The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  “Liar.”

  “You are altogether too free with that word. And the caution that holds you to your cell, though commendable, is wasted for the moment. He isn’t lurking outside the dining hall this time, dearest. Believing his adolescent suggestion to be undetected, he is content to await your inevitable surrender in his chambers. It is my will alone to invite you to dinner.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you haven’t eaten what would feed a flea in all the time you’ve been here. It worries me.”

  Mara laughed at him.

  He sighed and waved one hand theatrically through the air. “Because I wish to ply you with wine and then ravish your insensible body before a thousand reveling witnesses, do you like that better? Honestly. Suspicious little creature.”

  “I don’t like crowds.”

  “That’s understandable. But the alternative, my dear, is the gradual weakening of your body, mind, and will through slow starvation. You have already begun to feel its effects, whether you want to admit it or not. You are not a fool. Surely you grasp the danger inherent in your stubborn refusal to eat.”

  “I don’t refuse to eat, I just refuse to fight over pig swill for the amusement of you and your friends.” She looked at him, showing a hint of frustration, a hint of humor, both genuine. “You used to offer to feed me in your quarters.”

  “Tastes change.”

  Mara nodded, holding his mild, smiling gaze. Then she said, “Malavan approached me over the little matter of his harem today.”

  “Little matter?”

  “He put me on my knees.”

  The demon’s smile vanished. It returned swiftly, but not soon enough to escape her notice. “Oh?”

  “One of the other Masters came along and, I’m sure you’ll find this funny, actually stopped him from going any further, which was a relief.” She measured out a deliberate pause. “Of course, I was grateful, which meant I wasn’t quite as interested in stopping him from going any further.”

  Horuseps did not reply. His lips stayed curved, docile, but his eyes were cold and the lights of his distant galaxies looked on her without humor.

  “Kazuul has been trying all day to get me to come to him by the novel tactic of overwhelming me with erotic impulses. Apparently, he never imagined that I could be overwhelmed by someone other than himself.”

  His expression did not change, but the lights in his eyes burst outwards like fireworks, a visual aide to the spike of alarm that shot through him. Then he armored himself again and said, “You lie,” quite distinctly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “No one would dare defy him so.”

  “No one besides Malavan, you mean? Please.” She laughed. “Morality, dear Horuseps, is mortality. You are not human. You have no morality, but only privilege.”

  His eyes flashed again. “And there are oaths we have sworn, o my bittersweetness. We are all beholden to his law, and for now, his law states you are for him alone.”

  “He made you all swear upon your immortal lives to obey every word he ever said?”

  The lights of his eyes dimmed and narrowed. “He made it clear he was our lord and Master.”

  “I’ve been here long enough to know that semantics matter,” Mara said. “And making it clear is not the same as swearing an oath. You’re thinking about it now, aren’t you?” she went on, and Horuseps took a long step back and stared at her. “He made you all swear not to kill each other for any reason…not to use arts on each other…and something else I’m not getting…”

  “Do not provoke me, Mara!” he said sharply, one of the few times he had ever used her name, and he used it now like a knife. “You are not welcome in my mind!”

  “I’m not in your mind,” she countered. “Learn to control your thoughts.”

  He locked them down in blackness so complete, it seemed to leave a vacuum in the air around him. Even his eyes were entirely lightless. His hands on his shoulders were clenched.

  Mara held his empty stare for a long time in silence, and then let go her breath and dropped her eyes. “I don’t want you to be angry with me,” she said.

  “You express it oddly.”

  “Kazuul…dreamed on me all day. All day!” She threw herself against the wall and crossed her arms, staring blackly straight ahead of her and not at him at all. “Malavan came after me…and what happened after Malavan…I shouldn’t take it out on you, but you are starting to feel like a part of it.”

  “Am I?”

  “What does he want? You know, don’t you?”

  “He wants to fuck you.”

  “Besides that!” she snapped.

  And Horuseps smiled. “There’s nothing besides that, dearest. He wants to fuck you, he doesn’t want anyone else to fuck you, and he doesn’t want to wait. If you were looking for profundity, you were badly misled.”

