The Scholomance (28 page)

“Well, of course
I—Oh, you mean here? Yeah, off and on.” The admission shamed him some, a
reminder of the lessons he had not learned despite all his effort. “The first
year was the worst. I don’t even want to know how close I came to a tribunal. I
mean, I think I actually had pneumonia, you know? God, I didn’t think that
cough was ever going to go away. Felt like I had it for months. And a while
back, some guy came here with something pretty nasty, some fever-thing. I don’t
know, someone said it was typhoid. I don’t know if that’s what it was or not,
but I was sure sick with something.”

“I didn’t think typhoid
was something you could just get over on your own.”

“I didn’t. We
didn’t, I mean. That was one of the few times the Masters actually got
involved. Usually, they just let nature, you know, take its course.”

He was drifting
again, thinking of the theater where he had fought to wrap his head around
Growth, coughing into his sleeve so hard he’d actually blacked out once or
twice. He’d never gotten the Word to work, not even once.

“What did they
do?” Mara asked, bringing him back on track with a light tap.

“Mm? Oh. Yeah,
they just came and got everyone one night. Pulled us all out of our cells one
by one, dragged us into the ephebeum, and stood us up in a line. Master Toth
fixed us up. Inoculated us, I guess.”

“Do I know
Master Toth?”

“Probably not. He’s
teaches the highest-up combinations of Growth, Entropy, and Transmutation. Which
I guess makes sense if you’re going to, you know, inoculate someone.”

That was all he
wanted to say, more than he wanted to say, really, but in his mind, he was
there again, standing naked in a line with Master Argoth’s clawed hand like a
vise around his bicep, placidly holding him while Master Toth worked with
another student. The demon looked harried, which was a disturbing thing to see
on one of them. Devlin stood meekly, shivering and coughing, until Toth
finished and waved Argorth over, hissing his impatience. Devlin’s arm was
yanked out, his hand cut open. Toth drank from the wound, then seized Devlin’s
face, wedged his jaws open, and drove…something down his throat. Not a tongue. Hard,
leathery…and hollow. It scraped down into his esophagus and then disgorged some
kind of thick, hot sludge where Devlin couldn’t even gag on it. Toth withdrew,
spat a few times as Devlin staggered, and then waved him aside and reached for
the next one. “No stamina,” the demon was hissing to himself, his eyes huge and
ringed with white like that of a spooked horse. “We’ll lose half of them no
matter what we do.
Ra
, no, pointless, that one! Dead already and still
walking! Just throw him on the pile, Nezgulon.
Ra
, show mercy and crush
his skull! Next one, quickly!” And then the dizziness struck, and after it, the
pain, and then Argoth was carrying him back to his cell, screaming and writhing
and pouring sweat. For hours, he’d lain on the floor, insensible and raving,
but when an exhausted Suti’ok brought his hounds skulking around at first-bell
looking for bodies, he was alive and the cough and fever were gone.

“Does that
happen often?” Mara asked, sharing this memory with a faint sense of alarm.

“I wouldn’t say
often, but it’s not unheard of. This one guy told me they had to do it
something like ten times before they figured out how to screen for, you know,
HIV and all that. And one of the really old guys said it was the same way with
one of the other sex-diseases, I don’t know which one. And, you know, sometimes
the flu will get real bad, but most of the time, they’re perfectly happy to
watch us die, except that if we all go, they won’t—” The Black Door loomed
suddenly in his mind and gooseflesh popped out over his arms. “—get what they
want from us,” he finished.

“What happens
when people die?”

“I don’t know. Master
Suti’ok gets told. Him and his…the hounds. They take care of it, you know…the
body.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what they do with it. It’s not a big deal.”

“I’d think the
complications of disposing of a corpse inside a closed environment like this
one would be a damned big deal, particularly if they’re so against the spread
of virulent disease.”

“I’m sure they
just chuck it out a window somewhere.”

