The Scholomance (40 page)

The demon
straightened up. “The baths are closed, even to thee. Go to feast, girl. It
shall be opened by meal’s end.”

“But why is it
closed?”

“Why? And why
else would I be summoned? To clean the leavings of another mortal, slipped of
her mortal clay, else our humans pets be forced to bathe in the waters of her
last befouling.”

Mara felt that
dark weight of dread growing heavier in her chest. “Someone died?”

“Aye, they told
me thee had a ready mind, but to see its snap before me truly be an awesome
thing. Someone died.” He snorted and looked out into the ephebeum, but it was
all but empty now.

“Who?” Mara
asked, her stomach tightening. Breakfast was forgotten; Kazuul and Azkeloth,
utterly wiped from her mind. It was Connie. She knew it, the conviction as
solid and immoveable as the mountain itself. Connie was in the bath, being
eaten by hounds. She’d come too late.

“How shall I
know?” The demon glanced at her, and his good-natured smile flickered, became a
slow frown of concern. “I have sent the stains of her last making below, to be
held against the Book where her blood is laid. Her name is recorded there, but
I do not know it.”

“I want to see
her.”

“Eh?” He looked
over his shoulder at the tunnel and his hound raised its head at once, whining
wetly, ignored. “Now?”

“Yes. Please,”
she added.

He shot her a
startled stare, then disguised it by scratching along the sides of his muzzle. “No
student shall be permitted to see the final rites of the dead.”

“But it isn’t
completely forbidden, is it? I mean,” she went on when he narrowed his eyes at
her, “I was at the last tribunal. Horuseps said all the laws and that wasn’t
one of them.”

The demon
grunted. His hound imitated the sound, crawling closer on its belly, and he
reached back distractedly to pat the malformed head. “I will show thee,” he
said at last. And smiled. “For that thou didst ask so prettily. Follow closely.
Mok ja’ni
,” he told the hound, and it skulked forward to crouch in the
tunnel’s mouth, bristling and drooling at the empty ephebeum.

It was not a
long walk to the baths, not even knowing she may see Connie’s half-eaten body
at the end of it. The demon let her set the pace, but her legs moved her on at
a ruthless speed. She had time to wonder whether or not to take the corpse away
or leave it here in the Scholomance, only that, and then she was there.

They’d turned
the water off somehow, and the hounds had been working some time to bail out
the shallow pool where students bathed. Now nearly emptied, it glistened in the
yellow light of blister-lamps as hounds prowled through the basin, licking and
scratching at the rock as they searched for something else to clean. When they
saw their master enter, they stopped and fawned where they stood, some rising
onto their haunches in a shuffling, whining dance, others rolling onto their
backs to expose their bellies, all gazing raptly up at him with love and fear
stretching across their wolfish features. The demon ignored them all, watching
her instead.

The body lay at
the end of a short, wet trail: a lifeless mass in a waterlogged robe, bloated
out of all recognition. Three hounds crouched around it, hard at work—not
eating, but sewing—making a shroud of her own black robe. They’d drawn her hood
and fastened it to her collar already, pushed her arms in through the sleeves
and belted her with them, bent or broken her knees and fit her legs inside, and
now had only to finish stitching up the hem to complete her death-sack.

It was difficult
work for the hounds, with their paw-like hands, and even the way they had to
sit looked unnatural on them. Looking at them made her think of a page in a
picture-book she’d owned as a small child: the wolf from Red Riding Hood,
dressed in Granny’s cap and nightgown, trying to lie still in the old lady’s
bed, but for all his effort, looking like nothing but a hungry, drooling wolf. They
did not look up when Mara came closer, although she heard them muttering at
each other in coarse huffs and growls. Their minds, neither human nor demon,
eluded her.

“
Ska
,”
the demon said, and every hound in the room stopped what they were doing at
once and lay close to the ground. The three attending to the corpse withdrew,
lips stretched in lupine grins, panting and whining as they crawled past their
master’s feet and away to the wall, leaving their work unfinished. “Look then,”
the demon said, gesturing. “She has been dead half the day. By needs, thou must
look deep.”

Mara knelt down
in the cold puddle that dripped off the dead woman’s robe and took hold of the
pinched, roughly-stitched seam running down the center of the hood. She pulled.
Water squished up between her fingers and trickled down to the floor in reddish
streams. It was going to be bad. She braced herself, grabbed a fistful of robe
over the body’s chest, and ripped the new stitches away to uncover the corpse’s
face.

