The Scholomance (51 page)

“Change,” said
Devlin promptly, as Mara said, “Relationships.”

They both looked
at each other, she quizzically and he with dismay.

“It’s change,”
he whispered. “Trans-
mute
? Get it? Mutation?
Change?”

“That may be the
goal,” Mara argued, “but what gets you there is how things are connected to
each other, I think.”

“And why would
you think that?” the demon asked.

“Because you
said so.”

Without a mouth
and without eyebrows, he looked surprised.

“You said your
little friend had trouble making connections, that you had to do it for her.” And
while he considered that—and what else he might have let slip, no doubt—she
looked around at the rest of the class, tapping at every mind and closely
examining a select few. “It’s more than just knowing the right Word, isn’t it? You
have to direct this one.”

“One has to
direct all of them,” Dalziel said slowly. “But yes, my art requires a certain…dexterity.
In the art of Malleation, to which mine is closely allied, one uses the Word
and guides its power to the intended finished form. One can illustrate this
with gross simplicity as a straight line.” Dalziel held up his arm and spoke
the Word. His hand drew up and became a perfectly-formed human one, as pallid
and soft as the hand of a drowned man, but human. He closed his fingers, opened
them, and they had become webbed. He turned his wrist, and suddenly his fingers
drew out long and thin, the webbing between them stretching effortlessly until
he had a pale bat-wing reaching out from his body, glowing white where the
light shone behind it, enough to see the fine tracery of his veins and the
delicate fluting of his thin bones.

Then it shrank
back and was his hand again. “The only difficulty,” he said, flexing his limp
fingers, “lies in using Sight to direct this force effectively, and to perceive
the original form should it become lost to memory. But with Transmuation, one
must divide one’s energies and one’s focus, directing each portion to its
proper place in a chain linking the first form to its ultimate conclusion. Perhaps
you would assist me in a demonstration?”

Mara stood up
without hesitation and joined him on the dais. When he extended his hand, she
offered her arm at once.

“We’ll begin
with something simple. Transmute,” he said, not in the common tongue all the harrowed
shared, but in that other one, the language that made Words of power. Pain
knifed down into her bones and spread, warming her from within until her entire
body felt charged by it, hot and light and not quite there. She felt Dalziel’s
mind flare, and as she watched, fascinated, flakes of skin along her arm split
away and rose up on fine stalks, sprouting hundreds of pale filaments to either
side in a sharply-tapered shape. The burning sensation intensified briefly,
almost blinding her, and then was gone, the Transmutation complete.

Feathers. He’d
grown a patch of feathers over the back of her arm from her wrist right up to
her elbow.

“That is so
cool,” said Mara, touching them. They felt soft, undeniably real. She could
feel her own fingers from a hundred quivering points where the feathers rooted
to her arm. With effort, she found she could even fluff them out or make them
lie sleek and flat. Feathers.

“Cool,” Dalziel
repeated, and his eyes rippled. “The connection is a straightforward one,
invoking only one degree of change. You! Calibos! Would you like to attempt to
restore—”

“Wait.” Mara
closed her eyes and flexed her mind. The room fell into the blackness of Sight,
but through those eyes, she could See her own true arm still whole and
unchanged beneath her new growth of quills. “Transmute,” she said, the Word
falling effortlessly from her lips. Her flesh burned at once.

“Good gracious,”
murmured the demon distantly.

Feathers. Skin. One
degree of change.

She could feel
the connection well enough, amid countless others all aching to be made, but
just feeling it didn’t seem to be enough. She had to put a name to it, had to
understand the relationship and make that a part of the will that moved the
Word. Feathers and skin.

She remembered
from biology class back in high school that feathers were, like hair or scales
or fingernails, primarily made of keratin. She seemed to recall that they were
different kinds of keratin, but the exact name wasn’t important. She doubted
like hell that a four thousand year-old demon like Dalziel knew the word
‘keratin’ at all. But that was it, that was the element in common between both
forms, and as soon as she had it firmly in mind, she could feel the Word
throbbing to life, anchored to each quill. She tried to see it as Dalziel had
described, as links of a chain connecting her current feathered form back to
skin, using the concept of keratin as the central tie. Her body, hot with
anticipatory power, pulsed brighter in the Sight as she willed the Transmutation.

