by R. Lee Smith
‘Mentalism is not ‘easy’, my heart.’ He sat quietly enough while she touched his forehead, accepted her silent and somewhat belated apology with a nod, and then caught her hand before she withdrew it. ‘You never answered me. When did you learn that Word?’
**Yesterday. From Master Ruk.**
‘You went to class then?’
**I met him in the hall.** She reached up to rub her smooth brow, as if she could feel the indelible marks he’d spoken of when he’d tried to explain about truancy in the Scholomance. **Does that count? Am I marked?**
‘Your marks come from a far greater hand, my darling, and they are not for our accounting. But I am so pleased to see you studying, and with such success. There are no easy arts…and Malleation is among the more complex.’ He released her with a wave and she retreated across the dining hall, helping herself to another loaf of bread as she went. She had almost reached her place at the acolyte’s table when he struck again, a question as pointed and precisely aimed as any arrow: ‘Did you cheat it out of another student…or did you cheat it out of Ruk?’
The teeth of that trap were all around her. A lie was risky—sending thoughts wasn’t like speaking words, where lies were effortless—and silence would tell the truth for her. And the truth was terrible, she grasped that perfectly. Masters were set well above the students and there must never be even one of them opened and invaded. She had touched Ruk’s mind, and knew that all his weirdly genuine pride and ghost-pale affection for her would go up like so much flash-paper if he ever guessed she’d been inside him and pulled his art out for her own.
All this flickered through Mara’s mind, fully formed and brilliantly illuminated behind the Panic Room’s walls, in an unstudied instant. Without a pause, she thought back, **Whether you cheat or not, you still win. I told you that once already. I wanted a bigger room. Now I have it. And I want a softer bed.** She sat down at the table and looked at him, meeting his narrow eyes without flinching. **Tell me where to go.**
He didn’t believe her. He was himself too adept at sidestepping questions not to see it when it happened in front of him.
And he did believe her. Thoughts did not lie as easily as words, and she was young, far too young and simple, to deceive him so adroitly in the quiet of her mind.
Horuseps brooded on the dilemma, his long fingers picking his morning haunch of meat into bite-sized shreds which he did not eat. Perhaps she was not so simple, he thought, down deep where he believed he could think freely. Her kind did not breed cleverness, but once in a great while, there could be spawned a kind of dark cunning. The possibility intrigued him and aroused him. He thought of her in his theater, stealing in mere moments what took others years to grasp, what had taken even him many days in the bygone ages of his youth. He imagined her and the hulking Ruk together, bent over some faceless boy in a robe, he pouring power into her hands and never thinking that she might, while his great eye wandered, bring those hands to her lips and drink.
Not a single art was taught here that at least one human did not understand. Horuseps mused on this, dissecting his meat, and thought that she could have them all in a single day if she wanted.
Mara waited, patiently working through her bread. She could have told him she had no interest in pursuing every art. She didn’t see the point. They were useful only here, in the Scholomance, and only as weapons of fascination against other students. Once outside, back in the real world, with Connie, they would all be meaningless. What could she do with Malleation except maybe sit in some basement and sculpt statues for touristy roadside stands? What good was eternal youth after fifty years, when no one on Earth would ever believe she was that Kimara Warner anyway? It was magic, sure it was, and it was good stuff, but at the end of the day, what was magic but a handful of cheap tricks no one else believed in? Unless she wanted to rampage through the streets, Malleating roads and buildings and the bodies of screaming people as part of some quest to rule the world, and it didn’t get much more meaningless than sitting on a skull-covered throne, killing time while the world’s population stared up at you and waited for instructions. All she wanted was a more comfortable cell.
‘Transmutation,’ Horuseps said, breaking Mara from her private reverie. ‘Master Dalziel teaches the inexperienced. After you’ve cheated your way through what he has to offer, I’m sure he’ll direct you onward.’
