by R. Lee Smith
His evasiveness reminded her of Horuseps. She replayed some of his conversation as she walked, and finally said, “Have you ever been sick, Devlin?”
“Well, of course I—Oh, you mean here? Yeah, off and on.” The admission shamed him some, a reminder of the lessons he had not learned despite all his effort. “The first year was the worst. I don’t even want to know how close I came to a tribunal. I mean, I think I actually had pneumonia, you know? God, I didn’t think that cough was ever going to go away. Felt like I had it for months. And a while back, some guy came here with something pretty nasty, some fever-thing. I don’t know, someone said it was typhoid. I don’t know if that’s what it was or not, but I was sure sick with something.”
“I didn’t think typhoid was something you could just get over on your own.”
“I didn’t. We didn’t, I mean. That was one of the few times the Masters actually got involved. Usually, they just let nature, you know, take its course.”
He was drifting again, thinking of the theater where he had fought to wrap his head around Growth, coughing into his sleeve so hard he’d actually blacked out once or twice. He’d never gotten the Word to work, not even once.
“What did they do?” Mara asked, bringing him back on track with a light tap.
“Mm? Oh. Yeah, they just came and got everyone one night. Pulled us all out of our cells one by one, dragged us into the ephebeum, and stood us up in a line. Master Toth fixed us up. Inoculated us, I guess.”
“Do I know Master Toth?”
“Probably not. He’s teaches the highest-up combinations of Growth, Entropy, and Transmutation. Which I guess makes sense if you’re going to, you know, inoculate someone.”
That was all he wanted to say, more than he wanted to say, really, but in his mind, he was there again, standing naked in a line with Master Argoth’s clawed hand like a vise around his bicep, placidly holding him while Master Toth worked with another student. The demon looked harried, which was a disturbing thing to see on one of them. Devlin stood meekly, shivering and coughing, until Toth finished and waved Argorth over, hissing his impatience. Devlin’s arm was yanked out, his hand cut open. Toth drank from the wound, then seized Devlin’s face, wedged his jaws open, and drove…something down his throat. Not a tongue. Hard, leathery…and hollow. It scraped down into his esophagus and then disgorged some kind of thick, hot sludge where Devlin couldn’t even gag on it. Toth withdrew, spat a few times as Devlin staggered, and then waved him aside and reached for the next one. “No stamina,” the demon was hissing to himself, his eyes huge and ringed with white like that of a spooked horse. “We’ll lose half of them no matter what we do. Ra, no, pointless, that one! Dead already and still walking! Just throw him on the pile, Nezgulon. Ra, show mercy and crush his skull! Next one, quickly!” And then the dizziness struck, and after it, the pain, and then Argoth was carrying him back to his cell, screaming and writhing and pouring sweat. For hours, he’d lain on the floor, insensible and raving, but when an exhausted Suti’ok brought his hounds skulking around at first-bell looking for bodies, he was alive and the cough and fever were gone.
“Does that happen often?” Mara asked, sharing this memory with a faint sense of alarm.
“I wouldn’t say often, but it’s not unheard of. This one guy told me they had to do it something like ten times before they figured out how to screen for, you know, HIV and all that. And one of the really old guys said it was the same way with one of the other sex-diseases, I don’t know which one. And, you know, sometimes the flu will get real bad, but most of the time, they’re perfectly happy to watch us die, except that if we all go, they won’t—” The Black Door loomed suddenly in his mind and gooseflesh popped out over his arms. “—get what they want from us,” he finished.
“What happens when people die?”
“I don’t know. Master Suti’ok gets told. Him and his…the hounds. They take care of it, you know…the body.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what they do with it. It’s not a big deal.”
“I’d think the complications of disposing of a corpse inside a closed environment like this one would be a damned big deal, particularly if they’re so against the spread of virulent disease.”
“I’m sure they just chuck it out a window somewhere.”
“I’m sure they don’t. All it would take is one tourist finding a heap of human skulls and everyone would know about this place.”
