The Scholomance (55 page)

“And what game
is this, child?” Horuseps inquired silkily. His thrust at her in short, sharp
rhythm, each movement more painful than the last as his phallus pushed out
between them. He didn’t care who saw them now. The hand that did not have her
leg closed in an insolent fist between her breasts and began to pull her robe
up in handfuls. “Am I to be another piece upon your board? Oh yes,” he said
coldly. “I’ve felt you moving me about according to your whims. I allow it for
so long as it amuses me, but that, my dear, my Bittersweet, is at an end.”

“I don’t know
what you mean.”

“Don’t you? Do
you think I fear Kazuul?”

She pushed her
chin at him, grabbed his shoulder, and used that leverage to twist her other
leg around his hips too, now riding the thrusts he tried to punish her with. “And
do you think I’m afraid of you?” she hissed back.

The hem of her
robe, gathered at her thighs, rose no further. His erection still pressed
solidly against her belly, hot and alive and as weirdly smooth as the rest of
him. He didn’t move. His eyes never blinked.

“You fucking
pussy!” Mara snarled, and yanked her robe up herself, arching so that her bare
pubis rubbed around against his cock. “Take me if you want me! Fuck me now, you
coward!”

His wanting
leapt, as savage in its own way as any desire of Kazuul’s, but he dropped her. She
almost got her feet under her…almost. Her back caught the worst of the wall as
she went down, but the pain was in her ankle, flaring bright as it twisted
under her. Then she was sprawled at his feet and trying to get back up.

She made it to
her knees, decided nothing was broken, then glared up at the demon’s stony face
and spat, “I ought to bite you for that!” She took his cock in her fist and
squeezed, hard.

Horuseps exhaled
in another of those hissing, skittering groans, then snapped his eyes open and
backed away.

She refused to
let go, instead gave him a wrench to bring him back. “I’m not done with you,”
she said, and licked once from his slit all the way up the underside of his
cock to the groove at the tip, which she tongued wildly for just a second or two.
He tasted awful, acrid and sour as bile. “You’re right, subtlety is wasted on
me, but it’s not getting me anywhere with you either. You’ve done more for me
than he has. Maybe I’d rather have you.”

His mind was
churning now, a haze of sound and color too loud to be identified. He hissed again
and slapped her even as his hips twitched.

She fell over,
came up with a slap of her own, then began to fist him hard and fast, sucking
noisily at his smooth head. His fingers clutched at her hair in another of those
spidery lunges. His knees bent as he rocked onto the long balls of his feet. He
pumped at her mouth, making sounds in his throat like beetles’ wings, dry and
frenetic. He didn’t let go when she pushed, so she hit him with a mindslap to
knock him back, then bounced up and turned to the wall, holding her robes high
over her hips. “Right now,” she panted. “Don’t make me hurt you!”

His fingers dug
at her thigh. That skittering-clicking sound was in her ears, and then he pried
her nethercheeks wide and shoved into her ass. She wasn’t expecting that, but
it wasn’t as bad as she would have thought. Wet and glass-smooth as he was,
there was no resistance, only cramping pain and not even that for very long. His
hiss blew hot and broken into her hair and his freakish arms suddenly wrapped
her, tight as webbing, pinioning her against his own body and holding her quite
immobile while he drove furiously into her over and over.

It was
surprisingly good, the way it could be good with Kazuul, the way any sex was
good when it was hot and fast and for feeling’s sake alone. Mara went with it,
letting her voice mix hideously with his, pretending total oblivion to her
surroundings, but always watching from that cool, dark place, always listening
to the air and the things that hummed inside it. Horuseps was gone, a drone in
his frenzy of fucking, but there were students above and around them, students
who had been on their way to dinner for third-bell, now silent and still as
they were taught to be while waiting to see if their Master would require
another, and there were demons also—Argoth and Letha and others she didn’t
know, and soon there was Azkeloth, whose thoughts were made brightest by anger,
lust and resentment. Kazuul was not among them, but his name drifted in varying
degrees of concern and contempt from mind to alien mind.

