by R. Lee Smith
The tree burst. The trunk, by now netted in by saplings, merely bulged once and collapsed in on itself, but the higher branches exploded outward in a shower of spears. Mara, high on the tenth riser and forewarned by Malavan’s cruel glee, hit the floor with her hands over her head, fending off a heavy fall of petrified rain. Jagged flares of pain wracked the Mindstorm, but she didn’t think anyone was killed. It would have been easy to miss one death among the chaos of so many, but Master Malavan’s disappointment was difficult to misinterpret.
“So,” he said, moving easily through the debris to inspect the new trees. “Of you all, only…five with the skill to act, and none at all with the wit to recognize danger.”
“I resent that remark,” Mara grumbled, gaining her feet with a wince. Her brand-new white robe was now the nice splotchy color of an unwashed floor. Slapping at the dust only ground it in worse. Lovely.
“You resent…” The demon eyed her, his head low and small eyes shimmering from the shadows of his face. “You have made it clear you are not one of mine. You are like all the rest of them. Even as you are, powerless, you would set yourself above me.”
He hated her.
Mara felt at what she could feel of him, baffled. She had been hated before and it didn’t bother her, but Malavan hardly knew her. His hatred was as black as cancer in the Mindstorm, but it seemed to have more to do with the demons in the dining hall than with anything she had said or done. “You are the Master here,” she said carefully, sliding one foot out from beneath the hem of her robe. “I’m just a student.”
“Just! Ha!” But he was mollified, some. He hunkered low, shifting his weight from his claws to his knuckles as he glowered at her, and finally tried to smile again. “Mine is a valuable art. You would do well to remain, though I know you will not. Perhaps it is for the best. My students must earn their successes.” His eyes wandered to a bleeding, crouching student in the first riser, a broad-faced girl with a half-sprouted walnut clutched in each white-knuckled hand. “Such as they are.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“As you wish.” The theater doors opened at his distracted nod. All his attention remained fixed on the dazed student before him, at her feet, bare beneath her hiked-up robe. His thoughts colored with the first stains of his strange, black desire. “Yet return whenever you will. My door is always open. Almost always. Akiri, is it? Akiri…come here.”
Mara left. A few cowled heads turned as she passed by, but not many and no one at all moved to follow her. As exciting as the morning lesson had been, it was over now and class was still in session. Students who had managed to grow the life-saving trees wanted to stay and bask a little while in their own adrenaline and the envy of those who hadn’t. Students who had failed now shuffled back to their seats, newly determined to learn from their failures and so be one of the privileged few when the next test came around. If they thought anything at all of her leaving, it was only the peevish pleasure of seeing someone else slink away from what they themselves resolutely faced. No one, not even hate-mongering La Danse and his little laughing henchman, even bothered to catcall her.
* * *
Empty tunnels opened on a silent cavern. Mara stood awhile, feeling out in futility for some sign of life in the lyceum. The Mindstorm belied the quiet. Through the overcast haze of its cover came the muted shrieks and flashes of surrounding thought, but all of it proved untouchable. It was a new experience for her to be so blind to others, and she didn’t like it.
Light flickered deep in another passageway, away from the hive-like central room. Mara moved toward it instinctively, then caught herself. This had to be the first time in her life she’d ever voluntarily sought out the company of another person, or at least, the first since Connie. She couldn’t conceive of being lonely after so many years of avoiding other people, and so she told herself that she was here to ask questions, and walked a little faster.
She saw no one. The hall coiled out in front of her, dark and empty. The light was only one of those glowing blisters just on the corner where the tunnel curved away. The flickering, nothing more than shadows moving over its surface. Or under it.
Mara moved closer, staring into the core of the thing where the bulge was deepest. The shadows, when they moved at all, did almost seem to be cast from within. Nor did they seem to be exactly random, come to think of it.
Not without a due sense of trepidation, Mara reached out her hand. Nothing stopped her. Nothing would, in this place.
