The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  There was only one place left in the mountain she hadn’t searched, hadn’t explored. It was a place that lay below her, a place in the dark, the only place, logically, that Connie could still be. She wasn’t looking forward to it, but having rendered Kazuul unconscious, she was more or less committed not only to the search, but to success as well. She only hoped she was strong enough to do what magic needed doing. There would be a lot of it, if she was right. If she was wrong, there’d be even more.

  No students shared her shadows in the mid-day hours between last-bell and first. No demons prowled the passageways looking for violators. The caverns took the echoes of her footfalls just as they guarded the sleeping minds she surely passed. The Scholomance kept a thousand secrets. Today, she was one of them.

  Mara passed out of the lyceum into the Great Library, empty now. She paused at the rail and looked down into the pit where she had passed her harrowing. The Scrivener’s desk still lay in splintered pieces across the center of the floor. Of the Scrivener himself, nothing remained, not even a stain upon the stone floor. They had cleared the tables too, removed the chamberpots, put away the completed books and neatly stacked the unfinished ones. She saw nothing in the shadows, nothing more sinister or haunted than any other empty library might be. All the same, she didn’t like to linger.

  Mara walked along the high catwalk over the library and passed through another doorway, onward and outward, into the Nave. She walked past the Black Door with little more than a glance into the dark mirror of its face, and on to the open corridor that led to the dining room. The double doors were open, the tables made up for the first meal, but empty, dark.

  In the narrow rear passage that led from the dining room to the secret stair down to the student’s dorm, Mara saw light at last, heard movement and the rattle of metal and glass. The kitchen doors, open. She walked, expecting at any moment to see that same thin and scaly hand reach out to pull them closed, but nothing appeared, and so, on impulse, when she reached the waiting doorway, Mara stopped and walked boldly inside.

  Crawling over the tables, silhouetted before the fires, clinging to the sills where they hung in and out of open windows with their mouths full of herbs, the grotesquely gaunt creatures who worked the Scholomance’s kitchen stared silent and motionless back at her. Spits stopped turning. Gnarled hands rested on half-counted plates or half-polished silver. Sauce bubbled, unstirred. They watched her.

  Mara looked over at the butchering block by the fire. The meat lying on its back with its bloody ribs pointing at the ceiling was wild boar, only that, nothing more. Its head was still on, sightlessly staring. Its four sharp hooves stuck stiffly out at the walls. The creature carving it crouched inside the cavity of its empty belly, gory chunks of pork in each hand dripping slowly onto the floor.

  Then, movement. One of the creatures slid all the way through the window and onto the floor in a servile huddle, its whip-thin tail lashing like that of a nervous cat. It slunk sideways to a cupboard and fetched down one of the golden cups the demons used. It dipped it in a bowl and then it came for her, peeling back its lips from its fang-crowded mouth and breathing wetly through its smile, if smile it was, holding the cup out before it in an inviting way.

  “Ma-a-a-sssster,” it was saying, or trying to say. It slouched forward on its belly, eyes averted, and long neck arched back, grinning as it offered the cup. Dark liquid sloshed down its arm, falling in thick clots to the floor.

  Mara backed out again and gently shut the door. The meat was pork, only pork, and it had probably been pork all along. Satisfied, she moved on.

  The ephebeum was silent, but the lamps lit for her, one by one, radiating out from her where she walked. The reading rooms, the supply chamber, the baths—all empty. And so was the garderobe, but here, she turned in. She walked along the channel of quietly splashing water to the gaping hole at its ultimate end and looked down.

  The smell of the cesspit came up to meet her, but so did sound, and the sound of water falling into filth far below had the echo of a large room. She’d always thought so. Now, at last, it was time to search that room.

  Mara knelt down and put her hands on the rock. She made it malleable, as much as she could, and scraped it back to form a passage wide enough for her to enter, with good, deep handholds for her to climb. She didn’t think about the next step, didn’t think about the smell, how it would feel under her bare feet or soaking up into her robe, if it would be cold or warm, or anything like that. She thought about Connie at the end of it, and the task right before her, and let all the rest fade away.

