The Scholomance (24 page)

Well, they said
absence made the heart grow fonder. She’d try that for a while, and see.

CHAPTER NINE

T
he second day waking up on a stone floor was,
if possible, even worse than the first, despite the trifling benefit of a
second robe to pad her bed. Mara limped most of the way to the ephebeum, which
was entirely empty this morning (evening, she corrected herself mentally, and
thought of the open wall in Kazuul’s chamber, the fresh air blowing through the
curtains, a sky filled with white stars. It was oddly difficult to shake). Her
stomach cramped hungrily at the thought of food, but doing battle with the
other students for a few handfuls of mystery meat did not appeal to her. Baths,
Horuseps had said. Time to find them.

She’d hoped for
hot springs—as long as one was dreaming, why not dream big?—but was not exactly
devastated when she came to a large, plain cavern where water rained heavily
out of the ceiling into a single wide pool. Overflow vents kept the depth no
higher than her knees. A thick, mineral sediment clouded the water to the color
of thin milk. The temperature, it went without saying, was just this side of
ice.

But there were
sachets of soap and pungent herbs hanging from juts of rock on the wall, and
there were even rough towels made of woven grass that might be marginally
better than just dripping dry. It was better than nothing.

She was not
alone, unfortunately. A woman sat against the far wall, naked, her knees drawn
up and her head bent, silent. A tap at her unguarded mind told Mara it was her warden,
Desdemona. She looked up when Mara stripped and splashed into the pool (she’d
had the foresight to drop into the Panic Room first, so as not to embarrass
herself with a lot of undignified hopping and squealing, but even there,
watching the yellow light of alarm flare in her body’s health monitor, Mara
could not resist a mild, “Sweet fiddling fuck, that’s cold.”) and gave out a
pulse of weary blame that proved the recognition was not one-sided. Her face,
Mara noticed, had swollen around the bisecting scar left by Malavan’s claw
until her lips were the size of thumbs…all four of them.

She stood there
for a while, wondering what this made her feel, then decided she didn’t have to
feel anything at all about it. She hadn’t done the injury and certainly hadn’t
enjoyed seeing it done. Mara dunked her soap sachet and started scrubbing. She
needed it. Badly.

Desdemona said
something unintelligible through the drumming of water and the mangled petals
of her mouth. Mara tapped at her mind again. Apparently, they kept shampoo on a
shelf nearby.

And so they did.
Mara slogged over and got some. It lathered poorly and stung at her scalp, but
her hair felt infinitely better once it had rinsed clean. “Thanks,” she said.

“A’a ba ob.”

Tap.

I have a comb,
she’d said, and was holding it out when Mara looked her way: a crude,
metal-worked thing with two rows of rounded teeth, not much wider than her
hand. Mara accepted it with another word of thanks and found a wet ledge out of
the worst of the rain to sit and work her snarls out. Desdemona watched her,
miserable.

“Can anything be
done for that?” Mara asked finally, still combing.

Desdemona nodded
painfully. “A urgee a’ih.” I’m working on it, she’d said, but in her mind were
not thoughts of bandages or ointment, but of what she would have to do to get
someone called Shaitan to heal her, to draw out the infection, and reshape her
ruined face. There were others who could do it, but she knew Shaitan…and knew
him well enough to know what he would demand in return. It would be Nathaniel
all over again. It would be worse.

“If you had a
needle and thread, I could try stitching it up for you,” Mara said.

Desdemona only
shook her head. There were no needles, and thread pulled from the robes surely
could not be clean. It would only get infected and she would end up begging
Shaitan after all.

Mara shrugged. She’d
made the effort. Even if she didn’t consider herself responsible for the woman’s
plight, she wasn’t heartless. “Thanks for the comb,” she said, holding it out.

