by R. Lee Smith
Light flashed across his eyes, as if reflecting the headlights of some invisible car. Just a flash, there and gone. “How fearless you are.”
“You could always tell me to stop.” She pushed a little deeper. He was warm inside, and wet, and slick, but for all that, it was not like feeling another woman’s vagina. It was more like feeling around inside a stab wound.
Horuseps was breathing just a little faster, or maybe it only seemed that way because his breath had become so hoarse. He watched, expressionless, as she went deeper. Laying her palm flat against him, she waggled her fingers slowly back and forth, seeking the walls of his almost-pussy, and finding what felt queasily like organs instead, floating loose inside him. Something slick and solid bumped her; she just managed to rub her fingertips across it, and no amount of self-control could keep her face from puckering a little as she thought of someone actually fucking this gash, sharing space with all these unknown and inhuman things.
Whatever it was in there pressed on her harder, moving forward like a living creature. Mara jerked her hand back fast, but didn’t step away. She watched in sick fascination as the plated ridge of his slit opened—the lips bulging outward before they parted—and a wet, black bar emerged. Perfectly smooth, slightly tapered, with a bloodless, horizontal groove at the tip, it more resembled an eel than a phallus, and it moved forward with an eel’s cold-blooded and hungry intelligence.
Horuseps moved closer, touched her wrist. She moved her hand back to close around the thing (it was so much better to see it, recognize it, then to feel it in the blind, swimming soup of his innards) and stroke him as he arched his head back and exhaled a long, humming moan. He relaxed, here in the open, the proof of his gender visible only to those moving around in the body of the library, and no one there was capable of noticing or caring. It was still a greater risk than he liked to take, but ah, she was so fearless…
“Why do you let people think that you’re female?” Mara asked.
Horuseps chuckled, his eyes still shut. “I enjoy seeing the looks upon men’s faces when they realize I am not and they are deep inside me, particularly those whose lusts I have cultivated with such care. Proteus has been a labor of several years.”
“A cruel sort of game.”
“I am a demon, dearest.”
“Your kind has such a strange love of labels,” Mara said.
This time, he laughed outright. “With every passing moment, I see better why Kazuul has allowed himself to become enthralled by you. I am not accustomed to this.”
“What, handjobs on the library steps? I should hope not.”
“Envy,” Horuseps corrected, crookedly smiling, “of a brother. Tell me, Bitter One, what is your game? Do you mean us to duel over you? To tear at one another with tooth and claw until we are moved to throw down your lost lamb and so secure your favor? It will never happen.”
“Do what you want to do,” Mara said, shrugging. “I don’t give a damn about either one of you.” She gave his cock a squeeze, using this contact and the hot rush it provoked to steal a deeper exploration of his clouded mind, then said, “But since you bring it up, what would you do for my favors?”
“What would you ask?”
“You know what I’m after.”
Horuseps chuckled, hissed as she carefully slid a fingernail along his shaft, and chuckled again. “The girl? I’ve told you all I know.”
“But you haven’t done all you can. You can go where I can’t, ask questions I can’t.”
“Ha!” His neck arched luxuriantly as she stroked him. He might have been an angel just then, with the light from above pouring down and that smile, that radiant smile, all his cruelty cloaked by pleasure. “A tall price you’ve set on yourself, darling one, and I cannot imagine what you might do to make such a cost worth my while.”
“Oh well.” Mara took her hand away from him and clasped them both together nonchalantly.
His eyes snapped open and his head came up. They stared at each other, and gradually, his surprise darkened.
“I don’t believe you’ve finished with me,” he said softly.
“Oh, but I have.” She met him without flinching, without anger, without hesitation. “Since you’ve made your unwillingness to pay so clear.”
“You are a student here.”
“You gave me no order, teacher.”