Her arm itched
maddeningly. The feathers quivered, but that was all.

‘Patience,’ she
told herself in Ruk’s growling, good-natured voice. ‘A babe may fall many
times, but the way of the step is not changed.’

She knew she’d
done it right, could feel the purity of the power as it forked out in both
directions, the soundness of her connection, but she’d failed to hold her
focus. It wasn’t like Malleation after all, where she could use it like a knife
and just carve. And it wasn’t much of a chain either, although that was
probably the best analogy Dalziel knew here in the mountain. But having
attempted it, however clumsily, Mara had a much better grasp of how it worked,
and she saw it now as a pipeline. The Word, like a sleeve around the magic,
guiding it nowhere but across the connection, magnetizing it to her will. ‘Feathers
to flesh,’ thought Mara, not in so many words, but in that pipeworked way, and
said it again: “Transmute!”

She didn’t need
to watch to know it had worked that time. She relaxed her Sight, let reality
and color drop solidly around her, and showed her teeth in satisfaction as she
rubbed the smooth, whole skin of her arm.

“But every cell
in the human body can be considered to be connected to each other,” she mused
aloud. “To stem cells, if nothing else, and stem cells can be anything. I could
turn my skin into fingernails, or cartilage…or brains. Or…there’s iron in
blood. Do you suppose I could turn my skin to metal? If I—”

She stopped
there, because she’d looked up and seen Dalziel’s face.

Ruk had been
pleased by her easy mastery of his art, and Horuseps, faintly annoyed but still
amused when she walked away from him with Sight. She might have gone so far as
to say impressed, but certainly not surprised. She knew that other students had
to work for the little goals they reached, but to their instructors, Mara’s
prodigious skill with the Words they taught her had seemed merely some clever
trick. They weren’t in awe of her, and they certainly weren’t intimidated.

So she was
utterly unprepared to see fear in Dalziel’s inhuman eyes, so much so that she
couldn’t believe it was genuine even when she looked out and saw it in the
Mindstorm. She had to touch the churning snake-ball of his thoughts, feel his
dread for herself, before she could accept it, and then she had no idea what to
make of it.

‘She is
dangerous,’ he was thinking, his fear making even his mind clear to her. ‘More
than even he suspects.’

The he was
Horuseps (and for an instant, she could close her fist around that memory,
could see him as he’d been down in Dalziel’s bedchamber, could almost hear the
words he’d spoken, the ones that began, ‘She’s dangerous, son of Dal, and more
so because she does not know where…’), but then his mind sank back beneath its
primordial protection and she could read nothing more.

“I wouldn’t
advise a self-trial,” he said finally. “But if you wish to make an experiment,
I will give you whichever assistant you wish.”

Alarm popped in
neon flares throughout the Mindstorm until it blotted out every other thought.

“That won’t be
necessary,” Mara said, but she could see the pipeline in her mind. Flesh to
blood, that was the trick of it, and from blood to iron. It would work best if
she worked Growth in there somewhere, to improve the density of the blood,
otherwise she probably wouldn’t get much more than a few dull scales. But with
Growth, she could concentrate the production of iron at the midpoint of the
pipeline and—

Well, she could
probably change every damn inch of skin, if she wanted to. Make her own human
suit of armor. With eyeballs and teeth.

“He’d
suffocate,” Mara murmured, only dimly aware she was speaking out loud. “Iron
doesn’t expand for breathing, and I don’t think I could make it…What about
bones, iron bones?”

“Also lethal,”
Dalziel replied. “Think a moment, how much heavier is iron.”

“He’d be
crushed,” she guessed.

“Oh,
secondarily, I suppose he would be, but what would kill our hypothetical target
is the internal injury caused by having all his new bones rip away from their
binding muscles all at once.” He paused, stroking his chest. “It is
hypothetical, is it not?”