“Eeb ih,”
Desdemona said, not moving. Keep it. It would mean a nightmare to earn another,
of course, but what was one more nightmare in this place? What did a few nights
more on her knees really matter, if she made a friend in Mara, who had the
favor of the Masters, if only for a little while. She wouldn’t be pretty and
new forever. She’d learn. Even if she did everything right, she would never be
completely safe.

Mara waded out
of the pool and put on her robe, tucking her new comb into the pocket of one
sleeve. She started to leave, then sighed and came back. “I’m looking for
someone,” she said bluntly. “A young woman about my age, a little taller than
me, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She came here two years ago. She was
calling herself Faith. Do you remember her at all?”

“Ai?” Desdemona’s
frown split her wounds open. Her lips poured discolored blood thickly onto her
chest, where it was washed away by drops of rain. “Ai ood’oo ah ee?”

Why, was the
gist of that, Mara knew it without even tapping. Why would you come here, why
would you ask me, why would it even matter? Desdemona’s eyes above the open
petals of her weeping face were only puzzled, tired. Just for kicks, Mara told
the truth: “I came to get her out of here.”

The woman stared
without comprehension. “Oo and.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll
see, I guess. Have you seen her or not?”

Desdemona shook
her head. A tap at her mind confirmed it—her fellow students were only robes
and teeth to her, predators and prey. There was no escape, only the door, only
the demons and the ringing of their bells.

“I’m sorry he
went after you like that,” Mara said finally. “I didn’t know he would.”

Desdemona only
shrugged. The Masters did what they did. No one could predict them. She still
hated Mara in a dry, distracted way, but not because she really blamed her. She
hated her for being beautiful, for catching the collective eye of the Masters
and holding it so easily, for being fearless upon the library steps and
fearless under the hand of Horuseps. She hated her for being everything, in
short, that she herself was not, either as Desdemona, acolyte in the Devil’s
School, or as Lynn Wynwick, free woman of London. Life inside the mountain was
no different than outside. The cup never held better than bitter wine for woman
like Lynn, while every hand reached to pour pink champagne for the Maras of the
world.

Mara scowled,
looking down at her, thinking.

It would be a
small enough diversion to haul this miserable creature up and march her out to
find this Shaitan, to force him to do whatever he was capable of doing to see
her repaired. And what would it get her but another one like Devlin, stapled to
her damn shadow and useless in her search? She wasn’t here to start a Student’s
Union in the Scholomance.

In the end, she
turned around and left her. She wasn’t heartless, but she wasn’t a hero,
either. She was here for Connie. That was all.

*
         
*
         
*

The first meal
of the day was gruel. Great big buckets of it, the color and consistency of wet
cement, served without bowls or spoons. The students dove in, burning their
hands and their mouths as they fought each other for swallows. Mara was by now
hungry enough that she could not lose her appetite simply because she wanted
to, but this was truly revolting.

At the Master’s
table, the demons ate off silver platters with knives and hooked skewers. Bread
and cheese, fruit and meat, hot tea and wine. Mara found herself a seat with
the animals at the center table and contemplated walking up as bold as Oliver
and asking for something else. The only thing that kept her from doing so was
the certainty that she would be refused, and would then have to walk back
empty-handed in front of everyone.

A stray elbow
slammed into Mara’s back unexpectedly, knocking her into someone else, who
actually grabbed her by the robe and tried to topple her off the bench. She
resisted, shoving not just against him but against everyone, the entire crowd
like a single suffocating organism all around, and just as she’d managed to
straighten up, a thick gobbet of gruel went flying, landing like bird shit
directly in Mara’s left eye.

She lost her
temper and slapped.

Not with her
hand, but with her mind, Mara struck out in all directions, indiscriminately
flattening the squabbling students who jostled her. The ease of it inflamed
her. Before she knew she was doing it, she tore through defenses, broke open
pain centers, and got every last one of them to leap spastically away. Since
most of them were still sitting at the time, the result was a rather comical
shockwave of black and white robes tumbling backwards onto the floor.

