by R. Lee Smith
Sickening, all of it. Mara left, cutting straight across the ephebeum with Devlin in his flapping sandals right on her heels. Her exit delayed the start of the race, but was not loudly booed. More than one person recognized her, it seemed.
“Aha! I didn’t see you there, pretty bird!” Le Danse called. “But I thought I smelled sour cunt. If you like, you and your little pet may take the place of any two contestants you choose, but I warn you, you must restrict yourself to only one partner in the swallow’s race! No fair drinking them all!”
Loki honked laughter somewhere in the crowd.
Mara turned around. “I’ve let this go as long as I’m going to,” she said calmly. “The next time you speak to me, even to wish me a Merry Christmas, I am going to pop your brain like a balloon. It won’t kill you. You want to think about what it will mean for you to live the rest of your life here, entirely at the mercy of others.”
He didn’t believe her, and as the crowd around them ooo-ed and laughed and called mocking warnings, he opened his mouth to call her bluff. And then he hesitated, remembering a certain man in a white robe, the man who had been the first to call her a pretty bird, what else, a swallow. She had turned and looked at him, just looked, and the man had flinched and struck his head and…and had he only flinched? Had he even struck his head? He had fallen into Danse’s lap, he remembered that, and the next day he was still there on the ephebeum floor, stripped of his robe and his hair, until the cold and the damp took him, and then he was just gone.
Someone had even taken his hair…
No, he did not believe her, but there was no point in humoring her either. Le Danse turned away, his arms up, ignoring her. “Let the triathlon begin!” he shouted, and everyone applauded him.
Mara climbed the wide stair to the Nave, and then to the lyceum, until their howling-ape minds and their carnival cheers were behind her.
“Thanks,” Devlin said again.
“You keep saying that like you think I’m doing it for you.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I know you’ve got a reputation and everything. I won’t tell people how you really are.”
Mara thought of the boy stripped and tied on his belly, watching her walk away. “This is how I really am, Devlin.”
“Right.” He winked.
Oh, for God’s sake. Mara walked a little faster, trying to lose herself in the knots of students gathering in the central cavern outside the classrooms. It wasn’t really crowded enough for that, but then, most of the acolytes were below, watching the race.
“Hold.”
They stopped, all of them. Mid-step, mid-word, motionless. Even Mara, in whom the habit had no reason to be ingrained. She looked where the others looked, back down the corridor at the Master coming toward them.
The ground did not shake at his approach, but it should have. That was how he looked, the first impression that he gave. He was a creature of stone, a creature to make stone tremble. It was his size—half-again as tall as the tallest student here. It was his skin—slate grey and pebbled as a heat-dried riverbed. It was his shape—slabs of muscle slapped like clay over four thick legs and a barrel-body, the inhumanly broad torso rising up to a domed, low-browed head.
“Bow not,” he snarled, as students bobbed anxiously before him. “Show to me thy faces. Trial enough it is to teach thee, pestilent ones, I’ll waste no more effort than I must. Hold, I say!” he bellowed suddenly, rearing that massive, saurian body and slamming his black hooves down again hard enough to crack the stone under him. He aimed his hand like a hammer at a cringing man in a white robe, his eyes blazing. “Aye, thee! Uncover thy head and show thy puling face! Ah, so I thought. I’ve had thee already, and so thou wouldst run, eh? Thou wouldst avoid me? Even me?” His voice kept rising, not higher and higher, but deeper and darker, until it filled all the space in the hive-like caverns and in Mara’s head. Sending, he was sending as he spoke, blasting these people with telepathy they weren’t built to receive, just to make them scream and slap their hands over their ears as he came for them. “Now I’ll have thee again, thou craven!” he roared, already diving in to pluck the pleading man off the floor.
There was an unlucky bastard, thought Mara, to have escaped running La Danse’s race only to end up in this demon’s grip. But for what? Whatever it was, it was bad enough that the race below was entirely forgotten. She started to tap at Devlin, but then got a good look at him and left the poor bastard alone. His face was not white with terror, but grey, an awful dishwater grey. His eyes bulged even as he tried to squint them shut. The corners of his mouth dragged down in a ghastly wet-clay mask as he pushed his chin out, baring his face in a rictus of obedience. She didn’t need to know what he was thinking.
