The Scholomance (21 page)

“I heard about
it from a friend,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “How about you?”

“Sort of the
same, only he wasn’t a friend. More of a mentor. A guru. Kind of an idiot,
honestly. I used to get peyote from him. Have you ever tried that stuff? I didn’t
like it too much. Made me see cactuses everywhere. It fucked with me. Anyway,
he was the guy who first told me about the Scholomance, but he thought it was
around Hermanshadt, near Lake Beleal. For all I know, he’s still looking there.”
Devlin’s wide, triumphant smile faded as they came out into the lyceum again. He
looked up, down, and hunched in on himself. “You never did say why you came
here.”

“To find
someone.”

He was quiet for
a bit, still morosely fixated on peyote and the Y2K-bug and Lake Beleal, but
all at once started and said, “What, you mean a
student
?” in tones of
sharp amazement.

And what the
hell, he was here, she might as well make some use of him. “She’d be a recent
arrival,” Mara said. “A little taller than me, willowy. Dark hair, real curly. Dark
eyes. Kind of nervous.” She did not give Connie’s name.

Devlin’s
expression melted to one of bewilderment. “A girl?” he asked, but didn’t wait
for an answer. “Yeah, actually, I…You know we don’t get many girls…But it wasn’t
last year I saw her, it was the year before.”

Mara stopped
walking and turned around to face him.

He backed up at
once. “Kinda swarthy,” he rattled off, as if hoping to appease her with proof
of the sighting. “Very Italian-looking. She said her name was Faith, but, you
know, names here…” He shrugged.

Constance. Faith.
Mara drove a needle into his mind, chasing Faith to the memories that
resonated, and saw her.

She sat on a
bench by the fountain in the lyceum, separated from Devlin’s casual glance by
crowds of black and white robes. Her hood was back. She’d cut her hair, badly. Her
face was pale and her eyes too dark. She looked like she might be crying, but
even at this distance, even without Devlin’s interest, it was impossible not to
recognize her. It was Connie. Her Connie.

“Take me to her,”
Mara said.

Devlin blinked.

“Right now.”

“Gosh, I haven’t
seen her in…I mean, I never really knew her well enough to talk to her or
anything and…she just…”

“Wasn’t someone
people needed to know,” Mara said sourly.

Devlin shrugged
again, avoiding her eyes as he scratched at his robe. “There’s two kinds of
people who come here. Her and me, we’re the same kind, you know? It’s not a
good idea to hang out together.” He looked at her, saw her flat and undisguised
dislike, and turtled up a little. “In Africa, you know, you see the gazelles
all grouping up in herds to keep the lions away, right? Around here, lots of
gazelles just bring on lots of lions. You don’t…I’m sorry, but you don’t know
what it’s like here…how it gets…when there’s nothing else for them to do but…eat
you.”

Mara turned
around and started walking.

This time, when
he tried to fall into step behind her, Mara put out an arm and shoved him back.
“I’m here for her, not you,” she said into his hurt, hunched face. “Go find
another lion to suck up to.”

He let her go a
few steps, then lunged for her and grabbed her arm. She sensed it coming and
let it happen only because his desperation so completely precluded his doing
any harm, but he flinched just as though she’d come around fighting all the
same. “If I help you find her,” he whispered, already cringing back from her hot
eyes, “will you take me with you?”

“No,” she said,
and scraped him off her side with a shove and a mindslap. “You don’t know
anything more than I do. You’re useless to me. And I am not Moses leading
people to the Promised Land.”

He finally
stayed back as she walked away, and she got the feeling he’d be crying pretty
soon, but some perverse vindictiveness made her kick him when he was already
down and soundly beaten. “Remember this the next time you see some scared new
kid sidling up to you in the hall, Astregon,” she called. “Even a gazelle is
better than nothing.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
he lyceum was bigger than it looked, and it
looked pretty big. Its tunnels crawled like roots through the mountain,
senselessly forking and intersecting, sometimes climbing up and sometimes
steeply dropping down, but always they led back to the main room and another passage.
Mara climbed the spiraling stair around the lyceum’s outer wall all day, taking
each open doorway as she came to it. She didn’t try to orient herself, or
commit even a small part of the labyrinth to memory. She wasn’t going to be
here long enough to need to know where all the Masters made their homes. Mara
walked, her mind flying out ahead of her to tap at every living thing she
encountered, searching only for Connie.

