The Scholomance (19 page)

“You never said
what you taught,” she remarked, extending a piece of her mind like a needle to
circle the armored dark that was his.

“Growth.”

“Good for
gardening, I suppose.” She thought loudly of what possible use turning saplings
into trees might be, and while he focused clumsily on that, she slid that
needle in, quietly, painlessly probing.

Malavan grunted
and glanced at her, unaware of her infiltration. “It is the art of all life
force. I think you are the first even to think of trees and fruit and growing
things. Most consider my art solely a means of preserving youth or the vitality
of one’s seed.”

“Invigorating my
seed never occurred to me,” said Mara, probing deeper. No, he was no telepath,
but his mind remained irritatingly dark all the same. When she’d been younger,
Mara had spent a number of afternoons dragging her au pair to the zoo because
she’d heard that chimpanzees were intelligent and wanted to know what they
thought, and those experiences were very much like this one: Malavan was
intelligent, as the apes had been in their way, but his mind was just too
strange. He wasn’t human. He wasn’t even…whatever Horuseps was. She could
probably learn to read him in time, as she could have learned to read the
chimps, but that wasn’t why she was here.

Besides, she got
the broad strokes. She could sense the currents of his thoughts, his basest
emotions and how they changed when he thought of her. Now, for example, she
could feel his crawl of crude amusement as he looked at her feet, at her toes
in specific, and how they winked in and out of sight under her robe. Why in God’s
name he should be hung up on that she couldn’t begin to fathom and was afraid
to examine too closely, lest she give herself away. If the price of disobeying
a Master was death, she could only imagine the penalty for trespassing in his
head. “Eternal youth must appeal to a lot of people, though,” she said,
withdrawing.

“Studies require
lifetimes. Man is mortal.” Malavan glanced at her, so suddenly that she thought
at first he’d felt her retracting her needle, but no, he was grinning. “Do you
not wish to live forever?”

“That sounds
pretty awful, actually.”

He faced
forward, grunting to himself again, or maybe laughing, it was hard to tell.

“You’d outlive
everyone you cared about,” Mara said. Without meaning to, she thought of
Connie, an old woman, and herself, still young. It made her feel something. She
wasn’t sure what.

“Life requires
few things to sustain it. Love is not among them.”

“Neither is
magic.”

Malavan hissed
laughter out his teeth. “A point,” he said, and stopped before an open theater
door to rise up on the points of his claws, almost but not quite on level with
her eyes. He smiled, or tried to smile. “Study with me. I can give you a thousand
years of power if you will stay with me, stand at
my
side, and call me…Master.”

“I’ll consider
it.”

His eyes
narrowed. He dropped back onto his knuckles. “You’re lying.”

“I do that a
lot.” Mara moved into the circular room and down the descending rings to find
an empty place in the second row. Even with forty-three other students sharing
this space and forty-three other minds clamoring in her head, the round benches
were mostly vacant.

Far from
projecting an appearance of size and strength, this persistent theme of
oversized and empty rooms only served to instill Mara with a sense of vacuum,
of some unhealthy place being slowly eaten away from the inside. The air of
isolation and desperation infesting the students only made the analogy that
much stronger. Everyone knew that something was preying on them, but as long as
the predators fed them, no one seemed to care.

Lambs among
wolves, thought Mara. Lambs suckling of wolves. And if one or two got snapped
up by their mothers, oh well, said the rest of them, it made the milk that much
more abundant.

Malavan
descended to the dais, drawing silence like a curtain across the rings of
students who gathered to hear his lesson. He swung lithely up beyond the
lectern, reared, and jabbed his two long claws deep into the podium’s face, so
that he might lean on them upright. He’d dug out two grooves of prodigious
depth, proof of this comfortable habit of long age’s making. His eyes raked
across them, everyone counted, even those sitting behind him in shadows, and
when his eyes fell on Mara, he grinned.

“All things that
live,” he said, staring up at her, “bleed energy. It is the spark of all magic,
the soul of creation, the very breath of Life. This is the art of Growth, to
breathe in what God breathes out.”

Mara settled in,
bracing herself for a long stretch of boredom.