Her fingertips brushed over something repulsive—leathery and hard, faintly warm, something with just a little give to it. ‘Like a mummy,’ she thought, and was annoyed with herself for putting the image in her own mind. She kept her hand on the light to punish herself, daring it to come to life, to slap some monstrous hand up against the other side of the blister’s surface and grope for hers.
Nothing happened. The shadows moved, but without intelligence. Nevertheless, the longer Mara stood with her palm flat over the bulbous light, the more certain she became that it was skin, not tanned to leather, but calcified and gone to rot. That it was alive, in the same idiot manner as the doors of the Oubliette, and worse, that it was aware of her in some vague and helpless way. Even if it couldn’t touch her in return, some part of it was twisting torpidly around to look at her, perhaps to warn her, and some part of it was screaming.
‘I’m giving myself the heebie-jeebies,’ Mara thought, and scowled. Of all the things she’d seen in this mountain, that she picked the light fixtures to go all girly and squeamish over genuinely embarrassed her, but embarrassment did not remove the conviction that the lights were horribly, horribly wrong.
Determinedly, Mara kept her hand where it was, and through that contact, she opened her mind.
“What are you doing?”
Mara snatched her hand back fast—fast enough to disguise her gasping flinch, she hoped—and spun around. She’d been so fixed on the lamp, she’d been blind to anyone else and now there was a man in the hall with her, a tall man with his hood back so that she could see his earnest, acne-scarred face and his squinting, heavy-browed eyes. His hair was a thatchy mess of no particular color, in that awkward stage of growing-out that was not quite long enough to reach his shoulders but to long too lie flat against his head. He did not grow a beard well, but neither had he figured out how to shave. The overall effect was that of a hornless, excitable young goat.
Since he didn’t get an answer out of her, the man walked up to the light (moving in that bent-knee, bobbing way of some self-consciously tall men and all ostriches), and touched it himself. His manner was first wary, then perplexed. “What am I doing?” he asked.
“Acting like an idiot.”
He withdrew his hand, looking wounded. “I’m just doing what you did.”
“I knew what I was doing.” She hated being caught by surprise, and knowing that she’d exposed herself didn’t make it any easier to bear. Mara started walking deeper into the hall, hoping he would take the hint and leave her alone. Instead, not surprisingly, he came after her.
“How come when you do it—”
“What are you, twelve?” she snapped. “Get away from me.”
He did stop, but only for a few seconds. Then he ran to catch up with her. He’d made sandals for himself somehow, but he’d made them too big and the flapping sound as he hurried over the stone floor was like a physical blow to her ears after all the quiet.
She tried a different tactic. “Why are you following me?”
He shrugged, avoiding her eyes. “People say you’re somebody to know. They say Master Horuseps took you through the halls after your harrowing.” He squinted at her, but she gave him nothing to read. As if this were encouragement, he pressed on with greater enthusiasm. “They say you were only in the Oubliette, like, an hour.”
She shrugged that away. It hadn’t felt like an hour in the Oubliette, but then, perfect blackness came with a time all its own. “How long were you there?” she asked.
/>
“I don’t know.” He looked away again, watching the featureless walls roll by. “A few days, at least.”
Longer than that, Mara decided, tapping at his mind. A week, maybe two. There had been a pool in his Oubliette. Towards the end, something had crawled out of it.
“A few days,” Mara echoed, listening to the sound of trickling water and his own ragged breathing as it faded into the here and now. “Does that make you someone I should know?”
He stopped again, longer this time, but again squared himself up and came after her. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Mara.”
“See, you shouldn’t tell people that. Names are sacred, and you can use them to do magic on people once you know how. Did you ever read, um, A Wizard of Earthsea? Or—”
“What’s yours?”
“Huh? Oh. Astregon,” he said proudly.
Mara shot him a withering glance. “I didn’t ask for the name of your main on World of fucking Warcraft, I asked for yours.”
He hunched in on himself and stayed that way, even if he did keep walking. “Devlin,” he mumbled.