He wanted to. That was evident in more than his wetly jutting cock. He wanted her, yearned for her, more avidly than he had done in centuries, but in his mind, thoughts of lust were secondary to those of possession. He would fuck her, yes, but fucking her was incidental. He would have her, that was the important thing. To be his creature, his fascinatingly fearless thing…if only it were not for Kazuul…
Mara moved to the rail and leaned over it, looking down at the library, frowning. Distantly, she was aware of Horuseps eying her flanks, her bent back, as he masturbated himself slowly to climax, but she let those borrowed thoughts drift away ungathered.
Kazuul may be the undisputed lord of the Scholomance, but Horuseps was clearly his prime minister, and while Kazuul had no interest in Connie’s whereabouts beyond using them to keep Mara coming back to him, she still believed Horuseps knew something more. Maybe he didn’t know exactly where she was, but he knew something. She supposed she couldn’t expect him to pit himself against Kazuul on her behalf, but he could be a lot more helpful if he wanted to be. It frustrated her to have to see that potential in him and not be able to exploit it.
“What are you thinking now?” Horuseps joined her at the rail, his pleasures dealt with and his maleness once more secreted away. He rested a hand on her shoulder, a light and impersonal touch, tactilely unpleasant but meaningless. “Is it the Scrivener you study?”
Mara’s eyes had, in fact, been resting on the chaotically pulsing form of the library’s central inhabitant, but only because they had to rest somewhere. Now, however, she did study him. His head swung slowly left to right, from one great bookcase to the other, and his skin rippled with the blinking of his sightless eyes. He made an arm, his flesh drawing in on itself before bubbling out to form the appendage, but he only gripped the surface of his imprisoning desk for a few moments before retracting it again. It could never be easy to look at him, but even this little distance made it at least possible.
“Are you going to tell me again that he’s the same as you?” Mara asked, watching the Scrivener renew his swaying, senseless dance.
“I did not say the same. I said he is of the same substance. In that sense, so are we all upon this world. Even you and I.”
“Was he born here?”
Horuseps looked at her without expression. In his eyes, those ghost-lights dimmed and spun. In his mind, walls grew, dulling the sharpness of his alien thoughts. “Why would you think such a thing, I wonder?”
“Because I can’t imagine you moving him in.”
His caution eased, but did not vanish. “How perceptive you are. Yes, he was born here. He is the son of Zyera, Master of the art of Extraction, although I doubt she would admit as much to you, even if you were to prettily ask. He is an abomination, even unto our own eyes. Yet a useful one. Before his coming, we lost many years in lessons of language before those of sorcery could even begin. Ah, someone is hungry.”
The Scrivener made another arm, or a leg, and this time stepped all the way over his desk. He hovered there, swaying and grunting, and poured himself back inside.
“What does he eat?” Mara asked, eyeing the initiates. She didn’t see anything…wet…down there.
Horuseps chuckled. “I think it is not our Zyera’s disinherited son who hungers. Look there. Not every hopeful graduates his harrowing.”
Mara followed the line of the demon’s pointing hand to the loose ring of robed figures sitting around the Scrivener’s desk. Bent over their separate books, they wrote in silence, and while it was true that they looked a lot like the ones who had been there during Mara’s time in the Great Library, so it was also true that one
hooded guy in a red robe looked a lot like all the others. And then Horuseps caught Mara by the chin and gave it a short downwards tug, refocusing her startled gaze lower, until finally she saw it.
They weren’t chained to the tables, these figures. They were free to leave, if they wanted to.
“Some go mad,” Horuseps mused, releasing her. “And fall into the Scrivener’s keeping. He is not entirely mindless, you see. In some strange way beyond our perception, he is aware of them. He nurtures them. Perhaps even feels a kind of affection for them.”
The Scrivener finally made it across his desk. He moved in slow, rolling, humping motions to one of the scribes. His head bent, nuzzling at the figure’s back with what did indeed seem affection. His mouth opened, emitting a swampy sort of grumble. The initiate continued to work, oblivious.
“I find that I enjoy watching the Scrivener care for his scribes,” Horuseps went on as below them, something like a giant fluke or leech poured itself from the Scrivener’s mouth like a tongue, making ghastly little mewling sounds as it probed beneath the aspirant’s hood. “I did not care for my own offspring. When I watch displays such as these, I think of them, my Hori. I feel…fatherly.”
