The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  He came for the Scholomance.

  As he made his grim way towards her, Mara sorted through his mind, locating each image he had of this place. Using them, she studied the mountains around her and identified one of them from the Halloweens of his past. In this man’s mind, in the black of some remembered night, there was an opening in the cliff-side, midway between the peak and the lake. She looked now and saw nothing, not even a shadow in the place he believed he had seen some tunnel’s vast mouth open and throbbing with torchlight. She headed over anyway. People could lie and eyes could be deceived, but thoughts were impossible to fake.

  She was standing at the bottom, where the lake met the mountain, looking up at a sheer face of rock when he saw her. He was neither surprised nor pleased to find company, but in those first moments, believing he had caught her unawares, he contemplated, in foreign words but explicit imagery, how best to sneak up and kill her.

  Mara looked at him.

  He stared back at her, savoring his red thoughts, and began to make up his camp.

  Before dark, they were joined by another man, one whose mind spoke some sort of French far too rapidly for Mara’s halfhearted high school studies to follow. Nevertheless, the word Scholomance was clear, and so was his intention. He was out of shape, out of breath, and badly startled by the presence of strangers here before him, yet seeing their tents, set up his own and waited.

  All through the night, people closed in on them, some staggering through the dark in vague search patterns, others coming in bullet-straight lines towards this most particular peak. Mara watched them from the Panic Room, resting her body while keeping the more sinister of her two companions under close mental observation. Twice, he got up with murder in mind; twice she woke and put a hand on her knife, letting him see her see him. Although he had many opportunities, he never went after the French guy. He apparently saw Mara as his only real competition. She couldn’t help but feel a little flattered.

  It rained the next day, all day. The wind blew fantastically cold. In the Panic Room, none of this had any effect that she could feel, so she stayed there, monitoring her body’s condition without any of its discomforts and making sure it was kept fit in case Mr. Murder made a run on her. Four more people trickled in at four separate hours. Three were American, and one of these, the only other girl Mara saw or even sensed out there. They immediately grouped up, united by a common language. Mara pretended not to understand them when they hailed her, but she watched them make their communal camp. They had a bottle to pass, and later, little dried mushrooms and some good, pungent reefer. They talked about the Devil in adoring tones, about deathrock and shoegazing, about nihilism and Baudelaire, but after dark, the talk died. They emptied the bottle and then just looked at each other. The fat man who spoke French tried to go over and sit with them, but they turned him out with jeering laughter, and he went into his tent and did not come out again.

  Midnight. Someone’s watch beeped. The Americans looked up at the mountain. They talked a little more, smoked another two joints between them, and went to their separate tents. So did Mara. So, eventually, did Mr. Murder, but his thoughts stayed with her and stayed dark.

  There were wolves in the mountains somewhere. They howled to each other, the sound deceptively close as it bounced and rolled over rock, and the wind howled back, shaking the tents. The lake slapped at the stony shore. No one slept but Mara.

  The fat French-speaker stayed shivering in his sleeping bag and cried a little, off and on. The other guy poured some pills into his shaking hand and washed them down with a fifth of vodka. Eventually, one of the Americans slipped out of his tent and across camp. The girl didn’t mind waking up for him. They had loveless, frightened sex, and he returned to his own tent. The other American went next, to the same welcome, the same silent return. Mr. Murder lay awake thinking they would all be asleep in another hour or so and it would be the work of a few minutes and his sharp knife. This was no longer the idle hostility of a man surprised by strangers, but a real plan and she supposed she’d better deal with it.

  Mara woke herself up and walked barefoot to Mr. Murder’s tent. He had the knife in his hand already when she let herself in, but seemed reluctant to use it when she pulled her shirt over her head and dropped it on his floor. She closed his tent, opened his sleeping bag, took his wrist, and helped him cut her panties away. She licked the blade and he forgot about killing her.

