The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  “I’ll miss you terribly, but I’ll survive.” Mara headed up the risers, with whispers closing in behind her.

  “One moment.”

  She stopped, turned back, her defenses raised, but Horuseps had merely crossed to the cupboard at the rear of his dais. He unlocked it with a touch, opened the door, and brought out a neatly-rolled bundle of black cloth. “Your acolyte’s robe,” he said, and tossed it to her.

  She caught it, not so neatly or as elegantly as he’d caught the pebble.

  “I knew I would see you in it soon enough,” Horuseps murmured, ignoring all the students around them to smile only at her. “And I suspect I will see you out of it before very much longer.” His eyes dazzled. He laughed, then turned and clapped his long hands together once to bring his class back to attention. “For the rest of us, there must be practice. Locate a partner, please. Proteus…dear boy…you are with me…”

  * * *

  Alone in her cell just a few minutes later, Mara took off her locket for the first time since receiving it so many years ago. She leaned against the door, looping the chain around her fingers to let the tiny heart dangle. Not much light could find its way in through her cell door’s narrow window and what there was had the unhealthy yellow shine shared by all the blister-lamps, but she didn’t really need her eyes to see the locket anymore. She had lived with it since her twelfth birthday; she knew the lay of every line, the story of every scratch, the shape of every flaked-off bit of paint. Now she did what she had done perhaps three times before, and slid her thumb along the locket’s tiny clasp, popping it open.

  A couple of fifth-graders looked back at her: twelve year-old Connie with her shy Picture Day smile, and eleven year-old Mara, just staring.

  Mara smiled faintly, just looking for a time. Then her mind flexed. Her vision blurred, then came back to her filled with new light and color—the silvery shine of life’s own energy smeared over walls and floor and robe and door and all of it. Her touches stood out brightest, but beneath them were still the muted and much-trampled traces of the cell’s past inhabitants, and there in her hand, she Saw what she had gone to Horuseps to learn how to find. Glowing over the photographs that Connie had cut out and clumsily fit into the locket, photographs Mara rarely looked at and had never touched, a delicate wisp of life remained, washed out over the years to a fragile shade of coral-pink but still visible.

  Connie’s life. Mara focused, taking lessons stolen from the six years of a far better student than she would ever be, and as she did, the brighter lights of contact faded into shadow. Connie’s remained, fragile and dim, but there before her as all the rest of the world dropped away. The shine of dampness along the wall, the golden edging of her new black robe, even the yellow gleam of the blister-lamp outside her narrow window—all died, became insubstantial lines of grey and black on a flat, two-dimensional canvas in which Connie’s locket was the only true thing.

  Mara straightened up, opened a door she neither saw nor felt, and stepped out into the hall. A moment to orient herself, and then she began to walk, holding the locket up before her eyes and staring through it, she began to Search the labyrinth of well-traveled tunnels outside the cells for the lingering smudge of Connie’s bare footprints.

  She was at times aware of other students around her as she made her way slowly in and out of half-sketched passageways, but she ignored them. Whether they ignored her or not, she couldn’t tell and didn’t care. She searched, looking nowhere but through the locket and straight ahead. The Sight required so much more effort than she’d anticipated that very little else got through; voices were tinny, figures mere lines intersecting other lines, and even thoughts seemed no more substantial than shadows on the wall. The locket’s light was steady but pale, and holding the necessary will to keep it lit made even walking a physically-demanding chore. She could not afford distraction.

  “Oh hey! It’s you!”

  Mara’s Sight flickered. “Go away, Devlin. I’m busy.”

  The sound of loose flip-flops slapping at the stone floor beat on Mara’s ears, and with every throb of them, the rest of the world seemed to gain a little more clarity and the locket in her hand seemed to dim. “Was that hers?” Devlin asked, right behind her.

  “Go away, I said. I need to concentrate.”

  “This is actually the plan I was going to tell you about. How ironic is that? Only I figured you were going to have to get someone else to do it for you and I wasn’t sure if you had anything—”

  “Goddammit, Devlin, shut up!”

