The Scholomance (54 page)

His caution
eased, but did not vanish. “How perceptive you are. Yes, he was born here. He
is the son of Zyera, Master of the art of Extraction, although I doubt she
would admit as much to you, even if you were to prettily ask. He is an
abomination, even unto our own eyes. Yet a useful one. Before his coming, we
lost many years in lessons of language before those of sorcery could even
begin. Ah, someone is hungry.”

The Scrivener
made another arm, or a leg, and this time stepped all the way over his desk. He
hovered there, swaying and grunting, and poured himself back inside.

“What does he
eat?” Mara asked, eyeing the initiates. She didn’t see anything…wet…down there.

Horuseps
chuckled. “I think it is not our Zyera’s disinherited son who hungers. Look
there. Not every hopeful graduates his harrowing.”

Mara followed
the line of the demon’s pointing hand to the loose ring of robed figures
sitting around the Scrivener’s desk. Bent over their separate books, they wrote
in silence, and while it was true that they looked a lot like the ones who had
been there during Mara’s time in the Great Library, so it was also true that
one hooded guy in a red robe looked a lot like all the others. And then
Horuseps caught Mara by the chin and gave it a short downwards tug, refocusing
her startled gaze lower, until finally she saw it.

They weren’t
chained to the tables, these figures. They were free to leave, if they wanted
to.

“Some go mad,”
Horuseps mused, releasing her. “And fall into the Scrivener’s keeping. He is
not entirely mindless, you see. In some strange way beyond our perception, he
is aware of them. He nurtures them. Perhaps even feels a kind of affection for
them.”

The Scrivener
finally made it across his desk. He moved in slow, rolling, humping motions to
one of the scribes. His head bent, nuzzling at the figure’s back with what did
indeed seem affection. His mouth opened, emitting a swampy sort of grumble. The
initiate continued to work, oblivious.

“I find that I
enjoy watching the Scrivener care for his scribes,” Horuseps went on as below
them, something like a giant fluke or leech poured itself from the Scrivener’s
mouth like a tongue, making ghastly little mewling sounds as it probed beneath
the aspirant’s hood. “I did not care for my own offspring. When I watch
displays such as these, I think of them, my Hori. I feel…fatherly.”

The tongue, or
proboscis, or parasite or whatever it was, began to bulge and contract in
silence. It looked, Mara thought queasily, like a cartoon fire hose pumping
water. The hooded man wrote.

“My Hori are not
considered abominations. Nor are they demons, as you would call them. They are
simply lesser than I. More than mortal, perhaps, but not much more. Would I
feel differently if I were to sire a true demon? Perhaps.”

The Scrivener
finished feeding his initiate and stood, swaying and making that awful, boggish
purr as his fluke-worm tongue swung back and forth, as animate and alive as an
angry cat’s tail. Then the Scrivener bent low and that tongue slipped up under
the initiate’s red robe.

“Do you see how
attentively he tends his children?” Horuseps asked. “Never do they learn the
magic that will extend their lives, yet they can live for many years
regardless. And in all that time, never will their loving father allow them to
know hunger, to know thirst, to be soiled. He will make himself their mouths,
their stomachs, their bowels. They have no minds, of course, but as you can
see, it is possible to live quite comfortably without one.”

So it would
seem.

Horuseps waited
patiently while Mara looked her fill, but when she at last stirred, he raised
one arm, gracefully waving her on and extending half a bow. “Shall we, then? Or
are there more questions with which to prolong your descent?”

“Isn’t that why
people come here?” Mara asked. “To learn?”

“Customarily. But
not,” he smiled, “the things you wish to know. Come. Proteus will be waiting.”

Down they went,
and she could feel it as they sank into the heady smog of the Scrivener’s mind.
With every step, her own retreated, locking itself away from the toxic seep of
corrupt omniscience, knowing she couldn’t vacate herself entirely because
Horuseps was here and perhaps watching. And so she felt it battering at her,
seven billion voices clotted into a single roaring ocean, and did her best not
to drown.

