by R. Lee Smith
The stone sailed across the cavern and cracked into Kazuul’s shoulder as he stood brooding out of his aerie. He whirled, roaring, blasting her with psychic shockwaves powerful enough to knock her sprawling, but then saw her and drew back, confused.
“You son of a bitch!” she shouted. “Do you think I’m impressed? Do you think I’m scared?”
He glanced back at the rock she’d thrown, baffled but restrained, and came a step towards her.
“Don’t you touch me! You’re a thug! You’re a murdering thug!” She yanked another missile out of the floor under her hand and threw that too. He slapped it aside, his head cocked, frowning. “You think you can scare me because you can kill his children!?”
His eyes dropped to her hand and flared. He came for her fast then, seized her wrist, and licked once at the bloody stain. His grip tightened. He spat, released her, and was gone in a bang of imploding air.
Mara gaped at the place where he had just been standing, then scrambled up and raced back out the way she’d come. She couldn’t catch him, she knew, and couldn’t stop him even if she could, but neither could she just walk away from the events she kept stupidly setting in motion.
Down through the lyceum, shoving students out of her way, Mara ran. The sound of Suti’ok’s howls could no longer be heard, not even when she could see the lights of the killing chamber. She burst in, certain of what she would see, and saw instead Kazuul kneeling beside the same dead hound she had. Suti’ok was still there, cradling the same limp body, watching with silent tears streaming from his eyes as Kazuul inspected the wounds.
Mara stopped again in the doorway, breathing hard from fury and exertion. They must have heard her, but neither demon spared her a glance, and she backed up, unsure of herself. Kazuul’s hand was at the hound’s neck, and his hand was much, much bigger than the marks left from the killing claws. One of the survivors brushed at her hand. She patted it without thinking and the other three pressed up close.
“What would thee have?” Kazuul asked finally.
“My sons, alive again!” snarled Suti’ok. “Nay? Then give me blood for blood, one death to answer every unearned death around me!”
Kazuul grunted and let go of the dead hound’s neck. Its head smacked wetly back onto the floor and he stood up. “What within my power?”
“Within thy power? Nay, within thy whim! Offer just what thou wouldst give, naught! I know better than to expect justice for the low-breed from thee!” Suti’ok spat, and groped to pull the dead hound more fully into his arms. “Whenever have I protested the offenses in which I am mired? How many centuries have I swallowed the souring of high-born insult and never vomited it out at thee? Thou hast made my sons hounds and set me among them for the sin of my bloodline, to wallow with them in blood and ignominy, and now! Now I have not shown enough shame to suit thee and so thou wilt murder them to teach me humility!”
“Thou wert not the target of this attack.” Kazuul looked Mara’s way, his expression dark and distracted. The hounds pressed themselves to the ground and slunk away. “Dispose of thy dead. Tend to thy living. Take no further vengeance in this matter.”
“I’ll take it and be damned to thee!” roared the other, tears dripping from his wolfish jaws like drool. “Let my accursed line end here if it be so much a burden to thee! I did not offer thee my oaths to see my sons made prey for the high-born!”
“Thou hast served me well all these years,” said Kazuul calmly, walking toward Mara and the door. “Trust me now to serve thee.”
Suti’ok bared his fangs furiously at Kazuul’s back, then looked around him, beginning and ending with the body in his arms, and his hatred crumbled. Kazuul caught Mara’s arm in a hard grip as the other demon’s sobs rose up to fill the air. They left him weeping, his clawed hands gently moving over the dead hound’s face, trying in vain to close the glazed and bulging eyes while the surviving nephalim came to press their shivering sides against him and add their voices to his howl.
Kazuul did not speak to her, not one word as he climbed three levels of the lyceum and then turned aside. His grip was molten iron, burning through her robe. His step was quick and sure. He was not in the Mindstorm. He was calm.
Letha had two students with her upon the dais, amusing herself by watching them pit Allure against one another. Flushed and straining and struggling to hold on to heterosexuality, the two men battled motionlessly and in silence, the only ones who failed to notice when Kazuul burst in through the open doors and gave Mara a shove to one side. They remained staring glazedly at each other when Letha looked up and saw him.
