by R. Lee Smith
“It’s Mara,” she said.
His eyes flashed and focused sharply on her.
“And what do I call you?” she continued.
He did not answer right away. It took a long time for the surprise to fade out of his features, leaving behind a narrow wariness like a stain. This was not a demon like Horuseps or Malavan, whose minds were strange and difficult to grasp but essentially pliant. If she’d wanted to, she knew she could open Horuseps like an oyster and take whatever meat there was, but she’d never get far with her treasure and she knew that too. This demon…his mind was perfectly black to her, perfectly armored. Here was a telepath, she realized. Not like Horuseps, who knew she was reading him and sometimes put thoughts out for her to take, but a true telepath with a Panic Room of his own, only his was a Stronghold, a Fortress. She would get nothing from him but what he chose to tell her.
Mara rolled her eyes and turned around, moving toward the stair. “You may enjoy games,” she said pointedly, not slowing. “I expect my questions answered.”
“Thou hypocrite,” he said without sting. He didn’t follow her, but after she’d passed the curtains and had her foot on the first step, suddenly called, “I am Kazuul, to mortal tongue. So thou mayest call me.” When she paused, he added, “So much thou wouldst learn at thy first clever inquiry, so hear it first from me, Mara. Know thy Master. Know Kazuul and return.”
His last words were spoken in tones of unmistakably sensual intensity, a purr and not a growl. She wanted to say something, if only ‘We’ll see about that,’ but she knew how it would sound. Against the thunderous baritone of the demon’s voice, the most rebellious words in the world could only be reedy and petulant. It hadn’t been wise to spar with him in the first place. She wouldn’t compound the error now. She left him without speaking, and suffered the low, indulgent laughter he sent after her with fire burning in her chest.
* * *
“Did you find her?” Devlin shouted.
He had to shout. Third-bell had rung. This was the dining room. The Scholomance’s thousand students squabbled over their dinner (or breakfast, considering what the hour must be), which Mara again did not eat. She had been hungry enough on hearing the bell, but once here, all appetite had left her. What was not killed by the disgusting table manners of her fellow students had been thoroughly ruined by the meal itself: wide platters sparsely piled with ribcages snapped open and stuffed with even less appetizing hunks of unidentified meat and bone, all undercooked and shiny with grease and blood. Looking at this, it was impossible not to remember the dead man of the tribunal—had it only been just this morning? Or evening. Or whatever. ‘For all I know, you’re eating them,’ she’d said, and Horuseps had only smiled and murmured, ‘For all you know.’
“Mara! Hey, Mara! Did you find your friend?” Devlin bellowed. So great was his anxiety, his need to connect, that he reached across the table where he’d wedged himself in shortly after she sat down, and shook her sleeve for attention, just like a toddler to his preoccupied mother.
He hadn’t forgiven her for their little exchange earlier, but after a few lonely hours and one good cry, he had done the human thing and simply rewritten all the parts he didn’t like, gradually convincing himself that her tone hadn’t been quite so sharp and that anything that could be seen as, well, mean when taken out of context had in fact been spoken out of concern by someone who clearly wasn’t much of a people-person.
This part was true. Mara wasn’t.
Now she shook her head, mostly to shut him up without doing the indignity of bellowing back at him like a sick sea lion.
“Well, don’t get too discouraged!” Devlin shouted cheerfully. “I’ve been here a long time already and I still hardly know anyone. We’re not, like, friendly.” He lunged for another chunk of meat, took several punches for his trouble, and relinquished it, rubbing grease into his cheek with a hurt expression. “Anyway,” he continued, “This is a big place. And it’s just your first day. If you want, I can help you look.”
Mara got up and headed for the door.
‘You really must eat something,’ came to her in the silkily silent voice of Horuseps, watching from the Master’s table. ‘If the meat is not to your liking, I could perhaps arrange better fare…a private meal, perhaps, in my chambers.’