  Mara climbed down on her Malleated ladder. The light stayed above her, deceptive, pouring down in prisms as the water fell. She closed her eyes so they couldn’t distract her and felt her way down instead. The rock was more honest than sight anyway. Shadows hid and depth deceived, but a mountain’s memory was absolute. Through it, she felt the room opening up beneath her, just as she’d felt bones and blood vessels in their natural place in the bodies she had Malleated before. Its dimensions were grounding. When her foot broke down through softened stone and into empty space, she was not surprised, but only kicked the opening wider before turning it all hard again. She rested there awhile, in the Panic Room, where the smell couldn’t bother her, and watched the Mindstorm.

  Something was alive down there. She could see close living minds flashing outside the Panic Room’s windows, circling aimlessly through human filth, unaware of her. Medieval castles kept pigs in their cesspits, she recalled, to eat whatever there was to eat and keep the waste from blocking up the simple pipes. Somehow, Mara doubted what she met when she dropped down would be a pig.

  Oh well. Time to find out.

  Mara moved slowly, carefully, down the chute she’d fashioned, letting her legs dangle out into empty space. She stayed in the Panic Room for this maneuver. It was a dicey decision; from here, she had only the dullest sense of her hands and the risk of losing her grip was great, but from here, funneling her body’s strength into her arms and correcting its balance was as simple a thing as watching a monitor and making adjustments to what she saw. She couldn’t do a simple chin-up on her own. In the Panic Room, she simply forced her arms to do the work as her legs hung, moving cautiously down hand over hand, until she clung right at the lip of the garderobe’s opening.

  Water splashed over her head, crawled merrily over her body, dripped from her toes. Mara listened. She figured the surface of the cesspit was about three feet below her toes, maybe as much as five, but it was deep, very deep and wide. All four garderobes emptied into this one room, and with a thousand or so students to service, that made for a lot of raw material. Of course, she had only the rock’s memory to go by and the rock couldn’t tell her if she’d find a solid mass of compacted waste to stand on, or a vat of piss to swim through, or—a black possibility, but one that had to be considered—a sucking pit of thick sludge where she could do neither, but only drop thickly through until she drowned.

  But something moved down there, and so Mara had to believe she’d be able to move too. The logic didn’t necessarily follow, but what a person believed didn’t have to obey facts. That was one of the great things about the human brain. Mara flexed her toes a few times, took a deep breath and held it, then opened up her hands and fell.

  She splashed down into a warm swamp of fermented shit. Her feet scraped through a sediment of warm mire, then hit a more or less solid clay-like layer, and went out from under her. She sat hard, her chin up, grimacing with her eyes and lips tightly shut, but didn’t quite go all the way under. Not quite.

  She couldn’t do this from the Panic Room. Her footing was too precarious. Mara dropped reluctantly into her body, got the puking out of the way, and thrashed herself up onto her feet, so that she could puke some more.

  ‘Get a grip,’ she told herself furiously, spitting bile blindly into the dark. ‘Get a grip because you are not alone down here, and you had better stiffen the fuck up and get out!’

  Good advi
ce. She was always so full of good advice. How did such a sensible person keep getting into these situations?

  Mara allowed herself a final croaking heave, and then set her shoulders and began to slog grimly towards the wall, any wall. The sound of water falling overhead echoed a lot more loudly down here then it had seemed to up there. She couldn’t hear whatever it was sharing this pit with her, but she could sense them, sort of. She kept looking back, even though the only light was that dim cone coming down through the hole she’d widened, and it wouldn’t show her a damn thing unless whatever it was down here was dumb enough to—

  A long, flat-topped, tooth-lined head slid noiselessly into sight and paused there, angling back on its thick neck to drink from the clean stream pouring over it. Mara stopped too, partly because her reaching hand had just struck the wall and partly just to stare, because she knew was she was looking at. She guessed she’d known all along.

