by R. Lee Smith
She acknowledged this with a nod, but held up a hand to decline his offer. “Some other time. I’ll wait for the bell in my own cell.”
“Pity. We might have passed the time so pleasantly.”
“So I could be dragged across the Nave screaming that you’d seduced me?”
“It amuses me that you assume my interests are physical. Have you never heard of pleasant conversations? Besides which, fornications are only forbidden between students.”
“How unfair.”
“We are your Masters, my dear, not your equals.”
“Then order me to join you.”
His eyes flashed brilliantly white for just an instant. “Is that a challenge, little one?” he asked, his lips barely moving, frozen in his smile.
“Maybe it’s a test. Why should you have all the fun?”
“Mmm.” His fingers twitched, and his smile broadened. “Then I say goodnight. I give no orders at the whim of a student, no matter how precious she may be.”
“Goodnight then.”
He was watching as she walked away, and letting her know with what carnal delights he might otherwise have relished her company, but the rock took away the crawling of his thoughts in just a few dozen steps and then she was alone again.
Alone.
Her feet slowed, then stopped. There were no echoes, not of her footsteps, nor of lingering minds, and in that awful silence, she considered turning back. An hour or two in the company of a demon was better, infinitely better, than silence.
Mara found her way back to her cell and shut herself in. She sat on the floor and withdrew from the discomfort of the cold, flat stone to the numb oblivion of the Panic Room. She switched off the monitors, hovered in space, and watched the Mindstorm’s distant thunder and flash. It was not in Kimara Warner’s character to miss people or to wish for companionship or to feel lonely. She only knew that there was something misplaced inside of her. She switched the monitors back on and waited out the time until first-bell, wondering what was wrong.
* * *
At the tolling of the bell, Mara got up. It took some doing. Her limbs, stiff and bruised, were even slower to respond now than they had been in the night. Her body, unrested, felt heavy and difficult to balance. Her first experimental steps sent her clumsily up against the cell wall to rub at her feet until they felt a little less like blocks of wood.
When she finally managed to hobble out into the tunnel, it was silent. Most of the doors she passed on her long way to the ephebeum were still locked and uninhabited, but a few opened on empty rooms. She paused now and then to look in on them, unashamedly handling the sparse possessions she found and examining the adaptations these strangers had made with what magic they’d managed to pick up. Almost all of them had tried to make a softer bed, either by stacking spare robes or by scraping out a pit to fill with grainy sand. Some had even widened the interior of the cell, making quite a large space for themselves, but she saw no tool marks in the rock to indicate how. One of the cells had a ledge carved in to act as a kind of table; he or she had shaped little chess pieces and was well on the way to checking an opponent who may or may not exist. Another had drawn over damned near every inch of the walls, mostly crude cartoons wherein monstrous penises spat improbably huge puddles of semen over goliath breasts. She didn’t touch the furnishings in that room. One cell held a neat row of three skulls, one of them with hair. Another, a deeply-carved stone box. But the vast majority were as empty and featureless as her own.
Well, hers wasn’t going to stay that way. Finding Connie may take a while, especially if she was only allowed to search during certain hours. She might as well build a bed as sleep on the stone and resent it. Idle hands and all that. She was altogether too close to the Devil to be tempting him with a workshop.
There! Someone ahead of her. Two someones, arguing the principles of entropic decay in the human life-force. She couldn’t hear their words, only the drift of their thoughts, until the passage opened up and Mara stepped out into the ephebeum. The debate raged on; the two students thus engaged did not notice Mara until she came within arm’s reach of them, and when they did, they were immediately unified by expressions of scorn.
Mara hadn’t intended to speak to them. There was no need. She’d tapped at their minds as soon as she’d sensed them and already knew neither one knew Connie by name. Short of ripping through their memories day by day, looking for her face, that was all she could do. And if it came to that, she’d do it, but it was bound to be a lengthy process that would leave some scars (it may, in fact, leave pudding in place of a brain, she didn’t know) so it needed to be a last resort. Their contempt needled her, but contempt could be ignored. On the other hand, his, “Ah, the whore of the harrowing,” that needed an answer.