  “So was he, if he thinks he can make me stupid-drunk on his secondhand lust and trust his fellow demons not to take advantage of me.”

  “Thinking things through has never been among the strengths of his kind,” Horuseps said. “But there are exceptions. Perhaps his intent was not to bring you to him, but to make you uncomfortable enough to drive you away from the others.”

  “Then why does he want me at dinner?”

  Horuseps heaved a sigh. “He doesn’t, child. I do. Never in a thousand years would it occur to Kazuul simply to woo you over fine food and drink.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do?”

  “If it was, I wouldn’t be asking you to the dining hall. You really are too suspicious. Will you come?”

  “No.”

  “So be it. I leave you to your thoughts.” Horuseps turned around, but paused just beyond the doorway. His head bent. After a minute or two, he faced her again. “I suppose you know that when I grow tired of merely encouraging you to eat, I shall simply command you to do so, and like as not command you to gorge until you vomit and gorge again. So it has also occurred to you that the same is true of Kazuul’s desire for carnal intercourse. He will command,” he said calmly as Mara’s smile slipped into a thoughtful frown, “and you will gorge. Until you vomit. And gorge again. I like you, darling heart, and so against my better judgment, I am compelled to warn you: This is not the way to play the game. Do have a pleasant sleep.” He bowed, turned, and took himself away.

  Mara closed the cell door, and then just stood there with her hand on it, deep in thought. Her life’s experience told her the surest way to secure a man’s devotion was through carefully-orchestrated scorn and capitulation, but then, her life’s experience was with humans, and all of it together didn’t add up to one blink of a demon’s eye. She was going to have to adjust her plan of attack.

  She’d never been one for pulling plans out of her pockets at a moment’s notice. She’d sleep and maybe inspiration would strike her in the Panic Room. If not, well, she’d just blunder ahead and hope for the best. Mara thought, without any sense of sarcasm whatever, that this tactic had served her pretty well so far.

  Then she took off her neophyte’s robe and lay down in her cell to sleep in the heart of the Devil’s School.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  She slept on it for two days, but wandering the Scholomance’s halls all night while demons preyed on students and students preyed on each other gave her no new ideas, and brooding in the Panic Room all day while her body dreamed lost-Connie dreams failed to improve her outlook. Mara woke on the third day at the tolling of the bell, and knew she had to stop stalling. After scowling at her ceiling for a few minutes, she got up, collected her comb, and went to get a bath. As hard as Kazuul had been trying, she doubted she needed to look her best, but she still had some shreds of pride. She was a telepath, and the last thing she wanted to hear when she gave herself to this arrogant son of a bitch was him thinking she smelled.

  Most of the students were already upstairs when Mara came out of the tunnels into the ephebeum. She could hear the stragglers on the wide stair, running to catch
up to this or that one before they waged war in the dining hall. Mara was hungry too, but she could ignore it for a shot at privacy when she had to get naked, not a foregone conclusion when several hundred students shared the same crude facilities.

  She got half-lucky. The garderobe was empty when she used it, but there was a man standing next to the bathing pool. He had his back to her and he wasn’t bathing. He’d pulled his robe partway down, tying his sleeves around his waist to hold it up, and was bent all the way over, attempting to give himself a haircut with only the distorted reflection in the rippling water for a mirror and a sharp shard of stone for a knife.

  ‘What kind of idiot puts his back to the door in this place?’ Mara wondered, and tapped at his mind.

  It was Devlin, of course.

  Mara picked up a sachet of soap from the wall and walked over. She waited until the knife he was using was nowhere near his neck before patting his shoulder. “You’re an idiot,” she said calmly, after he was done shrieking and splashing hysterically away from her. “See? That wouldn’t have happened if you’d been able to see me coming.”

  “I can’t do this anywhere but here,” Devlin said, dragging his arm nervously across his face. “It’s the only place the water is, like, remotely calm.”

  “And you can’t turn around because…?”