Mara paused and looked back at him. It surprised him some. His teasing offer had been just that, teasing, and he’d thought she’d know it, which of course she had. Seeing her stop as if considering it first startled, then intrigued him. He considered it as well, but oddly, not as the right of a Master towards his beholden, but as something furtive, something forbidden to be savored against the threat of discovery.
**I went to the top of the lyceum today,** she sent to him, ending that speculation.
He studied her, closing off the good-humored openness of his mind. At length, he stood, rested his hands on his shoulders, and glided toward her. The tables quieted a little as he neared them, but such was the nature of the dining hall that it could never be very quiet unless everyone shut up, so the roar went on. No, even Horuseps couldn’t make it quiet, but what he did do was send Devlin—who had every intention of trip-trapping at Mara’s heels all the way back to her cell—scuttling back to the table instead. For that alone, Mara could afford to play his game. She fell into step beside him and the two of them went out into the Nave together.
“Did you find what you were searching for?” he asked, once the heavy doors were shut on the shouting. His tone was light, like his hand on her shoulder, gently steering her at his side.
“I think you know I didn’t.”
“Do I?”
“Tell me about Kazuul.”
“Ah.” Horuseps blew a short, irritated sigh, and then gave her his familiar smile. “Yes. Kazuul. What would you like to know?”
“What does he teach?”
Horuseps waved his hand dismissively before returning it to the small of her back. “He doesn’t teach anything anymore, darling one. And truthfully, he was never a very good teacher even when he did. He had something of a temper then…and he’s never suffered fools with any good grace. And, oh, fools come here just dreadfully often.”
“What did he teach, then?”
“I don’t recall.”
“You’re a liar.”
“That I am,” Horuseps said merrily, and smiled at her. “If you want to know, Bitterness, you’ll have to ask him. I’d much rather risk your anger over my evasiveness than his when I betray his confidence. He still has something of a temper, you see.”
“Who is he?”
“A Master of the Scholomance.”
“How can he be, if he doesn’t teach?”
“We make an exception for him.”
“Why?”
“Because he would kill us if we didn’t.” Horuseps laughed. “Or so he’d have us think. I won’t test him.”
Down they went on the wide stair into the ephebeum. A handful of students were here, lining the walls in small clots, engaged in their own conversations and quiet games. All of them stood when they saw the demon and bowed.
“I suppose you asked him about your little lost lamb,” Horuseps said, ignoring them. “But I’m afraid he hasn’t left his rooms in a very long time.”
“So he said.”
“Did he?” Feigning nonchalance (and feigning it badly, despite his efforts to keep his mind dark to her), Horuseps brushed at a patch of ground-in blood and dirt on Mara’s robe. “And what else did he say?”
“He said he was my Master and he told me to return.”
Horuseps pursed his lips just slightly and nodded. “When?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Ah. Well.” Horuseps gave her a wide, winning smile and a wink. “You could easily keep him dangling for a year or two, but then, what of your search for the hapless Connie? You’d ought to go now.”
“Last-bell is about to ring.”
“I’m sure he’ll be good enough to give you a bed
for the night.”
“For the day.”
“For however long it takes, dearest. I’ve no personal experience, but I have it on good authority that a day and a night together are easily within his speed. Whatever else may be said of him…” His expression lost most of its humor and became something cold, something bitter. “…he has never done things by halves.”
They walked together into the tunnel leading to Mara’s cell. Beyond the first corner, where the lamps were still lit, two men huddled close together, one on his knees before the other. The one standing had a sharp shard of stone pressed tightly enough to the other’s neck to draw blood. Engaged as they were, neither one noticed Mara and Horuseps quietly pass by.
“So how are you getting along?” the demon inquired once they were clear. “Making friends, I hope?”
“You are my only friend,” Mara said with a deliberate lack of feeling.
“You shameless flirt, you. If I didn’t already have a piece in play for this evening’s entertainment, I’d be tempted to join you tonight.”
Still teasing, but not as much as he thought he was. Kazuul had changed all that, somehow.
