by R. Lee Smith
She let him go, but the echoes went on. Screaming and scratching at his own eyes, Venice staggered from one side of his pleasant room to the other until finally he found the wall and beat himself unconscious against it. He toppled onto his comfortable bed, his face mangled and bloody, and lay twitching in the grip of even more terrible dreams.
“Mercenary habits,” Mara muttered, opening the door.
“What did you do to him?” Devlin asked, his voice hushed by awe. He’d felt nothing, of course, heard nothing, but had only seen Mara take fifteen seconds to stare a man into what must have seemed a suicidal frenzy. “Is he okay?”
“Of course not. Take the cup, if you want one. He’s not going to care when he wakes up.”
She felt Devlin’s indecision tickling at her, growing less distinct as she left him behind in the cell. Then it broke and he came running after her, carrying not one but something like ten or twelve cups in the bowl of his robe’s lower folds, exposing his hairy legs up to his knobby knees. He flushed when Mara glanced at him, but she didn’t say anything about it. Everyone had a little mercenary in them.
* * *
“So what have we learned?” Devlin shouted.
Third-bell had rung and they, like every other student, had followed the ringing to the dining room, where Devlin had enjoyed a brief celebrity among the cupless, but now they were doled out and he was back in her shadow, his lap covered in rolled-up robes, fully a’swim in his delusions of sidekickery.
Mara ignored him. She sat at the end of the central table—in ‘her’ place—where she could see the whole room radiating out before her if her eyes were open. They were not. Her resources served her best when turned inward.
She had checked the diners, as she always did, for Connie’s unique pattern, but no longer expected to find them. No one stays away from food this many meals in a row, not on purpose. She must be somewhere else, like the aspirants in the Scrivener’s service, tended and fed, but unable to leave. All Mara could know was that she wasn’t in the dormitory level and she couldn’t even say that with absolute certainty, owing to the maze-like tunnels and cells. Tomorrow, she would use her Sight and Connie’s locket to search the lyceum, but she did not expect to find anything. The lyceum was every bit as well-traveled as the ephebeum. Connie had been missing long enough for her aura to be rubbed out of existence by the hundreds of other bare feet. She hated to admit it, but the Sight wasn’t proving as helpful as she’d hoped.
Devlin touched her, shook her, trying in his eager way to wake her from whatever trance he believed she’d fallen in so that she could hear his inane prattling better. “I said, we should find out what art she was learning. Maybe her teacher remembers her.”
Having spoken with several, Mara doubted it, but what the hell. She glanced toward the Master’s table and tapped politely at Horuseps. He looked up from his conversation with willowy, bronze-skinned Letha, and raised a brow in her direction. She asked him who taught the art of imbuing objects with commands.
‘There are several,’ he replied. ‘But Master Azkeloth oversees the inexperienced. Shall I make an introduction?’
**Please,** she said silently, raising her cup toward him in a kind of thanks.
He sketched a bow for her, no less graceful for being seated. The lights of his eyes dazzled briefly, and then he smiled at her. ‘Done.’
None of the Masters at the table looked any more interested in her than they had a moment ago, so Mara settled back for a wait. She had only just cleared a platter of peeled roots for her selection, however, when the double doors leading out into the Nave swung open and in walked a demon.
‘My dear Mara,’ thought Horuseps, waving a hand in the direction of the newcomer as he turned his attention once more upon Letha. ‘Master Azkeloth.’
At a glance, he was very similar to Kazuul, with the same exaggerated masculine build, rough skin and bony protrusions, if not quite as physically impressive either in height, breadth, or in the length of his spikes. He had taken several steps towards the Master’s table before apparently being directed toward Mara and now he looked at her with what struck her as a rather strange expression: interest, of course, both academic and intensely sexual, thickly interwoven with the sparkle of casual cruelty so common to the demons of the Scholomance, but more than that, a sullen and much-bullied reluctance to approach. In short, it was the look of man who sees a thing he very much covets…locked away behind unbreakable bars.