She was quite
sure she didn’t make a sound, not even a gasp.

“Thou knowest
her,” the demon said, watching her closely. His alarm flared through the
Mindstorm, almost but not quite bringing his thoughts into clear focus. “Is it
she?”

“No,” Mara said.
“It’s not Connie. Just…someone I met.”

She hadn’t been
able to get Shaitan after all, it seemed. Mara wondered, had she settled for
someone else, or actually tried to do it herself without mastery of the proper art?
In any event, the results were the same. Magic didn’t always simply fail when
it went wrong. Sometimes it went wild.

Desdemona’s
split lips lay slack and open, grotesquely lengthened and now lined with teeth.
Mara could see an eye half-opened and dully staring out of the dead woman’s
swollen tongue. Her cheeks had split in several places, torn by malignant
growths of bone. She’d bled a lot, but not enough to kill her. Mara supposed
she’d never know for sure, but she thought it very likely that the weight of
her new skull had dragged her down into the bath to drown. Mara looked for a
long time. Then she covered it over again and stood up.

“Not the Ka-nee?”
the demon asked, his brow furrowed.

“No,” she said,
making her way through huddled hounds and back towards the ephebeum.

“Ah.” He smiled,
joining her and matching her brisk stride with long, easy steps of his own. “A
relief.”

“Is it?” she asked
tonelessly.

“I would rather
have thee grateful.”

She glanced at
him, unsurprised.

He held up his
empty hands, grinning. His claws gleamed with reflected light. “I cannot force
thee to pay, yet the price I ask is only fairness.”

“Ask?” She
stopped walking and faced him. “You’re a Master, aren’t you?”

“And thou,
favored of Kazuul. I’ll not touch thee. But I gave thee to look as thou didst
will it.” He licked his teeth, still smiling, and lowered his hands. “And I
wish a like repayment.”

Mara frowned. “You
want to look at me?”

“Unclothe.” One
word, hoarse and hungry. His smile never changed.

No, she supposed
it wasn’t unreasonable. Inappropriate, maybe, with the lights of the bath
burning behind him and corpse water still soaked coldly into Mara’s knee, but
really, what was the point of grieving? Desdemona had been Mara’s warden for a
day. They hadn’t known each other in anything like a friendly fashion, and what
Mara had known about her hadn’t been all that endearing. She’d killed two
people, for God’s sake, killed them for money, and then come here looking for
eternal youth and beauty so she could continue marrying and murdering
indefinitely. What was there to feel bad about?

She’d had the
chance to help. She’d turned her back on the woman.

‘It’s not the
same as killing her,’ Mara thought furiously, and pulled her robe off.

The demon’s eyes
sparked. He exhaled once, slowly, his gaze crawling over her in a way she could
almost feel. Then he began to laugh, soft and low, amazement and lust and conquest
all mingled together in his smile. She didn’t understand it. She supposed she
didn’t have to, but…

“Are you
laughing at me?” she asked. She kept her voice steady. She was calm, in
control.

The demon shook
his head, still moving his ravening gaze over her. “Knowest thou how I am
called here?”

“I think you’re
Suti’ok.”

“So I am. Born
of the tribe Suti, the first descent after Adam.” He brought his eyes up to
hers. They were cold, triumphant. “I am less than thou art. Please. Show me thy
cunt.”

If he’d said it
another way, she would have refused out of hand, but he was so oddly polite
that Mara simply found a jut of stone on the tunnel wall to brace her foot on
and opened her thighs wide for him. He laughed again—threw back his head,
opened his arms, the whole bit. He was the very picture of victory. Baffled,
Mara could only wait him out.

“Am I supposed
to feel humiliated?” she asked finally. Because if that was the case, she could
get angry, but—

“Nay, nay, ‘tis
my private pleasure only. Thou art very beautiful,” he added, ducking his head
in what was almost a bow. “Dress.”

She did, and
noticed that when she did, he actually turned away as if to give her privacy. She
could see only the upturned cut of his smile, the blade of his cheekbone, the
satisfied glint of one eye. She wished she could read him better, because she
really did not understand this.

“Wilt thou keep
secret our dealings here?” the demon asked without looking at her.

“If I can. You
know that Kazuul’s a telepath.”

“I know thou art
also. Aye, he may discover what I have asked of thee,” he said with a shrug. “But
I never touched thee. If thou must, wilt thou remind him?”