“I’m sure they
don’t. All it would take is one tourist finding a heap of human skulls and
everyone would know about this place.”

“Okay, so they’re
burying them. The rock doesn’t make much difference. The Masters can just magic
a grave open and shut.” Devlin was not thinking of the meat they were so often
served in the dining hall, not on the surface anyway, but deep down, that
connection had been made and squashed again with real horror, because he ate
the meat here, he always would, and therefore, he would not allow it to be
anything but meat. “But there’s no graveyard or anything, if that’s what you’re
after. I don’t think anybody keeps track of who dies.”

No one keeps
track…but that didn’t make much sense, did it? After all, someone had kept
track of the new arrivals. Mara remembered all at once tapping at the mind of
Gamaliel, who called himself the archivist, whose studies were interrupted each
year so that he might enter the names of the aspirants into the Book.

Perhaps he also
crossed them out.

CHAPTER TEN

S
he dreamed of Kazuul again and, preoccupied
with the trouble of how to get down to the archivist’s room unseen and where
the book might be if it wasn’t there, she didn’t even notice until the health
monitor flashed the faint blue of orgasm. She glanced down at the dream
spooling out on the other screen, saw her hands scratching blood from the demon’s
broad, stone-grey back, and immediately sprang up to look at her vitals.

He wasn’t there.
No careful touches below the Mindstorm’s radar, no whispers in the darkness, no
Kazuul with her in her cell. Just a dream.

Clearly, she
needed to get laid.

The figures on
the monitor moved together in violent, kinetic sex, neither one with any
obvious consideration for the other. It held a certain attraction, she couldn’t
deny it, and so she settled herself again in the air to watch the fantasy play
out, aware of a faint wistfulness in her as she did so. She had to be so
restrained in real life. A man’s idea of an uninhibited woman meant moaning
extra loud, maybe a little play-scratching. Not this. Mara liked to fight.

Kazuul, bound to
be the victor of any combat, gave back as good as he got, savaging her when she
bit, wrestling her arms to the ground when she clawed him, and always battering
her to new heights with his fierce and furious thrusts. Dream-Mara screamed,
the furious pleasure of a heat-crazed cat, then attacked, driving him back so
she could leap atop him. Savaging him into position, she rode at her pace, back
arched, teeth bared.

He tolerated it,
growling as he gathered his strength. Then his hand knotted in her hair,
dragging her up by the head only to throw her down again on her belly. His
thigh wedged between hers; he entered roughly from behind and dropped his
entire weight over her, grinding her into the floor with complete abandon. Crushed
immobile, she slapped spastically back at him and came and came.

Good times…and
yet Mara couldn’t help but notice that this was turning into a suspiciously
long dream. The average length for her, after all, was somewhere around three
minutes, and she’d probably been watching at least that long already. She
looked at her vitals again and again found them untouched by outside forces. On
the dream-monitor, Kazuul reared back onto his haunches, his claws digging into
her hips as he moved her fast back and forth on his cock, not even fucking her
as much as masturbating with her body. It was impossible to tell whether she
were even struggling at this point, or just fucking back at him. She came
again, washing the health-monitor with blue, and then he bucked her off, yanked
her up by the hair, and gagged her screams of pleasure with his cock.

A very long
dream. As a test, Mara made her dreamself bite him.
 
He roared, dug in his claws, and drove himself
deep into her throat, holding her there. Oddly, she needed air in her dreams. She
thrashed wildly as Kazuul growled above her, grinding his hips against her
face, and just as she began to lose consciousness (how could you even do that
in a dream?), he shoved her back and fell over her again.

No way was this
a dream. Mara gave the monitors a final baffled inspection, and then woke her
body brusquely and dropped back inside it.

She’d been
cumming, and every nerve still tingled as she sat up and stared around her
empty cell. She saw nothing, not with her eyes and not in the Mindstorm, but
nevertheless felt the unmistakable residue of another person’s will around her.
He wasn’t connecting, not really, and that was just as inexplicable to her
because it meant that he was blindly pumping thought at her mind even though he
couldn’t possibly know if it was being received, and what in hell could he be
getting out of it if that was the case?

