The Scholomance (65 page)

“Why do you let
me stay here?” Mara asked. “It can’t be just for the sex.”

“It could, I
assure thee.” He kicked at a chunk of stone by his broken table and moved on.

“Don’t insult my
intelligence.” She pulled her robe on, wincing at the smell, which was now
mildewy as well as rank with sweat. “You know I’m not here to learn anything. You
know I’m going to find Connie and take her away with me. I don’t think I can
help but upset your perfect order while I’m doing it. Why do you let me stay?”

“Perhaps I do
not consider thee a threat.” He crouched down to knuckle through debris.

“That would be a
mistake.”

Kazuul
straightened up with his dented silver cup in hand and came back towards the
bed. “Is it?”

“I’m very
dangerous when I want to be,” Mara muttered, and watched him pour himself more
wine out of the ewer by the bed. “Ask anyone.”

“How
frightening.” He drank, eyed her as he refilled the cup, and then grunted and
looked away. “Thou dost remain for that thou hast mine interest.”

She hadn’t been
expecting an answer. It made her suspicious and so she laughed at him. “I
refuse to believe, after all the years of your life, you’ve found something
entirely unique in the way I have sex.”

“So much I could
not yet swear to,” he replied, only a little sourly. “Nevertheless, thy words
hold a grain of unknowing truth. Tis not how thou movest that fascinates me,
but what moveth thou to do so.”

“I told you—”

“Thou hast an
itch,” he said for her, smiling. “Thou dost lie with me to ‘scratch’ it. Ah
yes. A plausible enough excuse. I pretend to believe it.”

“It’s not always
a lie.”

“Aye, that I do
believe.” He offered her his cup, drank it off when she shook her head, and
dropped it indifferently beside the ewer when he was done. He looked at her for
a long time as she sat there and ignored him. “Yet thy will matters little when
thou art come to me,” he said at last. “And I let thee stay, Mara, for that
thou art mine own.”

She shook her
head and stood up. “I refuse to be your harem, Kazuul. You can make me say
whatever you want, but as long as you’re stupid enough to give me a choice, I
will always choose to walk away when I’m done with you.”

“I could have
forced thee to my finish,” he remarked, watching her prove it. “But I let thee
have thy flutterings and never called thee fool for it. There was a time when
even my hands were unbloodied.”

Her step
faltered. She almost looked back, almost.

“I shall refuse
to make a harem of thee, Mara,” he said. “I will stand quiet and let thee crawl
upon me, tying thy strings where thee will, but thou shalt never move me. I am
the master of my lusts and of my rage, and I am master of thee as well. And when
I have thee at last, it will be at thy urging.”

“Ha!”

“Aye,” he said
grimly, his eyes spilling light in blades down his cheeks. “I could have chains
set on thee at any hour, but I need them not. Thou art bound to me already. So
go where thou wilt, my bitter sip, and return when thou hast thy heart about
thee. I would drink thy howls of rage as readily as screams of rapture, but I will
never have thee,” he said, moving away into the shadows so that his voice came
back distant and all around her, “save with the whole of thy heart.”

She wanted to
laugh at him again, since that was such a patently ridiculous thing for him to
say, after all that he had done, but couldn’t. She left him instead, unable to
see him in his broken lair, but knowing he was watching her as she walked away.

*
         
*
         
*

She traveled
back through the lyceum, seeing little, her mood unusually heavy. Looking back
at herself was a painful effort. She felt exposed in every unplanned word that
she’d let fall. Why had she spoken to him like that, like a…like a child crying
for comfort? And why in hell had he answered?

She could trust
him only when he was engaged in his single-minded pursuit of her. She could not
predict him, perhaps, and certainly could not combat him, but she could trust
that everything he said or did came straight from the cock. She liked that. She
could control that. It hadn’t upset her to have her clothes torn off or to be flung
across the room and into bed, because that was as coy as someone like him could
get, but he’d had her atop him, had her solidly in his grip when all it would
have taken was a few hard thrusts more, and he’d let her go. To have her
flutterings, he said, which served him no purpose at all.

It was a trick. It
had to be. A little playacted sympathy to melt her heart and bring her back
without a fight the next time. And anyway, he could certainly afford to send
her away. He had other recourses, didn’t he?

