The Scholomance (66 page)

“I’ve been out
of bed at least thirty.”

The lights of
his eyes swept upward. He planted one hand firmly on her back and propelled her
ahead of him down the winding stair. “Well. You’re as contentious as ever. I
trust that means you’re feeling better. How’s your head?”

“Fine.”

He sent her a
sharp glance. “No pain at all?”

“A little when I
first woke up.”

“Good.” He faced
forward again, his thoughts clicking through the air like beetles. “Very good. You
saw Kazuul?”

Mara’s jaw
tightened. “Briefly.”

“Hm. And then
you saw Letha.” His fingers on her back twitched, lightly tapping. He was
silent as they crossed into the Nave, but as he steered them toward the wide
stair that led to the students’ level, he suddenly laughed. “I think you
frighten her, precious. And before you start to feel too proud of yourself for
that, you should know that she’s killed his paramours before and he’s always
forgiven her. You’re different, but unless you want to stake your life on just
how different you are, I advise you to leave her be.”

“You’re just
full of good advice, aren’t you?”

“And yet, how
strange that no one ever listens to me. Here we are. One of yours, I think.”

They had come
down into the ephebeum, and there, centered against the far wall where no one
could help but see, his arms and legs sunk into Malleated stone and a spike
stretching out his broken jaws, was a dead man. His face was changed and the
mind that identified him was cold and gone, but someone had helpfully written
the name LOKI over his naked chest.

“I didn’t do
this,” Mara said numbly. She looked around, but the handful of students sharing
the cavern merely bowed their way quickly out of it.

“Of course not,
dearest. They did it for you. You’d rather they feared you than loved you, you
said. Congratulations. It isn’t a long walk, is it?” Horuseps released her and
rested his hands in their customary place on his own shoulders. “You honestly
never saw it coming, did you? But then, it is so impossible to predict the ways
in which humans show their worship. They used to kill their own infants on my
altar.”

“I didn’t do
it,” she said again, found a neophyte peeking out from a passageway, and
shouted, “I didn’t do it and
I didn’t want it done
!”

The student
vanished and Horuseps sighed. “But you allowed your eye to fall on him, oh my
bittersweet. And they are not the only ones watching to see where your eye
falls.” He was silent for a time, watching her stare at the dead man, and then
he quietly said, “Everyone knows that you’re sleeping with your most devoted
little servant.”

She swung on
him, her hands in fists. “I am
not
, goddamn it!”

“Oh, sleep is
all it is, I’m sure, but sleep is damning enough. Kazuul will never be content
with anything less than your whole heart.”

She looked at
him.

“Get rid of the
boy,” said Horuseps softly. “Or he’ll do it for you.” Then he smiled. “It was
so good to see you up and about, precious.”

He left her, and
she stood staring into Loki’s open, blood-filled eyes until the hounds came.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I
t wasn’t easy to push Devlin away. He came to
her cell and she shut the door on him. He followed her to the dining hall and
she refused to sit with him. He shadowed her down every tunnel until she
shouted at him to leave her the fuck alone, but he never retreated far. Even
when she was in the garderobe, he was right outside. His hurt battered at her
mind, but she shut it out. She was doing it for him. He wasn’t her friend, but
he was the only real human contact she’d had in this awful place, and she
wasn’t about to feed him to Kazuul.

He took it
pretty well the first day, assuming it was another of her moods and she’d get
over it, but by the third, something close to panic had taken him. Even Mara’s
psychic seed ordering him to go to class broke upon that stony soil, and she was
forced to stay in her cell while he beat his palms on the door and loudly
begged to know what he’d done.

“Would you shut
up?” she demanded finally, flinging the door open violently enough to make him
bolt halfway down the tunnel.

“You said you’d
get me out of here!” he howled, cringing by the lamp. “Now everyone thinks
you’re mad at me and for God’s sake, you know what they’ll do to me!”

“I can’t have
you sleeping in here,” Mara snapped. “I will get you out. I said so, didn’t I? But
that doesn’t mean I’ve adopted you, so give me some damn space!”