  He did, glimmers of hurt seeping into the air around her. Mara stopped moving and got a new grip on herself, until the churning anger subsided and took the world with it. She brought the little haze of Connie-pink back up and let it shine out like a lantern from the end of her arm. Slowly, she began again to walk, aware of Devlin at her back but paying him no further mind. Back and forth, she moved through the ephebeum, crossing and re-crossing the vast open space in the central cavern in narrow rows, and finding nothing. She moved up to the second landing and there, Saw it at last.

  Glowing high on the side of the first tunnel-mouth, the smudgy imprint of Connie’s bare hand remained. Mara stopped and studied it, wondering. She’d been here. It was not a sense, not a guess, but real proof. Connie had been right in that spot, rested her hand just there on the wall…on her way back to her own cell? Or out, to take a meal in the dining room on the upper level of the mountain? Perhaps she’d just stepped out of the way there to brace herself while she checked a pair of ill-fitting sandals. But she’d been here, right here.

  “So you must have already had Sight when you got here, huh? God, you’re lucky. I’m not like, you know, those other guys who—”

  Pink light shattered. The world surged up.

  Mara swung, shouting, “Devlin, for fuck’s sake, get away from me!”

  He jumped back, hit the low balcony that edged the walkway and nearly went right over and on his head into the ephebeum below. Near-death put the spine in him. He bounded back at her. “Why are you always so fucking hostile?”

  “Because I’m doing something here, that’s why! I don’t have time to sit around in your imaginary beauty parlor getting my nails done and being girlfriends! I don’t care, you goddamn fool! Whatever it is, I don’t care!”

  He was quiet, half-fuming, half-despondent. Mara focused once more on her locket, found a place of calm, flexed her mind in the way of Proteus, and let the world bleed away. Connie’s handprint seemed to hover just above the dusty, indistinct tunnel wall. The fingers pointed inward. Connie, turned away from the ephebeum. Mara raised the locket higher and looked through it. Deep in the mouth of the tunnel, another flash of pink beckoned.

  She started walking. Devlin followed.

  Pink in handprints, most of them partially obscured by other touches. Pink in thin smears where she’d let her hand trail along the rock as she’d walked…walking in the dark, perhaps. It was another long and winding tunnel, where the blister-lamps were mostly black and the distance between them considerable. Here, Connie’s two hands close together, pushing. A door.

  Mara groped, unable to see it herself, touched stone. It was gone in the next instant. Connie’s hands swept inward. Devlin, eager to please, had darted in to open the door for her. Mara eased in another step or two and stopped, looking grimly through the locket at a haze of pink.

  Pink in naked smears across the floor, pink handprints on the wall, pink nearly everywhere she looked. Connie’s cell.

  She relaxed out of Sight and let her aching arm drop to her side, looking at the room with her real eyes, her real vision. It was empty, but she was encouraged.

  The walls had been pushed out, creating a much larger cell, with cornices, no less, and a running board with a geometric pattern just hip-high. There were candles in carved bowls, unlit now but with black, burnt wicks and caked puddles of wax around them. There was a table, two chairs, an alcove beside the door to hold assorted toiletries, including a com
b, earrings, even a crude mirror of polished stone. Shelves filled with stone cups lined the walls of this spacious cell. There was a bed, raised well off the floor on a stone surface, and softened by dozens and dozens of red and white robes. How long the room had been uninhabited, she couldn’t tell, but the signs of occupation were everywhere and there was nothing to suggest Connie wouldn’t be back.

  It was a far more comfortable cell than her own, Mara thought, beginning to frown. For someone who needed such desperate saving, clearly, she’d done all right for herself.

  “Did you find a clue?” Devlin asked, picking up a cup.

  “This isn’t Scooby-Doo, you idiot.”

  He flushed, mumbling something about there being clues outside of cartoons, but put the cup down, only to pick up another one.

