The Scholomance (53 page)

“You haven’t
answered my question.”

“It’s not for me
to answer. I suppose special dispensation could be arranged…and you know by
whom.” He glanced down the passage, his long arms sliding out of their
customary crossed position to beckon her to him. “But if you’re in no rush to
ask him, perhaps you’d care to accompany me on a small errand?”

“Why not?” she
said lightly, and she went, but she had to wonder why he’d eased into the
request at all. Touching his mind tonight was like touching an oil slick: she
could see nothing of the thoughts beneath, only cloaking blackness and a hint
of alien color that stained even the lightest contact. He didn’t even talk to
her, but only walked on ahead and a little to one side, his hands resting on
his shoulders and a feminine sway to his stride. It made her curious as to how
much of his night he’d spent with Proteus.

Horuseps
chuckled, proving that even if he wasn’t talking, he was always listening.

“Well?” she
prodded.

“I spent my night
in lessons, precious. It’s my day I’ll be spending with Proteus.”

“Congratulations.”

He laughed. It
was not a pleasant sound. “I think you may have left a little piece of yourself
behind when you were in him. He’s made a number of startling strides since
then.”

“So he’s finally
mastered Sight, after only six years.”

“Eight, in fact,
for he’s had two since his initial achievement to fumble toward success. And
tonight, his reward.” Horuseps laughed again, running his black fingers through
his long, white hair. “I can hardly wait.”

“So where are we
going?” she asked. “Am I lending you a negligee?”

“Did you bring
one?”

“No,” she
admitted.

“Then don’t be
snide. We’re going to the Great Library. There are a number of books I’ve
promised to let him look at when he comes to me tonight.” He glanced at her,
again smiling. “You see why I’m bringing you and not him.”

“The Scrivener,”
Mara said, swallowing the unpleasantness that came even at the sound of the
name.

“No one is
immune to his effects, yet you have proven more resistant than most. It may
take some time to locate the tomes I seek.”

The library was
just as she remembered it, seemingly untouched by time. The same hushed
whispers and rustling pages, the same hooded figures moving back and forth,
dragging their chains behind them, and the same living mass of awful
intelligence at its center, overseeing all with his hundred sightless eyes. Mara
stood at the railing outside the lyceum’s archway, just staring, trying to
acclimate herself to the poisonous atmosphere of the place up here, where it
was thinnest. She could feel the crawl of the Scrivener’s thoughts, mindless as
beetles chewing into carrion.

“What is he?”
she asked, prolonging the descent the only way she knew how.

Horuseps glanced
at her, smiling. “An excellent question. One might ask, what are any of us? What
are you, young one? What am I?”

“He’s different
from you.”

“Are you not
different from any other living thing upon this world? Does not one tree bear
many fruit? Is not each one distinct?” Horuseps came to the railing beside her.
His long fingers curled around the curved stone cap of the banister. He gazed
down upon the Scrivener and lights moved in his eyes. “Yes, he is very
different.”

“What is he?”
Mara asked again, watching Horuseps now and not the object of her curiosity.

Horuseps only
shrugged. “He is the same substance as any of us, only set together in grotesque
manner.”

“The same. You
mean he’s a demon.”

“Your kind as
such a strange love of labels.” He started down, forcing Mara to follow. His
hands were always moving, graceful as birds in flight, tapping shoulders and
waving away the students who always gathered on the steps to amuse themselves
with the agony of the harrowing. “It was not so long ago, as time is reckoned,
that I have been called by Man an angel. My children yet are…of a sort.”

“Your children?”
She put out surprise for him to sense, although the news wasn’t exactly
shocking. “Are they…here?”

“No.” He
laughed. “Neither are they where your mythologies would have them be. Yet they
can be found, if one is persistent.”

“How many do you
have?”

“Many,” was his
amused reply, but then he stopped again, now on the second-floor landing, to
turn his back on the library below and look at her. They were alone, deep in
the stink of the Scrivener’s mind, where even sound warped out of truth, yet
Horuseps seemed unaffected. “They resemble me, to some degree.”