A thousand emotions crossed that perfect face. Not one of them was guilt. She settled on an expression of lazy indifference and watched through cat’s eyes as Kazuul descended the risers. “My lord,” she murmured, and smiled in welcome.
He slapped her.
Students got up and streamed very quietly out the door, all but the two upon the dais, ignoring and ignored by everyone.
“Serpent of the tree!” spat Kazuul, and slapped her again when she tried to speak. “Obscene stain! Unclean thing!”
Letha’s lips were bleeding. She stared at the smears this left on her trembling fingertips—like drops of pure silver over her bronze skin—and then at him, in shock. “Whenever didst thou make law it were forbidden to slay nephalim?”
He thrust a claw to her face, very close to her innocent eyes. “Mind thy words, or blood for blood, I’ll feed thy own, newborn and bleating, to the hounds thee left living.”
It was not possible for Letha to pale, but she grew very quiet all at once, all affectation gone from her posing. She stood small in Kazuul’s shadow, her beautiful quills flat to her body, and watched him pace around the staring students and back to her again.
“A cunning ploy,” he said, calm once more. “One I was never meant to see. Never would the son of Suti dare my chambers to cry the evil to my face. And never didst thou imagine she would.”
Letha’s gaze flicked to Mara, stabbing at her for a split-second of hate.
Kazuul smiled coldly. “Aye. Straight to me. To revile me for my murderous will, as fearless in her fury as thou wert craven.”
Letha blotted her lips, shrugged one rounded shoulder. “I throw myself upon thy mercy, o master, as I perceive ‘tis useless to protest in the presence of thy pet.”
“Again,” said Kazuul, his eyes narrowed, “or I shall give thy fate unto the hands of Suti.”
Letha sent another furious, fearful glance toward Mara, and then, shivering under Kazuul’s steady stare, she lowered herself to her knees. “My apology, lord.”
“Lower. On thy belly. Show me the scales of thy true form, viper.”
Her breast heaving, Letha bent and finally lay flat. The acoustics of her teaching hall brought her broken whisper easily to Mara’s ear, one word: “Forgive.”
Kazuul studied her in silence as time crawled and the two students stared each other down. At last he crouched, his claws relaxed between his bent knees, his head on one side. “If I must lose one,” he said quietly, “I would rather preserve the faithful low-born than the treacherous high. Hear me very well.”
“I hear thee, master,” Letha whispered.
“I will cast thee out into this changed world.”
“Forgive, I beg thee.”
“I will never have thee back.”
“O my beloved lord, I have offended thee and do repent.”
“To wander, as the mother of thy line was cursed to wander, or die as she ultimately died, the slave of Man.”
“I pray thee, forgive the foolish and indifferent act of thy most loyal servant.”
“Thou hast killed my last affection for thee,” said Kazuul and stood. “Make apology to him whom thou hast harmed, and manufacture some sincerity for if he demandeth it of me, he shall have thy half-born daughters from this day onward. Aye,” he said, as she clutched at his ankle with a wail. “To slake his throat with blood or to catch the dead seed of his surviving sons, I
care not. They are nephalim and deserveth my love no better than their duplicitous dam.”
Letha shrank back, shivering, and Kazuul kicked her outstretched hand away. “Forgive!” she cried as he walked away. “Upon my hands, I beg thee! I beg thee, o lord!”
Kazuul took Mara by the arm again and brought her with him out into the hall. The theater doors closed behind him at his gesture, cutting away Letha’s pleas. He stared straight ahead for a long time and finally faced her. “Why didst thou assume t’was my vengeance?” he asked quietly.
Mara pressed her lips together and shut her mind to him.
He looked away. “So.”
“Am I supposed to fall upon my hands next?” she asked, feeling her face burn. “Or do you want to wait until there’s another audience before you step on me?”
He said nothing. He was calm.
“I’m not sorry,” she insisted.