  “I need the light,” he said, and pointed unnecessarily at the room’s only blister-lamp. That gave Mara some pause, which Devlin interpreted oddly as encouragement. He splashed back over to her, holding out his knife. “Can you do this for me?”

  She recoiled. “Can I cut your fucking hair?”

  He flinched and shied away. “Never mind then,” he mumbled.

  “How ‘bout I scrub your back and paint your fucking nails while I’m at it?”

  “I said, never mind!”

  Mara stalked away, yanking her robe off and throwing it out into the hall where it would stay dry. It might also be stolen, but she’d deal with that if and when it happened. Right now, the bath was what mattered. Kazuul was waiting.

  She waded into the frigid water and found a steady trickle from above to stand under. The soap didn’t lather and it needed a lot of rinsing. She washed until that hot bloom of anger had been sent back to whatever irrational place had spawned it and Devlin never said one word.

  “Sorry,” she said finally. “That wasn’t about you. I’ve got to do something…I don’t particularly want to do, and I think I need to do it today.”

  “It’s cool.” He didn’t ask questions and his suspicions were close enough to the truth that she didn’t bother to correct them. He simply looked down, found his reflection again, and continued cutting.

  “Oh, give me that,” Mara said, heading over with her hand out for the knife. “I’ll give it a shot. You only want the—”

  Devlin started to hand it over and then screeched out something that sounded like, “Yarp!”

  Mara stopped, bemused, and tapped at his mind again.

  Even he didn’t know what he’d just said. All that he knew, every part of his functioning brain, was occupied at the moment by her naked body. Pale and perfect, her wet limbs gleaming and hair falling around her shoulders and over her breasts in golden streams where the lamp light hit it, tarnished silver where it did not. She was naked, completely naked, her…her…everything right there!

  She looked down at herself.

  “I’ll do it,” Devlin stammered. “It’s cool. It’s very cold—cool. You’re cold.”

  “You see a hot water tap around her somewhere, let me know,” said Mara, incredulous. “Don’t act like you’ve never seen a naked lady before!”

  “Of course I have.” He grabbed a huge handful of hair and sawed at it vigorously. “I’m not, you know, I’m not a virgin. I’ve had…women and…porn. I’ve had lots of porn!”

  “And I’ve seen more naked people since I got here than I ever saw on the outside, so what is your problem?”

  “No problem, I’m fine.”

  “Oh for God’s sake.” Mara resumed washing, but after a few minutes of listening to him try frantically not to stare at or think about her nudity, she went back and nudged him again. “Seriously, you’re going to strain something,” she said. “Look all you want, just don’t touch.”

  “I’m not a pervert!” he cried, grabbing more hair.

  “There is nothing is less perverted than a guy wanting to look at a wet naked woman. Knock yourself out. I’m not offend—” She stopped and stared hard at his neck. “What the hell did I just see?”

  Devlin dropped the handful of shaggy hair he’d been sawing at and clamped a hand over his neck. “Nothing.” He started to turn around, suddenly desperate to face her, even if it meant having to see her…her…everything.

  She caught his shoulder, shoved him back the other way, and firmly swept his hand aside. She stared for a long time.

  “Oh come on!” he groaned, embarrassment shooting out spikes of resignation all around him. Now she would make fun of him. Everyone always did. “I was high, okay? You never made a mistake when you were fucked up?”

  “You’ve got a bunny on your back,” Mara stated, and started to smile.

  “It’s a rabbit,” Devlin insisted weakly.

  “It’s a bunny.” It would be more accurate to say it was a marshmallow with floppy ears, rainbow-shaped eyes, and outflung arms that radiated lunatic joy to the whole damn universe, but it was definitely a bunny.

  “Rabbits were worshipped in ancient cultures as symbols of cunning and vitality, okay? Like, for thousands of years, people didn’t see a man in the moon, they saw a rabbit, okay, and they thought all rabbits could travel back and forth running messages for the gods. Even today, the concept of the rabbit as the magical trickster—”

  “It’s a bunny, Devlin. Christ, that thing looks like it could have its own cartoon show in Japan.”

