The Scholomance (39 page)

At last, the
demon Azkeloth started walking again, not toward her but to the Master’s table.
Placing a fist quietly on either side of Horuseps’s plate, he bent very low and
said a few black-looking words which Mara had no way of making out. Horuseps in
turn sent cordial regret to Mara. It seemed Azkeloth’s class was full.

“Bullshit,”
muttered Mara, narrowing her eyes. Silently, she observed that every student in
the mountain could probably squeeze into a single theater if they had to, and
she doubted like hell they ever had.

Horuseps
shrugged and spoke briefly. Azkeloth bared his teeth, shook his head. Horuseps
filled his cup and repeated the lie. Class was full.

**I’ll allow for
twenty,** Mara sent, her temper fraying, **but then I’ll eat every other
student I find in that theater.**

Horuseps relayed
this, smiling. Azkeloth grunted and looked back at her over his shoulder. Then
he shoved himself off the Master’s table and faced her.

The dining room
managed a respectfully dull roar as the demon stepped down from the dais and
came to Mara. With every stride, his similarity to Kazuul grew, and so did the
differences. His eyes were black all across, as black as the eyes of a shark,
and yet, still dimly glowing, spilling unnatural shadows down his cheekbones. His
body, leaner and smoother than Kazuul’s, boasted fewer and shorter spines, but
this was largely due to the fact that several of the most prominent—those
sprouting from his shoulders—had been recently broken off. Very recently. They
were still dark with blood at their exposed cores.

He was younger,
that too became clearer. It wasn’t in his body so much as his mind, which was,
like Kazuul’s, that of a lifelong telepath, but not nearly so well armored. No,
she couldn’t read it as she could a student’s, not even as she could a demon
like Horuseps, but when she tapped at the walls he had built around him, she
found a lot of hasty mortar and forgotten cracks. He would be an easy one to
break, if she had a little time and a little privacy.

Azkeloth stopped
well out of arm’s reach and showed her his fangs in a smile. “My theater is not
closed to the students of the mountain,” he said in a voice like gravel. “Tis
closed to thee.”

“I was told I
would be free to choose any art I wanted.”

“And wert thou
not also told that Masters make the laws? Thou hast no freedom but what we
allow.”

A hot boast, but
there was hunger in his eyes when he made it. Hunger and the resentment hunger
breeds when set apart from the feast.

“I’ll meet with
you,” said Mara, ignoring the flinching attention this statement drew from the
other demons at their dinner, particularly Horuseps, still tethered to her mind.
“I’ll meet with you outside of class. I only have some questions.”

Azkeloth’s lip
curled—neither a sneer nor a snarl, but only a grimace of frustrated ill-humor.
“Tis more than my life is worth to answer them. I’ll not meet thee.” He turned
away, all his hidden thoughts soured with spite, spite under one name, one
fragment of memory.

Kazuul. Kazuul
and the sound of snapping bone.

Mara watched him
march himself back to the Master’s table, but her eyes had a way of wandering
to the dark dots of blood in the center of his bony stumps. Not a fight, then. A
warning. Or a threat, more precisely.

Horuseps was
making some sort of apology to her. She accepted it distractedly, thinking. Kazuul.
He’d stopped trying to get her attention directly and had instead adopted a
more roundabout way of winning her over, namely, he was mutilating his
perceived rivals and it had only been one day since she’d last seen him. When
that failed to send her skipping back to his arms, what then? What indeed, but
coming up out of his den and dragging her off by the hair? Right out of class,
if he had to. Right out of her cell, right through the ephebeum.

One day. So much
for lengthy courtships.

Last-bell rang. Mara
emptied the table of snatching hands with one unaimed mindslap, then took a
little bread and a handful of boiled roots to eat alone in her cell. Budding
opportunist that he was, Devlin did the same, but he didn’t follow her when she
got up and approached the Master’s table. “I suppose he thinks he’s being subtle,”
she said, addressing all of them, none of them. “Well, I’ve never been one for
subtlety when it comes to sex and I don’t find interference endearing.”

