The Scholomance (18 page)

“It’s me,” Mara
agreed.

The woman stared
and Mara waited her out, tapping at her mind. No one had ever come through the harrowing
so swiftly or endured it so well, and things of that sort. Mara wasn’t a bit
surprised. No one else had a Panic Room to work from.

“I…I’m to tell
you the laws.”

“I heard them
this morning.”

“You attended
the tribunal?”

“I attended an
execution.”

“That—”
is a tribunal
,
Desdemona thought. She bit at her lip and carefully amended, “That is the fate
of all who break the laws of the Masters. Remember that. Now. We have only a
little time. Put this on—” She thrust the white sheet into Mara’s hands. “—and
do it quickly.”

Mara didn’t
move. “Is there a reason why I should be listening to you?”

“All neophytes
are given the attentions of an experienced acolyte during their first days, to
prepare and orient them. I am yours, your guide and warden.”

“I don’t think I
need one.”

“I don’t care,” Desdemona
snapped. “It is what my life is worth to see my duty done. Whether you need me
or not, the Masters
will
see me at your side. Put that on and follow, or
by Hell, I will drag you!”

In the end, two
things decided her. The first was the very real fear hiding inside this outward
show of annoyance and anger. The woman knew Mara was special, knew she was
bound for great things, bound to surpass Desdemona herself, and such pets are
marked from the moment they enter. She believed entirely that to allow Mara to
walk alone on her first day would be viewed as abandoning her warden’s duties,
and therefore insulting the Master who had so assigned her. Much as Mara did
not want a shadow dogging her heels in her search for Connie, she also didn’t
want to be responsible for the next tribunal.

Secondly, she
was hungry.

Mara shook out
the white ‘sheet’. It was a robe. A neophyte’s robe. How special. She put the
new one on over the old one and smoothed it out a little. “All right,” she
said. “Show me around.”

“You are too
gracious,” her warden snapped.

“I really am,
you know.”

*
         
*
         
*

Mara remembered
Horuseps pointing out the dining room from the Nave the night before, but
Desdemona didn’t take her the same way. Rather, she was led out of the ephebeum
by way of one of the twisting, narrow tunnels up an extremely claustrophobic
stair, down another door-lined passage, directly into the dining room itself. The
noise could be heard from the stairs. Mara had never heard anything like it.

Oh, the minds
were nothing. The minds were the chatter of an airport, a movie theater,
anywhere that hundreds of people could gather and be social. It was an
adjustment to pass from the muffled quiet of the tunnels into that roar, but
not a difficult one. It was the real noise, the one she heard with her ears,
drummed in her bones, that stopped Mara in the open doorway.

They’d done it
deliberately. They had to have done. Where every other room and passage had
been carefully shaped to reconstruct the sound-absorbing nooks and crevices of
natural rock, this room had been made into an amphitheatre. The walls, so
straight and smooth as to shine, slanted up to a vaulted shell of a ceiling,
directing the sound not outward to an appreciative audience, but right back
down upon their heads. The echoing din forced the students to shout to be
heard, which in turn brought greater noise hammering down at them.

The students
were arranged at five long tables, like five radiating lines drawn from the
center of the room toward the horns of a crescent-shaped platform, where
perhaps two or three dozen demons sat, overseeing the lot. The whole of the
room had been backlit from blisters growing out of the wall behind the Master’s
table, so that the demons themselves were mostly silhouettes, many with glowing
eyes or glinting horns. The students’ tables, by comparison, had only a few
candles for illumination, guttering madly in the wind made by all that shouting
breath.

Desdemona gave
her a nudge towards one of the tables, but she didn’t move yet. The Masters
were watching her. She could feel their many minds prodding at hers, sniffing
like starving wolves around her darkened windows, all but Horuseps. His
angular, pale silhouette raised a hand and waggled the black-tipped fingers in
welcome. His thoughts aligned, knowing she would be reading them, to inquire if
she’d lost herself in the dorms below and what a poor guide he must have been.