“Okay, so they’re burying them. The rock doesn’t make much difference. The Masters can just magic a grave open and shut.” Devlin was not thinking of the meat they were so often served in the dining hall, not on the surface anyway, but deep down, that connection had been made and squashed again with real horror, because he ate the meat here, he always would, and therefore, he would not allow it to be anything but meat. “But there’s no graveyard or anything, if that’s what you’re after. I don’t think anybody keeps track of who dies.”
No one keeps track…but that didn’t make much sense, did it? After all, someone had kept track of the new arrivals. Mara remembered all at once tapping at the mind of Gamaliel, who called himself the archivist, whose studies were interrupted each year so that he might enter the names of the aspirants into the Book.
Perhaps he also crossed them out.
CHAPTER TEN
She dreamed of Kazuul again and, preoccupied with the trouble of how to get down to the archivist’s room unseen and where the book might be if it wasn’t there, she didn’t even notice until the health monitor flashed the faint blue of orgasm. She glanced down at the dream spooling out on the other screen, saw her hands scratching blood from the demon’s broad, stone-grey back, and immediately sprang up to look at her vitals.
He wasn’t there. No careful touches below the Mindstorm’s radar, no whispers in the darkness, no Kazuul with her in her cell. Just a dream.
Clearly, she needed to get laid.
The figures on the monitor moved together in violent, kinetic sex, neither one with any obvious consideration for the other. It held a certain attraction, she couldn’t deny it, and so she settled herself again in the air to watch the fantasy play out, aware of a faint wistfulness in her as she did so. She had to be so restrained in real life. A man’s idea of an uninhibited woman meant moaning extra loud, maybe a little play-scratching. Not this. Mara liked to fight.
Kazuul, bound to be the victor of any combat, gave back as good as he got, savaging her when she bit, wrestling her arms to the ground when she clawed him, and always battering her to new heights with his fierce and furious thrusts. Dream-Mara screamed, the furious pleasure of a heat-crazed cat, then attacked, driving him back so she could leap atop him. Savaging him into position, she rode at her pace, back arched, teeth bared.
He tolerated it, growling as he gathered his strength. Then his hand knotted in her hair, dragging her up by the head only to throw her down again on her belly. His thigh wedged between hers; he entered roughly from behind and dropped his entire weight over her, grinding her into the floor with complete abandon. Crushed immobile, she slapped spastically back at him and came and came.
Good times…and yet Mara couldn’t help but notice that this was turning into a suspiciously long dream. The average length for her, after all, was somewhere around three minutes, and she’d probably been watching at least that long already. She looked at her vitals again and again found them untouched by outside forces. On the dream-monitor, Kazuul reared back onto his haunches, his claws digging into her hips as he moved her fast back and forth on his cock, not even fucking her as much as masturbating with her body. It was impossible to tell whether she were even struggling at this point, or just fucking back at him. She came again, washing the health-monitor with blue, and then he bucked her off, yanked her up by the hair, and gagged her screams of pleasure with his cock.
A very long dream. As a test, Mara made her dreamself bite him. He roared, dug in his claws, and drove himself deep into her throat, holding her there. Oddly, she needed air in her drea
ms. She thrashed wildly as Kazuul growled above her, grinding his hips against her face, and just as she began to lose consciousness (how could you even do that in a dream?), he shoved her back and fell over her again.
No way was this a dream. Mara gave the monitors a final baffled inspection, and then woke her body brusquely and dropped back inside it.
She’d been cumming, and every nerve still tingled as she sat up and stared around her empty cell. She saw nothing, not with her eyes and not in the Mindstorm, but nevertheless felt the unmistakable residue of another person’s will around her. He wasn’t connecting, not really, and that was just as inexplicable to her because it meant that he was blindly pumping thought at her mind even though he couldn’t possibly know if it was being received, and what in hell could he be getting out of it if that was the case?