  Under the patternless layers of white and red robes, Mara spied something different, something green. She moved the bedding and there was a book, handmade, much smaller than the ones pieced together in the Library. Connie was braver than Mara would have ever thought to dare that place over and over, scavenging materials for this. She opened it, expecting a diary in her friend’s neat, bubbly letters.

  The letters were neat. They were also in columns, in some kind of Asian character. Mara flipped a few pages, frowning, then raised her locket and Saw through it.

  There was no pink on the book, no pink on its pages.

  “Who are you?”

  Devlin shrieked. Mara turned around.

  There was a man in the doorway, a man to match the handwriting in the book: neat, orderly, Asian. His arms were full of rolled-up robes, but he didn’t act as though it bothered him to have his hands occupied. His expression was not invaded, precisely, but curious and wary, in a self-assured sort of way. His thoughts were not English, but they were enough to tell her that he felt confident if they should attack him. He had been attacked before, but not often and not recently. Make enough of a mess, and few people will try to succeed where others have failed.

  “What are you doing in my cell?” the stranger asked. Then his eyes dropped to the faces in the locket and his whole demeanor changed, drawing inward, becoming even more tightly reserved. “You’re her, aren’t you? You’re Faith’s friend.”

  “Her name is Connie,” said Mara. She closed the locket and put it on. “And yes, I am.”

  “She never read A Wizard of Earthsea,” Devlin explained.

  Neither Mara nor the stranger looked at him.

  “She told me you’d come. I didn’t believe her.” The stranger glanced at the neatly-arranged display of cups, then at the one still in Devlin’s hand. “If you want that, you’ll have to pay for it.”

  Devlin put it back in a hurry.

  “You’ll have to forgive me my rather mercenary habits,” the stranger said, putting his bundle of folded robes on his bed, further thickening it. “In this place, there are only two kinds of people—”

  “Lions and gazelles,” Mara interrupted. “Yes, I’ve heard.”

  He smiled thinly. “Beggars and burghers, I was about to say. I like your view better. I’m called Venice, by the way.”

  “Venice?”

  “As in, the Merchant of. I procure things.”

  “For a price.”

  Venice opened his hands disarmingly. “I’ve never had to threaten a kneecap to get paid. My gazelles come to me. Faith…your Connie…came to me.”

  Connie’s colors on the floor, on the walls. Mara felt her jaw tighten. “What was she buying?”

  “A cup, at first. Later, a more unusual request. Please, sit.” Venice indicated one of the chairs as he took the other. “There is no reason we cannot conduct our business in a civilized fashion, is there?”

  He wanted her to say something hot and defiant, preferably “I’m not here for business,” so that he could tell her it was all business, all of this, all of Life. It was an opinion few enjoyed hearing. It reminded them unpleasantly of the means by which they must pay.

  “I suppose not,” Mara said instead, and took a seat. “When was the last time you saw Connie?”

  “A fair question. I’ve no idea. I don’t keep a calendar.” Venice frowned, thinking back through days. “Not so long, I should think. Two months, perhaps. The night of our last transaction.”

  “Which was?”

  “One of my masteries is in Malleation,” he said, tapping the neck of his acolyte’s robe. “My specialty is stone. She asked me to open a portal in the mountain.”

  “Is that a common request?”

  “No, surprisingly. I’ve heard it only eight times before, but I confess I wasn’t shocked when Faith came to me with that request. This life can be unpleasant for gazelles, as you call them…and short. And Faith was a most peculiar sort of gazelle.” He paused there, inviting questions, but Mara simply sat. He was finding it difficult to read her, which was always nice to hear, and she was far more impressive in the flesh than he’d imagined listening to Faith talk about her. He’d pictured an Amazon of the West, noble, heroic, and as laughably idealistic as Faith herself, not this pale, knife-eyed creature. She looked more like the sort who would eat Faith, not save her.

  “A most peculiar gazelle,” he went on, taking back his book and tucking it under some of the robes thickening his bed. “She was…sweet. Polite, at first. Gentle. Determined, but in such a soft, helpless way. We get that kind now and then. Most of them attempt to escape at some point, but very few entrust another student with their plan. The penalty can be severe. Yet Faith came to me. A trusting soul.”

