by R. Lee Smith
The other climbers froze, some of them wailing out protests, but the portal that opened into the mountainside did not vanish, as some had believed. The light, and the figures within it, remained.
Mara, safe on her ledge, gave in to curiosity. She reached up and tapped at the girl’s mind, already receding into the mineral-rich baffle of the mountain. She caught a tangled glimpse of color, light and shadow, the ferocious joy of the victor, and the taste of blood in her mouth, but nothing telling, nothing really that needed to be seen.
And it was still such a long way to go.
Mara rubbed her shoulders, kicked ice carefully off each boot, and swung herself up and onward. She stared only at the rock beneath her frozen, bloodied hands. She kept her mind in wary motion and did not waste its energies on empty speculation. She climbed and the night passed.
Just seeing that the way remained open to them had a calming effect upon the other pilgrims. There were no other rocks thrown. After another hour (marked only because someone’s watch beeped), another climber reached the top. He staggered away from the ledge, raised his arms and roared. In his mind, he was a bear, an invincible and victorious bear, which Mara thought was a bizarre sort of connection to make, but okay, it made him happy, let the man be a bear.
Sometime between then and the end of the hour, screams came up the mountain from below. A pack of wolves had come for the corpses, and found the man and his broken leg. Mara gripped the rock and shut her eyes, not daring to retreat to the Panic Room, forced to endure the sight of teeth, the pungent stink of their bodies, the persistent way they circled and lunged and circled and bit and how it felt when the black one caught his leg and wrenched it back and forth and back and forth and then ran away, pulling the meat right out of his pant-leg with a shwooop-ing sound. Screaming, screaming, he didn’t really have the voice to scream forever, but when he stopped screaming, the wolves came skittering back to him, so he kept trying but the big brave black one came back and tore out the throat that was making all the noise, and after that, no one heard the screams but Mara and the dying man himself.
She couldn’t stay here, hugging the mountain. It wasn’t a ledge, wasn’t safe, and the hours were rolling by. Mara shook her head, shook it harder, picked up a handful of ice and rubbed it over her face. It wasn’t the first time she’d ever felt a man die, wasn’t even the worst and most painful way to go (which would surely be no consolation to the man who had just suffered it), and Connie still needed her. She only had one night and the night was almost over. Mara dragged herself into focus and climbed.
A third man reached the portal, but he didn’t get over the edge. Someone—Three! Only three can enter!—threw his climbing pick, which went end over end in perfect circles and dug itself in to the hilt square in the back of the man’s skull. Mara’s vision swam dangerously, eclipsed by a sudden sheet of white light, the sharp smell of lemons, and the meaningless fragment of memory that came to him as his brain split itself open—red ball flying green grass green and yellow and the dog runs runs and jumps and catches ball good dog o good doggie love is o love is everywhere—and then he was dead and falling.
Mara waited until the nausea passed, and then waited for the killer to reach the ledge ahead of her and rise triumphant into the light. He’d had another climbing pick. With him out of the way and only a few other pilgrims on the mountain, Mara gathered up what was left of her strength and made her final ascent.
Another hour came and went in electronic beeping. She knew the end was near, not because she could see anything—all her attention was focused on finding that next handhold, on keeping the strength in her weakening arms, on pushing herself up on her watery legs—but because she could see it in their minds, the minds of the figures in the light. She guessed she was only ten feet down. Not much. Might as well be a mile if the sun broke over those mountains.
The sky was turning blue. Not her imagination then, but the sun rising on the pagan new year. The day that stood outside the wheel of time was ending and the door, she was certain, was about to close.
She took chances. She told herself she wouldn’t and she took them anyway. Rocks slipped, skittering away into silence below her, but somehow she stayed up and went on. She could see herself now in the eyes of the watchers. They knew she was going to make it, and now so did she.