None of them
said anything, not even, ‘What are you on about, crazy lady?’ They watched her,
sipping wine, wary of expression.

Mara turned her
eyes on Azkeloth, sending threads of suggestion and desire undetected beneath
every word: “I’ll be in my cell tonight. I’ll leave the door open. I have
questions. You’ll have an hour for every one you answer.”

Horuseps looked
at her, at Azkeloth, at his cup. “Oh for the days of youth and charmed
stupidity,” he murmured.

Azkeloth’s
staring eyes sparked and narrowed. His face darkened, grew hard. He shoved
himself back from the table and stalked away without speaking to her.

“This is a
dangerous game you’re playing,” Horuseps went on, idly swirling the contents of
his cup. “All the more for that you cannot possibly appreciate the true
objective.”

“My objective
hasn’t changed,” said Mara.

“Oh my dear. You
are making things very difficult for us.”

“Then give me
what I want and I’ll leave.”

Zyera tittered
behind her hand, earning her half a smile and a pat on the thigh from Horuseps,
who then drank the last swallow of his wine, set his cup down, and stood up. He
leaned over the table without touching it—a pillar of alabaster and onyx in
perfect balance—and said, “I find that I want to see you triumph, o bitter one,
if only for the novelty of it. And to that end, I give you this advice: Before
you commit yourself too deeply to the win, find out what game you’re playing.” He
passed a hand over her hair, tapped the tip of her nose once, playfully, and
then left the hall.

So did Mara. If
all went as planned, someone would be coming to see her in about four hours. She
wanted to get a nap first.

*
         
*
         
*

Azkeloth came,
of course.

In the middle of
all those uncounted hours the other students believed to be night, the demon
came to her. He didn’t light the lamps when he came. He made no sound in the
tunnel, no sound when he stood outside her door and placed his broad,
claw-tipped hand upon it. Mara felt him, his strange, dark mind churning in
lust and hate and indecision. She woke herself up and rolled over, staring
through the black at the door, at him on the other side.

He had only to
push the door open, he thought. No one would know. To this, Mara added the
promise of her gleaming limbs (impossible to see in the absolute black of the
unlit cells, but desire was not fed by fact), her sleeping eyes fluttering
open, and the warmth of her body as he fell over her. There would be outrage,
there must be, and there would be struggle, but it would fade in time to
grudging welcome as pain succumbed to pleasure. She would be his, she promised,
down deep where he could not hear but must respond. She would be his and he, in
his eagerness and unchecked lust, would press his naked flesh to hers and open
the way for her to break him.

‘So come on in,’
thought Mara, helpless Mara, naked Mara. She lay back down, arranged herself in
sleeping innocence, and flexed her mind, waiting.

One minute. Two.
She counted out the seconds in the Panic Room, feeding him fantasies just under
the edge of his perception. Three minutes. Four.

Azkeloth spat
out a sudden breath, a wet and ripping snarl. It was the only sound he gave
her. There was nothing more, only the dimming of his hateful, vulnerable mind
as he retreated the way he’d come.

No, he hadn’t
detected her. And no, he wouldn’t be back. Oh, she could hammer at him for a
while, pursue him in the lyceum, haunt him outside his perceptions, and when he
finally snapped (and he would), he’d fuck her halfway to death and so much for
her grand schemes of possession. Kazuul had a stronger grip on him than Mara
could ever forge.

Things could
never just go right the first time, could they?

Mara rolled back
onto her side and put herself to sleep, still muttering to herself as she
dropped off. She needed the rest. She had a big day ahead of her.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
he bell rang once, rousing Mara from an
uneventful sleep. She lay there for a little while, thinking black thoughts of
Azkeloth—her perfect pigeon, too cowardly to fly into her trap—and Kazuul, to
whom she was the pigeon. Stiff, sore, and frustrated, she stared up into the
blackness of her cell and wondered how the hell she was going to deal with him.