The demon just kept coming, dragging the first student with him across the lyceum until he reached a wide ledge on the rounded wall which some of students used for a game-table. There, he threw his victim down, scattering play-pieces and burning candles, and caught another, scarcely looking to see who he took. Breath came out of him in a hard, impatient snort as he ran his eyes over the rest, as if the lack in today’s variety were particularly vexing to him. He took two men in rapid succession, shoved three more aside, and grabbed Mara.
His fingers were iron, each nearly as thick as her whole hand, closing around her waist and crushing the breath from her in an instant. He pulled her up off the ground, already eyeing the others at his disposal, and Mara unthinkingly grabbed at his wrist, as if she actually thought she could loosen the titan grip he had on her. His skin was hot, hot as Kazuul’s, and maybe it was the chill of her own that made him notice her at last. He stiffened sharply and looked at her for the first time.
His eyes were deep under the protruding crest of his slanted brow. She could see only glints of reflected candlelight far back in their shadows. His mouth, though, that she could see clearly: four interlocked mandibles over a black, fleshy maw, clicking in an oddly thoughtful way as he considered her. His mind, dark and deep as any Master’s, iron-bound and locked tight, had achieved a dim translucence through their shared touch; he thought of Kazuul. That infuriated her, knowing that Kazuul had put some kind of mark on her, more so since she was also intensely glad of it.
The demon’s arm lowered. He sat her carefully on her feet.
No one around them moved, but she heard…not whispers exactly, only a kind of group breath, more a sigh than a gasp. It was not a happy sound. It wasn’t surprised either. It was the sound of many people afraid to object who all wanted to very much.
The demon grunted, leaning back over his draconian body. His eyes stayed with her. His hand released its bruising grip one finger at a time, and he flexed them a few times, as if to rid himself of some lingering sensation her flesh had passed along to his.
Then he twisted around, seized a woman from the crowd, and threw her onto the table with the others. Apparently satisfied with this selection, the demon jostled his catches around until he had the first of them. He flipped this one onto his stomach, yanked his kicking legs down to touch the floor, and wrenched the hem of the black robe up, exposing the man’s pale and somewhat flabby buttocks.
She didn’t need to watch this. Mara glanced around, but no one else was moving. Most of them weren’t watching either, but had their eyes shut or their faces turned sickly away. She took a step; Devlin caught at her hand and gave his head a little shake, not raising his eyes from the floor.
The demon spoke a word behind her, something old and impossible to hear clearly. The next sound was a ghastly, crushed grunt, overrode by a thunderous roll of pleasure.
“Enough,” the demon rumbled. “Cease thy struggles. I’ll finish with thee in mine own time as thou must well remember. Nay, I know there is no pain upon thee, so lie thee still and savor the honor I give thee. To me, thou morsel. Here and let me taste thee until I am made ready.”
A woman’s strangled cry of repulsion. His laughter. The purr of ripping fabric. Then licking, mewls, contented hums.
> ‘That was almost me,’ Mara thought, watching Devlin watch his feet.
“Ah, you humans. So stubbornly set in the mold of your first making.” Heavy hooves slammed atop the table. One man was flung aside, another thrown down in his place. That same word punched through the air again, chewing at Mara’s ears. “Yet your flesh is as malleable as potter’s clay when the way is known. Ahh…see how easily thou givest way before me? And see how raptly thy fellows do bear me witness? If thou couldst but give me half this eye when thou dost sit my lessons, thee could Malleate thyself and spare me the effort!”
Malleate.
Mara’s head twitched towards the ugly sounds behind her. ‘Ruk,’ she thought, and felt again Kazuul’s hand passing over her belly, the way her skin had strained upwards. ‘It is Master Ruk who teaches the art of Malleation.’
Stillness, no longer than a heartbeat, and then the groaning thrusts and muffled grunts resumed. “So thou hast heard of me, eh? Come, then. Come behold mine art.”