Mara paused,
glancing down into the lyceum’s central cavern and the open archway to the Nave
beyond. Then she turned around and went back up the winding stair. Not far,
this time. It wasn’t Kazuul she wanted to see. She turned down a passage and
walked, checking her progress against her memories, until she made her way to a
very particular theater. The door was open. She stood just inside, looking down
over the crowded risers to the dais where Letha spoke in exultant tones of
beauty and attraction.

The demoness
glanced up. Her eyes met Mara’s. She touched a finger to her lips, thoughtful,
and then smiled. “Let us speak therefore of sex,” she purred. “The first and
purest magic, and one which even Man in his ignorance may share in shadow. Yet
if that ignorance be lifted by mine art, aye, even the clumsy couplings of
mortal flesh can become a mystery and a power.”

**I have lain
with him.**

The thoughts
were, if possible, even richer and more sensuous than Letha’s true voice. Mara
waited a moment or two, then acknowledged them with a mental shrug. **So have
I. Want to compare notes?**

**I have been
his eager concubine ten thousand times and heard my name upon his blood-kissed
lips. I have felt his body so tenderly a’crush of mine as his breath burned
upon my throat, and I have begged him to make ever more use of me.** Letha’s
fingers played across her smiling mouth, slipped down to caress her own neck. She
spoke on to her students, but her mind was all with Mara, as poisonous in its
beauty as the asp Cleopatra clutched to her breast. **What art thou to me? Egg,
thou art. Suckling pup. Clay-born creature, undeserving of mine eye.**

**I’m not
interested in your eye,** Mara thought back with unveiled scorn.

Letha’s smile
broadened enough to show the gleam of her sharp, white teeth. **I could have
him back at any hour that I desired it. Every chamber of his ancient heart is
known to me, thou plume of smoke, thou ripple over water. We were playing games
of flesh when Men yet burned their offspring in homage to the sun.**

**So take him.**

**At any hour,**
Letha promised. **For the moment, he desireth thee, and so it is for his
amusement that thou art permitted thy free footing in these halls, but he will
tire of thee eventually. I have seen his fancies bloom and wither and fall
forgotten throughout these ages, and here do I remain.**

It is a
difficult thing to lie with thoughts, and all of Letha’s sendings were boldly
made, except for this last, which shook ever so slightly with the words, ‘he
will tire of thee.’ Mara told herself she didn’t care one way or the other, but
still, it made her smile.

Letha saw it,
and the colors of her mind sharpened to brilliant edges. **Dare thee not to pit
thy contemptible will against mine. Our lord may allow thee to bandy words with
him, but I would as soon pull thy tongue as indulge thee. Mind thyself,
mortal-born. Thou shalt not long have his protection.**

There was no
shiver in those thoughts. Mara felt her smile slip, testing them.

Letha saw that
too. Her bronze eyes widened, all innocence and feigned concern. **Why, thou
seemest surprised! Dost thou think thee can forever flaunt thyself before our
brothers and yet retain our lord’s favor? Or hast thou at last condescended to
allow one of these glammar-suckling mortals to lie betwixt thy ready thighs?**

Mara sent only
wordless derision in answer.

**Nay? Then who
is the human who hath joined thee in thy bed as our lord doth patiently await
thy return?** Letha asked sweetly. **I shall have to see if I can make it seem
as interesting an account as Azkeloth’s charming tale of thee and Horuseps on
the stair of the Great Library. I do hope thy pet recovereth as well once our
lord’s ire is spent. Oh, thee he shall speedily forgive,** Letha assured her,
stroking one hand lazily over her breasts as her lecture went on for the
benefit of the raptly-staring students. **Until he hath tired himself of
filling thy woman’s well, he shall never let his hand fall on thee in anger,
yet surely thou hast seen with what tender mercy he doth treat his rivals.**

The memory of
Kazuul’s spike punching up between Horuseps’s thighs was never far—black blood
pouring around Kazuul’s fist as he twisted the point deep in the wound, the
shrill-cicada scream splitting the air, and the way he had turned afterwards to
look at her, letting Horuseps drop from his fist to thrash on the floor in his
own spreading gore. Now she saw Devlin in his place.