**Thank you,** she told him.
‘You are always very welcome,’ he answered. And then he clasped his hands into a cradle where he could rest his aching head and look at her while she ate, wondering what she knew, wondering what put that hard little smile on her lips, and wondering who it was she softened her bed for…and if it were he…
* * *
Devlin knew Master Dalziel and was only too happy to take her to the proper theater once the bell had rung. In the hive-like front cavern of the lyceum, one mind swelled and shadowed all the bustling clamor of the students. Mara looked up as she followed Devlin up the stairs and there he was, at the very top, his clawed hands all that were visible as they rested heavily on the rails. The rest of him was lost in shadow, but she knew Kazuul was watching her. She glimpsed a dizzying echo of what he saw bouncing back at her as she stared into the heights—the cave spiraling up to him and back down to her, ringed all around with white and black robes in motion.
His mind brushed at hers cautiously, promising even greater pleasures, if only she would return with him to his bedchamber and give him every will of her.
It was disturbing just how tempting a thought that was. Mara ignored him, not even bothering to refuse. The thought lingered, then shut itself away, and the next time she looked up, the hands at the rails were gone, and he was lost back up in the hidden reaches where his lair waited to take him in. And her, surely.
Would she go? She thought so, when this day was done. An hour’s hard surrender to just keep him on his toes, and then back to her own cell, and if she could make him roar again when she left him, all the better. All the better, because she hated him.
But for now, a pointed snub could only soften him toward her when she returned, and lessons were as good a way to pass the time as any, even if the subject matter itself were not particularly useful beyond her immediate needs.
Dalziel’s theater was among the more accessible, reached by one of the first passageways, where it was the first doorway. It seemed surprisingly crowded to Mara’s eye, perhaps more so since each of the twenty or thirty students had brought some kind of prop with them: crudely-cut hunks of stone, dried lengths of split wood, long animal bones (she hoped they were animal), a small number of vases or statuettes. The teacher was himself absent, but not long after Mara and Devlin found a place in the highest riser to sit, he appeared.
Mara’s first thought was that it was another woman, or at least, a female like Zyera or Letha. It moved like one, hips and shoulders swaying in ways even real women had to work at. Her second thought, without prejudice or emotion, was that it was male and simply screamingly gay. Then it came all the way off the stairs into the dais and she thought it might just be a regular straight male after all, it was just a snake. That wasn’t right either, but it was probably closer to the truth than either of her first two thoughts.
He was pale, this demon, the yellowish not-quite-white of an albino python. He stood upright and moved as though he were walking and not slithering, which was all the more impressive since he had no legs. His body dropped down in a thick, ululating trunk to about floor-level, where it diverged into dozens of tails or roots or tentacles, all of them crawling over each other as they pushed and dragged him along, and so he should have slithered, but no, he insisted on moving his hips, on sashaying as close to human movement as he could manage. It was grotesque.
He had arms, two of them, and hands with fingers that dripped off the ends at various points and to various lengths, coiling and curling off his wrists in that same lazy, lavender way that went with the rhythm of his hips.
He had a long
neck, very long, and a ridiculously small head perched atop it, somewhat elongated, with two black eyes that wrapped around the sides of his skull almost to meet again in back. He had no mouth, or at least not on his head, but there was a long, bloodless gash on his bare chest that emitted a distracted sort of humming as he moved to the podium, and it was from that gash that his low, reedy voice emitted when he said, “I see new faces, don’t I?”
Of all the demons she had seen, and she knew she hadn’t seen them all, he looked the least demonic, in the sense of evil as physical form. Perhaps for that reason, Mara felt the strongest impulse thus far to beware him.
“Astregon, is it?” Dalziel ran one of this horrible hands thoughtfully along the lips of his chest-slit the way another teacher might stroke a beard. “It’s been awhile.”
Devlin hehe’d nervously and made meaningless gestures. His desire not to be singled out overwhelmed every other thought in the room.