  She didn’t talk, didn’t react to his whispers or his attempts to embrace her, but she gave him things to think about, even things he didn’t particularly want to think about. The human mind can desire many things that repel it, and once a seed is planted under the right conditions, it almost always grows. It stopped being fun for him. She got on top and pushed him down, staring into his eyes as he lay motionless and panting beneath her, and made him remember every sordid, shameful, secret pleasure as she moved. He began to think she wasn’t human, began to be afraid. She rode him harder, let her fingernails dig into his chest and draw tiny dots of blood, but he was too far gone to move. He saw fangs in her mouth, thought her eyes were filled with moonlight. He came crying and she grabbed his throat and leaned in close, letting him believe whatever he wanted to believe about what was coming next, how it would end for him, where he would go after.

  Then she kissed him, her lips shut and her eyes open wide. She got up, put her shirt on, and left without ever speaking.

  He packed up and left soon afterwards.

  Mara slept.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The others were up with daylight, but Mara made herself stay under and at rest until well after noon. It was apt to be a long, difficult night. When she did rise, she didn’t bother breaking her camp. It would be here when she and Connie came back, or it wouldn’t and they’d have to do without a tent. Either way, its weight was bound to be too great a distraction. Mara was not an accomplished climber, but she knew enough to be careful of her balance.

  No one, it seemed, was eager to start up the mountain. Over the course of the day, four more stragglers had come in from the questing fields, but only four. She could sense dozens out there, searching the cliffs in mounting frustration as the day wore on, but they were ignorant of this location and it was unlikely they would come across it by accident. Of those gathered in the proper spot, only two had a clear memory of where the opening had appeared in years past: Mara had stolen hers from Mr. Murder, and the other had seen it only from a distance. There was nothing now, of course. The rock stayed shut against them and would remain so until dark.

  In the dark was a bad way to climb a mountain under any circumstances, and this was Romania in October. The wind, the cold, and the treacherously crumbling cliff-side weighed on her more heavily as the hours passed. She was tempted to start up now, while there was still a little daylight to speed her way, but knew that the first person on the rock was likely to start an exodus and she was certain the competition would turn bloody. Most of these people believed that only the first person to reach the opening would be allowed to enter the Scholomance that year. Mr. Murder had known, and therefore so did Mara, that they were wrong, but there would be no convincing them. Best just to stay back and take no chances. Connie was depending on her.

  As she had often done since arriving at the foot of this mountain, Mara scanned the Mindstorm for the particular frequency of her friend’s thoughts, and again found nothing. She was not discouraged. Her psychic range was hardly infinite, after all, and it was always more difficult to reach through solid objects, particularly heavy minerals. If there were very many tunnels occupied by this fraudulent little coven, she might have a tough time finding Connie even on the inside. All the same…

  Mara did not often experience doubt, but here was a situation that went well beyond the normal crowd of people with the petty lies and desires she was accustomed to feeling. She had a rough idea of what was going to happen when the sun went down, because Mr. Murder had seen it all before, but after that?

 
Outside, the wind blew. The tent shook, deafening her physical ears. In the Panic Room, Mara listened to the uncertain babble of minds both near and excited, and distant and dismayed. They were nerving themselves up to meet the Devil out there, and she knew that she must either join them or walk away and leave Connie’s last letter unanswered.

  Around her neck, a cheap heart-locket hung as it had for half her life. Eight bucks worth of stainless steel and gold paint…Did it really buy the rest of her life?

  The Americans were mustering, shrugging into backpacks and harnesses, planning a joint ascent. They didn’t know each other, didn’t trust each other, but felt, perhaps not unduly, that they stood a better chance of success that way. E Pluribus Unum and all that. Forty billion nickels couldn’t be wrong.

  And that was pretty selfish, yes, but it had to be nobler than Mara, hiding in a tent and cold-bloodedly considering the abandonment of her one and only friend. After coming all this way, oblivious to cost and inconvenience, that she could permit herself to succumb to hesitation now grated on her. Succumb, ha, she’d thrown herself at it, wallowed in it, and why? Because she couldn’t guarantee an outcome. Of all the world, Connie had called out to her—not her family, not her priest, not the police, but only her—and here she sat, looking for a better reason than that to save her.