She gave him a tap. It was. “That’s ironic, in a way.”
“I know,” he said glumly.
They walked. The corridor looped back around and into the lyceum. Mara, with no particular agenda, chose another to explore. Devlin stayed with her.
“Who are you looking for?” he asked finally. “I know where all the Masters teach. I could show you around.”
“I’m just getting my bearings.”
“Oh. Yeah. This place.” Devlin tipped his head back and gave the rock formations above them a brooding sigh. “You never know how essential windows are to finding your way around until you don’t have any. I was lost once for four days. Days! I could hear the bells ringing, but I couldn’t get to them. I don’t even know where the ringing comes from, you know? Because nothing else carries very far in these tunnels, that’s for sure. I don’t think anyone’s ever seen the bells, come to think of it. Much as I’d like to believe they’ve got speakers hidden in the corners here—like at the zoo, you know?—it’s probably resonating through the rock through some—”
“Why are you still talking to me?” Mara demanded.
He hunched again, just like a turtle tucking into his shell. “Just making conversation,” he mumbled.
“No, you’re chewing my damn ear off. Go away.”
He dropped back half a step. That was all.
They walked, returned to the lyceum, chose another tunnel.
“Can I ask you a question?” Devlin called.
“Can I stop you?”
“Why did you come here?”
She glanced back at him. “Why did you?”
“Oh, you know. The whole millennium thing.” He shrugged one shoulder, looking at his feet. “You know how all the computers were going to reset because of how they weren’t going to know 2000 from 1900 and it was going to destroy the world’s economy and all that? I thought…you know…be a great time to hide out for a while. Guys like me don’t do so well in post-apocalypse movies.” He peeked up at her, his mouth twisted into a crookedly rueful smile. “It was one of those ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time’ things. And I was pretty spaced back then, to tell you the truth. I don’t know. I mean, the most I could have lost out there was a few hundred bucks and I spent it all getting here anyway.”
They walked past the open door of a theater and Mara looked in, as she had been doing through every door they passed. She saw, as usual, a few dozen robed backs sparsely scattered over the risers and a demon at the very bottom, watching them work. The demon was a stranger to her, all feminine curves, gleaming bronze skin, and tiny tooth-like quills rippling all over her body, short and sharp over her belly, long and graceful down her back. The demon raised her eyes to meet Mara’s. ‘Tasty,’ drifted to her over the waves of studying minds, but Mara didn’t explore whether it was Devlin the demoness fancied or Mara herself. She moved on.
“That was Master Letha,” Devlin supplied. “She teaches Allure. Just about everyone wants to learn that. It’s, you know, sexy.”
Mara ignored him, found another tunnel, kept walking.
“So what did happen?” Devlin asked, after the silence apparently tore away his nerves. “Out there, I mean. What happened with the millennium?”
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“Nothing. A couple minor PC glitches, I think. Nothing huge. Nothing that hit the banks anyway.”
“Oh.”
“Just ‘oh’?” Mara prodded, trying for a teasing tone. She reminded herself that she’d been restless just a few minutes ago, enough to feel up the light fixtures. “You sound disappointed.”
“I traded my life in,” Devlin said bluntly. “No, I didn’t exactly hope that civilization would collapse, but Jesus, yeah, something would have been nice. Something to justify…I mean…this.”
They passed a few more doors. She recognized one, paused to look in. Horuseps was on his dais, gesturing to what looked like an large terrarium half-filled with sand. A nervous-looking student was on his knees before it, exposing one scrawny arm preparatory to reaching reluctantly inside. Every watching student leaned raptly forward. No one noticed her at all.
“How did you hear about this place?” Devlin whispered. He hung further back in the corridor, as if afraid to be seen loitering out of class. “You look awfully, you know, young.”
“No younger than most of this crowd.”