The tongue, or proboscis, or parasite or whatever it was, began to bulge and contract in silence. It looked, Mara thought queasily, like a cartoon fire hose pumping water. The hooded man wrote.
“My Hori are not considered abominations. Nor are they demons, as you would call them. They are simply lesser than I. More than mortal, perhaps, but not much more. Would I feel differently if I were to sire a true demon? Perhaps.”
The Scrivener finished feeding his initiate and stood, swaying and making that awful, boggish purr as his fluke-worm tongue swung back and forth, as animate and alive as an angry cat’s tail. Then the Scrivener bent low and that tongue slipped up under the initiate’s red robe.
“Do you see how attentively he tends his children?” Horuseps asked. “Never do they learn the magic that will extend their lives, yet they can live for many years regardless. And in all that time, never will their loving father allow them to know hunger, to know thirst, to be soiled. He will make himself their mouths, their stomachs, their bowels. They have no minds, of course, but as you can see, it is possible to live quite comfortably without one.”
So it would seem.
Horuseps waited patiently while Mara looked her fill, but when she at last stirred, he raised one arm, gracefully waving her on and extending half a bow. “Shall we, then? Or are there more questions with which to prolong your descent?”
“Isn’t that why people come here?” Mara asked. “To learn?”
“Customarily. But not,” he smiled, “the things you wish to know. Come. Proteus will be waiting.”
Down they went, and she could feel it as they sank into the heady smog of the Scrivener’s mind. With every step, her own retreated, locking itself away from the toxic seep of corrupt omniscience, knowing she couldn’t vacate herself entirely because Horuseps was here and perhaps watching. And so she felt it battering at her, seven billion voices clotted into a single roaring ocean, and did her best not to drown.
“The books I desire will be along that wall,” Horuseps said, and how could he be speaking so normally, when all the world was screaming? How could so much mindless, groaning sound be silent? Mara’s vision doubled, trebled, and came sharply into focus when she caught her lower lip between her teeth and bit to the blood. “As I recall, they are bound in green,” Horuseps was saying, already moving away. “There shall be sigils of Zakath upon their covers. Have you attended Master Uulok’s lessons yet?”
Mute, Mara could only shake her head, her breath burning in her lungs.
“Pity.” Horuseps reached for her, his eyes gleaming, to touch his blackened fingertips to her brow. To her embarrassment, she felt herself shrinking back—the first sensation of contact had been inexpressibly wrong, like being caressed by a blanket of centipedes—but he was already inside her mind, inside where she could feel him pushing through the Scrivener’s storm to close around the make-believe walls of the Panic Room.
“Just so,” Horuseps said, out loud and inside her, and she saw the sigil draw itself in fire behind her eyes. Loops and whorls and hooks, jagged lines and pregnant curves, simple enough to be a child’s crayon-scrawl, complex so as to require a lifetime’s study. She saw it and had to understand it, had to understand what it meant to see the mark and what it meant to carve it lovingly into flesh, to root it to mortal body and immortal soul. She had to see the monsters it was meant to make of the men who desired to know it.
Mara bit harder, drooling blood but taking reason back by the handful. She nodded.
Horuseps smiled at her, his face framed by his horrible hands. His fingers, smooth and brittle as bones, remained pressed to her brow. “Are you certain?” he asked. One thumb moved, following the contorted lines that pain had drawn. “Quite certain?”
In his eyes, he was already fucking her. Here, right here, with sanity like a puddle at her feet, he was in her in ways no one should have to witness, no one should even have to understand. Flesh was no more than a formality; he had impaled her already and he relished the squirm.
Mara bit, dragging herself together to the coppery taste of blood, then heaved her mind back and let it fly at him as a blow. A weak blow, maybe, but they said even a grizzly bear could be stopped by the right slap. “I got it,” Mara said in a hard, even voice as Horuseps flinched back and eyed her. She headed for the shelves, not staggering, but only walking.
