The Scholomance (29 page)

Was this her
Oubliette? No, there was someone in here. A man, the guy who’d thought he was a
bear when he first reached the summit of the Scholomance. Mara remembered him
standing there, his fists raised, roaring. Now he shrank back from her, crying
and jabbering at her, unable to understand if she were real or another dream,
another nightmare.

Mara left the
doors open for light, found the other one, and opened it the same way. Outside,
the tunnel was dark and bitterly cold. As Mara felt her way along, her naked
toes touched ice hiding in the crevices of the floor, only once in a while at
first, but more and more often as she continued on. By the time she reached the
room where she had been forced to strip and relinquish her possessions, she was
walking on a thin sheet of ice. It was only early November, but may as well be
in the heart of winter in these mountains.

November. Three
weeks until Thanksgiving, give or take. She wondered if the care service people
would do anything special for her mom. Rosalie usually had holidays and she
always asked Mara for a little extra cooking money. She pocketed most of it, of
course, but she was a darn good cook, so Mara kept shelling it out. Last year,
she’d baked a tiny pumpkin pie and a game-hen as part of a whole miniature
Thanksgiving-Day spread. Her mom had seemed to enjoy it.

Mara no longer
believed she was going to be out in time for the holiday. For that matter, she
wasn’t certain she’d be back in time for Christmas. It didn’t bother her, but
she knew it should. Her finances were in order. Her mom would be taken care of
for years yet. And if not, if something did happen…well, maybe it would be the
incentive Caroline Warner needed to stop faking crazy and start acting like a
person again. Mara could only be there for one person, and it was Connie.

The thought came
to her, without rancor or resentment, that her mother might actually see having
to pay her own way as a fair price to finally be rid of her strange, white-eyed
daughter. There had never been much love in that family, and none at all after
Mara became old enough to understand that the voices she heard belonged to
other people and not everyone could hear them. Maybe if there had been, Mara’s
filial devotion would have outweighed the interrupted friendship between her
and Connie. Maybe.

Kind of
pointless to speculate now.

The desk where
Gamaliel had registered the aspirants was empty now, but Mara found the book in
a chest underneath his chair, where it was mostly protected from the constant
dripping and frozen air. The chest had no lock; the book did, but it gave after
a few good whacks on the corner of the stone desk. Mara took it over to the
nearest blister-lamp and found the page with this year’s maroon-streaked names.
There were no dates, but that didn’t much matter. She began to read backwards,
and there, just sixteen lines above her own Kaspar Cortoreal, the word Faith
had been penned in over a bar of dried blood.

That was all. One
word. No secret code to follow, no cryptic hints, no death-denoting line
through the middle. Just Faith.

Mara touched it.
She didn’t know why. It couldn’t tell her anything. She touched it anyway, and
felt only the stiffness of the stained paper beneath her fingertips. “Only this
and nothing more,” murmured Mara.

Other names had
been drawn over, though, quite a few of them, which made her theory sound. She
flipped through the pages of the book one at a time, not reading it so much as
meditating over it. Five years, eight, ten. She saw the name Astregon squeezed
in between Childer (Deceased) and Aurora (tribunal). It was another six pages
before she saw her first (Graduant), and then another, and so on until the names
were almost completely accounted for in this fashion.

Assuming two or
three years per page, and assuming the book’s records were accurate (and she
know it wasn’t infallible, since she and Horuseps had found bodies unaccounted
for), some of the students listed here had first entered the Scholomance over a
hundred years ago. And Horuseps was right, there were far more names marked
dead than graduated, and far more graduates than victims of a tribunal.

At least Connie
wasn’t counted among them. Not yet.

What if she
really was hiding? Not taken, not imprisoned, but only hiding? There were a
thousand twisting passages here, ten thousand dimly-lit rooms. Maybe she was
running around while the others slept, thieving crumbs from the kitchens and
running from the sound of footsteps, secure in the knowledge that her psychic
friend would come and find her no matter where she hid, and completely ignorant
of the baffling effect of heavy minerals on Mara’s telepathic prowess.