  “It does,” he said glumly. “I was high, for God’s sake. We did, like, a whole bag of dusted grass and then that guy I told you about? My mentor? He took us on this bullshit Indian totem quest and mine was a rabbit.” He gave her a hopeful sort of glance. “Lots of people say I remind them of a rabbit.”

  “Really? I always saw you as more of a goat.”

  He hunched his shoulders and stared down at the water. “Yeah, well. We all went to get tattoos to celebrate our bullshit totems and mine was supposed to be a rabbit except I was fried out of my mind. To this day I don’t know whether I asked for that stupid thing or if the tattoo guy just fucked with a bunch of stoners. You should have seen my guru, seriously. He went in for a panther and came out with Hello Kitty on his ass.”

  “That needs to be on a DARE poster.”

  He snorted. She let him go and he went back to his hair, deliberately not looking at her.

  Well, she wasn’t a sadist. She rinsed herself off under one of the heavier overhead falls and reclaimed her robe. Devlin became infinitely more comfortable after she was dressed. Honestly, it wasn’t like he never thought about her naked.

  Mara put her soap back and found a dry bench to sit on while she combed her hair. Now and then, Devlin threw a glance her way, as if to reassure himself that she was still dressed and not thinking up new bunny-jokes. Eventually, he splashed out into the pool to find a calmer patch of water for his mirror, and it was only then that Mara noticed he was still wearing his sandals.

  “It’s just the smart thing to do,” he said when she commented. “So if I have to, you know, run…I don’t leave them behind. Same principle as this,” he added, tugging at the hanging drape of his robe. “It’s not like we can just run down to the store and get another one. Besides, I’m kinda hoping they’ll shrink.”

  “Where did you get them anyway?”

  Devlin glanced down and his expression clouded over. “From a guy,” he said evasively.

  Mara gave him a tap, which brought her a face and the name of Variden, but nothing more. “Is he still around?”

  “No. He graduated a littl
e while after I got mine.”

  “Well, where did he get them?”

  “From…” Devlin’s toes curled, a minute representation of his self-conscious turtle-tuck. “From me, actually.”

  She looked at him. He bent down and took a sandal off, holding it out to her pinched between two fingers like a dead rat. She didn’t take it.

  “It’s skin,” said Devlin. “It’s my skin.”

  She didn’t move. After a while, he shrugged and put the sandal back on.

  “Variden kind of pulled it out of me and did something to it, I don’t know exactly what, Transmuted it or something to make it tougher, you know, so it wouldn’t just rot. Then he cut it up into sandals. I gave him my aspirant’s robe. Like a trade.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “No.” His expression clouded over again and he went back to his hair. “It felt…pulled, that’s all. Nasty, like…like he was pulling a worm or something out of me. But it didn’t hurt. I’m sure there’s someone else around here making sandals if you really want a pair.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “Yeah, it’s weird. I’m not sure why. Variden says it’s just like wearing cow leather, but that’s not how it feels. It feels like, I don’t know, cannibalism.” The word hung in the air like the tolling of a tribunal bell. He tried to laugh it away, but his laughter wasn’t half as honest as the word. “Auto-cannibalism, if you can dig it.”

  “You are what you eat, they say,” said Mara. She wasn’t good at jokes.

  “Yeah, and we’re all cannibals here,” Devlin muttered, sawing at himself. “This place…It’s not that it’s so horrible as much as that it makes everyone inside it so horrible. Everybody here, you know, they were all normal once. You ever hear about the Stanford prison experiment?”

  “No,” she said, uninterested.

  “Okay, so in 1971, this professor at Stanford University gets the wise idea to study the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner as opposed to a prison guard. He gets a bunch of college kids, none of whom have any criminal history or mental issues so he can stay as neutral as possible, and randomly assigns them roles as either prisoners or guards. He sets them up in a fake jail rigged with cameras and just lets them go, right? And for a while, everything is fine, all laughing and joking, first-name basis, you know?”