by R. Lee Smith
His answering thought caressed her without words, preoccupied as he was with his conversation with Letha, but some part of it still held the spark of sympathy she remembered from their encounter in the night.
Devlin dove in at the first table they came to, drilling himself through the throng for a few chunks of half-burnt, half-bloody meat from a nearly empty bowl. Further down the table, another platter heaped with leg bones (or perhaps arm bones; she was not convinced she was looking at an animal’s carcass) rattled back and forth under the battling bodies of at least six grown men. That was all there was for this table, four plates to feed maybe two hundred people. It was like that for all of them…all but the center table, and where half as many students loitered over three times as much food, but of course, the center table was where the lions fed.
She headed over, and they made room for her. A lot of room.
Mara sat, but didn’t touch the meat. The platter set immediately before her held an entire ribcage, cracked open and roasted whole, then stuffed with more meat, most of which clung to smaller shards of unidentifiable bone. It had been picked over pretty well, but there was plenty of meat left, and there were nine other platters behind it, evenly spaced along the table, where black-robed acolytes added to the noise with jeers and cheers and threw their bones at hungry neophytes.
‘You’re not eating,’ came the deliberate thought from the Master’s table. Horuseps had finished his discussion and was watching her. ‘I do hope you’re not expecting a second meal out of me.’
**Do you do this on purpose?** Mara sent, watching students fight at the other tables.
‘Of course,’ Horuseps replied. ‘It encourages competition.’
**It encourages anarchy.**
‘Not at all. Every mother’s child of them is obedient to a Master’s law. But a hungry student is always more eager to learn. It’s a teaching aid, really.’
**And yet you’re trying to feed me.**
‘My dear and most beloved heart, I don’t want you any more eager to learn.’
Suddenly, in the Mindstorm, Mara saw a flash of devious intent. She homed in on it to be certain whoever it was wasn’t coming for her, and using his eyes and hers, was eventually able to see the very young man in his dirty white robe easing up on the center table.
He was good. He fought and scratched and shouted with the rest of them, but it was all camouflage to mask his true intention. Every buffeting shove he earned helped him along his way as he eased inch by deliberate inch away from his empty table and toward the bounty of the other. No one had noticed him yet. Mara did not stare.
Horuseps was thinking at her, politely extending a wordless sort of inquiry since he could not tap for her attention. She gave it to him, but her hesitation had made him curious. She could see the lights of his eyes gleaming out of his silhouette as he searched the room. It took him considerably less time to find the clever gazelle than it had her.
**Don’t let on,** Mara sent as the demon’s eyes gleamed white.
‘Why would I? These are always entertaining.’
The boy had made it as close to the acolyte’s table as a white-robe could get. He paused there, wrestling with the other neophytes as he nerved himself. His goal was the platter three up from Mara, which confused her some. There was almost no one around her and the ribcage within her easy reach was surely a tempting target.
‘Ah, but you, my ferocious one, are guarding it,’ Horuseps thought. ‘And you have a reputation, don’t you?’
**He can have it for all I care.**
‘Firstly, you really have to eat something. And secondly, if you’re so concerned for his success, why not put an end to this impending catastrophe and feed him?’
She looked sharply toward the Master’s table.
‘Feed him,’ Horuseps thought calmly, pouring himself another cup of wine. ‘No one would stop you, not you. Stand up and drop the feast into his grateful hands. It is entirely within your power to change the disastrous course of this tragic play. Who knows? You may even restore his faith in human kindness.’
**I’d never be able to walk in here again without drawing a mob of whining neophytes,** Mara sent, annoyed.
‘True, but they would love you.’
**I’d rather they feared me and left me alone.**
‘Of course you do,’ Horuseps replied, his thoughts like a gentle hand stroking through her hair. ‘Of course.’
The boy at the heart of this silent discussion made his move, lunging without a word of warning over the acolytes at the table.