Students shifted, eyeing one another, but Mara knew who he was talking to. She turned around.
He had the woman pinned against the wall, her face pressed aside under one splayed hand, her clenching feet dangling over his vast back. His mandibles were fanned open, digging at her soft skin, allowing the split tongue there to freely engage. His foreknees were bent on the tabletop, keeping him just low enough to weigh on the captive student he fucked, just high enough to do no real damage. The back of the man was gone, folded impossibly inward on itself, made into a nothing more than a stretched sleeve for the demon’s grossly swollen rod to move in. The force of each thrust sent fleshy ripples all the way up the man’s spine to his skull.
“Here is power, young one,” Master Ruk said, beckoning. “Gold is trivial. Youth and time…mere illusions. Flesh alone is power, and flesh can be changed. Behold.” He caressed the woman’s arm, then pulled a flap of skin out and reattached it at her hip in a boneless, pink sail. The woman screamed, but even Mara could hear only horror, not pain.
She stepped up and touched the waving sheet of skin, retreating to the Panic Room so that she could see it and still keep track of where Ruk’s arm was as he raised it indulgently over her. Beneath her fingertips, blood vessels pulsed with life. Tiny, pale hairs waved with her breath. The skin was smooth and soft as a child’s. “Could you make it into a wing?” she asked. “A real wing?”
“I?” Ruk thundered laughter and spread his arm wide, displaying the great bulk of him in a playful pass of his hand. “What need have I of winged things?”
“Could I, then?”
He grunted, looking her over again as he took another taste of the writhing woman’s sex. At last, he said, “If the ways of flight were known to thee, thou might easily. The Word and thy will are all. That is magic, true magic.” Ruk reared, drove the captive man beneath him back with a kick, and moved Mara gently aside to take another. Once settled and steadily thrusting, he beckoned her back. “What lessons hast thou taken?”
“None, really. I sat in on Growth once.” She shrugged. “I mastered Sight.”
“Ahh, then thou art skilled enough to make use of me, and still my virgin to despoil. Sight is no true art, child, yet essential to all art. Come closer, and See.”
She was already close enough to hear his flesh scraping on the table. Now she climbed it and stood side to thick, stony side with the demon, and rested her hand on his shoulder for balance.
“Flesh,” Ruk murmured (and it was Mara’s he saw, Mara’s flesh, gleaming white), and stroked the flapping fold of new skin back up into his woman’s arm, restoring it to normalcy. “Flesh is pliant by its very nature. It wishes to be shaped, child. All mankind shall be descended of clay, it is said. I believe it. Place thy hand here, my virgin. I have made it warm for thee.”
Mara touched the woman’s arm. It wasn’t warm, no, but it was soft. Soft… pink… It didn’t look like a real arm at all, but like an arm made out of Silly Putty. When she copied his stroking gesture of a moment ago, she left dimpled grooves in the skin. The woman, her face flattened against the wall with Ruk’s hand over it, couldn’t see what she did, but she had to feel something because she gave out a shrill, warbling moan and slapped blindly in Mara’s direction.
Ruk tapped the quivering stomach to silence her, licked distractedly at the glistening sex, but his eyes were on Mara’s hand. “Wheresoever thy whim leadest thee, so dally,” he murmured. His attention shifted briefly to the object of this lesson and his mandibles came forward for a playful pinch. “And thou wilt lie for it,” he said as she shrieked, “and lie silent, else I am moved to silence thee.”
Mara stroked again, now smoothing at the surface of the skin. She felt at the arm, felt into it, and got a vague sense of how it wanted to look, where bones and muscle and sinew were meant to go. She drew a thoughtful line along the bicep, then erased it and moved to the wrist. She pinched her fingers together on either side of the woman’s wrist, pinched and felt flesh part softly and easily, pinched until her fingertip met her naked thumb. She pinched a hole right through this living person’s body and still bones were sound, flesh and muscle intact, blood vessels whole and undamaged.
Fascinated, Mara drew her hand down the center of the woman’s arm, splitting it in a furrow so as to mimic the shape of the bare bones beneath. The woman sucked in a breath and shrieked so forcefully, she scarcely made any sound at all.