Mara turned around. She was cool, calm. “Excuse me?” she said, knowing what was coming.
The man she faced shrugged elaborately as his debate partner sniggered. “I understand. This place.” He glanced around. “It breeds desperation in the weak-minded. And you, a woman, it is easy for you to buy favor. It is intuitive. But tell me, does the Scrivener even have a cock?”
“I see.” Mara smiled thinly. “I must be a whore, because you can think of no other way to escape the harrowing.”
He shrugged again. His companion laughed, imagining her over the Scrivener’s desk, every orifice plugged by the monster’s loathsome, boneless body. It was making him hard.
“Of course, it is Horuseps who tests the harrowed,” Mara said. “Did I fuck him, too?”
“Him?” The man’s honest confusion curdled into deeper derision. “Master Horuseps is no ‘him’.”
They shared laughter, richly amused by this woman, this girl who sought mysteries above her station and did not know how to look at the truth of her own eyes. Mara, who had been inside the demon’s mind, and knew damned well he was male, let them laugh. She wasn’t here to educate them or to argue with them. “In any event, I’m speaking,” she said. “So it should be obvious even to you that I came through the harrowing honestly.”
“I’m sure,” the man purred, while the donkey beside him brayed anew.
Why had she ever stopped to argue with him in the first place? She might as well have painted a target on her head…or quite a stretch further south. He’d gone and found a button and now he was going to push it for all he was worth. Mara, who didn’t honestly care what he called her at the moment, strongly suspected she was going to hate the sound of his voice before too damn long at all. For now, however, she kept walking.
“Do not worry, little slut-child,” the man called after her. “You will have many chances to grease your pretty holes. I would not have the Scrivener’s leavings in any case, would you, Loki?”
The laughing jackass thought about it, in every possible position. “Never,” he said, wondering where Mara slept at night, wondering how best to follow, how many he would need to hold her down. They laughed some more, and then took up their old roles of argument again, this time in a new thread: “She won’t last out the month, will she, Le Danse?”
“You allow for an entire month? A week, I say. She’ll run out of cum to drink and die of thirst.”
The donkey laughed. “Die of thirst!”
“‘Him,’ she said. Him! Master Horuseps! How foolish a whore not to recognize the shape of her own livelihood? Perhaps her eyes were gummed shut.”
“By what, one wonders.”
“One does indeed, Loki. Why did such a foolish whore ever come to this place? Who would expect to find trade in the ephebeum so soon after first-bell?”
Mara turned around.
“She’s heard you, Danse. Beware!”
“Her ears are clean yet. You! Whore! Why are you here?”
“I was looking for the garderobe,” Mara said.
“Here?” Both laughed. Loki laughed hardest, slapping at his thighs while sneaking peeks at his friend. “Here, you silly slut?”
“Here. I followed the smell of shit
.”
Donkey-boy kept laughing, but his friend stopped cold. “Use your mouth for sucking cocks,” he said. “Talk gets little girls into trouble.”
‘Be subtle,’ thought Mara, feeling out his intentions. ‘Be calm.’ “A little girl would be all you could manage. Come put me in my place.”
He wanted to. He thought he could do it. He knew the Word of Entropy, even if he hadn’t mastered it yet. He couldn’t speak it correctly each time, but he’d done it before. If he used it now, he could wither the whore’s flesh, rot her haughty face away with a touch. But if he tried and failed…as so often he failed…he would have her laughter to endure, and Loki’s like as not, and then all the school’s by first-bell tomorrow…
He chose to be magnanimous. “The garderobe lies through that passage,” he said, tossing his chin to show the way. “Through the tunnel opposite the bath. It is marked, idiot.”