They didn’t say anything, these watching people. There were no jeers or catcalls, no cries of comradely encouragement, only silence. Their minds were ordered, but not disciplined, exactly. She’d touched the minds of marines, of policemen, of Buddhist monks. She knew self-control and self-assurance, but this was different. Quiet had been pressed into these people who watched her, carved into them. They were fear shaped into a mask of stillness, shaped until resignation became ritual. Mara thought, heaving herself determinedly towards them, of rabbits and the way they stand so still as they watch the car bear down on them. But Mara wasn’t the car in this analogy. She knew it and so did they. The car was all around them. They were driving at the wheel themselves.
Her hand caught flat stone, solid stone. The ledge. The end of the climb. The finish. She looked up now, for the first time, and looked at them. Men. Just men. Two women. Some old and etched by time, most ridiculously young and good-looking. All in plain black dresses. Robes. As in, ‘see how magic we are in our magic robes?’ She wondered if Connie had been impressed. She thought the answer was probably yes.
No one helped her up and over. She didn’t need their help. She staggered forward on solid, forgiving ground, into the open mouth of the tunnel. The other three climbers were waiting inside, as bruised and breathless as she. The American girl had taken her shirt off and had used it to soak up the blood on her face. Mara unwrapped her flashlights—batteries were dying anyway, cheap Romanian things—and found room in her pockets to wedge them. She could hear cries on the mountainside; the sun was rising. They were begging for time, alternately cursing and pleading, all without hope.
Mara touched the rock of the ancient doorway, holding it to steady her. She leaned out and looked for daylight.
‘Remember this,’ she thought grimly, and was instantly furious with herself for tolling doom’s bell. Furious, but she looked. She saw the slivers of glowing peach/rose sun rising like a bubble over the dark crust of the mountains. She saw the sky washed out to a pastel impression of itself, painted thick with bruise-colored columns of clouds. She saw morning come, saw it stealing through the sky above and reflected in the lake below.
Wordlessly, the robed men and women began to file inside. Mara let go of the doorway and went with them. While her back was turned, the door closed. There was no heavy grinding sound or resonating clang to echo in her ears, only darkness, sudden and silent, and she knew herself to be trapped inside.
* * *
No torches lined the walls of this passage and the sallow-faced watchers carried no candles. The only light came from widely-interspersed bubbles of glowing gold that grew out of the rock itself. Each was nearly half Mara’s own height, bloated and not quite symmetrical. The rock somehow came in right over the edges of these fixtures, if they were fixtures, and so gave them the tumorous appearance of something that had grown out of the rock itself. They flickered, not steadily and not often, but now and then, making the shadows of the grim welcome party and their new-come applicants dance high on the ceilings. Mara paused once, daring herself to touch one, but her arm was taken before she could and she did not resist it.
In silence, they were taken deeper in the mountain, past the last of the glowing blisters and into perfect darkness. No sound but their own footsteps met their ears; no voices, only their own ragged breathing. ‘Pageantry,’ she thought, and wondered how Connie had felt, walking this hall at last after so many years of searching. The minds around her were divided: some cloaked in that unnatural quiet, deadening the vague scorn they shared for these interlopers, the others jangling with trepidation and triumph in equal measure.
A light sparked ahead of them—a
single line drawing itself downward through the darkness. A door, opening for them at the crown of a slight rise. Light washed over them and like the others, Mara raised her hand to shield her eyes from its piercing glare.
Contempt struck her first: a watching, anticipant sense of superiority. She honed in on it, saw herself through his eyes as another bedraggled and ignorant creature, unworthy of the honor he had earned on his arrival. No, there were no peers here. He saw sheep and wished for slaughter, and instead he must sit here and give them welcome, he must take their names and set them down in the book where his own had been penned, he must bring them in as though they were equals.
Mara lowered her hands, glaring into the brilliance, but she did not see the man who regarded her with such disdain (regarded all of them, really). No, her eyes were yanked violently to one side, yanked and held, by the sight of something inhuman.