And how was he
doing
this? Mara got up, grabbing for her robe, and heard a dull clatter as something
caught up in the one she used for a pillow fell out. It didn’t register right
away, but when it did, she knelt down and carefully felt along the floor until
she found it. When her fingers brushed its solid sides, Kazuul’s will enveloped
her, bringing the dream, and countless other dreams just like it, hammering
against her.

Mara gloved her
hand in folds of robe and cautiously picked it up, exploring its shape in her
lightless cell. It wasn’t a rock. That would have been weird enough. For all
that the mountain and all its furnishings were made of stone, it was solid
stone. Not a lot of loose pebbles here. But no, this wasn’t a rock. This was
bone, smooth and hard in her hand, somewhat tapered at one end and rounded at
the base. Like a horn.

Or like one of
the spikes that grew from Kazuul’s body.

Mara put her
robe on. She went out into the hall and groped her way to the blister lamp
there, slapping at it until it came to groggy life. She looked, and by God,
that was exactly what it was: one of his spikes. There was no way that got in
her cell, in her
bed
, by accident.

He was using it
somehow, transmitting himself through all this rock into her dreams. Impressive.
Infuriating, but impressive.

Mara took it
with her down the hall to the first occupied cell she found and gave it a toss
through the narrow window onto the soft mound of a sleeping student. Let that
be a fun discovery for both of them.

But now she was
awake, and even though it was forbidden to run amok after hours, the temptation
to use this time to her advantage was more then she could resist. Mara made her
way cautiously into the ephebeum, reaching out ahead of her as far as possible,
but touched on no one.

Slowly,
silently, Mara crept down the winding tunnels and flights of darkened stairs,
until she came to the Great Library.

The upper
landing was empty apart from her, but several initiates moved down below her. She
remembered only too well the timeless quality of that place—without day,
without night, without peace. The initiates worked and slept and suffered
exactly as they had done during her service, oblivious to her, to everything. The
Scrivener sat in his desk, licking at some of his eyes and rumbling to himself
in idiot bliss.

God, she did not
want to do this.

Gritting her
teeth, Mara dropped into the Panic Room and started down the stairs. Every step
brought her closer to the librarian’s toxic seepage, but she was unaware of it
until was on the final flight and felt it closing in over her head. The sound
of all-knowledge, like cicadas screaming in her brain, consumed her senses even
as the Mindstorm blacked out. She could feel it humming at her from without,
relentless, indefatigable.

She didn’t have
time to be overwhelmed by it, not today. Mara fought her way across the floor,
giving the Scrivener’s desk a wide berth (still, he reached for her as she
passed by, gronking happily) on her way to where she’d originally entered. One
or two of the initiates raised their heads when she opened the heavy door, but
said nothing. Thoughts of freedom fluttered briefly and were swallowed again by
other things. Terrible things.

Mara slipped out
into the stairwell on the other side and closed the door quickly. Quiet, not
silence, but better than nothing. She took her body back and climbed rapidly
down the narrow stair she remembered, feeling her way along the wall.

A mind ahead of
her, drowsing and bored, but human.

She went
carefully around the corner into the glow of a blister-lamp and saw a man
sitting on a heap of red robes, only half-awake, serving his time as he waited
for this year’s batch of newcomers to free themselves from the Oubliettes. Mara
entered him, slid out a needle-thin shred of her own will, and jabbed it in
deep to a very particular place. The man jerked hard and suddenly sagged, fast
asleep. He never saw her, never knew she was there.

There had to be
a tunnel leading from here around to the portcullis, but going through the
Oubliette was bound to be quicker than looking for it. Mara went to the first
set of double doors she saw (and there were many, reaching out in both
directions through this room and out into the halls), and touched them, driving
her will at them until they opened. It was much easier than she remembered.