“Sure, but I
think you’re overestimating my control over him.”

“Am I? Dost thou
truly need me, fool of Suti that I am, to tell thee that the object of desire
ever dominates? Even our hearts. Even his.” He laughed again, nastily this
time. “He will lay his throat open beneath thy hand to have what mine eyes have
caressed, never doubt it. He would give thee all this mountain to fill the
chalice of thy cunt.”

“Why?” She
advanced on him; he watched her come, his smile stretching wide and wet with
fangs. “There are dozens of other women here, why me?”

“How many
uncounted thousands shall there be without this mountain?” he countered
scornfully. “Why hast thou love only for Ka-nee, why only she? Ha! But nay,
thou must demand conspiracy. Thou wouldst shun our lord’s bed and favor for thy
suspicions when thee should fall, aye, fall upon thy hands and be
grateful
his eye is upon thee, and thee with so much need of him.”

She actually
felt the sting of heat in her cheeks. Not much, maybe not enough even to show
in this light, but it was there. Grateful. The word was almost foreign to her. Mara
didn’t have to be grateful, not to anyone. Mara made people do what she wanted
them to do. Mara was in control. Fall upon her hands? She’d sooner fuck a hound
than Kazuul out of
gratitude
.

Behind them, a
hound suddenly yelped, and several of them loudly snarled. The demon glanced
that way and so did Mara, but she kept staring long after the hounds had
settled. She couldn’t see the body from here, but she imagined she could smell
it over the wet, mineral musk of the mountain. Desdemona was being sewn into
her own robe and maybe it wasn’t the same as killing her, but Mara could have
found someone in five minutes to fix her face and it had been too much trouble.
Now she was dead. She was dead…and Connie was still missing.

“Grateful,” she
murmured, hating the word.

“But who am I?” The
demon shrugged again, and continued walking to the tunnel’s mouth. “Only
Suti’ok, and pride has ever been my pleasure and my shame. Perhaps I revel
overmuch when I see it shine so brightly in others. Thou art beautiful, Mara,
and thou hast been uncommonly gracious. Go thy way, and let mine own good
favor, feeble thing that it be, go with thee.”

He moved his
sentry hound aside for her, making it clear with his direct stare and
outstretched arm that he was dismissing her. Mara retreated, but paused at the
threshold of the ephebeum and had to turn back.

“What do you do
with the bodies?” she asked.

The demon merely
gazed at her. “Shall I have her possessions brought to thy cell?”

The suggestion
startled her, as much as if it were an accusation. “No!” she said. “I hardly
knew her!”

“So? Death is
profit here. Should it not be thine?”

The notion
repelled her. She started to argue, then narrowed her eyes and said instead,
“Where do you take the bodies?”

“For certain, yon
unfortunate would rather see her goods in the hands of a stranger than go to
those whom she knew well.”

“I want to see
the graves.”

He grunted
amusement. “There are none.”

“Then where—”

“She was an
acolyte in life. She must have other robes, perhaps a larger cell. Her spoils
are thine to claim. Shall I gift thee the loan of a hound to track thee to her
chambers?”

“Why won’t you
answer me?” she demanded.

“Because of this
hour, I am thy Master,” he replied, hammering each word home with fierce
satisfaction. “And it pleaseth me to defy thee. Now I order thee hence. Go, and
remember that I did thee a kindness, and that I touched thee not.”

An urge swelled
up in her all at once, the urge to tell him that she could say pretty much
anything about whether or not he touched her and Kazuul was likely to believe
it. It was an ugly feeling and it left an ugly stain after she crushed it. “You
did me a kindness,” she said instead. “Thank you.”

She turned away.

“Humility. Odd,
that it pleaseth me as much as pride to see in thee.” Suti’ok followed her out
into the open cavern and casually snagged his claws in her hood, holding her. In
a low voice, scarcely moving his lips, he said, “I do not mark the living,
girl, yet there is no embrace more familiar than that which I share with the
dead. Faces change here and scent decays, yet Time has its own sweet flavor
that knoweth no pretense. I have not tasted honest youth such as surroundeth
thee in many years of handling human meat. If thy Ka-nee were of an age to
thee, I know I have not looked on her. Be warned, there are many deaths here
which do not merit the personal attentions of the Master of the Hounds.” He
spoke his title with obvious sarcasm, then smiled and released her. “The bells
are nearly rung and we both have work to be about.”