As the day wore
on, more and more students emerged from their classrooms to sit in the central
cavern or cluster around the lamps. As Horuseps had remarked, the matter under
study had a way of repelling those who tried hardest to master it. The people
she touched upon were worn, exhausted things that looked back at her with the
murderous hostility bred by only the blackest frustration. She did not avoid
them, but neither did she ignore them. Five times she was followed into the
dark, empty forks of the furthest tunnels, and five times she was forced to
turn around and deal with the wolf who tried to prey on her there. A good mindslap
and the hard stone floor were more than a match for even the worst of men, and
Mara moved on.

The lyceum
ceiling opened over the stairs higher up, so that it might seem to those below
that it circled around and met the rock, when in fact it merely passed out of
sight. Probably to the belfry, Mara decided, but she went on ahead to look,
feeling her way with one hand on the wall as she left the light behind her.

It was much
slower going in the darkness. The stairs came to an end after a while and then
the walls moved away, so that she found herself in a fairly wide tunnel. At one
point, her trailing fingers brushed up against the solid, unpleasant lump of a
blister-lamp. She started to feel for a switch, but gave up quickly. There were
no switches in the Scholomance. **Light,** she thought at it, hammered at it
really.

The lamp
responded by leaking a weak, yellowed glow. Mara paused there, holding her palm
over the repellent lamp to strengthen its power (which it seemed her touch did
do), to let her eyes adjust. She looked back, although she knew she was alone
here, and saw first the telltale bulge of another lamp on the opposite wall
well in the distance, and another ahead of her. She saw benches pulled out from
the stone, narrow enough to have passed beneath her outstretched arm without
her scraping against them, and alcoves cut into the overhanging stone to allow
for grotesque and fantastic carvings.

Mara left the
lamp guttering behind her and went to light the next one, moving from one wall
to another and examining all she passed. The walls were smoother here. She’d
known that in a peripheral way as she walked beside them, but seeing their
smoothness was another matter. A thick ribbon of carvings ran along them, about
hip-height, just a tangle of ornate knots that seemed to her uneducated eye
vaguely Celtic. The floor beneath her bare feet, also smoothed, and richly
carved where they met the walls. Here and there were splotches of ancient wax,
proof that there had been candles long before the lamps.

The ceiling
gradually arched and the hall widened. The carvings became more elaborate and
less abstract. Knots turned to flames, then to writhing bodies, and then whole
cities of wild and wanton dancers who bathed in showers of fire and who
executed mad orgies on beds of bone. Soon the carvings ate up all the stone
surrounding her and still the passage went on, painfully straight and level,
until suddenly, it stopped.

There was a door
here. At the very end of the hall, flanked by carved pillars and dully-glowing
blisters, a door. Similar in many ways to every other door in the lyceum, she
supposed, but much larger. Like all the theater doors, its face had been carved
in relief to show a demon triumphant over a cluster of writhing, pleading
supplicants, yet the supplicants in this case were not naked humans, but demons
themselves, of many different kinds. She was pretty sure she recognized the
tree-like Zyera among them, and she thought the angular one huddled near the
bottom and clawing at his own back might be Horuseps, but for the most part,
they were so grotesquely intertwined, she couldn’t make out individuals. All of
this held a certain fascination for her but of course, what interested her the
most was that the doors were closed at all. The backswept horns of one upturned
face made clear handles, but when Mara gave them a cursory tug, they didn’t
budge.

