by R. Lee Smith
What kind of place had she come to?
There were people in the light. Mara veered into a wall and hung on there, shielding her eyes as they adjusted to this brilliance. The people were staring at her, really staring. She wiped self-consciously at her nose.
“But…You…”
She recognized that voice. This was the woman who had taken her things, who had tried to take her locket. She backed away when Mara looked at her, her hands half-raised as though expecting an attack. “You…You were only admitted tonight!”
Mara let go of the wall (half a dozen robed figures stepped hugely back) and made herself look as dignified as possible with no clothes on. “Do I get a robe yet or what?” she asked.
* * *
Her robe was red and it had a hood. The fabric was thick and heavy and actually pretty soft, far more comfortable than she’d been expecting and absolutely essential against the pervading chill of the damp mountain. It had no belt and no pockets, but the voluminous sleeves were sewn up about six inches at the bottoms to form pouches of a sort, although at the moment, Mara had nothing to put in them. The woman who gave it to her said her name was Desdemona, but it wasn’t. The first thing the woman did after Mara put it on was pull the hood up and over Mara’s eyes, forcing her to pretty much look only at her own feet.
“You are nothing here,” the woman said crisply. She’d recovered nicely from her shock at Mara’s early arrival and seemed determined to make up for it with extra helpings of rude. “You have no name, no rights. For now, you are only an initiate. You will not be considered a student until you have survived your harrowing. You will find it more difficult than opening a door.”
“Why? Because you did?”
The woman slapped her. “Initiates do not speak to students!” she spat.
‘I bet we don’t knock you into walls either, but that’s what I’ll do the very next time you hit me,’ Mara thought. She wanted to say it. God knew, she wanted to do it too, but this was not the place or the time. Now was the time to be patient, to learn. The reckoning would have to wait until after she had Connie.
Oh, but she could make this woman cry. She could make her scream. She could make her get on her knees and beg…if she wanted her to.
The woman eyed her, perhaps remembering the slap-that-had-not-happened, uneasy. “Silence,” she said at last, but she only said it this time. “If you must speak, do so in whispers. Bow when spoken to.” She demonstrated, pressing her fists together at heart-height and bending low. “Show no one your eyes.”
Mara nodded, tight-lipped.
“If you are successfully harrowed, you will be accepted as a neophyte, one of the untrained. This you will remain until you have mastered at least one of the arts taught here. I am an acolyte,” the woman added, raising her chin and giving the folds of her black robe a little shake. “Mine is the Mastery of Sight and of Allure.”
It was on the tip of Mara’s tongue to offer her congratulations, since she seemed so ridiculously proud, but she didn’t care for another slap. She said nothing, and sensed a faint embarrassed sort of disappointment from the woman in front of her when her achievement went unmarked. Sometimes, you just couldn’t win.
“All neophytes owe respect to acolytes,” the woman continued. “But all students, regardless of their talents, owe respect to every Master. You will bow to them. You will answer every summons. You will obey every command. Do you understand?”
Mara shrugged and nodded.
The shrug probably wasn’t smart. Angrily, the woman said, “You are here by the grace of the Masters, and their grace is not guaranteed, initiate! Show them all obedience or suffer the consequences. It is not permitted for any student or initiate to defy an order given by one of the Masters. The price of defiance is death. Do you understand?”
Mara nodded again, omitting the shrug.
“Your harrowing begins in the Great Library. There you will attend the Scrivener, copying manuscripts.”
That was the harrowing? Doing lines for some librarian? In disbelief, Mara tapped, and caught a blurred and badly-remembered image of this woman, this Desdemona, in her own red robe, crouched over a candle-lit table, writing. It wasn’t much of a memory, which was curious all of itself, but then, people could sometimes have trouble remembering the things that really hurt them. Mara could force it out, she knew, but the woman was still talking and she had to pay attention.
“If you attempt to leave the library before you are fully harrowed, you forfeit your right to study. You will be used in lessons instead. These are not pleasant deaths,” the woman added, almost in a joking way.