He caught them by surprise, but the surprise didn’t last, and before he could snap a rib away and run, more than a dozen bodies were on him. They used their hands, they used their stone cups, they used greasy clubs of bone. Long after the boy was down and scrambling mindlessly to get away, they stayed on him, their laughter as indiscriminate from howls as their glee was indiscriminate from hate. Black-robes flew in like crows from the farthest point of the table, abandoning their meal to get in on the beating, fighting with each other for just one kick. One of them climbed up on the table, both hands raised, an incomprehensible sound eating through the Mindstorm as he opened his mouth to shout—
“Enough!”
Silence did not fall, but the roar did subside until there could be quiet. Neophytes, acolytes, and even the struggling boy himself stilled and turned towards the Master’s table, where Malavan reared high, his long foreclaws raised for attack. Contrary to the furious roar of his voice, his lips were peeled back in an unmistakable grin, and his enjoyment was a wash of red across Mara’s senses.
Into the quiet, Horuseps said, “Arts are not to be used in the dining hall. Show some decorum.”
Students eyed one another. The man standing on the table got down, flushed. The lions backed away from their kill and let the boy limp back to his own kind, bloodied but not broken. The noise gradually began to swell again.
‘One of last year’s crop,’ Horuseps told her, looking after the retreating boy. ‘Not a promising student despite his natural cunning. A talent for trickery, no matter how well-developed, can never compensate for intelligence. There’s something wrong with his mind.’
Mara tapped, and it was there: a slight dysfunction of thought, like a sparking wire laid across his ability to concentrate, to remember. Bad enough on the Outside, where letters would never quite make sense as he read them, numbers never quite add up, but here? He would never be able to master an art, never even be able to open a door or turn on one of the lamps. Dumbfounded, she drove deeper, holding her own memory of the Oubliette out before her to resonate in him, unable to fathom how he could have possibly survived it.
Cunning, Horuseps had said, and he surely had that. After a few days, not long at all by the standards of the Scholomance, he had pried a little rock free from one of the walls and sharpened it carefully against the wet floor. Then he lay down where the air was sweet as it blew it through that tiny crack under the door, cut his palm, and gently blew his blood out to pool on the other side. It took some time. He was patient. Someone eventually saw it. Someone opened the door to collect the body. And he walked out.
**Why do you keep him?** Mara asked, pulling these memories back so that she could watch them again, still astonished but also grudgingly impressed.
‘Dear child, it is not for us to judge the worthiness of those who seek us out. We are entirely indiscriminate.’
**He’s a puppy,** Mara insisted. **He can’t learn anything. He’s a tribunal just waiting to happen!**
‘Yes, but it can be quite a long wait, and he is rather an imaginative little puppy. And what would you have us do, heartless one? You who wouldn’t spare him a scrap from your table, you’d have us let him go?’
**I’m not heartless! And why not?** she demanded. **He’s no threat to you. Even if he told everyone he met about this place, no one would believe it.**
Across the room, Horuseps threw back his head and laughed. ‘No human is or has ever been
a threat to us, yet we release no one on their own recognizance. They have every one of them come to us, sacrificed themselves and others, broken themselves upon our doorsteps. Who are we to deny them entry after they have suffered so? No, Bitter One, all who knock may enter, all who enter must bide.’
**He couldn’t possibly understand what he was getting into.**
‘None of them do. Precious, you are doing it again, holding us to human standards of morality. Yes, I know the boy is doomed to answer to the hour of the bells, but he chose his path. There are thousands like him in the world, tens of thousands I dare say, with mental defects far more crippling, who yet manage to make their way in the world without seeking out demonic powers with which to destroy his enemies. He accepted the terms of his admission. Stupidly, perhaps, but the same can be said of so many of them. We send no one away without a reckoning.’
**Does that mean you intend to stop me from leaving when I find Connie?** Mara asked. Her inner voice stayed calm, but hard. She wanted him to see steel, and by his sudden, well-guarded silence, knew that he had.