He reached up wordlessly and carved a line across his heart. Blood poured, slowed, and soon stopped, but he left the stain on his breast. It gave her no pleasure to see it. If anything…it hurt.
“Return to me,” he said at last.
“Why should I?”
“I forgive thee. I forgive even the son of Suti.” He shut his eyes briefly, opened them without expression. “Return.”
“And if I don’t?”
A hint of frustration marred the careful quiet of his mind. “Did I not keep every trust to thee? And didst thou not swear to me thy faithfulness?”
“I was as faithful to you as you were to me,” she shot back.
He spat out a snarl, started to stalk away, and then rounded on her and came back. “T’was not my bidding brought her to my chambers!”
“Well, you sure weren’t bidding her get her tongue off you either! I came back to you, Kazuul, and you let her put her hand up your skirt, so don’t you talk to me about faithfulness!” Now it was her turn to walk away, and just like him, she swung around after only a few steps to shout, “It would have been Malavan if I could stomach the thought of him! It would have been anyone as long as it wasn’t you!”
“Thou art mine,” he said, burning his stare into the wall above her head. It was not an argument as he said it, not a weapon, but an implacable statement of fact. “Lie down where thou wilt, thou art ever mine.”
“Watch me walk away,” she hissed, and spun around to do just that.
There was a flat snap of collapsing air behind her and suddenly he was in front of her, catching the neck of her gown in his fist and pulling her violently forward into the light of his furious eyes. “Thou art mine,” he said again, softly and with dangerous intensity. “I am thy lord, thy mate and Master! I am the sovereign god of all this mountain! Thou hast not a breath upon thy lips nor free thought behind thine eyes thou owest not to my benevolence!”
“Ha!” she shouted. It was the best she could do.
His lip curled. He released her with a shove. “Thou hast sundered mine oath to thee,” he said. “Yet I do forgive thee, and press thee not for what easily I might take. What further proof wouldst thou have of my love? Return to me.”
“Never!” Mara shouted, vaguely aware of how ridiculous that had to sound against his quiet voice, how she had to look facing up against this hulking, bone-studded, utterly self-assured demon. There were lights flickering all over the Mindstorm now; students and teachers together coming out of their theaters to watch this lopsided melodrama play out, and still she could not control her stupid mouth. “Get yourself a new dog!”
He thought about that, his toe-claws gouging at the ground. Then, warily: “Demandest thou…some apology?”
The offer struck her like a slap. “I don’t believe anything you say,” she managed, backing away from him.
“I have been too long in my solitary habits,” he said, advancing on her. “Forgive me, o my beloved. Say that thou dost forgive, as thou art already forgiven. I cast out words I do not measure, but I would not hurt thee for all this Earth. Not for all the kingdoms of Men nor even the love of God.”
“Shut up!” she shouted. “Shut up with that! Just stop it!”
Kazuul stopped. He stood tensely, watching her shake on her feet and glare at him, and then, slowly, he lowered himself to one knee. Students crept closer, demons drew back, and Kazuul only knelt and reached out his empty hand. **Return,** he sent, piercing her rising panic with his calm, determined thoughts. **I shall forsake all others if thou wilt only return.**
His open hand mesmerized her, eclipsing all other sight, all other thought. His open hand, and how it would feel wrapping around her own. His strength, his heat, his stone-rough skin. His forgiving hand.
Mara’s bare foot struck a jut of rock. She stumbled, stared at him, then turned and ran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He could have found her if he wanted to. She kept away from her cell, and never stayed too long in any one place, but she always seemed to come back to the lyceum in the end. She could have called it her search, but she knew better. She’d run from him and now she was hiding, and as much as she hated herself for both, she knew he could have found her easily. But why should he pursue her when all the mountain was his trap?
Too often during that long day and the day that followed, she found herself at the foot of the winding stair, searching the heights of the lyceum with her eyes and her mind, but he was never there. He tortured her with his distance, tortured her with the memory of his damned hand. Nothing he’d done yet had been half so chilling, and she didn’t know why. All she knew was that it didn’t feel like just forgiveness in that outstretched hand, it felt like finality. She could step up and meet him shout for shout in even the worst of his rages without hesitation, but she shrank from him quiet on his knees, and she feared his open, empty hand.