The archway above the tunnel he indicated had been carved by vaguely Egyptian-looking glyphs: an inverted bowl over a double-row of wavy water lines. A crude cistern, perhaps. It served to orient her in the windowless room, at least. Mara went, letting the rock take the whispers first and the men’s thoughts second, and came quickly to a crossroads with a fairly predictable odor.
She checked, and found all four short passages leading from this point went to more or less identical rooms. In each, water emerged from several holes high along one wall and converged together in a series of channels that flowed across the full length of the floor, until it dropped down into a narrow, noisome hole, where it was presumably carried out of the mountain. Disgusting, but functional, and certainly not as bad as it could have been.
Mara probed the hall, found herself alone, then hiked her robe and urinated, splashing herself with clean water in lieu of paper, and covering quickly. She probed again; someone was coming. The surrounding rock made it difficult to read just who, but she was reasonably sure this someone was neither Le Danse or laughing-boy Loki. Hmm, to stay and pretend to be caught unawares, or confront someone who might just be coming to take a leak?
She’d been subtle enough for one day. She went out to meet the interloper.
Sallow light from a glowing blister showed her a woman in a black robe standing at the crossroads, holding what looked like a white sheet in her arms. The woman turned, and Mara saw surprise flash over a face she actually knew. It was the woman who had taken charge of her after she’d been brought into the mountain: Lynn, the black widow, or Desdemona, as she called herself here.
“So it is you!” the woman gasped.
“It’s me,” Mara agreed.
The woman stared and Mara waited her out, tapping at her mind. No one had ever come through the harrowing so swiftly or endured it so well, and things of that sort. Mara wasn’t a bit surprised. No one else had a Panic Room to work from.
“I…I’m to tell you the laws.”
“I heard them this morning.”
“You attended the tribunal?”
“I attended an execution.”
“That—” is a tribunal, Desdemona thought. She bit at her lip and carefully amended, “That is the fate of all who break the laws of the Masters. Remember that. Now. We have only a little time. Put this on—” She thrust the white sheet into Mara’s hands. “—and do it quickly.”
Mara didn’t move. “Is there a reason why I should be listening to you?”
“All neophytes are given the attentions of an experienced acolyte during their first days, to prepare and orient them. I am yours, your guide and warden.”
“I don’t think I need one.”
“I don’t care,” Desdemona snapped. “It is what my life is worth to see my duty done. Whether you need me or not, the Masters will see me at your side. Put that on and follow, or by Hell, I will drag you!”
In the end, two things decided her. The first was the very real fear hiding inside this outward show of annoyance and anger. The woman knew Mara was special, knew she was bound for great things, bound to surpass Desdemona herself, and such pets are marked from the moment they enter. She believed entirely that to allow Mara to walk alone on her first day would be viewed as abandoning her warden’s duties, and therefore insulting the Master who had so assigned her. Much as Mara did not want a shadow dogging her heels in her search for Connie, she also didn’t want to be responsible for the next tribunal.
Secondly, she was hungry.
Mara shook out the white ‘sheet’. It was a robe. A neophyte’s robe. How special. She put the new one on over the old one and smoothed it out a little. “All right,” she said. “Show me around.”
“You are too gracious,” her warden snapped.
“I really am, you know.”
* * *
Mara remembered Horuseps pointing out the dining room from the Nave the night before, but Desdemona didn’t take her the same way. Rather, she was led out of the ephebeum by way of one of the twisting, narrow tunnels up an extremely claustrophobic stair, down another door-lined passage, directly into the dining room itself. The noise could be heard from the stairs. Mara had never heard anything like it.
Oh, the minds were nothing. The minds were the chatter of an airport, a movie theater, anywhere that hundreds of people could gather and be social. It was an adjustment to pass from the muffled quiet of the tunnels into that roar, but not a difficult one. It was the real noise, the one she heard with her ears, drummed in her bones, that stopped Mara in the open doorway.