Mara put her ear
to the door and heard, naturally, her own pulse echoing back from unmoved stone
to her own ear. She rubbed her palms briskly on her robe, braced her feet, and
gave the horns as powerful a pull as she could manage.

Futility.

Mara spent a few
fruitless minutes searching without expectation for some secret latch or button
hidden among the carvings. When she came up empty, as she’d rather thought she
would, she found a place on the carved wall where she could lean and brood over
the matter.

How likely was
it really that this door led anywhere important? Her sense of spatial
relationships were badly askew underground, but she knew she was higher than
the portcullis where she and the other applicants had been brought in, much higher
than the Oubliette, and she thought she was higher than even the Black Door and
whatever lay beyond it.

The wall was not
as flat as it needed to be. Stone elbows and gyrating hips shoved painfully
into her back and kept her neck bent at an awkward angle. When she straightened
up, light from the glowing blisters fell across the demon’s mouth, making him
seem to sneer at her for giving up. Her own lips twitched sullenly back at it;
she stayed.

So there were no
mechanical switches…this meant the likelihood of a mechanical lock was also
low. There had to be another way in.

On impulse, Mara
touched it. Not the handle this time, but the door itself. Her hand traveled up
over writhing knots of pleading demons to the Master who stood over them all. She
wondered if it was meant to represent whoever was on the other side, the way
the other theater doors acted as portraits for those who taught within. If so,
this one cut an impressive figure.

It was a man’s
shape, essentially. Heavily-built and wrapped in muscles well beyond most male
proportions, he posed atop his writhing fellows with one clawed foot digging at
someone’s spine, his arms slightly outspread to further emphasize his sheer
size and strength, staring straight out and down at her. He had hair and he
wore it in a high knot and a long fall that was, like the carvings around him,
almost Asian and almost Aztec, but somehow neither one. A short ridge of blunt
horns grew in symmetry along his hairline—the smallest perhaps thumb-sized
directly over his eyes, growing progressively larger as they wrapped around his
head, so that the ones sprouting above his pointed ears swept up and out like
daggers. More of these bony nubs grew along his jaw, they outlined his thick
neck, jutted from his wrists, ribs, thighs and biceps. The jagged points of
larger spikes thrust themselves out from his shoulders, his back, even his
hips. He wore some kind of layered skirt or complicated loincloth, baring his
powerful body in defiance of any vulnerability, and the belt that cinched it
all together was as sharply studded with points as he was. His eyes were
deep-set, his mouth somewhat snouted. She couldn’t tell if he were snarling or
just grinning, but the effect was not a cheering one, whichever. Like a
fun-house portrait, the demon’s gaze had a way of following her as she paced
restlessly before it. She couldn’t say there was any malevolence in his
expression, but it was disquieting to stand before it and feel, however
foolishly, that she was being seen and sneered at.

That notion, illogical
as it was, suddenly put her in mind of the Oubliette again, and the tar-thick
intelligence which had sealed its doors. After a moment’s thought, she touched
the handles here, but didn’t try to pull on them. Instead, she opened her mind
to them, sending out thought like a spear, searching for that vital crack in an
enemy’s armor. She got no sense of awareness, but there was more to the door
than just stone, she was certain of it.

**Open,** she
thought.

She felt, or
imagined she felt, a subtle vibration under her fingertips, just briefly,
pulsing once through the rock and into stillness once more. ‘The mountain’s
heart beats only once a year,’ Mara thought vaguely and gave her head a shake
to clear it. When she looked up, the demon’s stone face was looking down, his
teeth bared in what struck her increasingly as a condescending smile.

Outwardly, Mara
did not move, apart from a slight curling of her upper lip, but outward
appearances ceased to matter. If Connie herself had walked by, Mara couldn’t
have noticed. All her attention drew inward, flexing into focus for one
explosive command. She felt it drive out of her with good, righteous force. She
felt it slam home and drive itself in deep. ‘Open’ was the word she gave and
that word resonated once, just once, seeming to blow itself up into something
far bigger than its echo, something ancient and alien of herself.