He retreated a
shaky step, hunched into the neck of his robe, wringing his hands.

“You’re a grown
man,” said Mara brusquely. “Stop trying to hold my hand everywhere we go.”

“They’ll kill
me.”

“
I’m
going to kill you, Devlin!” She covered her face, fought down her rising
temper, and looked at him again, more calmly. “Okay. I’m going to spell
something out for you that I’m sure everyone else already knows. I’m fucking
one of the demons.”

“I know,” he said
timidly. He even knew who, although Kazuul’s name was nothing but a word to
him, an unknown quality made even more dangerous for the secrecy. “But they
don’t care. I mean, I know we’re not, you know,
that
way, but even if we
were, they don’t care as long as we don’t do anything that could, um, get you
pregnant.”

“That’s what I
thought,” Mara said with a grim nod. “But Kazuul cares. He cares and he’s a
raging egomaniac, so just back off.”

Devlin shifted
on his feet, slowly beginning to uncurl from his protective slouch. “You’re…You’re
doing it for me?” he asked hopefully.

“Devlin, I swear
to God…”

“I know!” he
stammered, showing her his empty hands, raw and bloody from beating on her
door. “I know, okay? We’re not girlfriends, but…but we are…I mean, we could be…regular
friends. Can’t we?”

She looked at
him, and it was right at the tip of her control not just to tell him he meant
nothing to her, but to shove it right into his skull. She’d never tried to send
to a non-telepath before, but she sensed she could do it. It would hurt him a
lot—on a couple of levels, she guessed—but she could do it and he’d have to
know it was truth once it was ringing unmistakably in his own mind. He was
nothing to her but a convenient navigator, a means to pass the time when she
was in the mood for company, and an onus of responsibility she hated having to
carry.

He was searching
her face, all flyaway hair and hanging robe. Her pet goat.

“Whatever,” said
Mara.

“You saved my
life.” Devlin hesitated a smile at her. “No one’s ever done that for me. Not
even, you know, on the outside, where it doesn’t even matter.”

Mara stepped
back and started to close her door again.

“I’m sorry,” he
said. “I know I make you angry a lot and I can’t seem to help it, but you’re
not a bad person, you know? You’re really not.” He groped for something more to
say (Mara saw it coming and flinched, hard). “You’ve got a good heart.”

Water dripped
steadily somewhere deeper in the tunnel. Her hand stole up and touched the
locket through her robe.

“Go away, Devlin,”
she said tonelessly.

“Okay. I just…” He
thought of hugging her, chewed his lip a little, and then retreated down the
passage, nervously tugging his hood up over his head for the anonymity it
provided. “Okay. I’ll…I’ll see you around, Mara.”

“Whatever,” she
said again, without strength, and shut her door on the sound of oversized
sandals.

*
         
*
         
*

Mara woke to the
tolling of the bells. She sat up slowly, listening to the tangle of them, all
crashing together without rhythm or harmony. She’d heard its like once before. A
tribunal had been called.

Mara was not so confident
of Kazuul’s protection that she did not experience a twinge of dread, but she
supposed if she were the subject of today’s entertainment, someone would have
come to grab her before they rang the summons. Well, if she wasn’t in it, she
guessed she could just go back to sleep, but what the hell. She was already
awake. And as much as she did not want to see someone butchered, she did want
to know what went on around here.

So she got up
and went to the Nave with the rest of them. She didn’t immediately think it odd
that Devlin wasn’t sidling up to hang off the hem of her robe. He hadn’t been
at the first tribunal either, or at least, she hadn’t noticed him. He didn’t
really strike her as the sort who would attend one of these. Gazelles didn’t,
for the most part. Eviscerations were the amusements of lions.