“Yeah, but they’re faking it.” Devlin shrugged. “I told you Allure was popular. Also, you can use the art of Growth to kind of reverse aging if you know how, and just about everyone wants to learn how because otherwise, you don’t have enough time to study what you want to know before, you know…you die.” He shifted on his feet, scratched at his arm through the robe. “I tried,” he said, with a self-depreciating little laugh. “But I could never get the hang of it and, you know…it’s been ten years, I guess, because Master Malavan kicked me out. Well, he didn’t actually kick me. Have you seen Master Malavan?”
“Be quiet for a sec, would you?”
Horuseps glanced up, smiling to let her know he was not just noticing her arrival, then returned his attention to the student now easing his arm into the sand. The expression on the man’s face as he felt around inside the tank was puckered and queasy, but gave Mara no real clue as to what was happening. She tapped at a few students; they didn’t know either. She sent out a silent inquiry for the demon to read.
‘Come down then,’ he replied in kind. ‘I am at your service always.’
The touch of his mind killed whatever curiosity she had with the sure knowledge that, no matter what horrible secret lay buried under the sand, it wasn’t likely to end well for the poor sap feeling around there. Mara moved off down the hall and Devlin followed her. They’d taken about ten steps, far enough that she could no longer get a grip on any of the minds in the demon’s theater, when she heard the scream.
“I heard about it from a friend,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “How about you?”
“Sort of the same, only he wasn’t a friend. More of a mentor. A guru. Kind of an idiot, honestly. I used to get peyote from him. Have you ever tried that stuff? I didn’t like it too much. Made me see cactuses everywhere. It fucked with me. Anyway, he was the guy who first told me about the Scholomance, but he thought it was around Hermanshadt, near Lake Beleal. For all I know, he’s still looking there.” Devlin’s wide, triumphant smile faded as they came out into the lyceum again. He looked up, down, and hunched in on himself. “You never did say why you came here.”
“To find someone.”
He was quiet for a bit, still morosely fixated on peyote and the Y2K-bug and Lake Beleal, but all at once started and said, “What, you mean a student?” in tones of sharp amazement.
And what the hell, he was here, she might as well make some use of him. “She’d be a recent arrival,” Mara said. “A little tall
er than me, willowy. Dark hair, real curly. Dark eyes. Kind of nervous.” She did not give Connie’s name.
Devlin’s expression melted to one of bewilderment. “A girl?” he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Yeah, actually, I…You know we don’t get many girls…But it wasn’t last year I saw her, it was the year before.”
Mara stopped walking and turned around to face him.
He backed up at once. “Kinda swarthy,” he rattled off, as if hoping to appease her with proof of the sighting. “Very Italian-looking. She said her name was Faith, but, you know, names here…” He shrugged.
Constance. Faith. Mara drove a needle into his mind, chasing Faith to the memories that resonated, and saw her.
She sat on a bench by the fountain in the lyceum, separated from Devlin’s casual glance by crowds of black and white robes. Her hood was back. She’d cut her hair, badly. Her face was pale and her eyes too dark. She looked like she might be crying, but even at this distance, even without Devlin’s interest, it was impossible not to recognize her. It was Connie. Her Connie.
“Take me to her,” Mara said.
Devlin blinked.
“Right now.”
“Gosh, I haven’t seen her in…I mean, I never really knew her well enough to talk to her or anything and…she just…”
“Wasn’t someone people needed to know,” Mara said sourly.
Devlin shrugged again, avoiding her eyes as he scratched at his robe. “There’s two kinds of people who come here. Her and me, we’re the same kind, you know? It’s not a good idea to hang out together.” He looked at her, saw her flat and undisguised dislike, and turtled up a little. “In Africa, you know, you see the gazelles all grouping up in herds to keep the lions away, right? Around here, lots of gazelles just bring on lots of lions. You don’t…I’m sorry, but you don’t know what it’s like here…how it gets…when there’s nothing else for them to do but…eat you.”
Mara turned around and started walking.
This time, when he tried to fall into step behind her, Mara put out an arm and shoved him back. “I’m here for her, not you,” she said into his hurt, hunched face. “Go find another lion to suck up to.”