Scarily plausible.

She’d never even
considered the possibility that she would have to look for Connie once she got
here. Now that she thought about it, she supposed the only difficulty she’d
really anticipated was how to find the school. Once on the inside, she supposed
she’d expected to find her friend at the door with her bags packed, just like
escape was another sleepover from their childhood.

Mara flipped
back to the first page of the book, but saw nothing, really. It had told her
all it could. She would learn nothing more here.

Replacing it in
its protective chest, Mara left the portcullis for the Oubliette. The
victorious bear whose test it had been had nerved himself to creep out at last.
She found him huddled in the robes just outside, hiding his face against the
sleeping acolyte’s side as Mara passed and holding very still. Whatever. The
acolyte would wake up on his own sooner or later and who would be there to say
that Mr. Bear hadn’t willed his doors open fairly?

Re-entering the
library took more willpower, but she was across and up the stairs in seconds. She
met no one in the tunnels, heard no sound apart from her own footsteps. She
felt no mind…until she came out in the ephebeum.

Mara gasped and
swung a scant instant before Horuseps murmured, “Out for a stroll, my dear?”

His blown-glass
body gleamed in the darkness, illuminating nothing but his own self, fading to
black at his hips. He stepped away from the wall where he’d been leaning,
uncrossed his arms, draped one of them casually over her shoulders and began to
walk, not towards her cell, but to the wide stair that led to the Nave. “It is
forbidden for students to wander out of hours. I believe I’ve mentioned this.”

“Will there be a
tribunal?” Mara asked. Her voice didn’t shake; she was proud of that. Her mind
flexed. She’d never really used it as a weapon before, not a real weapon, but
no toy slap would do now.

“Oh, it isn’t
that forbidden,” Horuseps said dismissively, waving his other hand. “But where
were you?”

“The Great
Library.”

His arm
tightened on her shoulders, although his tone remained light. “Now it
is
that forbidden to borrow books.”

“I didn’t take
anything.” And before he could question her further, she said, “Were you
waiting for me?”

“Oh yes.”

“Why?”

“Need you ask?”

Was this about
Kazuul? “Humor me,” she said.

He glanced at
her, and behind his sly smile, Mara clearly heard his desire to dangle his
purpose over her, to torture her, however casually, for the few short minutes
he had, but no. He would tell her and his reason for doing so had less to do
with a generous nature than his recollection of the easy way in which she’d
pierced his mind the last time she believed she’d been dared to do so. If he
gave her cause, she would do it again. She was so much stronger now, so soon…

“I’m sorry,”
Mara said, genuinely surprised. “Are those supposed to be
secret
thoughts?”

Horuseps removed
his arm and darkness dropped between their minds. “How good of you to bring the
deficit to my attention,” he said. “Although perhaps not very wise. There’s
very little more enticing to me than an honest streak running through a
delightfully amoral soul. You’ve been warned.”

“Warned,” she
repeated scornfully. “You’re the Master here. If you see something enticing,
demand it.”

“You shameless
flirt. This way.”

Across the Nave,
through an open door, down yet another winding passageway. There were no lights
here. Mara followed the white cut of the demon’s body in the blackness, letting
one hand trail along the damp tunnel wall for balance. Her feet, badly burned
by the icy floors below the library, hurt terribly, but she refused to limp. He
had a reason for all this and her intuition told her it would be worth the
hassle, but still she didn’t entirely rule out the possibility of a trap.

“Here,” said
Horuseps, pausing before one of the rare closed doors of the Scholomance. It opened
at his touch and a blister-lamp within came to a slow and sullen life. “Your
diligence inspired me,” the demon said as he drew aside to let her enter. “I
have been searching the private chambers of my fellow Masters. I found her
among Malavan’s harem.”