Fuck him, of
course.

She bared her
teeth at the darkness, but found no reasonable argument to levy against that. It
was what he wanted…maybe not
all
he wanted, but Horuseps was right; when
he decided to stop letting her resist and simply ordered her onto her back,
she’d lose every advantage. Clearly, a surrender was inevitable, and if the
terms were to fall under her control at all, it had to be sooner rather than
later. Thus far, Kazuul had proved oddly hesitant to simply take what he wanted
from her, but his patience would seem to be nearing its end. She had to fuck
him before he lost his temper. She wasn’t sure how close he was, but she knew
she
was right on the brink, so it might as well be soon.

She got up,
dressed quickly, and headed out to steal a bath while her fellow students were
killing each other over breakfast. One had to look one’s best before seducing a
demon.

But to her
surprise, the tunnel leading to the baths was blocked. The dark-skinned demon
comfortably occupying it was not familiar at first glance, but his face
resonated when she sent it back through her own memories. She’d seen him in the
lyceum, although not teaching in a theater. Just prowling through the halls. He
must be a Master…but why would he come here? He didn’t seem to want anyone. He
just stood there, leaning up against the tunnel wall and watching students scurry
off to the dining hall with mild amusement scored onto his snouted face.

Mara hesitated,
watching him. She couldn’t afford to stop and investigate every unusual
occurrence that dangled in front of her. She had been here for days
already—days!—and every new face was another distraction keeping her from her
friend. She knew this, but the demon’s presence at the mouth of the bath-tunnel
felt ominous.

The other students
were still hurrying away, rarely giving him more than an uneasy glance before
they moved on a little faster. And this was ominous too, because students
weren’t supposed to clear the room when a demon was there. They were supposed
to stop and wait to see if they were wanted.

Mara began to
realize that she didn’t feel just curious about this, she felt dread. She
wasn’t used to feeling that, not about anything, and she couldn’t ignore it. It
might be safer to head on up to the Nave, wash off in the lyceum’s pool, and
keep her focus on Kazuul, but instead, she started walking toward the stranger.

“The baths are
closed,” the demon said, craning his neck to watch another woman run across the
ephebeum and up the stairs, her white robe hiked high and hair flying out
behind her. The demon’s black lips peeled back in a cheerful leer; he hitched
absently at his belt. “Move on, girl.”

“When will they
be open again?”

He didn’t
answer, but grunted out a word unfamiliar to her. Not a Word, nothing with any
power to it, just a sound she didn’t know: “
Jhost
.”

Something
answered. Out of the deep shadows of the tunnel behind him, something crawled
forward. Mara saw its eyes first—shining greenish-yellow like the eyes of an
animal caught in headlights. Then its teeth, what seemed like hundreds of
teeth, far more than could fit in even its long skull. They jutted at every
angle, black and grey and rotted yellow, dripping drool as it growled at her. Its
skin was the same deep red/black of the demon who had called it, so smooth and
tight over its lean body that it seemed to shine wetly, as though the whole
beast had been dipped in fresh blood. At that moment, in this light, it looked
like some hellish, tailless, starving wolf with the fur ripped off, and it was
coming for her.

“
Ska
,”
said the demon, and the creature hunched low to the ground, its hindquarters
shaking with the effort not to spring. “Now go, else I feed him thy fingers.”

“Is that a
hound?” Mara asked.

He finally
looked at her. His wide nostrils flared for a sniff. He considered, then pushed
himself off the wall and came a step closer, bending low to draw in a deeper
breath. His eyes shut while he analyzed whatever it was he smelled on her. Sweat
was all she could smell, and it was pretty damn ripe.

“Art Mara?” the
demon asked, sounding uncertain.

“Yes,” she
replied, eyebrows peaking.

His eyes opened.
He studied her some more. “
Tah
,” he said at last. “
Tah haas ja’ni.
”

The hound,
because that had to be what it was, ducked its long head and cringed back, snarling
as it fawned for him.