“All of them?”

“Yes. They are
identical, each one to the other, and none of them precisely made in my image. They
are only half-demon, after all.” He shrugged one shoulder, and braced his hands
on the railing behind him, smiling at her. The openness of this posture came as
an invitation. She could feel his expectation of her wandering gaze and so she
gave it to him, her eyes moving freely down his weirdly smooth chest to the
dark, chitinoid plating of his lower half. “Men believe them to be daughters,”
Horuseps said, once her eyes reached his denuded groin. “As there are men who
believe me a woman. Or should I say, a female. Labels.”

He wanted her to
ask him questions—about these children of his, about their mothers, about his
own ambiguous gender—but Mara said nothing. Instead, with a calculated
spontaneity, she reached out her hand and touched him.

His mind leapt
in surprise, as physical in its way as a slap, but apart from a certain
sharpening of his eyes, he didn’t move. He watched intently as her hand slipped
over the smooth, glassy plane of his chest, moving slowly downward as each
untraveled muscle was explored and marked. His thoughts churned behind their
oily cover, thoughts of her, of Kazuul, of other things too tangled and too
deep to read in safety.

She felt at his
hips, just where he changed texture, and reached up with her other hand to
stroke his chest. His skin was hard, like glass. He had no nipples, no
indication of womanly breasts. Lower down, his armored parts seemed almost
stony by comparison, smooth but pitted and heavily creased along plated seams,
intensely unpleasant to feel in human form. At the place where his plates
joined along his groin, she could see an aperture, very hard, not long and not
wide. Just a slit, really, with an especially pliant ridge along its outline.

His thighs
opened minutely. She could see the muscles of his arms tighten as he leaned a
little more weight on the rail behind him. Otherwise, he remained motionless. He
watched, and so Mara looked up and into his eyes as she slipped her finger
inside him.
 

Light flashed
across his eyes, as if reflecting the headlights of some invisible car. Just a
flash, there and gone. “How fearless you are.”

“You could always
tell me to stop.” She pushed a little deeper. He was warm inside, and wet, and
slick, but for all that, it was not like feeling another woman’s vagina. It was
more like feeling around inside a stab wound.

Horuseps was
breathing just a little faster, or maybe it only seemed that way because his
breath had become so hoarse. He watched, expressionless, as she went deeper. Laying
her palm flat against him, she waggled her fingers slowly back and forth,
seeking the walls of his almost-pussy, and finding what felt queasily like
organs instead, floating loose inside him. Something slick and solid bumped
her; she just managed to rub her fingertips across it, and no amount of
self-control could keep her face from puckering a little as she thought of
someone actually fucking this gash, sharing space with all these unknown and
inhuman
things
.

Whatever it was
in there pressed on her harder, moving forward like a living creature. Mara
jerked her hand back fast, but didn’t step away. She watched in sick
fascination as the plated ridge of his slit opened—the lips bulging outward
before they parted—and a wet, black bar emerged. Perfectly smooth, slightly
tapered, with a bloodless, horizontal groove at the tip, it more resembled an
eel than a phallus, and it moved forward with an eel’s cold-blooded and hungry
intelligence.

Horuseps moved
closer, touched her wrist. She moved her hand back to close around the thing
(it was so much better to see it, recognize it, then to feel it in the blind,
swimming soup of his innards) and stroke him as he arched his head back and
exhaled a long, humming moan. He relaxed, here in the open, the proof of his
gender visible only to those moving around in the body of the library, and no
one there was capable of noticing or caring. It was still a greater risk than
he liked to take, but ah, she was so fearless…

“Why do you let
people think that you’re female?” Mara asked.

Horuseps
chuckled, his eyes still shut. “I enjoy seeing the looks upon men’s faces when
they realize I am not and they are deep inside me, particularly those whose
lusts I have cultivated with such care. Proteus has been a labor of several
years.”

“A cruel sort of
game.”

“I am a demon,
dearest.”

“Your kind has
such a strange love of labels,” Mara said.