“No, I guess they wouldn’t be,” Mara remarked, and got slapped again.
“Water is made available at all times,” the woman said, flexing her hand as Mara gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling. “Bread, twice each day. We have no timepieces here. Listen for the tolling of the bells—”
‘And ask not,’ thought Mara. She smiled to herself.
The expression disconcerted the other woman, enough to force her back a step. She regarded Mara as one regards a dimly-seen lump in the crawl-space one must enter: it could be a rock, it could be a wadded-up bit of trash, or it could be some crouching, silent, savage thing just watching you and waiting for you to come close enough to bite.
Mara really liked that image.
“First-bell rings to waken us and summon us to our morning meal,” the woman said slowly, still uneasy. “At second-bell, lessons begin. At third-bell, lessons end and the evening meal begins. At fourth-bell, our day ends. Your bread shall be brought after first- and third-bell. Do you understand?”
Mara nodded.
“There are chamberpots beneath the tables. Try not to soil your robe,” the woman concluded in a doubtful tone. “You will not receive another. This way.”
Try not to? With a chamberpot under every table? Mara had no exhibitionistic tendencies and yet, if everyone else was doing it, why would she balk? She’d much rather piss in a pot in front of people than wet her damn self like a baby.
The librarian must be a demon, the sheer terror of whose visage had to be the ‘harrowing’ part of copying books. Mara thought she’d be okay with that. Horuseps was terrible, in his own quiet way, but he wasn’t exactly harrowing.
Mara followed her guide along yet another passageway, this one winding slightly upwards. More of those glowing blisters lit the way. The floor had been worn smooth and somewhat shiny by ages of untold feet. Connie had perhaps come this way.
For the first time, it occurred to her to wonder how in hell Connie had opened those doors. The flinching idea that Connie’s may have been the bit of bone Mara had so callously toyed with during her ordeal didn’t hold up. Connie had sent a letter. Two years after her disappearance, Connie had sent a letter.
‘Not necessarily,’ a part of her whispered. ‘Two years after her disappearance, Connie’s letter was found and sent.’
Mara crushed that, too. Then, because even crushed things leave a stain, she reached out and sank unnoticed into her guide’s mind.
Her real name was Lynn Wynwick, that came first. Twice married, once disastrously, and twice widowed by her own hand. The first time was almost an accident, a misjudgment of medicinal herbs she’d been using to keep Richard’s bold and roving eye under control. Both deaths escaped lawful notice and both brought her money.
Mara went deeper. This was familiar territory for her, a familiar sort of game. Deftly, she took the woman’s unsuspecting mind and made it into a filing cabinet for her own use, thumbing through loose sheaves of memory for Connie’s name, Connie’s face. She found nothing, but—
The Oubliette, that was what they called that first room, those who survived it. Lynn had been in the Oubliette long enough to lose forty pounds. Oh, tell the truth and shame the Devil, closer to fifty. She’d spent most of it maddened by thirst, crawling on her belly through her own waste, trying to suck drops of water off the floor, no longer even hoping to open the doors but on
ly to survive another day, another hour. Sometimes, she thought her husbands were with her, alive sometimes and sometimes dead, but always accusing. Her second, that bastard Nathaniel, had raped her. There on the wet floor, his breath reeking of rotten meat and his last cup of bitter tea, he’d raped her all over again just the way he used to when he was alive. So she’d killed him again, killed him screaming as he was inside her, just put her hands on him and wished him ferociously dead, and he was, and so the doors had opened—
Frowning, Mara withdrew and let the woman keep taking her away. She was as incapable of imagining Connie killing somebody, even in the extremity of some hunger-induced hallucination, as she was willing the door open with her mind. Heck, as badly as she’d wanted to be magic, that was the reason she’d left that one coven back in college, because they wanted to sacrifice a dog and Connie couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t even dissect a dead frog in high school biology, that was Connie. No, she didn’t believe it…but she had to believe Connie got through those doors somehow.
