The Scholomance (57 page)

Then they
exploded again, erupting out of his twitching body like a spray of black
fireworks and taking little bits of him away on their needle-like points: a
shred of robe, a clot of flesh, one pierced and leaking eye. A third explosion,
and they were all so silent, that was the worst thing, it robbed the violence
of any reality. Venice, now a mass of black and red at the center of a stone
sea urchin, had stopped moving but still breathed, losing bubbles from dozens
of openings in his chest, throat, and sides. He thought of Connie again, the
way she’d been on the aerie he’d made for her, with the sun behind her hair,
and it occurred to him in a confused way that she’d looked beautiful, if only
for that moment.

Then the spears
withdrew, torpidly pouring themselves back into the Threshold and taking the
body with them, until Venice was scraped off against the unfeeling door to land
in a meaty heap at their feet, dead.

“How did you
know about him?” Mara asked. Her voice was even. She thought that would be
hard, but it wasn’t.

“Not from you,
if that’s what concerns you. But you really should take care what company you
keep. You have rather a knack of attracting companions who can’t keep their
thoughts to themselves.”

Devlin.

Mara looked up
and into the demon’s narrow smile.

“Calm yourself,”
he said, patting her head. “I left your pet scampering freely in the lyceum. It’s
not a crime not to report the escape attempts of the past. Merely to facilitate
them.”

“If this is your
way of telling me—”

“When I want to
tell you something, precious, I’ll speak plainly. Subtlety is not among your
many talents, as so recently you’ve reminded me. Ah, Master Suti’ok!”

Mara swung
around, expecting to see the demon and his hounds just entering the Nave, and
instead saw him less than three meters away. She flinched, flared immediately
into anger, and swiftly suppressed both. She hated this place, hated not being
able to see the minds around her, but her hatred was irrelevant and
distracting. She ducked her head in a stiff nod instead.

The Master of
the Hounds chuckled and bowed low. His gaze shifted to the mess on the floor. “One
of thine?” he asked, brows rising. “Impressive.”

“He’s speaking
to you,” Horuseps murmured, inspecting his fingers.

Mara frowned,
actually stepping away from the corpse as if to further distance herself from
responsibility. “He was Malleating the door,” she said.

“Ah.” Suti’ok
turned his wry smile on Horuseps. “One of thine, then.”

Horuseps stroked
one of his long eyebrows. “And you’re not as impressed, are you?”

“I’ve seen the
trick too often out of thee.” He turned and raked his eyes across the students
still gathered by the dining hall doors. “Clear the Nave!” he bellowed. “None
may witness the rites of the dead! To thy cells!”

Some of the
students retreated, but to Mara’s mild surprise, only some. The greater number
merely shuffled on their feet, looking at one another until one of them worked
up the courage to say, “But the bell’s about to ring.”

Mara turned on
her heel and would have left, but for Horuseps closing one hand quietly over
her shoulder. “I don’t need to watch this,” she said.

Suti’ok cast her
an amused glance. “Lady?”

“She thinks
you’re about to release the hounds,” Horuseps supplied.

The other demon
chuckled. “As tempting a thought as it be, no Master is permitted so to slaughter
our sheep without our lord’s consent.”

“Do they know
that?” Mara asked.

The demons
exchanged thoughtful glances.

“Hounds!” roared
Suti’ok. “Feast thou on human meat!
Te ha’vok
! To every moving form,
savage!”

The hounds set
up an immediate and bloodthirsty baying, and students scattered in
mind-blistering panic. Suti’ok burst out laughing, and a few of his hounds,
eager to please, gave frolicking chase as far as the wide stair, ripping at
robes and biting playfully at hands and feet. They crawled back on their
bellies, tongues lolling, and Suti’ok hunkered low to rub their hideous heads
and praise them in that coarse, guttural tongue.

For Mara, one
hand pressed to her throbbing temple, it seemed an eternity before the Nave
fully emptied, but intellectually, she knew it couldn’t have been more than a
minute or two. And still, Horuseps kept her under his hand.

“I suspect
you’ve added some to your reputation,” he observed, looking toward the stair
where echoes of fear and pain still wafted up from the ephebeum.