“You’re a Master of the Scholomance,” said Mara. “Ditch your date. I’ll make it up to you.”
He cut her a sharp glance. “You aren’t serious.”
“I might have been, if you’d actually told me something about Kazuul like I asked. I may be shameless, but I’m no flirt. I have no scruples whatsoever when it comes to getting what I want.”
“Is that a fact?” the demon murmured.
“But since I gave out all the information, you get nothing from me.” She stopped at her cell door. “Without your express command, of course.”
He gazed at her, the lights of his eyes all that moved.
“The Scholomance is full of tests,” she told him, pulling her robe off to stand naked in her cell. “This one, you have failed. Good night, Horuseps.” She took a step back and shut the door.
He didn’t leave. She’d suspected he wouldn’t. And although she was aware of him standing just outside, watching through the small slot window that ventilated her cell, she put him wholly from the surface of her mind as she spread out both her robes for a bed and lay down on top of them. She wanted him to feel dismissed, but it wasn’t her he thought of at all as his gaze lingered, but Kazuul. He thought about Kazuul, not so loudly or precisely that she could see those thoughts clearly, but his mind was troubled, conflicted by casual desire, by the certainty of pain, by his own dark sense of humor. He knew he was being played, especially when she rolled onto her back, spread her legs, and began lazily to stroke herself, but he didn’t leave.
This wasn’t the sort of thing she did for her own pleasure—getting a man was easy enough, and she too had never seen the point in doing things by halves—but enough men found it a vital part of the sexual experience that she’d learned to do it well. She gave him her best performance now, all innocence and exhibition as she touched herself, putting every shivering new-felt sensation out on the surface for him to see.
Her body became a stranger’s as she explored it. Her breasts had to be fondled, her nipples pinched to points while she licked her empty lips. Down over her writhing belly to her pubis, where she let the first little moan spoil her silence. His mind was her camera; she watched herself open to her own questing fingers and shared his quick hot leap of lust, darker perhaps, but the same as any man’s. She drew it out for him as much as she ever could, tracing tiny circles over her clitoris as she stroked the soft folds of her bare labia (briefly, a distraction: she had never grown hair there, had always remained child-smooth. This, like her strange, ice-pale eyes, and perhaps even her telepathy, had always seemed very obviously a continuance of the same basic genetic fault, and it did not disturb her). It never took her long to warm up, and when she parted herself with eager fingers, it was to show him the shine of her ready oils.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re accomplishing with this endearing demonstration,’ Horuseps thought archly (each word pulsing with its own inner lining of heat), ‘but it isn’t working.’
She pretended not to hear him, filled the surface of her mind with only this—with the slick, tight welcome of her pussy, the chip-hard thrust of her nipples, the ache of need now throbbing in her core, a need bitterly unrequited by only her well-practiced hand.
‘Not at all,’ the demon reiterated, but not so firmly as he had first done.
She gave no hint that his mind had registered. Hers was aflame with the first of several peaks, but it was not enough. She thought of him—not him outside her door of course, but him in all his funny little poses, the essential Horuseps, he of the moon-white body and black-stained hands. In her mind, she clasped that glassy body to hers (he must be male I know he is o for his cock in me right now), and she thrust her fingers hard and fast inside her, groaning at the unfairness of it all.
The sight of herself in exultation burned in him at her suggestion, and then was stolen away as he swung away from the door and stared instead at the fading light of the blister-lamp in the tunnel. ‘She can’t be serious,’ he thought, no longer addressing her, but black with disbelief all the same, and quite a heavy hint of resentment as well, resentment seething with Kazuul’s name.
Nicely spent for the moment, Mara rolled her body in stretching completion and ended on her side, gathering in a fold of her robe to use for a pillow. “No, I’m not,” she said. “But I can fake it with the best of them. Come in, Horuseps. Tell me about Kazuul. I can make you very welcome.”