**You were such
a good guide, I was waiting for
you,** she replied, speaking silently
over the questing minds of the other demons. It was the first time she’d done
such a thing—not tapping but speaking, wanting to be heard. There was something
thrilling about being so brazen when all her life she’d kept this secret. **I
suppose now we’ll have to pretend our meeting here was accidental and there’s
nothing more between us.**

He called her a
tease, lacing his long fingers together as a cradle for his chin.

**I never tease.
I have no sense of humor.** She glanced at her warden, who seemed to share this
deficiency, and allowed herself to be seated at a table. There were no
individual plates or bowls, only communal platters from which all students
fought for handfuls of bread or meat or crumbling cheese. Some of them had
cups, which they filled at slopping bowls of wine, but only some. The rest
dipped their naked hands and drank from them like monkeys. Mara watched them,
faintly disgusted.

Horuseps
silently asked if she were hungry.

**I don’t think
it’s wise to eat the food in Hell,** Mara replied, watching the student across
from her suck meat off what sure looked like a bird’s head before throwing it
on the floor.

Horuseps assured
her there were no pomegranates.

One by one, the
demons retreated from her mind. Mara glanced over their physical forms, each
one so different from each other, so fundamentally inhuman. She counted
twenty-eight of them.

‘Oh, there are
many more of us,’ Horuseps assured her when she asked. ‘These you see—’ He
waved a hand gracefully at either side of him. “—are but those few who enjoy
watching the animals feed.’

**A base
entertainment.**

‘Needs must,’
thought Horuseps in a mocking way, ‘when the Devil demands. We have no
recreations but those our little pets provide us. You should eat something.’

**You have
enough entertainment in front of you.**

He gave her a
thought which was at once denial, apology, and oily amusement.

The bells rang
twice.

The students
stood up, very nearly in unison, and the sound of their feet as they stepped
away from the tables made a thunder Mara could actually feel in her bones as it
rolled from wall to wall. They left in a shouting, tromping tide, grabbing last
handfuls of food to carry in their sleeves, and taking away their cups. What
was left on the tables was nothing but a few guttering candles and one godawful
mess. Desdemona waited for her out of the press of humanity, her hands clasped
whitely together and her back bent low.

‘One cannot help
but observe that you’ll make little progress in your quest if you starve
yourself to death,’ Horuseps told her, still without speaking aloud, although
now he certainly could. ‘Nevertheless, that is your decision. Will you be
joining me in class?’

**No.**

“
Move
!”
hissed her warden. “It is not permitted to stay in the dining hall after the
bell has rung, you cow! Go!”

‘However will
you make your search if you have no Sight?’ wondered Horuseps, his gaze
wandering to the woman behind her.

“Do not even
dare to think of keeping her for yourself,” said Zyera, the coral-bodied
demoness of that morning.

“She’s useless
to you, dear sister,” Horuseps murmured, smiling.

“As useless as
to you, and yet there is still fun to be had by her. Shall you hoard it?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

One of the
unknown silhouettes suddenly stabbed what looked like twin swords into the
table, using them to rock his small, thick body up onto his own empty platter. He
(it was a he; no physical proof could be made out in this light, but even if
Mara could not sense the masculinity in his mind, there was only a male
strength and power in his stalking movements) pulled the swords and folded them
against his body, walking forward on his knuckles like an ape—an ape in his prime
and confidant of his authority—across the table, to leap down in front of it,
and also into a puddle of light, so that he was suddenly and, she was certain,
deliberately revealed.

He might have
been taller than her, if he stood upright, but hunched as he was, his eyes were
on a level with hers as she sat. The hunch was no affectation. Oh, his back was
straight, his torso long and powerful, but his muscular legs were bent back in
the way of an animal, so that he walked upon the toepads of his thick feet. And
it wasn’t his knuckles he balanced by after all, she saw, or at least, not many
knuckles. He had only the one finger at the end of each muscular arm, and the
swords now comfortably curving back against his ribs were the two lengthy claws
that tipped them.