  They’d taken its eyes away. She supposed they’d decided the creatures wouldn’t need them in their new home. Or want them. And they were probably right. They had no eyes, but the rest of the features were still there, and no matter how horrifically stretched or shaped, they were still recognizable. That was a human nose, pulled into two long grooves over the top of its wedge-shaped head. Those were human teeth filling out that crocodilian jawline; some of them had fillings. Those were human ears before they’d been improved to flap shut against the muck if the creatures should submerge. It was a human being and its mind was gone, replaced either by the feral purpose its Master had installed within it, or by whatever ugly instinct was left behind in all of us once our comforting blanket of reason has been ripped away.

  Mara groped for a firmer grip on the wall and put her back flush up against it. The creature opened its ears and aimed them around, clacking its lipless jaws in a thoughtful way, searching. Another creature bled out of the blackness behind it, sniffing at the falling water and ultimately drinking. As it did, the first creature rose up out of the cess to paw at the air—walking upright was no longer a natural position for this thing, but its forepaws were still human hands, ghastly to see at the ends of those mangled, bestial legs—and then dropped down again with a heavy splash. Its tongue lolled, flicking like a snake’s. It swung around and faced her, dropping its head between its shoulders like a stalking cat, and it was then and only then that Mara saw the tattoo that used to be on the back of his neck, perfectly preserved by some demon’s sadistic whim, over the distorted muscle and bone of his new body. Not a rabbit and not a hare, no matter what he might have liked to think. A bunny.

  Mara stared at Devlin and made no sound.

  He pushed through the swamp, his head always level, his eyeless face always aimed at her. When he grunted through his teeth, the creature on his right raised its head and a third appeared just at the edge of the light. There may have been others beyond that, but it was impossible to tell. All their minds blended together. There was nothing of Devlin to reach for, nothing to appeal to. He was gone and this was what was left.

  Time to leave. She could Malleate the rock behind her and crawl inside it, but that temptation was a trap. It could be miles of solid rock, for all she knew. She’d exhaust her air in minutes. There had to be a door.

  Mara moved, her back pressed to the wall, her eyes fixed on the monstrosities that hunted her. She tried to make no noise, but the creatures re-oriented after each lick at the air. They were drooling, rivers of it running unchecked through their human teeth into the filth they wallowed in. They had no conscious memory of fresh meat, but an ugly, animal want for it remained, pulsing in them like infection. She wasn’t going to be able to fight them off.

  And just as she had that thought, Devlin jumped.

  He crashed into her, nothing but a heavy, reeking mass of scrabbling hands and snapping teeth. Mara grabbed at his swollen neck and fell back, smacking her head a damned good one on the wall and feeling his hot breath heaving at her face as he bit air in frustration. His skin, slimy with shit, gave her nothing to grab, nothing to push back. In desperation, Mara shoved her arm into his mouth as deep as she could, wedging his jaws open and useless as she grappled with him. It would be easy enough to snake her other arm around his neck and bring them together, either snapping the creature’s spine or crushing his windpipe, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. It was Devlin. She’d shouted her last words at him. She’d told him she wasn’t here to save him. She’d all but sent him to this place.

  She felt damned.

  Devlin flailed on top of her, choking and clawing blindly, until a second creature slammed into her from the side, its teeth savaging her shoulder. Mara dropped into the fetid swamp and came up retching in a tangle of fighting, snarling monsters. A third banged into her from behind, knocking her into a monster’s bucking back and nearly into Devlin’s snapping jaws. The third pounced again, crushing her in the middle of the mess, humping hard at her even as he savaged her robe in his effort to get at her flesh.

  Mara lashed out in all directions with a mind-slap, to no response. They ignored the physical pain of combat and they ignored her. All their thoughts were red with blood. Nothing penetrated.

  A Word. Mara made the monster under her hands malleable and pulled his upper jaw over his head, cementing his skull to his spine. She shoved him down into the muck. With no mouth to close, it filled itself with cess in a single sick gulp and dropped away, madly thrashing. Now she fell forward, driven down by the pumping, biting weight of the thing on top of her, kicked and battered by Devlin as he hunted for his adversary. ‘His power, not mine,’ she thought, and tried to focus. Blood to salt, she willed, and reached back to slap a hand against the thrusting flanks of the monster that rode her. It was her Word, but his energy that fueled the Transmutation, and he scrambled away in the next instant, ripping up the air with animal shrieks. The others fell on him in a frenzy, leaving Mara to stagger up and away, both hands before her, searching for the wall.