Horuseps came
with his voice first, shrilling out a burst of sound so piercing it made her
ears hurt, not just once but three times, and each time, his arms tightened. At
the third, just on the lea-side of a broken rib, she felt him empty into her, a
great jet of seed drilling sickly even deeper into her bruised bowels. Horuseps
coughed out a huge breath, then grappled violently with her unresisting body
before thrusting once more, banging her into the wall with force sufficient to
briefly white out her vision. There was a second flooding, this time hot and
somehow thicker than before, a vile sensation that made her writhe with painful
fullness, which in turn made him fall into a final (and mercifully brief) spate
of pistoning thrusts. He let go of her to slash and hammer at the wall with one
hand, then threw back his head and shrieked, or at least, made some ghastly
whistling noise at very high pitch. The final cumming was explosive, brutal,
spilling out of her in torrents as he hammered it to completion.

Then, done. He
sagged against her, breathing hard, his grip slackening. Mara glanced down and
saw the plates along his hip and thigh flexed outward, spiking off his body
like the wings of a beetle, still connected by ropy strands of indefinable
wetness. Gradually, they too realigned themselves and lay flat.

Third-bell rang,
calling them to dinner. The crowd, such as it was, began to disperse.

“You demon,”
Horuseps said softly, without raising his head from her shoulder.

Mara smiled and
above them, Azkeloth slapped a student heavily out of his way and stalked from
the room.

*
         
*
         
*

Kazuul came
through the dining room doors without commotion—no throwing them open, no
roaring, no crashing things into other things. He walked directly to the Master’s
table, bringing a tense silence with him in his wake as more and more students
saw him. He didn’t look at Mara when he passed her, but went straight to
Horuseps and, with the same silent, easy grace as his stalking step, reached
back to one of the long spikes sprouting from his own shoulder and ripped it
free in a spray of blood and shards of bone.

Like most of the
students in the hall, Mara jumped up. Unlike them, she neither cried out nor
bolted from the room, not even when Kazuul stabbed the other demon through the
chest, pinning Horuseps to his high-backed chair.

Horuseps didn’t
cry out, either. He winced and raised one slender hand to feel at the thing
impaling him, and finally cocked an eye up at looming Kazuul. “My,” he said
with tight levity. “At least you’re taking it well.”

Kazuul gave the
jagged spike a curt twist, seemingly oblivious to the blood pouring down his
arm, his chest, his back. He said nothing.

“I am sorry
about the whole thing, of course.” Horuseps managed a smile and a strained
shrug. “You’ve met her. She has a certain charm. And it was only the smallest
offense, I assure you. I did no lasting harm.”

Kazuul wrenched
the spike out and stabbed it in again, aiming as for a kidney, if Horuseps had
kidneys, and accepting the glut of black fluid his victim coughed into his face
without blinking.

The shock of
this unexpected assault was obviously wearing thin. One of the other demons at
the table, Master Letha, gingerly reached for an ewer and poured herself
another cup of wine. Master Malavan took his seat back and leaned out over his
claws so that he could see the goings-on for himself. Someone whispered. Someone
else tittered in reply.

Horuseps tried
several times to speak, and finally raised a hand to cover his whistling chest
wound. His voice, what voice there was, bubbled. “Oh, must it always come to
violence before forgiveness can be found? Will you not accept my apology,
brother?”

Kazuul appeared
to consider it. Then he ripped the spike out, yanked Horuseps out of his chair
by the throat, and rammed the spike up through the demon’s mock-vagina until
his fist slammed into the hard chitin of Horuseps’s outer shell. Horuseps
shrieked like a swarm of locusts. Eerily, it was not so very different from the
sound he’d made on climax. Kazuul expressionlessly worked the spike back and
forth, then pulled it out and dropped it indifferently on the table.

“Apology
accepted,” he snarled, releasing Horuseps to a writhing, keening heap on the
floor.

Now he looked at
Mara, turning his head first, and then all his body to finally face her. His
hands flexed, as if longing for another spike in his fist. God knew, he still
had plenty. “Thou triest my good humor, woman.”

“Don’t you lay
this at my feet,” she snapped, and students scrambled madly away from her. “When
did you ever ask faithfulness of me?”

“A fair point,”
he conceded, striding toward her in that light, furious way. “Do I strike thee
as fair-minded then, truly? Be it so, then I am grossly feebled after these
ages of solitude. Thou shouldst know thy place without mine instruction,
supplicant!”