“And you brought a friend. Gracious. I think I know you.” The demon sashayed around his podium and right to the lip of his dais, staring intently up the risers into Mara’s face. He was quiet for a long time, long enough for Mara to feel the pale tendrils of his thoughts slithering clumsily along the Panic Room walls. He didn’t react to the obstruction, didn’t even seem to know it was there. A telepath, but not a good one. Something about his mind felt unfinished…primitive.
“Well,” he said, withdrawing. “I was warned. Come down. Children, begin your studies. Quietly, please, quietly.”
He was turning away, back to his private chambers. Come down? Was this part of the class?
Devlin, as baffled as she, was no use to her. She left him nervously eying the other students and climbed the risers down to the dais. Dalziel had already slithered out of sight. She had to walk quickly to catch up, and she couldn’t help wondering as she did why he had stairs at all when a ramp would be so much easier for him to navigate. She pushed the thought at him, then sent it into him, but he did not respond. His mind flinched and rolled a little, like a freshly-severed tentacle will if touched, but that was all.
“Does my appearance repel you?” he asked suddenly.
“I haven’t been here long. I’m still adjusting,” she replied, prodding at his mind again.
“Ah. I sensed…not discomfort, precisely…but then, I come as something of a shock to many. I am not offended. I know that I am among the least human of all my brothers and sisters. Do you like it here?”
And what kind of a question was that? Too stunned by its audacity to answer right away, Mara instead aggressively tested for sincerity. The demon’s mind wrapped hers, neither attacking nor defending itself, and was impossible to read.
Dalziel hesitated on the stair and looked back. “Are you…I hardly know how to ask…Are you feeling me?”
“I thought you were a telepath.”
“Ah. No. I have some…small sensory skill. No doubt you sense this. But it is more a kind of sight than true mentalism.”
“Like the Sight that Horuseps teaches?”
“Not at all. If I may draw a personally abhorrent analogy, it is as the sight of a serpent, which sees deeper into the light than human eyes. What you sense in me is, I’m sure, what Kazuul calls my crude empathic spark. It is enough to glean the names from my students and keep me from the appearance of ignorance. Appearances are so important here…but I don’t need to tell you that.”
“No,” Mara agreed. “Appearances may not be all that matter, but they’re high up on the list.”
“Quite. Here, my private chambers. Mind the last step.”
The step, which was no more or less treacherous than any other, was easy to mind. The curtain cutting across it was white and filmy, and he’d left several lights burning in the room beyond. Like a gentleman, he moved ahead to sweep the hanging cloth aside. He even bowed, but his eyes remained with her, and his thoughts behind their layers of blind tentacles were anxious.
The room was smaller than Kazuul’s. She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised. Kazuul’s chambers were truly iconic, filled with so many curtains and pillars and carved stone screens that it was impossible to see the whole thing at once from any angle. But then, he was Kazuul. And this was Dalziel.
So the cavern was smaller, but by no means tiny. It had room enough for the bed, for those long gaming tables, for bookshelves stocked with volumes, not one of which seemed to have a thing to do with arthomancy or the binding of efreet. The walls had a sculpted, almost organic look, all swoops and arches. There was no aerie, but there was a glass window, opaque just enough to admit sunlight if it were daytime, which it was not.
And there was a woman here, propped up on pillows with the blankets around her waist, reading a magazine. She wore a black robe, had her hair elaborately pinned, and did not look at Mara.
“My Star,” said Dalziel, gesturing. The woman turned a page and read, ignoring them. “My harem, if you like.”
Mara stared at her, then at him. She could not imagine how the two could possibly fit together and absolutely did not want to tap at either of them and find out.
“It is an arrangement we have…perfectly within the laws. She takes a lesson each day at my hand, and at the end of ten years, or should she master my art, I’ll have to say goodbye.”
The woman glanced up, her expression of cool indifference marred by even colder anger, but then returned to reading.
“In the meantime, she is here, away from the…” Dalziel brushed his hands over his unblinking eyes fastidiously. “…unpleasantness of her peers. And I have some companionship throughout the dreary daylight hours.” He spread his arms. His fingers dangled like worms. “She’s perfectly free to leave, and she’s not been misplaced, by you or anyone. Star, you’re making me look quite bad. Say something.”