“Seest thou how easily Man is made to suffer change?” Ruk asked, sounding pleased. “Come, thou requirest not a direct touch. Only lay thy hand here and feel thy vessel’s entirety. Carve with thy will and not thy hand. Here, close thy useless eyes. Thou hast Sight. Use it.”
Mara obeyed, laying her palm under his arm against the woman’s jumping stomach. She closed her eyes and, as a spider feels prey by each twitch of her web, slowly brought her target’s body into focus by the quivering sense of each muscle, each vein, each nerve. She Saw the adapted arm, Saw the uneven shape of the bones she’d parted, and willed them to straighten.
Nothing happened.
Mara concentrated, honing her will from a light into a laser, commanding it to cut for her.
Still nothing.
Like a cloud, Ruk’s mind overlaid her own, watching.
“I’m doing something wrong,” Mara said, and was struck suddenly by just how true that was. It was wrong, it was very wrong. What if Connie were out there right now? What if she were out there watching this?
“So often a babe falls before walking is mastered,” Ruk murmured. “Yet the way of the step is not changed. It is only that one must find one’s balance. Thy endeavor is sound. Again.”
Mara flexed, seizing hold of the image in her mind of this poor woman’s hand and willing it to change, demanding it, reaching right in and savaging it into submission. Above her and around her, Ruk oversaw her struggles and shone out a consoling sort of encouragement. He was playing with her as much as the woman in his grip or the man gloving his cock. More than failure itself, being his amusement infuriated her.
She renewed her efforts for him, struggling in his psychic sight and being very visible in her failure so that his eye lay heavily with her and even his mating movements stilled, supplanted for the moment by this new game. Behind the curtain of his distraction, through the hand she still rested on his naked shoulder, Mara stole in and sank a skillful needle of her own into his mind, into darkness.
She went slowly, feeling before her with exquisite care, holding the memory of the half-grasped sound of that awful word before her, humming subaudibly through him for resonance. She touched things now and then, pools of almost-clarity that threatened to overwhelm her control and reveal her to him, but she did not have time to explore them. She followed the subtle quiver of that word through the lightless fortress of his mind, until she found the place where it originated, the place of Malleation.
Mara sank her needle into him, deeply now. She pulled and that same sick, stuffy headache started up, that throb of rotten
-tooth awareness she had endured in the Scrivener’s library, when all knowledge came without cost and no room was big enough to hold it. And all at once, it struck her how ridiculously easy this really was, and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why she was trying so hard. There was nothing to it, as easy as drawing a picture with a pen. Just know what you want…and draw.
“Ah, excellent!”
Mara opened her eyes and saw the woman’s hand stretching out, the fingers elongating until they were nearly equal to the length of her mutilated forearm. She could twist them around if she wanted, she knew that now. She could stretch out the skin, hollow out the bones, make it a real wing. If she wanted to. It seemed kind of pointless now.
She looked up at Ruk and Saw the shape he wore beneath, the mold of his making, so to speak. It was not so different from Kazuul’s, really. He’d been handsome once, in a terrible way. Ruk saw her, understood, and smiled at her with the mouth he no longer had, spreading one arm in a generous motion to behold him, past and present, to see what his will had wrought with the power of one Word.
“Tell me,” Mara said.
He spoke it again and this time, Mara listened and made it hers.
“O thou rare and precious gift,” Ruk said, casting his used vessel away and throwing the woman down before him. “I have seen but two of thy heart’s measure in all the years of my life immortal. One wast damned for his ambitions.” He sank himself and grimaced as he filled the womb of the creature now clutching her arm and screaming. “And one, deified.” He pulled back and dismounted the table, waving a hand at the waiting students to dismiss them. “Thou art the third, and that is a powerful number indeed. How honored I am that I have been the first to pierce thy most sacred veil and see thee set upon thy true path. Remember me at thy Fate’s unfolding. Remember Ruk and, to good or ill, go on.”
He bowed to her, his hands together at heart’s height, then turned and left.
