stopped
him. He stared at her, not shocked as much as intrigued. “A human? This…Ka-nee?”

“Connie, yes.”

The lights of
his eyes spiraled together into twin gleams. “A lover?”

She laughed
again, this time with sincere humor. “Jesus, not again. No. Just a friend.”

“Humans do not
rashly enter Hell for the sake of friendship. Are you quite certain,” he
inquired silkily, “it is not a lover? One of imagining, if not of fact?”

She kept
laughing, although it died to soft chuckles soon enough, and shook her head. “No.
And I’ll tell you something, since you seem so interested. I’ve been to bed
with a lot of men, but there’s not one of them I’d run across a busy street
for, much less fly to Romania and do time with the Scrivener. Sex isn’t the
same as love, and taking a lover is sure as hell not a promissory note of my
devotion.”

“Indeed? Then I
think you shall do quite well here, Mara. The heartless often do.”

Her smile
vanished. “I’m not heartless. And you’ve got no right to say so just because I
don’t care about the people I fuck when I’ve come halfway around the world for
my best friend.”

“Ah well. That
is the failing of my kind, you see. We have few friends and little love.” He took
her arm again and gave her a hard, sidelong smile. “Fucking is one of only a
few passions we share with humanity, although not, I suppose, to the same
degree.”

She didn’t know
what she was supposed to say to that, so she only shrugged and started walking
again.

The floor rose
as the tunnel curved around. It was very quiet, particularly as crowded as the
passage was. The rock, pitted and scored, vaulted and dripping stone, hoarded
all sound. It had to be done deliberately. She remembered reading somewhere
that only man-made caves echoed because their surfaces were made too smooth,
but these were no more natural tunnels than the subway system in New York. Nevertheless,
whoever had shaped them had been careful to simulate enough of the natural flow
of rock so as to trap sound, and if it was a psychological ploy, it was damned
effective. It disoriented her, made her feel very small and easily misplaced.

“We will be
coming soon into the lyceum, the college-proper, as you would say. Here you
will find the theaters where every art is taught. You will find them empty now,”
Horuseps said, waving a last cluster of students away. “Lessons are held
between second- and third-bell. Students must return to their cells within a
reasonable time, and of course, they are not permitted to wander after the last
bell is rung.”

“Cells?”

“Ah, you think
of prisons? No, these are honest cells, as for scholars of old…or religious
disciples, I suppose. My theological education is severely outdated. But fear
not, dear heart, there are no locks, no dungeons. Why would we need them?”

A good point. All
the mountain was a dungeon.

“Here,” said
Horuseps, as they came out into a great cavern. It was, as he’d said, empty
now, but it could have held easily five hundred people without any of them touching,
and it had been lightly furnished with stone tables and chairs. Water spilled
out from several small spout-like protrusions in the innermost wall, collected
in a crescent-shaped pool, the room’s only real decoration. The floor rose up
along the perimeter, forming a spiral that narrowed as it climbed, giving the
entire room the seeming of a cathedral or a beehive. Tall, heavily-carved doors
stood open at evenly-spaced intervals along this wide path, and a short wall
gave a nod to the prevention of accidental tumbles over the side. Light came
from more of those glowing bulges of yellow rock dispersed along the walls and
set in waxy columns of cave-stone, casting a sallow hue over Mara’s arms and
turning the demon’s moon-like skin to corpse-flesh.

Horuseps
released her at her first step away, resting his long hands on his shoulders as
he watched her move to the first vacant doorway and peer cautiously within. She
saw no classroom, but only another tunnel, pocked with open doors. “Wander here
at your will,” he called, when she eased a short way into it, “and also at your
peril. Here will you find all the wizardry of the mortal ages, but all things
come at a cost.”

“And you teach
here too?” Mara asked, returning to the great cavern.

Horuseps did not
answer, but started walking, climbing the round flight of stairs to the first
landing and passing several open doorways before he paused. When he saw her
jogging after him, he entered. By the time she reached the opening, he was just
a white blur vanishing around a corner. He led her on like this for some time,
his mind disappearing in fits and lunges where the tunnel curved around on
itself, until he came at last to a particular set of doors. There, he waited,
one hand resting on the carved jamb, until she came up close. One of his
fingertips tapped; she stopped before entering the room beyond and looked at
the door instead.

The first thing
she saw was the sinewy and contorted figure at the bottom—a naked man on his
hands and knees, his neck arched and agony in his face, split down the middle
where the two doors joined. Other figures surrounded him, men and women both,
all nude, all straining upwards while huddled small. Mara backed up obligingly,
trying to see the whole picture, and it was only then that she noticed the
abstract lines carved above this teeming display of unhappy humanity was not so
very abstract after all.