The Scholomance (59 page)

Mara silenced
him with a mindslap, grabbed back that flicker, and pulled it with her into the
Panic Room where she could see every shade of danger in the Mindstorm while she
studied it.

Devlin, dragged
away. Two men, almost invisible in their black robes, until one of them looked
back over his shoulder to laugh at their victim. It was a face she knew, and
recognizing it, she understood why no one gave the abduction more attention
than their lost meals.

It was Loki. Laughing
Loki, La Danse’s ever-present henchman, so she could guess who the other guy
was. And somewhere in the maze of cell-pocked passages, there was a race being
run.

Mara turned
around, rapidly comparing each tunnel mouth to the one in her stolen memory. When
she had it, she emptied her sleeve of its distracting weight for the students
to dive at and started walking. She did not run. There was a chance La Danse
had merely seized an opportunity to play his sadistic games on the first
gazelle he’d spied, but she doubted it. No, this had all the hallmarks of a
deliberate stab at her, and she meant to answer it. She would stay calm, she
would be careful, and she would turn his brain into soup.

The blister-lamps
were only just beginning to fade down this corridor, which meant someone had
been through recently who knew how to turn them on. They made a fairly obvious
trail through the many crossways for Mara to follow, and where the lights
ended, the screams began.

Rock absorbed so
much sound…she was nearly at the cell before she heard him. His voice was raw,
breaking down, and he’d lost the wit to make coherent words beyond the
occasional, “Please, stop!” or “God, no!” or a howling effort at her name. He
might have been screaming like this the entire time she’d been upstairs,
enjoying her Master’s feast and playing games with Argoth under the table. The
thought pierced her, and bled out fury. Controlling it left her feeling hot and
not quite connected to herself. She was not aware of walking. She only felt
that angry heat straining at her ribs and was there.

The cell where
they held him was shut, but not sealed. Mara banged the door open, as much to
catch anyone behind it as to announce herself, but no one was there. No one was
anywhere. The cell had been Malleated to three times its original size, but it
was still small enough to see it all at once, and apart from Devlin lying on
the floor, it was featureless and empty.

Devlin. They’d
stripped him, tied him hand and foot, blindfolded and beaten him, but the game
still appeared to be in the preliminary stages. He was more or less in one
piece, although someone had been entertaining himself with a few dozen
evil-looking stone needles, all of which had been left imbedded in their
plaything. They were in his stomach, in the soles of his feet, his scrotum, the
tender inner cavity of his elbows, they were in his nipples, his neck, his lips
and his gums. Devlin didn’t even know his torturers had left him. With every
minute movement, the needles quivered, wracking him with fresh pains as he
pleaded to an empty room for it all to stop.

If they hadn’t
bothered to stick around and laugh at him, then this had nothing to do with
Devlin and everything to do with her.

The anger again.
Mara could feel it lunging like a dog on a fraying lead, hungry to bite and
difficult to rein in. She drew herself in and looked at the Mindstorm, muted by
layers of rock except where Devlin’s fear and agony ate it up. She stepped out
into the hall and probed to her limits in both directions, but felt nothing, no
one.

Scowling, she
went to Devlin and yanked the blindfold off. “Shut up,” she said, before he
could do more than suck in a sobbing breath. She got his ankles untied, started
to loosen the knot at his wrists, then changed her mind and went after the
needles instead. The first one she pulled on broke into a handful of brittle
flakes, each one its own razor. She stared at the shards in her hand, feeling
again that red eclipse, and reminded herself to be calm.

Devlin let out a
rusty shriek, gagged on his own blood, and then screamed through his savaged
mouth, “
It’s a trap
!”

“I’m aware of
that,” Mara snapped, plucking needles in quick, impersonal jerks. They bled,
and for now she’d let them bleed, but when this was over, she knew she’d better
do something for him. Malleate the holes shut, if nothing else, but they were
bound to get infected. Why hadn’t she bothered to learn the word for Growth
yet? Wait, who was the man Desdemona had wanted to fix her face? Shy-something,
she thought. She couldn’t look it up now, pulling needles was too fiddly to
risk doing from the Panic Room, but she’d find out and she’d make him fix
Devlin up.