Students at the
other tables swung around to gape. Demons at the far end of the room erupted in
laughter. Mara righted herself, knuckled gruel out of her eye, and made herself
stop there. She had to be cool. She had to stay calm.

“What the…What
the fuck just happened?” One of the black-robed acolytes got up, flushed and
bleeding, hunting for his attacker. He saw Mara and homed in at once.

“Let it go,”
someone muttered.

“Did you just
hit me?” the acolyte demanded, not even angry as much as just stunned. Very
much as Mara would be, she supposed, if their positions were reversed.

“To be fair, I
hit everyone,” she replied, flexing her mental muscles. “I don’t care for
crowds.”

“You don’t care
for—” He lunged forward, was restrained by two of his cohorts, and stood
shaking in their grasp, filling the Mindstorm with the colors of his fury. “I
ought to turn you inside-out for that, you cunt!”

“I don’t care to
be shouted at, either.”

“Fucking
cunt
!”
he shouted.

She didn’t lose
her temper twice, not really, but all at once, she had to wonder just why she
had to stay cool? To a Master, yes, but why to this man? Why to this screaming,
swearing fool in his magic black robe? She could see inside him as easily as if
he were made of glass and like glass, by God, she could shatter him. This was
not the Outside, it was the Scholomance, and it was perfectly okay if people
knew about her, it was just as fine as fresh paint, and just maybe she’d been
cool long enough.

“Apologize to
me,” Mara said softly.

Somewhere in the
room, Loki’s laughter honked out, shared and expanded upon by students at the
other four tables. Where the Masters sat, Zyera also laughed, the sound like
tinkling bells, stilled when Horuseps put his hand on her arm. Mara saw all of
this, saw none of it. She stared into the acolyte’s fury-dark face and was
ready for his outburst. More than merely ready. She wanted him to come.

“Apologize?” Disbelief
cracked his voice, took away twenty years, and left him just as reckless and
foolhardy as he’d been the day he’d first read of this place. He pushed back
his murmuring friends and advanced on her, screaming, “I’ll pound your brains
out with my dick, you shit-faced stinking cow-cunt! That’s my apology!”

He lunged.

Mara, without moving,
threw out a needle of thought and jabbed it precisely into his brain, but for
just a moment, it didn’t want to be a needle at all. Just for a moment, she
could feel her own mind flexing, wanting to take that power that nestled so
quietly in the calm heart of her and draw it out big, not a needle but a spear.
Just for a moment, she could see herself throwing that at him, and not sending
him crashing to floor in a sound sleep as he was doing now, but flinging him
back in one last spectacular convulsion, snapping his spine with the strength
of his spasm, spraying bloody froth like a fountain and bursting the eyes out
of his head.

The urge left
her, but it didn’t leave her as shaken as it should have, and that bothered
her. She wasn’t a killer.

‘You don’t make
friends easily, do you?’ Horuseps thought loudly, as the rest of the room began
to return to its normal level of activity and noise.

**I already have
a friend,** she answered, watching as the unconscious acolyte was rolled
impersonally away from the tables and his place usurped. The two who had tried
so hard to pull him away from the conflict were going through his sleeves,
removing what they found as deftly as any back-alley thief. **I don’t think I
want to make new ones here anyway.**

‘It isn’t all bad.’

There was no
polite way to answer that, so she stayed silent and turned her attention back
to breakfast. Against her better judgment, she dipped one finger in the closest
bucket of gruel and brought it to her lips for a taste. Salty, greasy, with the
lingering tang of rancid fat. Mara spat the bitter swallow out and got up.

‘Oh dearest, you
really must do better than that. You’re wasting away before my eyes.’

**This is
disgusting, Horuseps.**

‘Yes, it is. More’s
the pity, because it’s all you’re going to get…unless you ingratiate yourself
to one with the means to provide better. Kazuul takes his meals early, but the
kitchens are never closed to him.’

**Subtlety isn’t
your strong suit, Horuseps.**

‘It is. It would
simply be wasted on you, dearest.’