“Something,” said the woman on the bed.
Dalziel sighed. Faint irritation gusted across the Mindstorm and was gone. “Well, she’s in a bit of a mood, but I assure you, she’s no prisoner.”
He might have said more, but stood quietly aside when Mara approached the bed. She had the impression of trepidation from him as she fingered the soft, girly fabrics of the bedding, but neither of them interrupted her. Mara said, mildly enough, “Where did you get the magazines?”
The woman glanced at the demon. Dalziel stroked his chest and said, “Humans bring them here. She likes to keep abreast of things. Recent things.”
“I was under the impression all our possessions are waiting to be returned to us.”
The woman frowned slightly. She hadn’t thought of that.
“Somewhat manhandled,” Dalziel said. It felt like a lie. He knew she was psychic, knew she’d know, and that disturbed him. He hadn’t foreseen the question and that disturbed him even more.
Mara took hold of the blankets and pulled them back all together, all at once. She expected to see a chain, or some other proof of imprisonment. She didn’t, but she stared anyway.
“It isn’t what you think,” Dalziel said quietly.
The woman smirked, turned a page, and ignored them.
She had no legs. No, not strictly true. She had the muscle and the bones, however grossly rearranged they were. She had her skin still, even the rough circles where her knees had been. She had toenails, soft and grossly out of shape, but still there to be seen. She had something…she just didn’t have legs.
“Is this Transmutation or Malleation?” Mara asked, looking at the long, white tubes lying in the bed. Her voice did not shake. She was calm.
“Some of each.”
“This is her lesson?”
“It’s a work in progress,” said the woman dryly. The foot that still had toes—if that’s what those thin, boneless, tentacles were—rippled up and over the ankle of the other, which ended neatly and digitless in a rounded point.
“Did you agree to this?” Mara demanded, and felt again that faint puff of annoyance, from both of them this time.
“He likes to do it with someone lik
e him,” the woman said. She put down her magazine, still with that bitter half-smile, and pulled up her robe, all the way up, so that Mara could see not only the perfectly smooth and denuded patch of skin between her serpentine legs, but the slick and slightly pulsating bloodless slit that opened between her small, mostly vestigial breasts. There was a clitoris at the crown of it.
The woman dropped her robe, picked up her magazine, smiled.
Mara looked at the demon.
“Surfaces changes,” he said. “Far more cosmetic than you might think. Easily restored, when our time is done.”
“And nobody asked you,” the woman remarked.
Mara thought about that. Eventually, she nodded. “I apologize for intruding on your privacy,” she said.
“Of course. I understand—” He took her elbow in his soft hand as he led her to the stair, allowing her to feel that they were not boneless after all, no more than the body of a snake. “—one has a need to be certain. And some of my, ah, lesser-evolved cousins can be, well, unscrupulous when meeting their baser desires. I shan’t name names. But now that you’ve seen her for yourself, I’m sure you’ll be off about your business.”
“My business is in your class today.”
“Is it?”
“Tell me about Transmutation.”
“Certainly,” he said, relief throbbing through his touch. “But first, perhaps you should tell me. What is Transmutation?”
Mara considered it—the word itself, what little she’d gleaned from the students waiting above them with their teaching aides in their hands, the woman’s slithery and distended legs. “It’s turning something into something else,” she said. “Like rock into sand.”
“How marvelously refreshing,” said the demon. “Usually it’s, ‘lead into gold.’ But then, Horuseps told me you had an unusual mind.”
“Horuseps talks about me?” That was an unpleasant thought.
“He came to inspect my chambers recently, and to make an examination of my harem, such as she is.” Dalziel’s oversized eyes rippled in a faceless moue of annoyance. “She’s quite a good conversationalist ordinarily, and can even be charming when she sets her mind to it, but she’s having difficulties with her lessons and doesn’t think she’ll master them in time. She wants me to arrange an extension.”