Mara turned
around. “Have fun with your jealous fit, Kazuul. I’ll be in my room.”

He grabbed her,
flung her back to face him, and roared, “
Thou art mine
!” full into her
face. “Mine own! My property! And I’ll have thee back bone by bone if thou dost
defy me now!”

“It’s against
the law for me to defy a Master of the Scholomance,” Mara hissed, grabbing at
his wrist. “Just don’t expect me to obey orders you haven’t given!”

“Now they are
given!” he shot back. “On thy knees, woman, and swear to it!”

Letha chuckled
and refilled her cup. Malavan crawled onto the table for a better view and was
hissed at by someone else. Horuseps, moaning, rolled onto his stomach and
pressed his face to the stone floor.

Kazuul seized
Mara by the hair and threw her down on her belly, so apparently he did mean it.
Tight-lipped, Mara eased herself onto her bruised knees and bent her back to him.
His toe-claws dug warningly at the floor before her.

“I swear to be
faithful,” she said. Her voice, to her own ears, was unrecognizably hoarsened
by anger. If he wanted her to say it nicely, he was shit out of luck.

“Thou art mine.”

One of the
demons giggled. Mara started to glare in that direction and Kazuul’s foot came
down on her neck, crushing her flat to the floor. “Say it!” he bellowed. “Thou
art mine!”

“I…yours…”

He eased up on
her, but did not remove his foot entirely. The claws pricked at her through her
robe. She could feel the itch of blood dripping down her sides. “Mine own,” he
growled.

“Your own.”

“My property.”

She clenched her
teeth until her jaws ached. “Your property.”

He took his foot
away, but replaced it with his hand, lifting her roughly to drop her back on
the bench she had vacated. “I should demand thee submit to me here and now,” he
said, glaring at her. “Yet so prettily thou didst bend to me that I give this
gift and accept thee at thy word. Do not force me to regret my leniency.” He
glared over his shoulder. “Either of thee.”

Horuseps,
facedown in his own black blood, raised one hand in a polite wave of dismissal.

Kazuul grunted,
eyeing the fallen demon, then turned without another word to Mara and stalked
away. Those at the Master’s table picked up their conversations and their cups
almost at once. The students, those who hadn’t run, were longer in resettling. Gradually,
it penetrated even Mara’s senses that there was fear here that bordered on
panic, even still. They didn’t recognize him, didn’t know Kazuul, and to be
confronted with a stranger after ten, twenty, or even sixty years had made them
all newcomers again.

“Well now,”
Letha began, watching over the rim of her cup as Horuseps heaved himself into
his chair again. “I do hope that’s an end to it. Squabbling over sweets in the
dining room! Shameful!”

“Are you killed?”
Zyera asked, toying with strands of his disheveled hair. “I can’t say I’ve
never seen him so angry, but it’s been many years.”

Horuseps
groaned, but the sound held more theater than pain. The black blood smearing
his chest, belly, and thighs certainly looked real enough, but then so did his
sly smile. “His years have mellowed him,” he said, wincing. “He let me keep my
eyes.”

Zyera tickled
his chin. “I dare you to bring the oversight to his attention.”

“Was it worth
it?” Malavan inquired, spearing a piece of meat from the platter to take back
to his chair. “From what I hear, his vengeance occupied more time than your crime.”

Horuseps gasped
laughter, grimaced, and then folded carefully over and pressed both hands to
his oozing groin. “Every second. You’ve no idea.” He rolled his head slightly
to the left and lifted one corner of his mouth in a smile. “Is it you I have to
thank for this hour of humility,
dear
brother?”

Azkeloth drank
his wine.

“I should have
known. You never come to the dining hall. Well, if you wished to see me
bemoaning my fate and cursing the God that ever put her before me, you’ll
never. I would pay, feel free to run and tell him, a hundred times for every
sweet and silver thrust I had inside that marvelous Mara. She is, oh,
exquisite
.”

Demons at the table
cast speculative eyes over Mara. Students scattered across the floor level
gaped at her in horror or smirked nervous amusement. To leave now would be
running; to stay would be performing for them. Her appetite thoroughly crushed,
she nevertheless got a grip on her cup. It gave her something to squeeze,
anyway.