The second bell rang, and still Horuseps said nothing.
**Another time, then,** she sent, as students began their roaring exodus out into the Nave. **But you had better decide what you are going to do about it, because the time is coming.**
‘You sound very fierce, as always, sweetling, but stop and think. Are you really prepared to fight your way free of us?’ Horuseps asked, his silent words pulsing with humor.
**I think the better question is, are you really prepared to have all your groveling students see someone fight?**
Mara got up from the empty table and headed for the door, where Devlin waited for her, somewhat bruised from the breakfast battle. She didn’t get an answer, and she didn’t expect one. She supposed it would probably get back to Kazuul, and then he’d have another reason to want her in chains, but she’d deal with that when and if it happened. For now, it mattered more that the question had finally been asked: What were they prepared to do when she finally had what she came for? They had to think about it, because it was only by knowing what they were thinking that she’d ever be able to plan a way around it.
* * *
Mara went back down into the ephebeum, still hungry and now restless as well. She had begun to think there was no point in continuing her search until she had some means of accessing the forbidden areas and there was only one person who could give it. She doubted like hell he’d let her just because she showed up to ask. He was going to know she needed him when she came back and he was going to want to see her crawl first. The time for granting requests would come after the lord of the Scholomance finished the fucking the respect back into her.
Bastard.
She could deal with it if she had to, but she was just too angry to do it now. So she went to the ephebeum. She would take a bath, she decided, maybe wash her robes once the other students took themselves to class, and she would spend her day reminding herself how to be cool, how to be calm.
Unfortunately, it seemed everyone had the same idea. When first-bell rang in the Scholomance, the goal of every student was to get to the dining hall and get fed. That was what made it the best time to find privacy in the garderobe. It was now, after second-bell, that the body’s other needs took priority, and while a person could snatch a bath in the lyceum as easily as here, there was only the one garderobe in the whole damn mountain.
Never mind. She would wait them all out in her room. Sooner or later, they’d all go to cla—
Halfway across the ephebeum, someone shoved her. Not maliciously, but she still had to grab at the neck of Devlin’s robe to keep from dropping and falling under the tromping feet of a few hundred indifferent students. She straightened, a psychic attack at the ready, but the shover was already five steps ahead and worming his way deeper into the crowd, oblivious to her. She tapped at him instead, and felt the young, disconnected mind-print of the boy from the dining hall. He kept his head down and moved fast, trying to lose himself amid all the other white robes. He thought he was being followed.
Was he? Mara moved quickly out of the unprotected open, dragging Devlin with her almost without noticing him. She lost sight of the boy, but sent his image out, hunting for resonance.
And found it.
Loki was at the top of the stairs, making his way down slow, giggling. He was obvious enough, but the obvious threat wasn’t always the most dangerous. Loki was indeed chasing the boy, but just to make him run, not to catch him. Catching him was for—
La Danse sprang out from around a jut of rock and caught the boy in a textbook full nelson. Instantly, the boy set out screaming and struggling, but Danse was bigger, stronger, and had his arms wrenched high behind his back in seconds, his head shoved down right against his chest. Students scattered back from them in a flurry of panic, then came carefully back and began to add their jeers and laughter to La Danse’s as he dragged his quarry out of the garderobe’s tunnel mouth and into the open. He did it slow, making sure everyone had a chance to poke, slap, or spit at his prize.
It wasn’t very violent, but the hostility was shocking, so much more than what she would have thought a fruitless play in the dining hall deserved. They were tearing at him like a pack of a wild dogs, even people who hadn’t seen him make his foolish dive for a handful of acolyte’s breakfast.
This was not a safe place to be.
“Do you know him?” Mara asked, releasing her grip on Devlin’s robe.
He immediately and too casually slid behind her. “No. People don’t really get to know the gazelles, you know.”
“Then why is everyone laughing?”
“Because it isn’t them,” Devlin said. “Yet.”