And how was he doing this? Mara got up, grabbing for her robe, and heard a dull clatter as something caught up in the one she used for a pillow fell out. It didn’t register right away, but when it did, she knelt down and carefully felt along the floor until she found it. When her fingers brushed its solid sides, Kazuul’s will enveloped her, bringing the dream, and countless other dreams just like it, hammering against her.
Mara gloved her hand in folds of robe and cautiously picked it up, exploring its shape in her lightless cell. It wasn’t a rock. That would have been weird enough. For all that the mountain and all its furnishings were made of stone, it was solid stone. Not a lot of loose pebbles here. But no, this wasn’t a rock. This was bone, smooth and hard in her hand, somewhat tapered at one end and rounded at the base. Like a horn.
Or like one of the spikes that grew from Kazuul’s body.
Mara put her robe on. She went out into the hall and groped her way to the blister lamp there, slapping at it until it came to groggy life. She looked, and by God, that was exactly what it was: one of his spikes. There was no way that got in her cell, in her bed, by accident.
He was using it somehow, transmitting himself through all this rock into her dreams. Impressive. Infuriating, but impressive.
Mara took it with her down the hall to the first occupied cell she found and gave it a toss through the narrow window onto the soft mound of a sleeping student. Let that be a fun discovery for both of them.
But now she was awake, and even though it was forbidden to run amok after hours, the temptation to use this time to her advantage was more then she could resist. Mara made her way cautiously into the ephebeum, reaching out ahead of her as far as possible, but touched on no one.
Slowly, silently, Mara crept down the winding tunnels and flights of darkened stairs, until she came to the Great Library.
The upper landing was empty apart from her, but several initiates moved down below her. She remembered only too well the timeless quality of that place—without day, without night, without peace. The initiates worked and slept and suffered exactly as they had done during her service, oblivious to her, to everything. The Scrivener sat in his desk, licking at some of his eyes and rumbling to himself in idiot bliss.
God, she did not want to do this.
Gritting her teeth, Mara dropped into the Panic Room and started down the stairs. Every step brought her closer to the librarian’s toxic seepage, but she was unaware of it until was on the final flight and felt it closing in over her head. The sound of all-knowledge, like cicadas screaming in her brain, consumed her senses even as the Mindstorm blacked out. She could feel it humming at her from without, relentless, indefatigable.
She didn’t have time to be overwhelmed by it, not today. Mara fought her way across the floor, giving the Scrivener’s desk a wide berth (still, he reached for her as she passed by, gronking happily) on her way to where she’d originally entered. One or two of the initiates raised their heads when she opened the heavy door, but said nothing. Thoughts of freedom fluttered briefly and were swallowed again by other things. Terrible things.
Mara slipped out into the stairwell on the other side and closed the door quickly. Quiet, not silence, but better than nothing. She took her body back and climbed rapidly down the narrow stair she remembered, feeling her way along the wall.
A mind ahead of her, drowsing and bored, but human.
She went carefully around the corner into the glow of a blister-lamp and saw a man sitting on a heap of red robes, only half-awake, serving his time as he waited for this year’s batch of newcomers to free themselves from the Oubliettes. Mara entered him, slid out a needle-thin shred of her own will, and jabbed it in deep to a very particular place. The man jerked hard and suddenly sagged, fast asleep. He never saw her, never knew she was there.
There had to be a tunnel leading from here around to the portcullis, but going through the Oubliette was bound to be quicker than looking for it. Mara went to the first set of double doors she saw (and there were many, reaching out in both directions through this room and out into the halls), and touched them, driving her will at them until they opened. It was much easier than she remembered.
Was this her Oubliette? No, there was someone in here. A man, the guy who’d thought he was a bear when he first reached the summit of the Scholomance. Mara remembered him standing there, his fists raised, roaring. Now he shrank back from her, crying and jabbering at her, unable to understand if she were real or another dream, another nightmare.