  “And you helped her?” Mara pressed, ignoring this last comment, which had been very deliberately and derisively aimed.

  “As I say, I’m a mercenary at heart. I make no apologies for it. I named a price and she paid.”

  Ten nights in his bed, Mara saw. Ten nights, long after his idle lust was satisfied and all he had left was the pleasure of tormenting her. In his mind, she saw each encounter neatly filed for his revisiting, saw her best friend with shame branded across her desperate face as she performed for his amusement. For now, she did not allow it to bother her, but she kept the memories close. Very close.

  “After the last…shall we say, installment?…I took her as close to the outer wall as one can get without passing the portcullis, and opened a passage. I thought she meant to climb down, so I made a ledge for her. She didn’t use it.”

  “No?”

  “No. She brought out a folded sheet of paper…it looked like an envelope, really…and imbued it with a command. It took her quite a few attempts to speak the Word correctly, but she did it well, once it finally worked. Then she brought out the cup I’d made for her. She’d had someone place an Allure on it. Apollo, I believe. He is the best you’ll find this side of the lyceum, and that was the most powerful Allure I’d ever felt. She tied the letter to the cup and threw them both off the mountain. That was all.”

  “When was this?”

  “As I say, I couldn’t swear to a certain day, under the circumstances, but it was at least two months ago.”

  And the letter sat there for that long in the Romanian weather before someone mailed it? Mara shook her head, frowning.

  “I think you underestimate the strength of that Allure,” Venice said, somewhat condescendingly. “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it drew some unsuspecting person from even a few miles away. And at that time of year, there’s always a few pilgrims in the forest, searching for the portcullis.”

  “And that was the last you saw of her?”

  “Yes, but that’s perhaps not so sinister as it may sound. After all, the first I’d seen of her was only a few weeks prior, and I’m sure she’d been here far longer. Our business was done, you see. There was no reason to continue meeting.” Venice stood up and went to his shelf of cups. He brooded over them a short while and finally took one down, one of his finest, at least in his estimation. Made of many minerals, simply and stylishly ornamented, it stood out from most of his plainer works. He would have asked twenty n
ights from anyone else, but he offered it to her with a smile. “No charge,” he said.

  Mara took it. “Why so generous?”

  “Your name has already gained a certain notoriety.” Venice shrugged casually. “They say you’re someone to know.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Mara glanced at Devlin and stood up. “You don’t mind, I assume, if I check the veracity of your claims?”

  “Not at all,” said Venice, and then his sardonic little smile was stretched into a grimace of shock and pain as Mara ripped her way inside him.

  She could have done it gently. Her little taps as she’d listened to his story had gone entirely undetected and had certainly confirmed everything he’d said, but this was the man who’d prostituted her best friend ten days for maybe two minutes of his magic. She let him feel her in him. She made sure it hurt, made sure the shock of it sent unmanning spasms through his bladder, his bowels, and his guts. She made sure it dredged up every despicable act he’d ever tried to suppress, and when she was satisfied with the pain and humiliation and the hell of it, she dragged his most vivid memory of Connie sobbing as she struggled to lie still while he did those…things…and painted it with lunatic clarity over Venice’s brain—brighter and brighter until it was all he could see, all he could feel gouging itself in deeper.

  **This was my friend,** she told him, and she told him how easily she could plant a suggestion, if she wanted to, a suggestion that might make it seem like a very good idea if he shaped himself a sharp knife one night and cut his genitals—not off, say, but just, oh, just to shreds. Like a cheerleader’s pom-pom, say, or the long spiral peel off an apple. She showed him how it might be, how he might have to sit for hours in diligent labor to get it just right, how the blood would pool, and how the fleshy ribbons, once dried, might rot. **An easy thing for me,** she told him, **but, if you’ll forgive my mercenary habits, I can’t help but think I could find someone in this mountain willing to pay me for the pleasure of watching you do it. Until then, just think about it. Get some bandages. Make a plan. Because it could be coming, Venice. It could be coming any day.**