“There.” The woman stopped and pointed on ahead. “I go no further.”
Naturally not. Because of the harrowing. She tapped, but the woman was not thinking of the room beyond. Was rather pointedly not thinking of it, in fact. Mara pried, and got back that dim and strangely distorted image—the red-robed Desdemona, the candles melting on the table, and the writing, the awful writing. There was no sense of pain, no sense of sickness, exactly, only a terrible, formless strain, and with it, an all-encompassing desire never to remember it any better. Mara could make her, of course, but Mara let it go. The woman was a bit of a bitch, but there was no need to torture her over something Mara would experience for herself soon enough.
She shook her sleeves back a bit, raised her hood so that she could see the flight of stairs at the end of this sloping corridor, and the little gleam of light from one of those glowing blisters higher up, out of sight. She could feel something, she wasn’t sure what, something like the droning of flies or the sound of static eating up the radio, only on the inside. Nothing serious. Nothing that even seemed precisely alive. She started walking.
“If you survive, you will be a student of the Scholomance,” the woman said, frustrated by Mara’s total lack of hesitation where she herself had once stood paralyzed. “And you will learn such things as you cannot imagine. Nothing is beyond the reach of a true student. The embrace of the Masters is all-reaching.”
When Mara came to the foot of the stair, she climbed. And with each step she took towards the Library above her, she felt the press of that drone, that static, dialing itself up around her. Halfway up the stair, her ears needed popping. After another three steps, her nose began again to bleed. She stopped then and looked around, but the woman who had brought her here was gone.
‘I really should have checked to see exactly what this harrowing was, and never mind the torture,’ Mara thought, then realized she was stalling and climbed the rest of the stairs in an angry burst of energy. They brought her to a sharp turn, a short corridor, and a wide door. It opened at the touch of her hand, and Mara was knocked out of this world into Hell.
CHAPTER FIVE
Screaming. That’s all it was. Just screaming.
She’d fainted. She realized that when she discovered she couldn’t move her body, but unconsciousness was no escape from the screams. They bored into her like seven billion beetles. She could feel them crawling on her, crawling in her, their combined weight driving her down into the earth and burying her.
Mara wrenched herself into the Panic Room. For the first time in nearly twenty years, it was hard to do. Even there, the screams were only muffled, not silenced. The monitors, when she switched them on, were black.
So were the windows. The Mindstorm was not gone. It was full. There were no fragments for her to see flashing across her inner skies, only every thought in its entirety, every memory, every voice, all blending together into a solid cover of blackness, and a single unending scream.
‘I’m being harrowed,’ she thought, and it was every bit as bad as she’d been warned it would be. What was she supposed to do now, just wait it out? She tried to lift herself up into the air and couldn’t. The scream dug into her, undiminished, devouring her concentration and her will.
Mara paced, her hands uselessly pressed over her psychic ears. Screaming, screaming…and the worst of it was, she was beginning to understand it.
Oh, she still couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t separate single words or pictures out of the wholeness, but understanding came anyway. Thoughts she didn’t want, thoughts that sickened her, breathed themselves into her mind like maggots chewing free of bloated corpse-flesh. Not all of it was in English. In fact, most of it was not, but that didn’t stop her from knowing things.
Mara returned to the monitors so she’d have something to look at, something that was hers and free of obscenity, hoping the sight of her fainted body would help to ground her. It did, sort of. She couldn’t look around with her eyes closed, and still covered by that stupid hood, most likely. She had only a vague impression of the way her arms and legs were sprawled, floating like a ghost-image over one screen. She couldn’t even tell if she’d soiled herself.
‘I can’t lie there like that all day,’ she thought. ‘I’ll be harrowed to death in my damn sleep.’
Or worse (if there was anything worse). Anything could be happening out there. She switched on her dreams, but there were none, only screams. She switched them off again.