She was still
calm. Angry, but calm. She believed Devlin when he said it was a trap and she
believed that trap was about to spring its teeth on her, but then, she also
believed she’d sense anyone coming when they finally rushed the cell and she
believed she was a match for La Danse and his laughing donkey.

Mara didn’t have
much imagination. Even knowing the cell walls had been manipulated in the past,
she was taken entirely by surprise when the rock rolled back on either side of
her and she was at once surrounded. They ran at her, not just one or two, but five
of them, slamming into reality in a scant second and catching her completely
unawares. One massive mindslap could have dropped them, or at least disoriented
them long enough for her to run, but she couldn’t slap indiscriminately without
hitting Devlin too.

She hesitated,
and they were on her.

Mara didn’t know
how to scream. The sound she made when the first blow smashed into her was more
of a hoarse yelp and she knew it wouldn’t carry far in the sound-swallowing
tunnels. Her feet went out from under her with a single expert kick, and then
she was tumbling backwards with hands all over her, grabbing her anywhere they
could and pulling her into the black. Fists came out of the dark, fists
hammering into her chest, her stomach, her face.

The lions had
come for her. She couldn’t see them through the barrage of blows, but their
minds shouted their identities along with their delight. La Danse and his little
laughing friend, one of Ruk’s cock-sleeves from that day in the lyceum, one man
she didn’t even know, and Proteus, Horuseps’s pet and reading partner. This was
no spur-of-the-moment attack. They had been planning this for days, just
waiting for Devlin to wander off on his own so that they could turn him into
bait. Behind the Malleated walls, they had brought candles, so they could see
her at their mercy. They’d made a wide ledge, just hip-high, against one wall. They’d
made spikes on another one.

Dimly, she was
aware of Devlin thrashing through the Mindstorm, all pain and panic and
impulse. Everyone else was too busy trying to get their kicks in to notice when
he snatched the last of the needles out of his feet and got his legs under him.
She could sense him hovering at the edge of her perceptions, see the way she
looked through his eyes as she fought back against the mob.

Then he ran.

‘That’s how you
survive eleven years in the Scholomance,’ Mara thought as rock walls wiped all
trace of Devlin from her mind. And she had to laugh, even as the rage welled up
and savaged her. She could expect no better from a man with a bunny tattoo.

“That’s enough! That’s
enough! What—Where’d that numb fuck go? You were supposed to be watching him!”

“It doesn’t
matter. Let him go.”

Proteus, the
leader here, stuck his head out into the empty tunnel and then slammed the door
on it and escape. He pulled his playmates off her, yanked her head up, and spat
in her face. Then he grabbed her, threw her down on the ledge he’d made, and
knotted his hand in her hair. She got the breath knocked out of her, started to
struggle up, and got slammed down again, face-first, twice in sharp succession.
It knocked her out, but only as far as the Panic Room, where she could just as
easily force her battered brain to obey her and wake right back up. She wasn’t
going to be unconscious here.

“It was your
fault,” Proteus was hissing in her ear as she came groggily back around. “She
was hurt because of you.”

She? She who? Horuseps
was in his mind, Horuseps in Kazuul’s grip, suspended in the air over the
dining table with a bony spike stabbed up between the demon’s thighs. His
Horuseps, who had laughed at him when he’d come down into the theater that
night, who’d laughed and waved Proteus off as if he were a bug, as if he’d
never meant anything. Horuseps, who had been fucking this bitch on the library
stairs, Danse said he saw them. Danse said Horuseps wasn’t a woman. But this
bitch, this bitch was, and she was going to pay for ruining his chance at a
Master’s bed.

Mara gathered
what concentration she could muster and sent out a mindslap like a pulse in the
open air around her. It didn’t feel very strong to her, but it did knock them
all briefly back. Briefly. Then the fists rained down, hammering her head into
the rock, and one of them, that one of Ruk’s, was screaming, “Kill her! Kill
her! Kill her!” and leaping around like a damn ape.