“Death,” said
Malavan. “Death is only ignorance. You are mortal—” His eyes burned into Mara’s.
“—because you expect to be. Yet within your body, the countless fibres of flesh
make and remake themselves, immune to decay, until ignorance and weakness of
will corrupt them. The years, like beetles, burrow in. You soften. You wither. You
collapse.”

Amazing how many
people responded to those words with real fear. Mara propped one foot up on the
riser in front of her and wiggled her toes, trying to distract her teacher. It
worked. That was pretty amazing, too.

“Mortality is an
unnecessary limitation,” said the demon, staring raptly at her foot. “Yet
mortality is not the only enemy a student of Growth conquers.”

Was it sexual? It
didn’t feel sexual. She couldn’t read him any better now than she had before,
but sex things had a way of rising to the surface of any mind. This fascination
was more what one would expect of a man in a museum, as if toes were art.

“I am reminded,”
Malavan said, pulling his claws to drop comfortably onto his knuckles, “that
human vanity is not the purpose of my art. Flesh is not the sum and substance
of all power. Heed.” He walked to one edge of the dais, deftly stabbed the tip
of his claw through a wooden box on one of his shelves, and brought it to the
lectern. A few casual slices dissected the box handily and he brought out what
looked for all the world like a shriveled testicle or a—

A walnut.

And as Mara
watched, trying to puzzle out just why a demon would keep a single walnut in a
carved wooden box with a
lock
on it, the demon spoke. Just once, one
syllable of horrible sound that scraped out of his hoarse throat and twisted
its way into Mara’s ears. A short word, almost a bark coming from him, and as
Mara recoiled from the hearing of it, the nut cracked open and sent up a
spindly, pale shoot.

“Every
instructor you meet within this mountain will tell you his is the greatest art,”
Malavan murmured, seemingly fixated by the slow thickening and straightening of
that slim, stretching stalk. “And each is, in its own limited way, truly great.
Do not be deceived. Fiery shapes and monstrous transformation may impress the
eye, but this…this is life itself.”

Roots spilled
over the sides of the lectern and dug in, boring into the stone as effectively
as the demon’s claws. The stalk forked as it grew, darkened with bark, forked
again. The podium creaked under its growing weight, snapped out a few shards,
then let go with a crash. Students bolted back as the tree rooted itself to the
dais and stabbed upwards, its branches beating at the walls, gouging grit from
the high ceiling.

“Life is always
at its most terrible when it is young, when it is beautiful,” Malavan
continued, walking along the raised platform’s edge, his head tipped on side to
watch his creation’s growth. “This is why you all seek it, even when you do not
understand its consequence. Life, growth…these are merely words to mean
potential, and what is potential but unresolved ambition?”

The tree’s
thousand branches suddenly erupted in size, pushing out a hissing, furious
cloud of new leaves. The green stink of it permeated the air. Waves of nausea
echoing out from the students turned Mara’s own stomach.

“It is will that
makes for greatness,” said the demon as branches groaned and spread, bowed by
the weight of budding walnuts. “Life itself can become death in the hands of
one who has the power, and the will, to command it.”

The nuts began
to drop, one by one, and then in a clattering, deafening hail. It lasted only a
few seconds, and when it ended, the leaves buckled over, bleeding red and
brown, and dropped on top of them.

“It is not the
word, but the speaker,” Malavan said. He twitched a claw and putted one of the
nuts up in a high arc to land smack in the open box at his feet. He bound it
together again with the same unreal agility he’d used to take it apart, saying,
“Too many of you desire forever with no idea how to fill those endless years. But
life can be deadly when it stagnates. Potential, undirected, rapidly decays. Ambition,
without strength of will, cannibalizes itself. And magic, in the hands of the
ignorant, becomes very dangerous.”

That didn’t
sound good. Mara got up calmly and started back up the risers, away from the
giant, rapidly-decaying, magic walnut tree.

The sound of
dead wood cracking carried exceptionally well in the classroom. Some of the
students shifted uneasily in their seats, particularly when Mara passed by, but
no one followed her example. It was a test, they were thinking. A test of their
resolve. And those who ran (Mara resented the notion that she was running) did
nothing but prove themselves unfit before their Master.