The Scholomance was run by demons, Connie had said. Run by the Devil Himself. Mara’s very limited and mildly condescending expectation had been of more people in robes, perhaps more garish ones. Her equally limited and condescending experience of demons depicted in the media were always rather cartoonish to her mind: red skin or maybe black, yellow or red contact lenses, pasted-on horns, a computer-generated tail and wings dubbed on in the final edit. Comic-book demons, in other words. Men in costumes.
This was not a costume. Nor was it a man.
Oh, but he might have been. He stood very much like a man, on two legs. He had two arms, very long and thin, but arms for all of that, folded across his chest so that his bony, blackened hands rested on opposite shoulders. He had the features of a man—a pretty face with two eyes, a mouth, a nose, even eyebrows, although they hung well out in silky lengths so as to frame his sharp cheekbones. He had hair, fine strands as pale as spiderwebs that dropped straight and shining over his shoulders, with just one errant tress that cut playfully across his black and glittering eyes. A man could maybe dress up like this thing in a movie. People watching that movie may even laugh at the costume. But this, this was not a man.
He wore no clothes, although at first glance, he seemed to. From the hips down, he seemed to be covered in layers of black, plated armor of some alien design, with odd serrations and grooves over each snugly-fit seam and joint. On closer inspection, one could see those seams moving slightly, just slightly, with each minute movement of his body, and one realized it was skin. Those heavy, shiny, armored plates were him, his shell, from which his moon-white upper body grew like blown glass somehow affixed to obsidian. He had no nipples, no navel. His chest had all the sculpted look of muscles (in a slender, slightly effeminate way), but no hint of bones beneath—no ribs, no sternum, not even collarbones. His demon’s face was thin, beautiful, smiling welcome as he waited for them, and his eyes were the eyes of an insect—ovid and black, shining as with many facets, but these were in fact lights. Lights not reflected from somewhere else, but generated inside him and moving around. He had galaxies in his eyes. His mind…
Mara slammed her own away, not with a jerk and a bang, but softly, unhurriedly. Things that run are the first to attract the hunter’s eye. He did not seem to see her as she made herself fast against him, except as he saw all of them. His eyes moved over her and moved on.
Somewhere in this room, the man who had been waiting for them began to speak. Again and again, in different languages, sounding both impatient and bored in all of them. After a while, one of the arrivals flinched and stared around. The robed man beckoned him closer to where he sat behind his imposing desk and interrogated him in that other language. After a while, one of the robed watchers from the cliff-side stepped up and took the newcomer away and the man began his droning call again. The demon watched their numbers dwindle without speaking. His smile never changed.
“Are you English? Are you American? Canadian? Who among you is of this tongue?”
“I am,” said the goth-girl, and Mara raised her hand without looking away from the demon or the lights swirling in his eyes.
The man behind the desk blew out a breath, one more richly stained with derision than the others. The demon looked at the girl behind her, his mild expression unchanged, and then at Mara, at her and into her, past the storm of outer thoughts which assailed and surrounded her even here, to bump up against the little sanctuary she had constructed for herself.
His pale brows rose and twitched once.
“Over here, then. Over here!” Snapping fingers, summoning her as if she were a dog. Mara moved toward the desk, but her eyes stayed with the demon. “I’ll have your names now. You first. Give me your hand.”
The girl behind her uttered a sudden little yelp. Mara tapped at her without turning away from the demon and saw blood welling from tip of a dirty finger.
“Sign here,” the man said. Mara tapped at him as well. Gamaliel, he called himself. The archivist. Summoned once each year from his studies to bring the applicants through the portcullis and into the school. Gamaliel, but that was not his name. His name was Kaspar Cortoreal, whose only talent had been with words and whose favorite vice had been with women, and who had fled Portugal in the stillness and the heat of that long-ago night with blood pooling out over the streets. She should not have laughed, should not have threatened to scream, but she did and it was her own fault, all her own, and he had taken her watch and her money and the book, her journal, the little book where he first read in fevered wonder of the Scholomance.