They’d done it deliberately. They had to have done. Where every other room and passage had been carefully shaped to reconstruct the sound-absorbing nooks and crevices of natural rock, this room had been made into an amphitheatre. The walls, so straight and smooth as to shine, slanted up to a vaulted shell of a ceiling, directing the sound not outward to an appreciative audience, but right back down upon their heads. The echoing din forced the students to shout to be heard, which in turn brought greater noise hammering down at them.
The students were arranged at five long tables, like five radiating lines drawn from the center of the room toward the horns of a crescent-shaped platform, where perhaps two or three dozen demons sat, overseeing the lot. The whole of the room had been backlit from blisters growing out of the wall behind the Master’s table, so that the demons themselves were mostly silhouettes, many with glowing eyes or glinting horns. The students’ tables, by comparison, had only a few candles for illumination, guttering madly in the wind made by all that shouting breath.
Desdemona gave her a nudge towards one of the tables, but she didn’t move yet. The Masters were watching her. She could feel their many minds prodding at hers, sniffing like starving wolves around her darkened windows, all but Horuseps. His angular, pale silhouette raised a hand and waggled the black-tipped fingers in welcome. His thoughts aligned, knowing she would be reading them, to inquire if she’d lost herself in the dorms below and what a poor guide he must have been.
**You were such a good guide, I was waiting for you,** she replied, speaking silently over the questing minds of the other demons. It was the first time she’d done such a thing—not tapping but speaking, wanting to be heard. There was something thrilling about being so brazen when all her life she’d kept this secret. **I suppose now we’ll have to pretend our meeting here was accidental and there’s nothing more between us.**
He called her a tease, lacing his long fingers together as a cradle for his chin.
**I never tease. I have no sense of humor.** She glanced at her warden, who seemed to share this deficiency, and allowed herself to be seated at a table. There were no individual plates or bowls, only communal platters from which all students fought for handfuls of bread or meat or crumbling cheese. Some of them had cups, which they filled at slopping bowls of wine, but only some. The rest dipped their naked hands and drank from them like monkeys. Mara watched them, faintly disgusted.
Horuseps silently asked if she were hungry.
**I don’t think it’s wise to eat the food in Hell,** Mara r
eplied, watching the student across from her suck meat off what sure looked like a bird’s head before throwing it on the floor.
Horuseps assured her there were no pomegranates.
One by one, the demons retreated from her mind. Mara glanced over their physical forms, each one so different from each other, so fundamentally inhuman. She counted twenty-eight of them.
‘Oh, there are many more of us,’ Horuseps assured her when she asked. ‘These you see—’ He waved a hand gracefully at either side of him. “—are but those few who enjoy watching the animals feed.’
**A base entertainment.**
‘Needs must,’ thought Horuseps in a mocking way, ‘when the Devil demands. We have no recreations but those our little pets provide us. You should eat something.’
**You have enough entertainment in front of you.**
He gave her a thought which was at once denial, apology, and oily amusement.
The bells rang twice.
The students stood up, very nearly in unison, and the sound of their feet as they stepped away from the tables made a thunder Mara could actually feel in her bones as it rolled from wall to wall. They left in a shouting, tromping tide, grabbing last handfuls of food to carry in their sleeves, and taking away their cups. What was left on the tables was nothing but a few guttering candles and one godawful mess. Desdemona waited for her out of the press of humanity, her hands clasped whitely together and her back bent low.
‘One cannot help but observe that you’ll make little progress in your quest if you starve yourself to death,’ Horuseps told her, still without speaking aloud, although now he certainly could. ‘Nevertheless, that is your decision. Will you be joining me in class?’
**No.**
“Move!” hissed her warden. “It is not permitted to stay in the dining hall after the bell has rung, you cow! Go!”
‘However will you make your search if you have no Sight?’ wondered Horuseps, his gaze wandering to the woman behind her.
“Do not even dare to think of keeping her for yourself,” said Zyera, the coral-bodied demoness of that morning.