Malavan heaved a
sigh, heard even above the ominous death-knells of the tree. “Have I no student
of quality before me? Have I, after all, only dogs fawning at my knees?”

“And bitches who
run,” someone muttered—Le Danse, from the ephebeum. “I suppose it was the wrong
kind of growth to hold your interest, eh?”

His henchman
laughed obediently.

“If I were you,
I would worry less about insulting me and more about how to avoid being killed
by an exploding tree,” Mara remarked, still climbing risers, nearly to the
door.

Now Danse
laughed too, somewhat hesitantly. “Idiot.”

The sound of
Malavan’s bone claws cracking down over the podium silenced him, silenced
everyone. “You’ve ruined my surprise!” he snarled. “Now you share their
punishment!”

The double doors
before her swung inward and slammed, trapping her inside. Mara stared for a
second, then caught the carved handles and pushed, but might as well have been pushing
at the wall.

The tree began
to splinter, bulging outward as with terrible pressure, sending shrapnel of
bark whipping through the air, some of them hard enough to chip the walls where
they struck. The first threads of panic stabbed up through the Mindstorm. Students
stared at each other, stunned, and Malavan crouched down at the edge of his
dais and grinned at them.

“Is there not
one of you, not one, who can seize hold of the power I’ve put before you? Come,
you dogs, the threat and the solution are one! You, Silvana? You, Mercutare? Revanche,
will you not come and earn the favor I have so lavishly given you? Where is my pretty
Adamantine’s will today? Do you think that I will save you? Do you think I will
have you back if you survive disgrace?”

The tree
groaned.

“For God’s sake,”
Mara snapped, tugging futilely at the immoveable doors. “Someone pick up a
walnut and grow another tree!”

Students gaped
at her in stupefied silence. The dead tree cracked, firing shards of itself
ominously out in a wide fan that seemed, to Mara’s distracted eye, capable of
reaching every corner, every riser, every unprotected point of this killing
room.

“Quickly,”
Malavan murmured, tapping his toe-claws comfortably on the dais. “Else I have
none to hear lessons tomorrow.”

His voice broke
them into a surge of motion as students dove for walnuts. Bare feet slipped on
shells, heads conked together, but there was no comedy in the moment. Then, the
shouting: the same word over and over, howling from mouth to mouth. It couldn’t
have taken very long—the tree didn’t have very long in it—before the first
green shoot went spiraling up the splintering trunk, quickly followed by
another, then another. They grew at differing speeds, none of them so rapidly
or well as Malavan’s.

“Wrap it
tightly,” the demon called out as the dead trunk sent out another shower of
bark shards so sharp and dry, they might as well be stone. “Contain the whole
or suffer the lack, as my sire would say. You see, Mercutare, you had it in you
all along. Ah! Ah! Here is the test!”

The tree burst. The
trunk, by now netted in by saplings, merely bulged once and collapsed in on
itself, but the higher branches exploded outward in a shower of spears. Mara,
high on the tenth riser and forewarned by Malavan’s cruel glee, hit the floor
with her hands over her head, fending off a heavy fall of petrified rain. Jagged
flares of pain wracked the Mindstorm, but she didn’t think anyone was killed. It
would have been easy to miss one death among the chaos of so many, but Master
Malavan’s disappointment was difficult to misinterpret.

“So,” he said,
moving easily through the debris to inspect the new trees. “Of you all, only…five
with the skill to act, and none at all with the wit to recognize danger.”

“I resent that
remark,” Mara grumbled, gaining her feet with a wince. Her brand-new white robe
was now the nice splotchy color of an unwashed floor. Slapping at the dust only
ground it in worse. Lovely.

“You resent…” The
demon eyed her, his head low and small eyes shimmering from the shadows of his
face. “You have made it clear you are not one of mine. You are like all the
rest of them. Even as you are, powerless, you would set yourself above me.”

He hated her.

Mara felt at
what she could feel of him, baffled. She had been hated before and it didn’t
bother her, but Malavan hardly knew her. His hatred was as black as cancer in
the Mindstorm, but it seemed to have more to do with the demons in the dining
hall than with anything she had said or done. “You are the Master here,” she
said carefully, sliding one foot out from beneath the hem of her robe. “I’m
just a student.”