He was quiet for so long, his mind so dark behind the stone door, that she briefly wondered if he’d gone away and left her. Then he spoke, not dangling out thoughts for her to grasp, but out loud, where, although he made an effort, he could not quite disguise his angry, unfulfilled lust, or his genuine amusement. “I’ll tell you this much, darling Mara,” he said. “You belong here. And you belong with him.”
She was sure he left her then, because he laughed as he walked away, and because the lamp at last died for an empty hall. Still, it felt like a victory and a good start. Mara gathered up a little more pillow, dropped down into the Panic Room, and put herself to sleep.
* * *
It began sometime after last-bell rang, which was right about when she’d expected it. He probably thought she was asleep and defenseless. Actually, she was asleep, but she was never without defenses.
Hovering at the center of the Panic Room, Mara saw the monitor that played out her dreams first flicker, then subtly darken. She checked her body, but it looked okay. In the Mindstorm, all remained muted. Nevertheless, someone was there, easing into her dreams.
Mara touched down onto her psychic feet and turned up the speakers. There he was, Kazuul, whispering. Mara double-checked her body again, not just her vitals this time, but all of it.
There was a hand upon her stomach, very lightly resting, and it wasn’t hers. He was right next to her in her cell. He was touching her. And yet, he managed not to be in the Mindstorm. Now there was a well-cloaked telepath.
It didn’t take much to influence a dream. His scent, his touch, his voice—he needed no magic to pour himself into her subconscious mind. On the dream monitor, Kazuul grew out of mist and shadows and moved toward her. On the body monitor, the hand so carefully stroking her stomach slipped between her thighs.
How far to let this go? The cell was really too small and stony to have any kind of comfortable sex. If that was his intention, he had to expect her to wake up, which rendered the exquisite care he was taking now sort of pointless. But that was definitely the direction the dream was going.
Mara studied the monitors, wondering what to do. She had a lot of voluntary control from the Panic Room, even while her body slept, but the involuntary stuff stayed out of her hands for the most part. She couldn’t stop herself from experiencing the arousal he so expertly orchestrated and the longer she sat here watching, the worse it got. He was still only petting her, bu
t her mons was already throbbing, her hips already stuttering in dreamy writhes. When he brushed a thumb across her lips, she opened them, moaning, and dreamed in embarrassing detail of going to her knees before him and taking his cock into her mouth.
Whispering, he was whispering, commanding her to pleasure her Master, and he would reward her.
She was going to cum soon, there was really nothing she could do about that. Mara drummed her psychic fingers on the non-glass of the monitor, flexing her mind. The body’s lips moved; the body’s lungs pushed air out at her will. “Master,” she made herself sigh.
Kazuul’s laugher rumbled soft and low against her ears. He pierced her with one clawed finger and moved it deep and slow, telling her to cum for him.
Mara let it happen, unmoved by her gyrations or the swift, embarrassing rush of heat that came out of her in such wet urgency, but before the whole of it could fade, she stole some control and arched her neck to groan, “Oh, Horuseps!” and then leaned back smugly to listen.
The whispering stopped. So did the hand at her sex. He stayed that way for quite a long time as Mara slept the sleep of sexual completion. The next breath he took blew hot against her cheek as an animal snarl.
“What’s the matter, Kazuul?” the sleeping body asked, and he jerked away from her. She could hear the hard crack of his bony spikes hitting the very close confines of her cell. “Not the name you were hoping for?”
“So,” he breathed. That was all for a while, and then there was another snarl and he said, “I ordered thee to return.”
“You invited me,” she corrected, still sound asleep. “And I’m considering it.”
His growl was nothing that could have come from a human mouth. The Mindstorm, pictureless, began slowly to bleed red.
“I was considering it a lot more favorably before you snuck in here to molest me, I must admit.”
“Mind thy words,” he spat. “Thou art not beyond my punishing will!”
“Likewise. Thank you for a lovely interlude. Now get out of my cell. Oh, and Kazuul…”