  She tripped over the dead thing she’d drowned and went down again, came up puking so violently she nearly blacked out, and folded onto her knees. Furiously, she ducked to the Panic Room, pulled herself back to consciousness, and dropped back into the body before it lost its balance. She came to in time to see a monster slam into her, see the teeth that closed over her face. “Bone to blood!” she screamed, and the bite that should have taken her eye and opened her skull instead became a sluice of hot, coppery gore. The creature dropped, mewling. Mara climbed over it and banged into the wall at last. She could hear the fighting sounds turn to feeding and could only hope that was it as she worked her way noisily around the perimeter, because she didn’t have it in her to turn around and look.

  Her head smacked stone before her hands found the jutting lip of rock that marked the threshold. There were no stairs. Even from the Panic Room, it was impossible to chin herself up. Mara stripped away the saturant weight of her queenly gown and tried again. She got her arms up and her breasts, badly scraped, then hung there, gasping. One of her kicking feet brushed the slimy back of a prowling creature, but it passed on, fed now and complacent. Nevertheless, its unexpected pressure gave her the adrenal boost she needed to heave herself up onto the landing, where she huddled small and panting, until her pulse slowed to something approaching normal.

  A door. There was a door. She touched it, found it dead/alive like the doors in the Oubliette, and ordered it open. Light rushed in, and like every other hero ever to escape Hell, her eyes rolled back and she looked behind her.

  Devlin floated face-down in the cesspit, still weakly undulating the best he could without bones, the brown tide of swampy shit slowly closing in over that white, happy, cheering bunny tattoo.

  Mara tumbled backwards into the room behind her and kicked the door shut on the horrors of that place. She wasn’t going back that way and she didn’t care anymore what the alternative was. Even lost and suffocated in the heart of the mountain would be better. She’d get over it someday, she guessed—she got o
ver everything—but right now, today, there simply better be another way.

  Light, golden and guttering, surrounded her where she lay on the floor. The lamps of the Scholomance, responding to her presence here, came to life, revealing more of the simple room she inhabited. She stared around at it dully as she gained her feet. A part of her had hoped for floors tiled in human bone, perhaps walls pulsing with veins, and writhing tentacles dripping down from the ceiling—the true face of the Scholomance, in other words, the blackened bones beneath the flesh. But if anything, things were plainer here, with straighter edges and brighter light. It looked disturbingly sane, far more so than the school above her.

  But there was a series of shallow pools cascading in a fountain down one side of the room, and a little dish of perfectly recognizable soap beside it. Doubtless there was always some backwash when the demons threw another monster into the cesspit. Mara limped over and began to wash, leaving scummy footprints behind her to dry on the stone. There was no sound but the playful splash of water. In the Panic Room, no flash of color interrupted the murky clouds of the Mindstorm. She would seem to be alone. For now.

  Her skin scrubbed raw and red with cold, Mara replaced the soap and moved away from her bath. Almost directly across from her, on the other side of this well-lit space, was a wide stairwell leading up into darkness. She tried to think of where it must lead in relation to the garderobe beside her, but all she could picture was the Black Door. She could go up and look at it to be sure, but standing here, realized she didn’t need to. It all made no difference now.

  Several tunnels led out from this chamber, none of them marked in any special way. Mara chose the one nearest to her, leaving a sudsy puddle on the stone where she’d had her bath. She could have Malleated the floor up to swallow it, and perhaps she should—she hated leaving so obvious a trail behind her—but her power was finite, and the end wasn’t yet in sight.

  The lamps continued to light up as she moved into the tunnel, illuminating the passage to a deeper and deeper degree, until it seemed impossible to her straining eyes: miles long and still growing, a funhouse reflection, pocked with seemingly hundreds of narrow doors shut against her. Cell doors, with slivers of windows to ventilate them for their unknown prisoners.