“A race!” La Danse shouted, grinning like a skull over the top of the boy’s tossing head. “We must have a race!”
Pandemonium. Some of the acolytes quietly excused themselves and left for class, but most erupted in cheers and lunged at white-robes. The neophytes were also sharply divided; some, like laughing Loki, sprang up and joined in the hunt, but most were runners, their panic bright as razor-shine in Mara’s mind.
Devlin slowly sank down behind her. She glanced at him and up again in time to see an acolyte coming at her. Her eyes narrowed. She readied a slap.
But the man paused, recognition stealing the fervor from his little game. He lowered his snatching hands, hesitated a glance at Devlin, then backed up and launched himself at someone else.
“Thank you,” Devlin whispered at her shoulder.
“Get out from there,” she snapped, throwing an elbow into him.
“A race! A race!” Rope belts were removed and captured neophytes dragged to opposite sides of the cavern. At one end of the ephebeum’s central space, the collected neophytes were stripped and bound at wrist and ankle with their hands before them. One of the acolytes gaily produced a small pot of ink from his sleeve and began to paint numbers on the victims’ naked backs. No longer trying to escape, the captured neophytes stood for it, shivering with cold and humiliation. At the other end, an equal number of neophytes were de-robed and stood in a row, penned in on all sides by laughing, jeering students, but left unmarked. They were not the participants, it seemed, although just what they were eluded her for the moment.
“A triathlon, I think,” Le Danse called, striding out into the center of the ephebeum.
Cheers.
“Does this happen often?” Mara asked.
“What else are they going to do, watch TV?”
A good point.
“For the first leg, the worm-race!” More cheers, which Le Danse magnanimously waved down. “Contestants, to your bellies and crawl. It is not so far, eh?”
Not so far. Perhaps three hundred feet, end to end, naked, across a rough stone floor. Mara glanced at the five men marked to compete, but saw no rebellion in them, only anger and defeat.
“The second leg must be…the swallow’s race!” Le Danse bowed to his cheering section, beaming f
rom ear to ear, then pointed to the silent row of naked neophytes held at the far end of the ephebeum. “When you reach your partner, feel free to help yourself to, ah, a little protein drink! As much as you like, they have plenty!”
Roars of laughter. The neophytes in the distance kept their heads bent and their fists at their sides, burning with humiliation.
“It must be to the finish.” Danse wagged a chiding finger at the captive racers being pressed to their bellies before him. “You must show proof to our judges before you swallow or you will be required to begin again. No exceptions! And last…” A dramatic pause while he thought, then Danse threw out his arms, crying, “The piss-race!”
“Are they all like this?” Mara wondered.
“They’re all bad, if that’s what you mean. But it’s never exactly the same race.” And he’d been in several over the years, as a racer or as a hurdle. Even now, he wanted to throw up, just being here.
Shallow basins were produced and passed among the acolytes and their white-robed flunkies, who were only too happy to fill them.
“You may walk, crawl, or slither,” Danse told the bound men generously, “bearing those upon your back, until you return to your starting point. So easy! Unless you drop your pisspot, in which case, you will be immediately disqualified.”
Boos. Jeers. Laughter.
“For the winner? Release!” Le Danse held up his hands to control a disappointed crowd, and once they’d quieted, he cried, “The losers shall be set into stocks!”
Mara half-turned to ask Devlin what the stocks were, but he was cringing behind her again. She took two long steps to the right and hauled him up by the hood of his robe. “Do not hide from these people, you damned fool!” she hissed.
“From race’s end until last-bell!” Danse was shouting, scarcely audible over the cheers. “For the amusement and buggery of all!”
And the fear she felt from the contestants was not necessarily for that, but for the day of class it meant they would miss. One precious day out of the ten allotted each year, when exceeding one’s limit meant a Master’s hand dragging you out of sleep up to the Black Door to the jangling, discordant pealing of the bells. And that, Mara sensed, was half the fun for these jackals.