“If you survive it,” the woman had said, but people didn’t die here, Mara knew that now. They went mad. They went mad and they were grateful when it finally happened.
“I have to get up,” Mara muttered. From the Panic Room, it was possible to make her body do things even when she wasn’t at the helm, so to speak, but she’d always at least been conscious. She had to wake herself up and how was she supposed to find a way to concentrate with that damned scream eating up her brain?
She’d better. She couldn’t afford to be helpless in this place. After all, she wasn’t alone out there. Somewhere, there was supposed to be a librarian, and anyone who could do anything as prosaic as organize books while listening to this could not possibly mean any good for Mara. What if he’d already seen her? What if he were coming for her right now?
Mara returned to the monitor where her body sprawled in its ignominious heap. She bent over it, staring into her own slack face, and willed those stupid eyes to open.
Screaming, screaming. She understood all at once the true and obvious science behind the blueness of the sky, after years of taking it on faith that light bent or something on its way through the atmosphere. The information boiled in her as she endured an onslaught of perfectly sound reasons how a six-year old boy could be sexy, could in fact be coquettish, could even practically demand to be taken out into the woods and—
Mara’s body on the monitor kicked unconsciously and spat out a little frothy bile. So something was getting through.
‘Wake up,’ she thought at it, and then, as if it were the living doors of the Oubliette, Mara slapped her hands down on the flat surface of the monitor and hammered at it, shoved at it: ‘Wake up! Get up, you idiot! Wake up and start acting like you can save someone, for God’s sake! Wake up!’
Mara-in-the-monitor kicked again, then blurred. The screams seemed to double in volume. The air inside the Panic Room grew dark and heavy.
And then her eyes were open and she was looking out of them.
Her first breath was a choking swallow and it ended badly as she rolled onto her side and puked what little there was in her out onto the floor. It didn’t help. The air was still thick, as if the silent screams she was still hearing had enough substance out here to taste. An oily, salty, rancid taste.
Suddenly, she understood Analytic Number Theory, not just as some abstract concept tossed off in the back of a textbook in her Senior mathematics class, but as a fact. As a fact she could prove. It would involve only the study of the Riemann
zeta function, as defined on half the complex plane as the sum 1 + 1/2s + 1/3s + 1/4s + …well, and so on, but the important thing was that zeta is never zero, except along the line Re(s)=1/2, or at the negative even integers, and if that was true—
Where was she? Mara found her knees and managed to push herself about halfway up before she noticed that the heaviness in her limbs wasn’t entirely psychological. Someone had come along while she’d been out and clapped her in irons, by God. Iron rings around both her ankles connected by a thick length of chain, which in turn connected her to a table. The rings were reasonably loose, not so much that she had a prayer of getting them off, but enough to wear comfortably, if one could use that word to describe an set of irons and a hundred pounds of chain.
She looked for the door she’d entered through and found it clear across the room, closed. Carved on this side were characters, alien lettering she could not comprehend. Not yet.
She saw herself suddenly, as from a great height, on her hands and knees with one bare foot sticking out from a fold of red robe. Mara jerked her head up, and high above her, past several flights of stairs and balconies, Horuseps watched her.
Another wave of knowledge crashed into her—sailing and smelting steel and the cellular structure of irradiated wheat and how to turn coal into diamond in an instant, an instant! Mara retched dryly, spat, and shivered it out until it broke in her like a fever. The demon was gone when she looked up again, but he was here somewhere. She could feel him moving like an oil slick across the tossing waters of all these other minds.
Mara stood. It took a lot of effort, as if she were pushing against an invisible yoke on her shoulders. Even upright, she swayed, badly off-balance. The floor seemed tilted when she wasn’t looking directly at it; the walls bulged at the corners of her eyes.
‘I’ve been poisoned.’
That was what it felt like: a cloud of heavy, toxic gas. Mara made herself look around, made herself concentrate beyond the screams and the pressure and the fits of illogical knowing that battered her.