She wasn’t
prepared for it. As prissy as that sounded even to her, she wasn’t prepared. Never
in her life had anyone laid hands on her in violence. Hell, few enough were
those times hands had been laid on her in annoyance, in passion, or even in
affection. Here was no demon, no monster, but just a man and that man was
strong enough to make her struggles into his game. They meant to rape her and
they meant to kill her, and there was nothing at all she could do about it.

Proteus spoke a
Word, dragged handfuls of stone up and over her arms, sucking them down into
rock to keep her helpless and his hands free. His friends were laughing—Loki’s
donkey-like bray cut across her ears the loudest—jostling each other for the
best view. Shock gave way to a grossly inappropriate sense of outrage; this
couldn’t be happening, how could it be happening, and how could it dare to be
happening to her? This storm of sick confusion swelled and swelled and suddenly
popped as La Danse yanked her robe up and she felt the chill draft of the caves
on her naked skin.

“She’s mine
first!” Proteus snarled. “You hear that, you bitch? I’m going to fuck you. He’s
going to fuck you. And when we’re all tired of using your whore-holes, I’m
going to do to you what your cock-slave demon did to Horuseps.” He banged her
head into the rock a few times, as if for emphasis. “I’m going to pound that
spike up your cunt so deep, I stab you through the fucking heart! Do you hear
me? Do you?”

She thought she
would be terrified. Terror was the logical place to go, after all, and there
was sure a part of her hedging inexorably into panic, but terror itself never
came. Instead, and without a single hitch of transition, Mara fell from
confusion into rage.

Not anger. Anger
was a far gentler emotion for a far gentler time. Tantrums were had in anger,
or shouting fits, or at its extreme, a sudden brawling spat. What took hold of
Mara’s heart as her thighs were wrenched apart was black and throbbing, alive
in some murderous, cancerous way that frightened her as much as anything
happening behind her now. She had always been in control, all her life, even in
her sleep. Now that control was gone and the rage swept over her, and as she
felt the hot press of Proteus shoving his cock into her, some grotesque mimic
of her childhood calm took hold of her and used Ruk’s voice to whisper, ‘Thou
requirest not a direct touch…carve with thy will and not thy hand.’

Proteus had her,
skin to skin. Mara reached out through that contact and was inside him, easily
and far, far deeper than he was inside her. His body moved and she saw every
movement, every pulsing vein and floating cell. Her vision swam out of life and
color to the empty black of Sight. Mara looked at him and spoke the Word of
Transmutation, all her furious will in focus.
Bone to blood
, would have
been her thought, but she did not need thought in that time of pure rage. The
will and the Word were all.

Proteus
collapsed behind her. She didn’t know it, didn’t feel him go down or even slide
out of her. She didn’t hear the jeering of his friends turn to gasps and
choking cries. She spoke a Word and the rock that held her become warm. She
pulled her hands free, screaming that Word again even as she spun around and
slapped. She did not see the face she hit, not before she struck him and not
after, when mouth, nose, eyes and open bone were so hideously smeared together
and he was down, down and choking on his own mangled flesh for want of air.

Rage. It was all
rage, and rage did not burn the way they said it did. Anger burns. Rage
sings
.
It sang in Mara as she threw herself at every movement, every living thing that
shared her space. They were not men she killed—Kimara Warner could never kill a
man—they were objects of disgust and disease, objects to demand a death. And
she was rage, who gave it to them.

They ran,
tearing open the door and sprinting out into the tunnel, screaming, scattering.
She ran after, quickly saw that she was no match for their speed, and dropped
instead, slapping her hands against the floor she made malleable, reaching
through it as she had reached through flesh, and bringing the rock itself up in
a wave to take one of them down, to fall over him, to crush him in its terrible
fist.

Something was
wrong. Her heart, beating too fast. Mara staggered, clutching at her chest as
pain began to splinter through her, but a man broke from his hiding place in
the shadows and rage was on her again. She ran after, chasing him around the
muting shields of winding rock until she burst out into the brilliant open
field of the ephebeum and he was hers. She lashed out in a Word of Transmutation—
blood
to salt
—and screams became a curtain over every sense.