“Take her. Go! And you. You! Come here!” Snapping fingers again. Mara put out her hand without looking to see what he did with it. She kept the demon in front of her and watched through the archivist’s eyes as he took up his pen and pierced her naked finger. Blood welled. He took her hand and pressed the wound to a fresh line in the ancient page, drawing a bar of wet red to dry below the other names of applicants before her, applicants far more worthy. “Give me your name,” he said, releasing her. He wiped his pen and dipped it in ink. “Name! Now! Have I all day to spend ungluing the slack lips of foolish sluts who cannot even speak their names? Give me your name!”
“Kaspar Cortoreal,” she said, and the archivist cut a black gash of shock through the page.
The demon’s head tipped, regarding her from an angle, like a bird will do, or a bug. His hair moved, rippling as if in the wind, but there was no breeze here.
“What are you?” Mara asked.
The lights in the demon’s eyes sparked and faded, like fireflies in a field. He did not reply.
“Here,” said the archivist, quietly now, subdued. “Take her.”
A hand touched her arm. One of the plain-robed watchers, one of the women, waiting to lead her away, but going meant turning her back on the demon and Mara wasn’t ready to do that yet.
“What is he?” she demanded, turning on the woman who held her.
“He is a Master of the Scholomance,” the woman said. She tried to sound haughty, as if the question were beneath contempt, but inside, she was taken aback by this pale-eyed stranger who asked questions as with ignorance, but without fear.
That was all the answer Mara was going to get, but she guessed it was answer enough. The women believed what she said, believed they were in the Scholomance, that place of evil legend, and she believed this creature in Man’s image was one of its inhuman Masters. Nowhere in the mind yawning open before her was even a hint of doubt or disbelief.
The archivist had moved on to other languages, trying to ignore her, to ignore the fears and memories stirred up by the sound of his name in the stranger’s mouth. He waved them away, the woman who held her more than Mara herself, cursing them both in another tongue. The woman, recovered and embarrassed, grabbed Mara’s wrist and wrenched it, trying to pull her away, to make her stumble after like an errant child in a schoolroom. Mara sensed it coming, got moving in time to rob her of the worst of it, so that her arm got a good yank and that was all. She looked at the demon once more as she was towed to a passageway and he looked back at her, still smiling as he inclined
his head for farewell.
One of the Masters, the woman had said. There were more.
Mara was taken to a small chamber, lit by another of those grossly-swollen blisters of glowing light, and bare except for a large wooden box on the floor, opened and empty.
“Remove your clothing. Put everything in here. All the things you wear. All that you possess.” The woman rolled her eyes at Mara’s hesitation. “You will have it all back when you leave this place.”
“Not everyone leaves,” Mara said.
The woman smiled unpleasantly. “Then we’ll burn it for you. Hurry up. I have better things to do than herd stubborn sheep like you.”
Mara undressed. She watched her body bare itself through the woman’s eyes and tasted a little envy, which she was used to, and a little nervousness, which struck her as odd. ‘Beautiful,’ she was thinking, not quite fearfully. ‘Already so beautiful.’
Mara inspected herself from this new perspective as the clothes went into the box. Beautiful, yes, why not? She’d been an object of desire since she turned thirteen, even younger in certain cases. Hers was a body of unreal beauty, the sort other women could not hope to achieve without paying for it, or at least working at it. Her hips were full, her buttocks shapely and toned, her belly flat, her legs firm and long and perfectly curved. Her woman’s sex was hairless, smooth, plump and taut at once. Her breasts were heavy, youthfully buoyant, and even. The chill in here made her nipples hard. Her pale hair, disheveled by the climb, fell in fine, wavy strands down her back. The sickly light shining out of the walls turned it orange in places, made her too-pale skin seem to glow. Her lack of embarrassment about her own nudity unnerved the woman further, spurning on that strange envy. ‘Another pet for them,’ she was thinking. Aloud, she said only, “Everything.”