“Me? How the
hell was that my fault?!” Something brushed at her fingers. She looked down and
saw a hound sidling up close, a rapt and hopeful expression stretched across
its skinned-wolf face. She made herself give it a pat. It rolled onto its back
at once, displaying its naked belly and throat, and whined pleasure. In its
excitement, it had begun to grow an erection, but it wasn’t yet aware of it. She
decided it was best to ease away before it did.

“
Ska
,”
said Suti’ok, straightening. He saw the hound at her side and frowned. “
Kor’vek
!”
he snapped, and the hound sprang up, head and tail tucked low, drooling blood
on Mara’s robe. The demon called commands, and his hounds leapt away, some
running to guard the stair and every other door in the Nave, while others went
to work on the body. Suti’ok grunted, then glanced up as third-bell sounded. He
chuckled again. “So many empty bellies. Aye, they shall remember who it was
stood close when they were sent hungry to their beds.”

“And who it was
at my side,” Horuseps agreed, “when the unfortunate Venice was set against the
door. How many of them know, do you suppose, that it was Venice who last had
dealings with your little lost lamb?”

“I wouldn’t have
killed him,” Mara said.

“That isn’t what
Astregon remembers.”

“Astregon’s an
idiot!” she snapped. “I don’t kill people and I don’t force them to commit
suicide by making them mess with a magic door that I know is going to kill them
just to prove a point to someone else!”

“One wonders how
long you expected him to live with the seeds you planted eating up his brain.”

“My seeds don’t
last that long!” Mara said, but she could feel herself frowning. It had been
days since she’d spoken to Venice. Days. And he’d looked…awful.

“You may find
that your boundaries have shifted, precious. But no matter.” Horuseps smiled at
her. “No one forced him to use his arts to open secret escape passages either,
but he did, and was punished. And if I can use that punishment to clarify the
dangers of messing with magic doors to my darling Mara, what harm does that do,
really? As you are so quick to observe, you aren’t here to make friends.”

Suti’ok grunted
again, but all his attention was on his hounds. Not the three who worked to sew
Venice’s robe back together and not the sentries who occasionally lunged out
snapping at late-arriving students, but the rest of them, the ones scraping the
meatier remains into a single heap and the ones who crawled along the floor,
lapping up blood. The jovial boredom she remembered when he’d cleaned up after
the woman in the bath was gone. His gaze raked back and forth, taking a
constant count of his charges, but the usual pride with which he viewed them
had been dimmed by an unmistakable wariness.

“What do you get
out of making my life more difficult?” she asked, holding very still while a
hound licked blood from her feet.

“The
satisfaction of watching you overcome adversity. Come, Bitter Waters. Leave the
Master to his work. The tables are laden and waiting. It would be a shame to
waste them.”

“And now you
want to feed me? I think you need to make up your mind whether you’re punishing
me or not.”

“In all honesty…”
Horuseps uttered a peculiar, tight-sounding little laugh as he too gazed at the
crouching, snarling creatures that surrounded them. “I just want you out of
this room before the hounds realize how dramatically they outnumber us, and
that there’s a fair chance three or even four of them could fuck you before
their Master could stop them, but yes, you also need feeding. Come away.”

Mara looked at
the hounds and saw that several more had drawn nearer to her than the bloody
heap on the floor strictly demanded, and even those who still fawned adoringly
for Suti’ok kept one feral eye on her. Some were shivering. All were drooling. She
glanced once at their Master, but he remained fixated on his hounds. He too had
drawn closer to her, and stood in a tense half-crouch, his hands hooked into
ready claws.

“At your
convenience,” Horuseps said, holding out his arm.

She started
walking, unhurriedly, so as not to provoke a pounce, and Horuseps fell into
step beside her, resting his hand on her back. “They didn’t act like that the
last time I saw them,” she said.

“Fresh blood
excites them,” he replied. “Under certain circumstances, we don’t even allow
Zyera or Letha to stray too near.”

He neither asked
nor wondered where she’d seen them before. There were many deaths in the
Scholomance.

Mara looked
back. Most of the hounds had stopped working to watch her go. Suti’ok knelt
beside one, stroking its bony back and murmuring to it, watching her as well.

“Does Suti’ok
teach anything, or does he just keep the hounds?” Mara asked.