There had to be a thousand green covers among the copied books, but it was a start. She looked for spines that seemed freshest, pulling them one by one to check their covers for the hated sigil of Zakath, and turning aside to spit blood whenever the storm took her too hard. This drew the Scrivener, which in turn compelled Mara to search faster, bite harder, so that she didn’t have to be standing right there when the Scrivener ran out that second sucking mouth to drink her fluids off the floor.
She found the first book on the seventh excruciating shelf she searched. By instinct, she opened it. Words became images the instant her eyes fell on them. She vomited, then staggered away with a sick cry as the Scrivener slid eagerly forward. She bumped into Horuseps, whose outer show of concern could not mask his laughing delight when their flesh touched. (o she is precious, precious more than opal in the sun, and see her bend, see her eyes revile me, how I would love to see those burning eyes when I fuck inside her, cum inside her, and lick the blood from her screaming lips)
Mara shoved the book into his hands. “How many more?”
He held up three fingers, consciously or unconsciously imitating a scout’s salute (“We pledge to be true, to God and our country,” and now every thought was a memory, every memory became all memories, and there were so many people trying to share it). He smiled at her.
She went back to work, yanking on unmarked green spines, her stomach still roiling. From the corner of her eye, she saw Horuseps doing the same, albeit at a more leisurely pace, sometimes even stopping to thumb some random volume or read some errant page. He found the next book an eternity later, and she, the third midway down the shelves. The last was still in the stacks, waiting to be filed. Mara snatched it up, her head now ringing as with the sound of a swarm of beetles. Then she ran for the stairs and to hell with him and what he thought.
Clarity came like breaths of sweet air to the drowning. She could actually feel herself pulling free, climbing from the muck into sanity, singularity. The buzzing of her brain subsided; voices receded to whispers and then became dumb. Mara climbed to the third floor landing and dropped there, still breathing hard, to wait for Horuseps. She was vaguely aware of him below, the same way she was vaguely aware that she now knew quite of bit of Mandarin Chinese. She hated the knowledge, this parasite of the Scrivener’s seeding, but she supposed she could learn to live with it. Even use it, if she had to. All knowledge was power, that was the hell of it. All knowledge was power, and
power corrupts.
Horuseps appeared, moving with dignity and unnatural grace, the books in his arms. “I thought you’d fled,” he remarked.
“Only as far as I had to.”
“Would it placate you to hear that you bore that better than any other I have known?”
“I don’t need placating.”
“Naturally not.”
The humor in his voice galled her. She straightened up and gave him another of her efforts at a bow. “Am I excused?”
“Of course. I hadn’t realized so much time to pass, so pleasant was your company. They’ll be ringing third-bell soon. Dear Mara,” he said, gesturing expansively to the corridor. “What must you think of me, to starve you so?”
“I’m not hungry,” she said, already moving ahead.
He followed. “Back to your cell then. Where you would be even now, had I not waylaid you, sleeping the sleep of the just and unenlightened.” He chuckled. It was a nasty, skittering sound, made indulgent by imitation and not by nature, but she cut it off sharply with five words:
“Like I could sleep now.”
The demon’s hand closed over her shoulder, closed and pinched hard. He turned her, no longer smiling, into the lights of his stare. “Our students are forbidden to wander the halls after hours,” he reminded her. “Even those fearless ones.”
“I’ll only wander as far as Kazuul’s bedchamber,” Mara told him.
It was a hook, barbed and baited. She felt it when he bit—a thought not of her own devising came to her of her hand dually on his chest and inside him, her eyes staring up at him. She hadn’t realized until she saw herself through his mind just how wild she’d looked in that moment, not calm as she’d tried to seem, but tense and feral, a pantheress about to leap.
“I really hate the library,” Mara said, cutting across the thought as expertly as a surgeon. “But it wakes me up. And since my meeting with Kazuul is clearly no secret, at least not from you, you can guess what I’m after.”