At last, the demon Azkeloth started walking again, not toward her but to the Master’s table. Placing a fist quietly on either side of Horuseps’s plate, he bent very low and said a few black-looking words which Mara had no way of making out. Horuseps in turn sent cordial regret to Mara. It seemed Azkeloth’s class was full.
“Bullshit,” muttered Mara, narrowing her eyes. Silently, she observed that every student in the mountain could probably squeeze into a single theater if they had to, and she doubted like hell they ever had.
Horuseps shrugged and spoke briefly. Azkeloth bared his teeth, shook his head. Horuseps filled his cup and repeated the lie. Class was full.
**I’ll allow for twenty,** Mara sent, her temper fraying, **but then I’ll eat every other student I find in that theater.**
Horuseps relayed this, smiling. Azkeloth grunted and looked back at her over his shoulder. Then he shoved himself off the Master’s table and faced her.
The dining room managed a respectfully dull roar as the demon stepped down from the dais and came to Mara. With every stride, his similarity to Kazuul grew, and so did the differences. His eyes were black all across, as black as the eyes of a shark, and yet, still dimly glowing, spilling unnatural shadows down his cheekbones. His body, leaner and smoother than Kazuul’s, boasted fewer and shorter spines, but this was largely due to the fact that several of the most prominent—those sprouting from his shoulders—had been recently broken off. Very recently. They were still dark with blood at their exposed cores.
He was younger, that too became clearer. It wasn’t in his body so much as his mind, which was, like Kazuul’s, that of a lifelong telepath, but not nearly so well armored. No, she couldn’t read it as she could a student’s, not even as she could a demon like Horuseps, but when she tapped at the walls he had built around him, she found a lot of hasty mortar and forgotten cracks. He would be an easy one to break, if she had a little time and a little privacy.
Azkeloth stopped well out of arm’s reach and showed her his fangs in a smile. “My theater is not closed to the students of the mountain,” he said in a voice like gravel. “Tis closed to thee.”
“I was told I would be free to choose any art I wanted.”
“And wert thou not also told that Masters make the laws? Thou hast no freedom but what we allow.”
A hot boast, but there was hunger in his eyes when he made it. Hunger and the resentment hunger breeds when set apart from the feast.
“I’ll meet with you,” said Mara, ignoring the flinching attention this statement drew from the other demons at their dinner, particularly Horuseps, still tethered to her mind. “I’ll meet with you outside of class. I only have some questions.”
Azkeloth’s lip curled—neither a sneer nor a snarl, but only a grimace of frustrated ill-humor. “Tis more than my life is worth to answer them. I’ll not meet thee.” He turned away, all his hidden thoughts soured with spite, spite under one name, one fragment of memory.
Kazuul. Kazuul and the sound of snapping bone.
Mara watched him march himself back to the Master’s table, but her eyes had a way of wandering to the dark dots of blood in the center of his bony stumps. Not a fight, then. A warning. Or a threat, more precisely.
Horuseps was making some sort of apology to her. She accepted it distractedly, thinking. Kazuul. He’d stopped trying to get her attention directly and had instead adopted a more roundabout way of winning her over, namely, he was mutilating his perceived rivals and it had only been one day since she’d last seen him. When that fail
ed to send her skipping back to his arms, what then? What indeed, but coming up out of his den and dragging her off by the hair? Right out of class, if he had to. Right out of her cell, right through the ephebeum.
One day. So much for lengthy courtships.
Last-bell rang. Mara emptied the table of snatching hands with one unaimed mindslap, then took a little bread and a handful of boiled roots to eat alone in her cell. Budding opportunist that he was, Devlin did the same, but he didn’t follow her when she got up and approached the Master’s table. “I suppose he thinks he’s being subtle,” she said, addressing all of them, none of them. “Well, I’ve never been one for subtlety when it comes to sex and I don’t find interference endearing.”
None of them said anything, not even, ‘What are you on about, crazy lady?’ They watched her, sipping wine, wary of expression.
Mara turned her eyes on Azkeloth, sending threads of suggestion and desire undetected beneath every word: “I’ll be in my cell tonight. I’ll leave the door open. I have questions. You’ll have an hour for every one you answer.”