  Mara dropped down into her body and found it smiling. She guessed her mind was made up. It was half past four and the sun was going down. Time to climb.

  The last ray of sunlight left the sky as Mara zipped her empty tent up and walked to the shores of the lake where the others had loosely gathered. The sky held on to color for another minute more, turning the mountains to shadows and the clouds to clots of blood, and then it just seemed to give up and die. Darkness came with hungry speed after that, eating the rest of the overcast light and giving nothing back—no moon, no stars, only darkness. The Americans moved closer together without seeming to be aware of it. The other hopefuls shifted further apart, eyeing one another. Mara put her backpack down by her feet and waited.

  Stillness. In the distance, the lost and hunting stragglers grew louder as their emotion turned to desperation, but here at the foot of the mountain over Lake Teufelsee, the minds of the pilgrims of the Scholomance quieted to a subaudible hum of wordless anticipation.

  ‘The killing is about to start,’ Mara thought suddenly, and frowned.

  Sound, low, more felt than heard. It groaned upwards against the soles of Mara’s boots, then passed away into the hissing trees. The wind wheeled abruptly about, sending stinging sheets of rain into her face and plastering the tossing mane of her hair to her skull in seconds. That sound again, like rusted gears at the core of the Earth, like the explosion of some undersea volcano, like the death knell of a dragon. The Americans, pale even under their deaths-head makeup, huddled closer. One of the others broke then, broke and ran, muttering incoherent excuses in a language no one else knew. At the very edge of Mara’s perceptions, Mr. Murder’s brain sent out a plaintive pulse of anger, loss, and a piercing relief that wore Mara’s face. He would not be back next year, nor any other year. He would never look again upon the golden light of the UnderEarth, or drink from the cup of Solomon. He had failed in his pilgrimage and would live and die as mortal.

  High above them, the mountain opened. Not as a mouth, which was meant to open, and not as a door, which had been built to open, but as a wound, torn open suddenly and in violence. It bled light, unnatural light, like yellow paint poured over the black rock, illuminating nothing. How done? She didn’t wonder, didn’t care. The night was not infinite and the climb was not going to be easy.

  Mara’s first step broke the eerie paralysis that held them all. With a tidal surge, they ran at the rock and up it, swallowing rain and snarling at each other like animals. No, she sure didn’t want to be first, unbalanced and fighting for each grip with that behind her. Mara paused, watching the first lap of this race run itself to its predestined conclusion.

  The man in the lead was foreign, unprepared, unequipped. He’d expected stairs, for some reason. He slipped only a few feet off the ground and fell badly; the snap of bone seemed louder than his scream, and was ignored. The others swarmed over him, kicking off his grasping hands and punching at each other. The Americans, united by language and experience, went up like monkeys, screaming encouragement over the wind and covering great strides in a well-choreographed drill of pick, heave, clip, swing, and climb. They angled themselves out over the lake, directly below the opening and out of the throng. The made great time, enough to provoke one of the others into prying rock out of the crumbling cliff-face to throw at them. Once he started, the others took it up, and it was just a matter of time before one of the missiles—a rock the size of a big man’s fist—smacked into an American’s skull.

  Mara didn’t hear that sound, but she was close enough to hear the others shouting when the man fell. Roped together, he couldn’t fall far, but his weight was enough to stop the climb. Did they pull him up, check his wound? No. Did they cut him loose, keep climbing? No. They started throwing rocks too.

  Safely out of the crossfire, Mara was free to examine the mountain, plan her route, and study the opening above. There were figures in the light, dark figures in the shape of men. They stood without moving, watching the carnage from their high vantage. She could sense them, sort of, but there was something strange about their minds. It wasn’t that they were protected as much as overlaid by something else, something foreign. Feeling at them was like looking at an x-ray, seeing bone (disconcerting enough), but also the ghostly smudges that could be organs, skin, stones, tumors, and not knowing what any of it meant.