Mara left the doors open for light, found the other one, and opened it the same way. Outside, the tunnel was dark and bitterly cold. As Mara felt her way along, her naked toes touched ice hiding in the crevices of the floor, only once in a while at first, but more and more often as she continued on. By the time she reached the room where she had been forced to strip and relinquish her possessions, she was walking on a thin sheet of ice. It was only early November, but may as well be in the heart of winter in these mountains.
November. Three weeks until Thanksgiving, give or take. She wondered if the care service people would do anything special for her mom. Rosalie usually had holidays and she always asked Mara for a little extra cooking money. She pocketed most of it, of course, but she was a darn good cook, so Mara kept shelling it out. Last year, she’d baked a tiny pumpkin pie and a game-hen as part of a whole miniature Thanksgiving-Day spread. Her mom had seemed to enjoy it.
Mara no longer believed she was going to be out in time for the holiday. For that matter, she wasn’t certain she’d be back in time for Christmas. It didn’t bother her, but she knew it should. Her finances were in order. Her mom would be taken care of for years yet. And if not, if something did happen…well, maybe it would be the incentive Caroline Warner needed to stop faking crazy and start acting like a person again. Mara could only be there for one person, and it was Connie.
The thought came to her, without rancor or resentment, that her mother might actually see having to pay her own way as a fair price to finally be rid of her strange, white-eyed daughter. There had never been much love in that family, and none at all after Mara became old enough to understand that the voices she heard belonged to other people and not everyone could hear them. Maybe if there had been, Mara’s filial devotion would have outweighed the interrupted friendship between her and Connie. Maybe.
Kind of pointless to speculate now.
The desk where Gamaliel had registered the aspirants was empty now, but Mara found the book in a chest underneath his chair, where it was mostly protected from the constant dripping and frozen air. The chest had no lock; the book did, but it gave after a few good whacks on the corner of the stone desk. Mara took it over to the nearest blister-lamp and found the page with this year’s maroon-streaked names. There were no dates, but that didn’t much matter. She began to read backwards, and there, just sixteen lines above her own Kaspar Cortoreal, the word Faith had been penned in over a bar of dried blood.
That was all. One word. No secret code to follow, no cryptic hints, no death-denoting line through the middle. Just Faith.
Mara touched it. She didn’t know why. It couldn’t tell her anything. She touched it
anyway, and felt only the stiffness of the stained paper beneath her fingertips. “Only this and nothing more,” murmured Mara.
Other names had been drawn over, though, quite a few of them, which made her theory sound. She flipped through the pages of the book one at a time, not reading it so much as meditating over it. Five years, eight, ten. She saw the name Astregon squeezed in between Childer (Deceased) and Aurora (tribunal). It was another six pages before she saw her first (Graduant), and then another, and so on until the names were almost completely accounted for in this fashion.
Assuming two or three years per page, and assuming the book’s records were accurate (and she know it wasn’t infallible, since she and Horuseps had found bodies unaccounted for), some of the students listed here had first entered the Scholomance over a hundred years ago. And Horuseps was right, there were far more names marked dead than graduated, and far more graduates than victims of a tribunal.
At least Connie wasn’t counted among them. Not yet.
What if she really was hiding? Not taken, not imprisoned, but only hiding? There were a thousand twisting passages here, ten thousand dimly-lit rooms. Maybe she was running around while the others slept, thieving crumbs from the kitchens and running from the sound of footsteps, secure in the knowledge that her psychic friend would come and find her no matter where she hid, and completely ignorant of the baffling effect of heavy minerals on Mara’s telepathic prowess.
Scarily plausible.
She’d never even considered the possibility that she would have to look for Connie once she got here. Now that she thought about it, she supposed the only difficulty she’d really anticipated was how to find the school. Once on the inside, she supposed she’d expected to find her friend at the door with her bags packed, just like escape was another sleepover from their childhood.
Mara flipped back to the first page of the book, but saw nothing, really. It had told her all it could. She would learn nothing more here.