“The books I
desire will be along that wall,” Horuseps said, and how could he be speaking so
normally, when all the world was screaming? How could so much mindless,
groaning sound be silent? Mara’s vision doubled, trebled, and came sharply into
focus when she caught her lower lip between her teeth and bit to the blood. “As
I recall, they are bound in green,” Horuseps was saying, already moving away. “There
shall be sigils of Zakath upon their covers. Have you attended Master Uulok’s
lessons yet?”

Mute, Mara could
only shake her head, her breath burning in her lungs.

“Pity.” Horuseps
reached for her, his eyes gleaming, to touch his blackened fingertips to her
brow. To her embarrassment, she felt herself shrinking back—the first sensation
of contact had been inexpressibly wrong, like being caressed by a blanket of
centipedes—but he was already inside her mind, inside where she could feel him
pushing through the Scrivener’s storm to close around the make-believe walls of
the Panic Room.

“Just so,”
Horuseps said, out loud and inside her, and she saw the sigil draw itself in
fire behind her eyes. Loops and whorls and hooks, jagged lines and pregnant
curves, simple enough to be a child’s crayon-scrawl, complex so as to require a
lifetime’s study. She saw it and had to understand it, had to understand what
it meant to see the mark and what it meant to carve it lovingly into flesh, to
root it to mortal body and immortal soul. She had to see the monsters it was
meant to make of the men who desired to know it.

Mara bit harder,
drooling blood but taking reason back by the handful. She nodded.

Horuseps smiled
at her, his face framed by his horrible hands. His fingers, smooth and brittle
as bones, remained pressed to her brow. “Are you certain?” he asked. One thumb
moved, following the contorted lines that pain had drawn. “Quite certain?”

In his eyes, he
was already fucking her. Here, right here, with sanity like a puddle at her
feet, he was in her in ways no one should have to witness, no one should even
have to understand. Flesh was no more than a formality; he had impaled her
already and he relished the squirm.

Mara bit, dragging
herself together to the coppery taste of blood, then heaved her mind back and
let it fly at him as a blow. A weak blow, maybe, but they said even a grizzly
bear could be stopped by the right slap. “I got it,” Mara said in a hard, even
voice as Horuseps flinched back and eyed her. She headed for the shelves, not
staggering, but only walking.

There had to be
a thousand green covers among the copied books, but it was a start. She looked
for spines that seemed freshest, pulling them one by one to check their covers
for the hated sigil of Zakath, and turning aside to spit blood whenever the
storm took her too hard. This drew the Scrivener, which in turn compelled Mara
to search faster, bite harder, so that she didn’t have to be standing right
there when the Scrivener ran out that second sucking mouth to drink her fluids
off the floor.

She found the
first book on the seventh excruciating shelf she searched. By instinct, she
opened it. Words became images the instant her eyes fell on them. She vomited,
then staggered away with a sick cry as the Scrivener slid eagerly forward. She
bumped into Horuseps, whose outer show of concern could not mask his laughing
delight when their flesh touched. (
o she is precious, precious more than
opal in the sun, and see her bend, see her eyes revile me, how I would love to
see those burning eyes when I fuck inside her, cum inside her, and lick the
blood from her screaming lips
)

Mara shoved the
book into his hands. “How many more?”

He held up three
fingers, consciously or unconsciously imitating a scout’s salute (“We pledge to
be true, to God and our country,” and now every thought was a memory, every
memory became all memories, and there were so many people trying to share it). He
smiled at her.

She went back to
work, yanking on unmarked green spines, her stomach still roiling. From the
corner of her eye, she saw Horuseps doing the same, albeit at a more leisurely
pace, sometimes even stopping to thumb some random volume or read some errant
page. He found the next book an eternity later, and she, the third midway down
the shelves. The last was still in the stacks, waiting to be filed. Mara
snatched it up, her head now ringing as with the sound of a swarm of beetles. Then
she ran for the stairs and to hell with him and what he thought.

Clarity came
like breaths of sweet air to the drowning. She could actually feel herself
pulling free, climbing from the muck into sanity, singularity. The buzzing of
her brain subsided; voices receded to whispers and then became dumb. Mara
climbed to the third floor landing and dropped there, still breathing hard, to
wait for Horuseps. She was vaguely aware of him below, the same way she was
vaguely aware that she now knew quite of bit of Mandarin Chinese. She hated the
knowledge, this parasite of the Scrivener’s seeding, but she supposed she could
learn to live with it. Even use it, if she had to. All knowledge was power,
that was the hell of it. All knowledge was power, and power corrupts.