“He teaches,”
Horuseps replied, steering her well around two panting sentries posted at
side-tunnels. “He teaches methods of magical defense against physical attack,
but he has a student at the moment, and never accepts more than one. His
teaching aides are difficult to control.”

“Is he their
father?”

Horuseps took
his hand off her back and armored his mind. “Why would you ask?”

“You said they
were demon-stock. And look at them.” She glanced over her shoulder again. “They
love him.”

“We don’t like
to talk about the nephelim, precious.” Horuseps went ahead of her to open the
dining hall doors, but paused with his hand on the latch and looked back. “We
aren’t proud of them.”

“Suti’ok seems
to be.”

“We’re not proud
of him, either. Please—” He broke himself off, closed his eyes, and opened them
dimmed. “Please,” he said simply.

Puzzled, she
could only frown at him at first. “Do…Do you think I’m going to go in there and
ask all the Masters about their half-human kids?”

He winced
elaborately.

“You’re the only
one I’d ever ask,” she told him. “I’d never even ask Suti’ok to his face.”

His melodramatic
grimace faded into something less easy to read. “Because you…trust me?”

“Because I can
usually tell when you’re lying.” Mara thought about it. “I guess that’s trust.”

He looked at
her, motionless. Even the lights of his eyes were still. Eventually, a yelp
from a distant hound distracted him. He stared in that direction for a long
time too, then finally turned around and opened the door. “I should never have
allowed myself to become fond of you,” he said, and went inside.

The dining hall
was not quite empty. The other demons who were in the habit of taking their
meals among students were already here, sipping wine and eyeing the empty
tables below them curiously. The corridor at the rear of the room that led past
the kitchens and down into the ephebeum was dark, but not so dark that she
couldn’t see the hound prowling for trespassers there.

“What hast thou
done with our daybreak entertainments?” Letha called.

“I’m afraid I’ve
made a bit of a mess in the Nave,” Horuseps replied, leading Mara past the low
tables with their platters of burnt and bloody meat. “I do apologize.”

A chorus of
good-natured groans answered this, which Horuseps accepted with solemn nods and
waves of his hand, but not everyone was playing along.

“What is she
doing here?” Malavan demanded, stabbing a claw at Mara.

The rest of the
table quieted.

“She’s here at
my invitation.” Horuseps came around to the Master’s side of the high table
with Mara securely under his hand. “And so, Malavan, if you’d be so kind as to
remove yourself,” he said. “We seem to be short a chair this morning.”

Dull red color
began to bleed into Malavan’s skin. He speared a piece of meat and dragged it
to his plate defiantly.

One of the
demonesses—Mara couldn’t tell if it was Zyera or Letha—tittered. Someone else
whispered and a deep, gravelly voice muttered back. The air was charged,
expectant.

“I see ten long
benches standing empty,” Malavan spat finally.

“So you have
your pick of them,” Horuseps replied. “Move on.”

Malavan hissed,
slammed his two long claws into the table and leaned out over them, throbbing
scarlet and shaking with rage. “I was here first! I am always here! I’ll not be
moved by the likes of her or you!”

But his fear was
louder even than his anger, and Mara could feel his thoughts squirming: He
didn’t dare strike at Horuseps, and everyone here surely knew it. How dare he? How
dare he oust him from his place and order him away as if he were some human? How
dare he do it for
her
!

Then he spun,
and Mara knew it was coming even before his sharp scythe of a claw left the
table. He spun and slashed, intending to open her face as he’d done to her warden
those many days ago. He’d caught her by surprise then, but she was watching him
now, and as fast as he was, Mara’s mind was faster. He’d only just drawn back
his arm, filling the Mindstorm with his envious hate, when Mara slapped him.

Slap was perhaps
too kind a word. This was a demon, not a human, and she withheld nothing. Everything
she had went out along a single focused line, crashing into him like a psychic
battering ram.

Malavan flipped
over and off the table with one claw still imbedded in the stone. For an
instant, that long, bony sword seemed to tremble, and then his weight came down
and the claw shattered, sending shards of bone spinning out into the room and
leaving a piece nearly as long as Mara’s own forearm quivering straight up from
the table. Malavan landed thrashing and shrieking just as the first flares of
alarm at his attack began to light up in the Mindstorm.