Horuseps looked at her, at Azkeloth, at his cup. “Oh for the days of youth and charmed stupidity,” he murmured.
Azkeloth’s staring eyes sparked and narrowed. His face darkened, grew hard. He shoved himself back from the table and stalked away without speaking to her.
“This is a dangerous game you’re playing,” Horuseps went on, idly swirling the contents of his cup. “All the more for that you cannot possibly appreciate the true objective.”
“My objective hasn’t changed,” said Mara.
“Oh my dear. You are making things very difficult for us.”
“Then give me what I want and I’ll leave.”
Zyera tittered behind her hand, earning her half a smile and a pat on the thigh from Horuseps, who then drank the last swallow of his wine, set his cup down, and stood up. He leaned over the table without touching it—a pillar of alabaster and onyx in perfect balance—and said, “I find that I want to see you triumph, o bitter one, if only for the novelty of it. And to that end, I give you this advice: Before you commit yourself too deeply to the win, find out what game you’re playing.” He passed a hand over her hair, tapped the tip of her nose once, playfully, and then left the hall.
So did Mara. If all went as planned, someone would be coming to see her in about four hours. She wanted to get a nap first.
* * *
Azkeloth came, of course.
In the middle of all those uncounted hours the other students believed to be night, the demon came to her. He didn’t light the lamps when he came. He made no sound in the tunnel, no sound when he stood outside her door and placed his broad, claw-tipped hand upon it. Mara felt him, his strange, dark mind churning in lust and hate and indecision. She woke herself up and rolled over, staring through the black at the door, at him on the other side.
He had only to push the door open, he thought. No one would know. To this, Mara added the promise of her gleaming limbs (impossible to see in the absolute black of the unlit cells, but desire was not fed by fact), her sleeping eyes fluttering open, and the warmth of her body as he fell over her. There would be outrage, there must be, and there would be struggle, but it would fade in time to grudging welcome as pain succumbed to pleasure. She would be his, she promised, down deep where he could not hear but must respond. She would be his and he, in his eagerness and unchecked lust, would press his naked flesh to hers and open the way for her to break him.
‘So come on in,’ thought Mara, helpless Mara, naked Mara. She lay back down, arranged herself in sleeping innocence, and flexed her mind, waiting.
One minute. Two. She counted out the seconds in the Panic Room, feeding him fantasies just under the edge of his perception. Three minutes. Four.
Azkeloth spat out a sudden breath, a wet and ripping snarl. It was the only sound he gave her. There was nothing more, only the dimming of his hateful, vulnerable mind as he retreated the way he’d come.
No, he hadn’t detected her. And no, he wouldn’t be back. Oh, she could hammer at him for a while, pursue him in the lyceum, haunt him outside his perceptions, and when he finally snapped (and he would), he’d fuck her halfway to death and so much for her grand schemes of possession. Kazuul had a stronger grip on him than Mara could ever forge.
Things could never just go right the first time, could they?
Mara rolled back onto her side and put herself to sleep, still muttering to herself as she dropped off. She needed the rest. She had a big day ahead of her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The bell rang once, rousing Mara from an uneventful sleep. She lay there for a little while, thinking black thoughts of Azkeloth—her perfect pigeon, too cowardly to fly into her trap—and Kazuul, to whom she was the pigeon. Stiff, sore, and frustrated, she stared up into the blackness of her cell and wondered how the hell she was going to deal with him.
Fuck him, of course.
She bared her teeth at the darkness, but found no reasonable argument to levy against that. It was what he wanted…maybe not all he wanted, but Horuseps was right; when he decided to stop letting her resist and simply ordered her onto her back, she’d lose every advantage. Clearly, a surrender was inevitable, and if the terms were to fall under her control at all, it had to be sooner rather than later. Thus far, Kazuul had proved oddly hesitant to simply take what he wanted from her, but his patience would seem to be nearing its end. She had to fuck him before he lost his temper. She wasn’t sure how close he was, but she knew she was right on the brink, so it might as well be soon.