Horuseps
appeared, moving with dignity and unnatural grace, the books in his arms. “I
thought you’d fled,” he remarked.

“Only as far as
I had to.”

“Would it
placate you to hear that you bore that better than any other I have known?”

“I don’t need
placating.”

“Naturally not.”

The humor in his
voice galled her. She straightened up and gave him another of her efforts at a
bow. “Am I excused?”

“Of course. I
hadn’t realized so much time to pass, so pleasant was your company. They’ll be
ringing third-bell soon. Dear Mara,” he said, gesturing expansively to the
corridor. “What must you think of me, to starve you so?”

“I’m not hungry,”
she said, already moving ahead.

He followed. “Back
to your cell then. Where you would be even now, had I not waylaid you, sleeping
the sleep of the just and unenlightened.” He chuckled. It was a nasty,
skittering sound, made indulgent by imitation and not by nature, but she cut it
off sharply with five words:

“Like I could
sleep now.”

The demon’s hand
closed over her shoulder, closed and pinched hard. He turned her, no longer
smiling, into the lights of his stare. “Our students are forbidden to wander
the halls after hours,” he reminded her. “Even those fearless ones.”

“I’ll only
wander as far as Kazuul’s bedchamber,” Mara told him.

It was a hook,
barbed and baited. She felt it when he bit—a thought not of her own devising
came to her of her hand dually on his chest and inside him, her eyes staring up
at him. She hadn’t realized until she saw herself through his mind just how
wild she’d looked in that moment, not calm as she’d tried to seem, but tense
and feral, a pantheress about to leap.

“I really hate
the library,” Mara said, cutting across the thought as expertly as a surgeon. “But
it wakes me up. And since my meeting with Kazuul is clearly no secret, at least
not from you, you can guess what I’m after.”

“I would guess
comfort.”

She laughed. “From
him
? Jesus, have you even
met
him?”

He thought of
her hand on his cock, that tight, feline smile she’d worn as she squeezed him,
and none too gently. To this, Mara skillfully underlaid her own slightly-moist
lips, her tongue across her teeth, the subtle shifting of her body. He
immediately saw her going to her knees before him in hungry worship.

“I’m not the
only student here with a certain understanding,” Mara said. “Are you going to
stop us all? Perhaps you’d like to begin with Proteus?”

Horuseps glanced
at the books under his arm, then looked back at her. His expression remained
wary throughout. “You are the only student who seeks out her Master for such
arrangements.”

“He’s not my
Master,” Mara countered, stealthily promising pleasures, such pleasures, from
deep beneath her hot denial. “He’s just the guy I go to when I want to fuck.”

His gaze
sharpened. ‘Want to…?’ he thought, and the thought was a knife of covetous
disbelief.

She pretended to
misunderstand and laughed again. “Oh dear, I think I’ve shocked you. Do I
strike you as the coy kind? Well, I’m not. I want to get some sleep tonight,
and after that little field trip—” She shuddered without having to reach too
far for the affectation. “—I can think of only one good way to guarantee it.”

Horuseps said
nothing. His mind was alive with possibility.

She pierced it,
not stealthily now, a touch anyone could feel if he knew how, and took a bold
look at what there was—every position in which she bent, every humiliation,
every ecstasy—sorting through them as cards before the shuffle. She gave him
exactly the crooked smile he was so wont to give others, now as she released
him to armor himself in the wake of her invasion. “You should have asked me
first,” she said. “But then, I already know you’re male, and anyway, you look
like you and Proteus have a lot of reading to catch up on. I guess this is
goodn—”

He dropped the
books, seized her. She didn’t see his hands move, only had the faintest
impression of being snatched by this impassive, alien thing, but her alarm was
manufactured. She was calm, always calm, even as she yelped and slapped once at
his smooth, steely arms. She hit the wall. One foot struck a book and sent it
scraping over the floor. The motion attracted him; he caught that kicking leg
by the thigh and wrenched it up around his hip, slamming himself against her.