Dark brown hair
spilled in curls off the end of the stone ledge where the girl lay. It didn’t
quite serve for a bed. Her arms overhung the sides. Her fingers twitched, about
every four seconds, as steady as a metronome. The hands were too small, not
just to be Connie’s, but to be real. Like the tiny feet at the end of the girl’s
twitching, elegant legs, they were sized for a child on the body of a woman. Her
breasts were not large, but perfectly-formed and perfectly-placed upon her
delicate torso. Her waist was too small, her hips too rounded, her sex as
hairless and smooth as Mara’s own. In fact, apart from the glossy curls growing
from the girl’s head, she had no hair at all, no scars, no blemishes or
birthmarks, nothing to disturb the perfect whiteness of her body. As for the
face…there was none.

It wasn’t
ruined, wasn’t torn or mangled beyond recognition. It was gone, wiped clean, a
perfect porcelain blank. The brow was high and smooth and regally rounded down
into heart-shaped cheekbones and chin, but she had no features, apart from a
tiny pointed nose, which was the girl’s only means of respiration. It was
beautiful, that was the worst of it, beautiful in its macabre inhumanity, a
face that epitomized anonymity in perfection.

“It isn’t her,”
said Mara.

“Are you
certain?”

Mara tapped at
the mushy remains of the girl’s mind. There were no more thoughts, no true
memories, but there were impressions, as with every mind, a kind of sediment
built up after years of existence that were absolutely unique to each
individual, and it endured even after the existence itself had been rendered
obsolete. “It’s not Connie,” she said again. But it had been someone.

“Pity. I’m
afraid I was rather harsh with Malavan. Now I shall have to apologize.”

“You’re not
taking her back to him?”

“Not this
instant, but yes, I might as well. For certain, she’s not much use elsewhere.” Horuseps
lifted the girl’s dangling hand and arranged it on her soft, white belly, but
its twitching soon dislodged it. “Malavan has been warned, of course, not to
fill his harem from the student body, but—”

“No one noticed.”

“No.” He met her
eyes without apology, as if daring her to push the matter.

She’d always
found it difficult to let a dare go. “Will there be a tribunal?”

The demon’s long
eyebrows twitched up in surprise. “Against a Master?”

“He broke the
law, didn’t he?”

“It’s really
more of a suggestion. Besides, it’s entirely possible that the girl was herself
punished for breaking the lesser of our laws…perhaps he caught her out of her
cell before first-bell.”

“Or perhaps he
just liked the look of her feet.”

Horuseps gave
her a quick smile. “So you noticed that, did you? Ah well, we all have our own
affectations.”

“What are yours?”

“Oh, I’m quite
boring, I assure you, especially compared to some. Master Uulok, for example,
favors amputees.”

Mara opened her
mouth to ask how many amputees could possibly have made the climb up the steep
mountainside, and then realized that was exactly his point. “Let me guess. There’s
no law against that, either.”

Horuseps
shrugged.

“Do the students
here have any rights at all?” Mara demanded, beginning to lose her temper in
spite of every effort to rein it in.

“They had the
right to stay away,” Horuseps replied mildly. “But gave it up to enter here. I’m
not sure what they were expecting, but as someone or another once said, they
knew it wasn’t nursery school.”

Mara looked at
the faceless girl, at her flawless skin and perfect beauty. She had been made
into a doll, as near to inanimate as any living thing could be. She served only
one purpose now, to be an object of admiration, a vessel of lust. And it was
not a crime.

“If this had
been Connie,” Mara said slowly, watching the delicate hands jump and dance. “What
would have happened next?”

“Next?”

“Yes, next. The
interval between me discovering my best friend transformed into Master Malavan’s
cock-sleeve and me leading her out of this mountain. Next.”

“Leading,”
Horuseps echoed, looking at the twitching doll with something like amusement.

Mara’s temper
slipped again. Holding on to it had a weight now. She was beginning to tremble
from the exertion of keeping it. “Yes, leading,” she said, somewhat hoarsely,
although still calm, still in control. “Because, you see, if there were no way
to restore her from this condition, it would be the same as finding her dead.”

“I suppose so.” He
began to look slightly disturbed, as if this scenario had not yet occurred to
him. He too considered the body of the girl on the slab. “The human mind is
remarkably pliable. What Malavan dismantled could, I’m certain, be repaired.”

“By you?”