This time, he
laughed outright. “With every passing moment, I see better why Kazuul has
allowed himself to become enthralled by you. I am not accustomed to this.”

“What, handjobs
on the library steps? I should hope not.”

“Envy,” Horuseps
corrected, crookedly smiling, “of a brother. Tell me, Bitter One, what is your
game? Do you mean us to duel over you? To tear at one another with tooth and
claw until we are moved to throw down your lost lamb and so secure your favor? It
will never happen.”

“Do what you
want to do,” Mara said, shrugging. “I don’t give a damn about either one of
you.” She gave his cock a squeeze, using this contact and the hot rush it
provoked to steal a deeper exploration of his clouded mind, then said, “But
since you bring it up, what would you do for my favors?”

“What would you
ask?”

“You know what I’m
after.”

Horuseps
chuckled, hissed as she carefully slid a fingernail along his shaft, and
chuckled again. “The girl? I’ve told you all I know.”

“But you haven’t
done all you can. You can go where I can’t, ask questions I can’t.”

“Ha!” His neck
arched luxuriantly as she stroked him. He might have been an angel just then,
with the light from above pouring down and that smile, that radiant smile, all
his cruelty cloaked by pleasure. “A tall price you’ve set on yourself, darling
one, and I cannot imagine what you might do to make such a cost worth my while.”

“Oh well.” Mara
took her hand away from him and clasped them both together nonchalantly.

His eyes snapped
open and his head came up. They stared at each other, and gradually, his
surprise darkened.

“I don’t believe
you’ve finished with me,” he said softly.

“Oh, but I have.”
She met him without flinching, without anger, without hesitation. “Since you’ve
made your unwillingness to pay so clear.”

“You are a
student here.”

“You gave me no
order, teacher.”

He wanted to. That
was evident in more than his wetly jutting cock. He wanted her, yearned for
her, more avidly than he had done in centuries, but in his mind, thoughts of
lust were secondary to those of possession. He would fuck her, yes, but fucking
her was incidental. He would
have
her, that was the important thing. To
be his creature, his fascinatingly fearless thing…if only it were not for
Kazuul…

Mara moved to
the rail and leaned over it, looking down at the library, frowning. Distantly,
she was aware of Horuseps eying her flanks, her bent back, as he masturbated
himself slowly to climax, but she let those borrowed thoughts drift away
ungathered.

Kazuul may be
the undisputed lord of the Scholomance, but Horuseps was clearly his prime
minister, and while Kazuul had no interest in Connie’s whereabouts beyond using
them to keep Mara coming back to him, she still believed Horuseps knew
something more. Maybe he didn’t know exactly where she was, but he knew
something. She supposed she couldn’t expect him to pit himself against Kazuul
on her behalf, but he could be a lot more helpful if he wanted to be. It
frustrated her to have to see that potential in him and not be able to exploit
it.

“What are you
thinking now?” Horuseps joined her at the rail, his pleasures dealt with and
his maleness once more secreted away. He rested a hand on her shoulder, a light
and impersonal touch, tactilely unpleasant but meaningless. “Is it the
Scrivener you study?”

Mara’s eyes had,
in fact, been resting on the chaotically pulsing form of the library’s central
inhabitant, but only because they had to rest somewhere. Now, however, she did
study him. His head swung slowly left to right, from one great bookcase to the
other, and his skin rippled with the blinking of his sightless eyes. He made an
arm, his flesh drawing in on itself before bubbling out to form the appendage,
but he only gripped the surface of his imprisoning desk for a few moments
before retracting it again. It could never be easy to look at him, but even
this little distance made it at least possible.

“Are you going
to tell me again that he’s the same as you?” Mara asked, watching the Scrivener
renew his swaying, senseless dance.

“I did not say
the same. I said he is of the same substance. In that sense, so are we all upon
this world. Even you and I.”

“Was he born
here?”

Horuseps looked
at her without expression. In his eyes, those ghost-lights dimmed and spun. In
his mind, walls grew, dulling the sharpness of his alien thoughts. “Why would
you think such a thing, I wonder?”

“Because I can’t
imagine you moving him in.”