Now he settled
forward, sinking slightly upon his bent arms so that he stared up at Mara in a
particularly brooding fashion, his shoulders rolling like a cat stalking
squirrels. He had no body hair of any kind, but a number of fleshy rope-like
tendrils grew from his head a little longer than his shoulders. They slid over
his skin with snakish hissing sounds at his every movement, and as he studied
her, their blunt tips gradually darkened to a deep, bloody red.

“What are you
called?” this creature demanded. His voice was hoarse and the words
thickly-made. He wasn’t used to talking, which was strange, because he wasn’t
much of a telepath either.

“Mara,” she
said, flicking a subtle question at her warden. Master Malavan, was the answer.

“It is my
command, Mara,” this demon, this Malavan, said next, showing his teeth to his
fellow Masters in a grin, “that you attend my lesson.”

“Cheat,” Zyera
sniffed. She was the only one who spoke, but every mind that Mara could read
had some derisive sting about it. Malavan thought he was doing something
clever, that he was taking the first turn with the toy everyone wanted, but no
one had any envy for him, only a cold and smirking contempt.

“I’ll go,” said
Mara, studying the other demons at the table. “But I thought students were free
to choose their arts.”

“Hereafter.” Master
Malavan shrugged. “Should not your first be given special attention?”

“That’s why I
have a warden, isn’t it?”

Malavan’s gaze
shifted to the woman bowing low beside her. His expression puckered, meanly
thwarted. He thought. Then he swung his arm. He did it fast, so fast Mara wasn’t
even sure she’d seen it all. It seemed to her just that he’d rocked back and
crooked his terrible claw in toward his body, only now it was dripping.

Desdemona let
out a gurgling, soundless shriek, bleating fear and disbelief and finally pain
all over Mara’s brain. Mara turned around into a spray of hot blood and saw a
gaping red chasm open over the woman’s face, splitting her nose and opening her
mouth into a four-petaled orchid.

“She’s sick,”
Malavan said, dropping diffidently onto his knuckles. Some of the Masters at
the table laughed.

It was a fight
not to show the shock she felt, but Mara managed. She wiped her face on her
sleeve, smearing red across that crisp, new white fabric, and projected only
irritation, irritation and calm. “That was unnecessary. I said I’d go.”

“Now your
reservations are at rest. Come.” He stalked ahead of her, but paused to glare
at the woman until she, still screaming, forced her hands together and bowed
for him. Then he continued out into the Nave, putting her utterly from his
mind.

Mara followed,
watching students stare at her as she and the demon moved among them. They
resented her for the preferential treatment, but oddly, they weren’t envious of
it. A Master’s moods were volatile, and when interest faded, suffering began.
For some of the Masters, the rewards were worth the risk, but this was Malavan.
“What do you teach?” she asked.

“What do you
wish to learn?”

“I didn’t come
here to learn anything.”

“So I hear.” He
took her out through a tunnel and down a well-lit stair, not one she knew. It
wound around and around and suddenly came out again, not in the lyceum, but on
the catwalk above the Great Library. Malavan moved on without stopping, but
Mara simply had to go to the balcony and look down.

Even at this
height, the Scrivener was not lessened and his place in the library drew the
eye. He was his own well of gravity, sucking in the light and vitality of the
room’s inhabitants as much as sight. Funny. She could not see the Hell of the harrowing,
but it was there, just four long flights of stairs below her. All the knowledge
of the universe was there, curdled into madness, but she couldn’t see it, not
with her eyes, not even in the Mindstorm.

Master Malavan
waited for her at the passageway that led to the theaters above. Patience was
not natural to him, but he was content for now to watch her and guess at what
she must have endured. Listening to the things he imagined was worse than what
she had to remember. Mara left the Scrivener to his initiates and ascended to
the lyceum.

Students swarmed
in the great cavern, a mass of white and black blobs moving down tunnels and
through doorways. They bowed if they saw Malavan, but most had their hoods up
to keep the dripping ceiling off, and Malavan was not so noticeable a demon as
coral-edged Zyera or glowing Horuseps. He didn’t seem to mind. His thoughts,
armored in strangeness, seemed fixed on a single point and she thought it had
something to do with her.