“I’d never set
out to kill anyone.”

“How
comforting.” He stirred himself to look around, letting his eyes move slowly
over the knots of whispering students in the theater, making her aware of them
with his attention. “It will be interesting to see how long your pacifist
convictions survive here.”

“I never said I
was a pacifist. You could do a lot of damage without killing someone.”

“A true, if
heartless, observation. Somewhat less comforting.”

“I’m not—”

“It’s time for
you to leave,” Dalziel said softly. “I suspect you have what you came for…and I
think my children would feel less threatened if you went now.”

His ‘children’
held very still, staring, some of them even holding their breath as they
watched her. Devlin was up there, she remembered, as uneasy as the rest in this
moment. More so even, because he’d been there that day with Ruk too, and he
knew better than anyone here what she was capable of when her curiosity was
piqued.

“Fine,” said
Mara, turning away. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Master Dalziel.”

“Was it?” He
bent his neck in another of those almost-bows, his eyes never leaving her face.
“I only wish I could say the same, although I confess I find you rather less
disagreeable than others of your kind. Good day to you, Mara. Do feel free to
drop by again sometime…briefly.”

*
         
*
         
*

She went back to
her cell (alone, ultimately, although she had to chase Devlin off three times
before he finally quit following her) and fixed her bed. Turning the rock to
sand was easy enough, but she spent a considerable amount of time trying in
vain to find a way that would allow her to turn it into something even
better—down, or cotton maybe. She could sense some connection existed, but
without a way to name it, it could not be harnessed, no matter how much will
she put behind her Word. Still, sand was a definite improvement. Once she’d
spread her red and white robes over it to keep the grit away, she lay down to
try it out and was asleep in minutes.

From the Panic
Room, Mara watched her body dream and contemplated her next move. She could
think of nothing.

Infuriating. She
had survived the trials of the Scholomance, mastered three of its arts, and for
what? She was no closer to finding her friend than she’d been on arrival. She
wasn’t even really looking anymore, she was just…passing the time.

Where hadn’t she
looked? She had searched all the obvious places and Connie just wasn’t there. What
did that leave, for Christ’s sake? The mountain was a maze in three dimensions,
and any wall could be Malleated. The demons knew more than they were telling
her, but nowhere in the stolen glimpses she’d had of their minds had she seen
Connie, so what good were they or their secrets?

Kazuul. Kazuul
was still good. He owned all the others, and as dangerous an opponent as he
was, the fact that he wanted her still gave her an edge over him.

Unbidden, the
memory of how she’d gone to him during the day came to mind, and came to life
across one of her monitors. Annoyed, Mara snapped it off before the image could
show her anything too embarrassing, but now the thought was there and could not
be dislodged.

She’d gone to
him, all right. No one had forced her up the winding stair or laid in any
will-devouring suggestion to make her open his door. She’d gone on her own two
feet. She’d kissed his mouth freely. Rode his hand to orgasm after blistering
orgasm. She would have sucked his cock if he’d offered it, and hadn’t some part
of her wanted him to offer?

He had a hold on
her after all. Perhaps it wasn’t as strong as he liked to believe, but it was
real and it unnerved her. She’d almost feel better if it was a psychic
suggestion, because the alternative was that she’d gone to him…and she didn’t
know why. Mara always knew why, always.

And she wanted
to go back and she didn’t understand that either.

Lying on her
soft bed of sand in her newly-enlarged cell, Mara slept and dreamed and even
smiled a little. But in the Panic Room, the part of her that never slept
hovered beside the windows to the muted Mindstorm, keeping watch over the
dreams that Kazuul dominated and the body that craved even his dreaming touch. She
tried to think of Connie, lost in the dark and waiting to be found. She tried
to think of the world outside, the real world, where magic was for children’s
parties and demons belonged solely to bad horror movies. She tried to think of
some connection that could bridge the two, if only her will were strong enough.