And still he left her alone.
When last-bell rang on the fifth day, she went to her cell to find a deep drift of furs and blankets waiting in the middle of her bed, as well as a golden platter overfilled with roasted hawk set in a ring of glazed fruit and stuffed with fragrant bread and onions. Never in a thousand years, Horuseps had said, so she supposed she knew who she had to thank for fine food now…but the fruits were apricots.
It didn’t matter. She was hungry. She ate and then she slept. She dreamt of Kazuul and Connie both, and woke not knowing which one she wanted anymore.
There was a new gown laying across the foot of the bed when she woke, and pot of tea beside her on the floor, still warm if not still steaming. And her cup, the cup she’d last seen sitting before her throne at Kazuul’s table, waiting beside it. Mara dressed, drank, and left her cell.
The dining hall was predictably filled with noise. She let it lead her in as far as the doorway, where she stood and watched students shove, slap and throttle each other for a handful of cold, greasy gruel. She realized in a distant way that it didn’t even disgust her now, no more than watching pigs at a trough. It wasn’t like looking at people, not even starving or desperate people. They were different somehow. Or she was.
‘Welcome,’ thought Horuseps. She saw his silhouette raise a hand and beckon to her. ‘We’ve saved out a seat for you.’
Malavan’s seat, he meant, empty since the night she’d first stolen it, but that had been a very different night.
**Everyone will see,** she sent, and felt the demon smile inside her mind.
‘Would we be showing them anything they have not guessed for themselves?’ he asked, his thoughts like gentle, stroking fingers. ‘You ordered them to their knees for you, precious, and they knelt. You can never go back among them now. Come, and take your place among us.’
She knew it. She’d had days walking to and from her pillaged cell to feel their watchful eyes and unquiet thoughts, their human dread of an inhuman thing.
Connie would feel the same way, eventually.
Kazuul wouldn’t.
Mara retreated, one hand gripping at her head as if she thought she could reach in and pull her confusion out. She walke
d, not seeing where she was going or who she passed, until she looked up and found herself halfway up the winding stair in the lyceum.
Halfway to him.
“No,” she said, because if she didn’t say it, she was going to shout it. There was no psychic seed in her, no demon’s trick to bring her in under his dominion. There was no reason for her to be here!
She made herself turn around, plunging blindly into the tunnels that opened off the lyceum’s central cavern. She knew she’d go if he came to her again, but she wasn’t so far gone that she’d go crawling back.
Not yet.
The tunnel was empty, dark and still. Her questing hand found a blister-lamp bulging out of the wall. She lit it with a tap of mental effort and took her bearings, such as they were. She could see only two theaters as the passage stretched out into blackness, and both doors were closed, either against the hour or against students of insufficient skill. She was alone for the moment, alone with its sickly yellow light.
She had nowhere else to go, nothing to think about. It was easy to become fascinated by its not-so steady glow, by the shadows that seemed to drift inside it, by the sheer incongruity of its very existence. She approached it, touched it, and was again vaguely repelled by the weirdly plastic feel of its bulging surface, by the elasticity it seemed to have when she pressed on it just a little.
What were these things anyway? It was one thing to say, ‘Oh, it’s magic,’ but she’d been here long enough to know that even magic followed rules. Nothing—with the possible exception of the Masters themselves—was truly supernatural, even in the Scholomance. However fantastic things seemed on the surface, they were all rooted in reality. So what were the lamps?
If they only glowed, she’d have never paid them a second thought. She was familiar with the concept of phosphorescence, even knew it could a natural property of certain minerals, so why not here? Magic would then explain how those minerals could have been collected into a single lump, focused as it were, and shaped for aesthetic appeal. End of mystery. But the lamps didn’t just glow, did they? They were dark where the halls lay long empty or unused; they gave off warmth, but only a little; they flickered.