She got up, dressed quickly, and headed out to steal a bath while her fellow students were killing each other over breakfast. One had to look one’s best before seducing a demon.
But to her surprise, the tunnel leading to the baths was blocked. The dark-skinned demon comfortably occupying it was not familiar at first glance, but his face resonated when she sent it back through her own memories. She’d seen him in the lyceum, although not teaching in a theater. Just prowling through the halls. He must be a Master…but why would he come here? He didn’t seem to want anyone. He just stood there, leaning up against the tunnel wall and watching students scurry off to the dining hall with mild amusement scored onto his snouted face.
Mara hesitated, watching him. She couldn’t afford to stop and investigate every unusual occurrence that dangled in front of her. She had been here for days already—days!—and every new face was another distraction keeping her from her friend. She knew this, but the demon’s presence at the mouth of the bath-tunnel felt ominous.
The other students were still hurrying away, rarely giving him more than an uneasy glance before they moved on a little faster. And this was ominous too, because students weren’t supposed to clear the room when a demon was there. They were supposed to stop and wait to see if they were wanted.
Mara began to realize that she didn’t feel just curious about this, she felt dread. She wasn’t used to feeling that, not about anything, and she couldn’t ignore it. It might be safer to head on up to the Nave, wash off in the lyceum’s pool, and keep her focus on Kazuul, but instead, she started walking toward the stranger.
“The baths are closed,” the demon said, craning his neck to watch another woman run across the ephebeum and up the stairs, her white robe hiked high and hair flying out behind her. The demon’s black lips peeled back in a cheerful leer; he hitched absently at his belt. “Move on, girl.”
“When will they be open again?”
He didn’t answer, but grunted out a word unfamiliar to her. Not a Word, nothing with any power to it, just a sound she didn’t know: “Jhost.”
Something answered. Out of the deep shadows of the tunnel behind him, something crawled forward. Mara saw its eyes first—shining greenish-yellow like the eyes of an animal caught in headlights. Then its teeth, what seemed like hundreds of teeth, far more than could fit in even its long skull. They jutted at every angle, black and grey and rotted yellow, dripping dr
ool as it growled at her. Its skin was the same deep red/black of the demon who had called it, so smooth and tight over its lean body that it seemed to shine wetly, as though the whole beast had been dipped in fresh blood. At that moment, in this light, it looked like some hellish, tailless, starving wolf with the fur ripped off, and it was coming for her.
“Ska,” said the demon, and the creature hunched low to the ground, its hindquarters shaking with the effort not to spring. “Now go, else I feed him thy fingers.”
“Is that a hound?” Mara asked.
He finally looked at her. His wide nostrils flared for a sniff. He considered, then pushed himself off the wall and came a step closer, bending low to draw in a deeper breath. His eyes shut while he analyzed whatever it was he smelled on her. Sweat was all she could smell, and it was pretty damn ripe.
“Art Mara?” the demon asked, sounding uncertain.
“Yes,” she replied, eyebrows peaking.
His eyes opened. He studied her some more. “Tah,” he said at last. “Tah haas ja’ni.”
The hound, because that had to be what it was, ducked its long head and cringed back, snarling as it fawned for him.
The demon straightened up. “The baths are closed, even to thee. Go to feast, girl. It shall be opened by meal’s end.”
“But why is it closed?”
“Why? And why else would I be summoned? To clean the leavings of another mortal, slipped of her mortal clay, else our humans pets be forced to bathe in the waters of her last befouling.”
Mara felt that dark weight of dread growing heavier in her chest. “Someone died?”
“Aye, they told me thee had a ready mind, but to see its snap before me truly be an awesome thing. Someone died.” He snorted and looked out into the ephebeum, but it was all but empty now.
“Who?” Mara asked, her stomach tightening. Breakfast was forgotten; Kazuul and Azkeloth, utterly wiped from her mind. It was Connie. She knew it, the conviction as solid and immoveable as the mountain itself. Connie was in the bath, being eaten by hounds. She’d come too late.