So she was not
much surprised when she came to the threshold of the Black Door, swept her mind
across the clamor, and did not find her irritating little shadow. She was
surprised, however, to see that the demons standing at the end of the Nave
seemed to be waiting on her. She’d come to expect that sort of thing from
Horuseps, but all of them? Zyera? Letha? Dalziel was there, one long arm
wrapped twice around a column. Below him, Malavan stood as upright as his body
allowed, all his weight forward on the outthrust swords of his finger-claws,
craning his thick neck to see her in the crowd. Others she didn’t know well
enough to name still watched her with only her face in their minds and
anticipation tingling throughout their hidden thoughts.

“What is this?”
she asked, as ice took hold of her heart and the fires of rage began to sing
down deep in her gut. She couldn’t fight them all, but by God, she’d try.

“An
unpleasantness,” Horuseps answered, stroking her hair in a pretense of
sympathy. “I had hoped you would not witness it.”

“Liar!” she
spat, checking herself just in time to keep from slapping suicidally at his
hand. “If you’ve found her, if you’ve trumped up some charge to kill her in
front of me—”

“Such a
suspicious mind you have. My dear, vengeful young child, we would never arrange
a mock trial. We have no need. We can exact whatever murder we desire when the
mood is on us. The sad fact of the matter is, your fellow students provide us
with an endless bounty of errors to fuel interludes such as this. But set your
burning heart at ease, child. Our prisoner is not even female.” He patted her
on the head and turned away, raising his hands for silence.

“We have very
few rules here,” he said, just as he had said once before. He left Mara,
walking among the robed students who bowed before him and enjoying himself as
he basked jointly in their adoration and her seething impatience. “And we are
careful that you hear them all, understand them all, and appreciate the
consequences of disobedience.”

Malavan chuckled
nastily, gouging his claws through the rock floor as he watched Mara. Several
demons hushed him.

“It is forbidden
to defy any Master’s command,” Horuseps was saying calmly. “It is forbidden to
remove books from the Great Library without the express permission of a Master
of the Scholomance.”

Watching her. Why
were they all watching
her
?

“It is forbidden
for our students to indulge in such sexual games as could conceive offspring,”
Horuseps said, and turned back toward the Black Door. His eye wandered over
Mara’s way. “It is forbidden to linger more than ten years in the study of any
one art, and it is forbidden to miss more than ten days each year of lessons.” He
finished his stroll and faced out into the crowd with a good, clear killing
field between them and the silent students. He rested his hands on his
shoulders. “The breaking of these laws,” he said, “is never to be tolerated.”

The doors deep in
the shadowed side of the Nave opened and even before Mara heard his voice, all
that was Devlin crashed into her mind.

“Human called
Astregon,” Horuseps said, gazing into Mara’s eyes, “you are found guilty of
truancy.”

“Kazuul put you
up to this,” she said, watching the demon—the executioner—unconcernedly drag
Devlin before the Black Door. It was Argoth, the same muscle-bound monster who
had performed at the last tribunal, only he didn’t look bored this time. He
tipped Mara a wink as he dragged his victim across her view, and for an
instant, rage blotted out everything, everyone, even Devlin.

Only an instant.
Mara turned on Horuseps, not seeing the way his smile had turned to cautious
alarm or the flinching movement at his side as Zyera and Letha retreated
several steps. “Where is he?” she demanded. “Where is the coward?”

“Perhaps not the
proper attitude to take into an audience,” Horuseps murmured, examining his
fingers.

“I did what you
said! I got rid of him!”

A flicker of
something that was not quite sympathy crossed his face. “Then this won’t hurt
as much, will it?”

Rage again,
there and gone. Mara looked at her hand, half-raised, and lowered it with
effort to her side. “If he thinks this is going to hurt me at all, he is dead
wrong.”

Kazuul’s
powerful voice rolled out before Horuseps could reply: “Pun unintentional, I
presume?”

He strode in
from the great stair and through the crowd, his green eyes stabbing out from
the darkness. Students hastened to bow before him, and he cut an indifferent
path directly through them to Mara, clearing his way with brutal sweeps of his
bone-bladed arms. He did not seem to hear their screams or feel the weight of
the bodies he hooked. When he reached her, he shook off the flotsam at her
feet, and snorted when she kicked a flailing hand aside.