  None of them were Connie. Connie’s mind was still burned clear in her memory. She didn’t need to hold it up and compare it to know none of these were she. Nevertheless, hope that Connie was here somewhere, as yet unseen but able to be saved, renewed itself in her heart, and if it didn’t exactly give her wings, at least it gave her the will to keep climbing.

  The Great Rock Battle was winding down, its opponents exhausted and beginning to remember how dangerous that was now that they were thirty feet up a jagged cliff with what could easily be two thousand feet yet to go. The climbing continued.

  Mara opened up her backpack and started getting ready. Some of the others had brought helmets with lamps set right in them, and that was a neat trick, but they hadn’t been selling any in the village store where Mara had bought all her gear. She’d have to make do with flashlights and duct tape. Sure, it looked goofy—

  The overweight fellow from France or Switzerland or wherever he was from lost his footing and fell shrieking to a sudden, silent stop not far from the first guy, who promptly started getting hysterical again.

  —but it sure beat climbing blind. Mara switched each light on and taped them tightly to her body: one over the top of each wrist, and one over the toe of each boot. She tucked her knife into her pocket, took a climbing pick from the belt of the very messily-dead French guy, and started up.

  * * *

  Funny how the hours fly by when you only have one night to do something. By Mara’s best guess (and she didn’t put much faith in it), the opening where the figures waited was a good half-mile over a mostly sheer drop onto the rocky shore of a very deep lake. A bad climb, particularly when the other climbers were so determined to see the competition killed, but certainly not one that should take all thirteen hours of night to complete.

  But an hour went by, and Mara had gained only two hundred feet. Another hour added scarcely half that to her total. She had underestimated the cold, the numbness of her frozen fingers, the watery sensation that would seep into her arms after only a few minutes, no matter how long she rested. Pain and physical discomfort—conditions she had grown accustomed to avoiding in the Panic Room—gnawed steadily at her reserves. She couldn’t hide away from them now. She depended on her tactile senses too much to leave her body, even for an instant.

  Over the night, the climbers spread th
emselves out over the mountain and they were mostly quiet, laboring under their own efforts rather than undermining anyone else’s. Mara checked on them as routinely as she checked her own footing, making certain she didn’t wander within reach. Many stones were thrown. She could sense each one coming, of course, but there was nothing she could do about it except to try and protect her head. One of them clipped her in the ear despite her best efforts, and another hit her hand, necessitating a rapid retreat to a safe jut of rock where she could rest until she got her grip back. She did not throw stones back at them. As much nasty pleasure as she knew it would give her to watch one of the troublemakers plummet to his death, Mara was not a killer.

  The Americans continued to make the best time, particularly after they cut their injured teammate free. He fell like a sandbag into the lake, thrashed briefly, and was gone. The girl didn’t seem any more emotional about it than she’d been when she’d taken the man into her tent last night. The remaining teammates climbed rapidly, leapfrogging like experts in spite of the rain and leaving the rest of them far behind. Half a mile straight up was nothing to those two. They were there well before midnight.

  At the lip of their destination, the man stopped and unhooked the girl from his harness. Mara felt no surprise from anyone. He kicked her in the face; the girl swung her arm and buried the steel bill of her pick in his thigh. Mara, resting for the moment on a ledge, raised her arm and shone a spotlight on the battle for everyone to watch, and everyone did. They made very little sound, no doubt having exerted themselves too heavily on the climb. The girl took her lumps like a prizefighter and kept that pick swinging until his thigh was nothing but raw hamburger squeezed through a denim tube and her face was painted with blood. Her last blow caught him in the groin and it was all over. He lost his grip and dropped, managing only a single strangled cry that seemed, to Mara’s ears anyway, more angry than anything else. He fell, smacking meatily into the cliff-side twice before breaking on the rocks below. Hoarse, terrified squawks rolled up the mountain from the man with a broken leg lying at its bottom, and the girl finished the race alone.