Letha waited
while the full consequence of this possibility revealed itself to her. Then she
smiled again, all her delicate quills whispering like silk sheets as they
rippled down her back. **Thou shalt tell him the boy is harmless. I will tell
him he is not. And we shall see which of us he believeth best.**

Mara did not
answer. She shouldn’t have answered any of it. She shouldn’t even be here. She
turned around.

**Thou art in my
grip as much as his, never doubt it,** Letha sent, as her lilting voice
continued to give unheard praise to the art of Allure. **So down, mortal-born,
down upon thy naked back before him. Give him all he doth demand and creep away
to the depths before thou dost incur my wrath beyond all mending. I tolerate
his fleeting whimsies for so long as they know their place, but I shall not be
made the warden of she who seeketh to usurp me without a vengeance.**

Mara swung back.
“Do not threaten me,” she said, silencing the demoness and attracting every
student’s startled eye. “Or we really will find out who he loves best.”

That knocked the
smile off Letha’s lips as effectively as a slap. “Who he
believeth
!” she
said, interrupting her own lecture in clear, golden tones of fury.

For a moment,
Mara was confused. She ran back her words—
loves
—and felt as struck by it
as the demoness seemed to be. She hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t even meant to
think it. She needed Kazuul’s favor and protection; she neither expected nor
desired his love, even assuming a creature like him was capable of such an
emotion.

But the word had
a way of echoing in Letha’s increasingly agitated mind, until she turned on her
restless, uncertain students with her hands hooked into claws. “Away, thou
ravens! Thou carrion rats, thou jackals! Away, or I’ll mar thee so that even
Malavan would not have thee!”

And then she was
directly in front of Mara, snapping through the space between them in an
instant. Even angry, she was beautiful. She could contort her furious features
in no way that she was not beautiful. Like the quills that grew from her
flawless body, the most grotesque changes could only accentuate her perfection.

The demoness sneered
at her in that beautiful way as the theater emptied, and a snap from her
molten-bronze eyes slammed the doors and sealed them in alone. Mara could sense
her thoughts prowling just beneath the surface of her closed mind, but she kept
them quiet in spite of her obvious rage, and her voice was still as sweet and
smooth as chocolate when she said, “I suppose thou thinkest that the murder of
thy fellow students has made thee mine equal, but I am yet thy Master and ever
shall be.”

“I never said
otherwise.”

“Nay? Down upon
thy knees then, and kiss thy Master.” Letha thrust her chin forward, her mouth
twisted in a savage smile. “Tis my command, thou child of crippled Earth, and
as thou didst so recently observe, thou art my property also. Kneel.”

‘Never should have
come here,’ thought Mara again, not without a rueful smile. She knelt and felt
the stab of Letha’s bitter pleasure piercing through the Mindstorm as she bent
her back and touched her lips impersonally to Letha’s perfect foot.

“Nay,” the demon
purred. “Not there.”

Mara
straightened slowly, cocking a cool eye upwards.

Letha smiled at
her. The quills that lined her hairless pussy rippled outwards, each black tip
shining with clear drops of pungently sweet musk. Her nether lips parted,
exposing the gleaming folds of her sex and the bronze pearl that crowned it,
every part of her in sinuous motion.

“Kiss me,
clay-born,” Letha whispered, as the first drops fell from her quills and hissed
tiny holes into Mara’s damp robe. “Kiss thy Master.”

The theater
doors opened. “Precious, that I have to see you first in the mind of—”

Horuseps,
motionless behind them with one hand upon each door, studied the tableau before
him with a thoughtful expression. “Get up,” he said finally, his tone hard.

“I was given an
order,” said Mara as Letha snarled prettily.

“I’m giving you
another one. Oh dear, we have a dilemma. Shall we take the matter to Kazuul for
judgment? Get up, Mara.”

She got up. Horuseps
caught her arm in a painful grip and pushed her roughly behind him. He stood and
stared for a long time at Letha, but didn’t say another word to her, at least
not one that Mara could hear. At length, he pulled the doors shut and then, and
only then, did he turn around and look at her. “You’re not out of bed five
minutes,” he began.