by R. Lee Smith
She saw a library. Just a library.
The room was not quite round, not quite squared. Egg-shaped, maybe. Its two widest walls were bookshelves, shelves that towered over her until the spines of those books at the top blurred into a single stripe of color. At the narrowest curve of the room were cupboards, some open to offer sparing glimpses of bookmaking supplies—inkwells, sheaves of paper, bolts of colored leather, unburned candles. At the other, stairwells rose out of this miasmic Hell. Students in black robes lounged at the railings, watching her and the other initiates suffering here below the way casually cruel boys will study the effects of flies once their wings are pulled. All across the floor, red-robed figures worked, sitting quietly at tables to write, dragging their chains behind them when they went for fresh paper, and occasionally conferring in whispers that were somehow perfectly audible over the never-ending screams. They had no faces, these initiates, only hoods pulled low over shadows. Their hands were blackened, gloved by ink. Some were bandaged and Mara knew at once, the way she knew so many things, that they had written their fingers, quite literally, to the bone.
For him. For the librarian. The Scrivener.
He sat at the center of the room, doing nothing: a great, heaving mass of wet, brown flesh, pulsing with dozens of open, lidless, frost-filmed eyes. He seemed to have a head, he seemed to, but the rest of him was just a mountain enclosed on all sides by a circular desk. There appeared to be no hinge, no access panel to let him in or out. The Scrivener sat, his gelatinous head bobbing slowly, complacent in his containment. His head turned blindly toward her. Beams of purposeless knowledge hammered against her and moved on, leaving her to stagger into a table.
He was the source of it all, him, the unthinking transmitter of all this poisonous, deafening thought. He radiated it. The air around him actually shimmered if she stared hard enough, showing her the flow of his idiot omniscience.
A hand stroked once down her hair. She knew it for Horuseps—knew it because she couldn’t not know—and she yanked her hood down and over her eyes reflexively. She heard him chuckle. The sound made her think incongruously of spiders mating. His hand came into view before her, his fingers gracefully offering a steel-nubbed quill. The tip swelled with ink, forming a single pregnant drop that refused to fall.
She took it and found a table with an unattended book, a bottle of ink, and a thick sheave of unbound paper. She touched the paper first—twice the size of a standard sheet, very thick and soft, it seemed more like cloth than paper. She’d had a letter once written on paper like this. She’d come to find the girl who wrote it. A girl who would always be younger than Mara, a girl who would always need saving. She put that image before her and held on to it, drawing strength and will until the trembling of her hands and the aching of her mind could be overcome.
Mara sat down. She opened the book. Breaking the Moon, it was called. It was not written in English, but she understood it anyway. She had to, here in the Scrivener’s service. Horuseps patted her shoulder and drifted away toward the stairs. Mara kicked her chains underneath the table where they couldn’t trip anyone, dipped her quill, and began to write.
* * *
The things she wrote were terrible things. She tried not to pay attention to them. She spent as much of her time as she could in the Panic Room, supervising her body’s work from this place of relative quiet. She got to know the other aspirants because they were here, all around her, seeping in through her pores, but she did not try to talk to them. They were not nice people to know.
Mara was given a cup at some point. The man who brought it was named Alim Muhammad and he had come seeking a way to summon djinni in an age when even he did not truly believe in them. Now he believed, but now he feared the summons. He did not want to leave and he did not want to learn anything more. He dreamed of the Black Door opening and taking him in with teeth made of fire. All this, Mara knew. She drank it in with her water. She ignored it and she wrote.
Bells rang. She forgot to count them, but she did rouse herself on hearing them to fetch fresh ink and a candle. Her movements were followed by the Scrivener. His huge head swung slowly after her until she stopped walking. He had a mouth. It opened to emit a saurian grunt. Part of his side bulged outward into a boneless arm that groped at the air for a second until he became distracted and took it back in, turning away. His interest was bearable only because there was nothing in it to touch, only a stupid intent without reason, absolute awareness without a mind.
Sometime later, as she dimly recalled being promised, bread was brought. In the Scrivener’s company, Mara could have no appetite, but she ate it anyway. The bread was tough, brick-hard and mud-brown, gritty. The man who gave it to her was named Shome Akai. He had come from a village of crushing poverty, father of seven starving children. He had killed one of them, his most beloved son, as part of a spell that he had been promised would bring wealth. It hadn’t. In the darkness, before his crime could be discovered, he had fed the flesh of his son to dogs, and then fled. Sometimes he dreamed of dogs with human faces, dogs who cried out to him in human voices. Sometimes it was a dog who took him, a dog who laughed with Master Madrek’s mouth and bit, bit, bit at the back of his neck.
Mara stayed in the Panic Room, making her body eat as she stared thoughtfully into the monitor that showed her these tangled, doom-swept thoughts when another flickered to life. Horuseps, coming towards her. She braced herself as best she was able and dropped back into her body to meet him.
She managed not to vomit, but it was a near thing. Mara stared into her open book and was a thousand miles away, a lump of newly-budded tissue and blood suddenly hooked and ripped apart, ripped away, and it was aware, yes, aware of pain if nothing else, and she was its weary mother also, back on this filthy table and thinking, ‘That’s done, that’s over again and I can be back at work in half an hour.’ She was fetus-pain and mother-relief and she was the infection already creeping in, the infection that would kill in three months’ time, but not before she spread the virus to another hundred unknown men, not before she spawned another swimming, mindless, hopeful lump to die with her in baffled agony.
A covered tray appeared before her. Mara looked at it, then up into the face of the black-robed student who had set it down. ‘Your name is Aaron Micheals,’ she thought without emotion. ‘You had sex with your sister once when you found her passed out after a party. And then you got her drunk to do it again, but she never passed out all the way, did she? She just got sick enough to need to go to the hospital, just sick enough to come back from it unable to talk straight or write or take herself to the toilet. You tell yourself you’re here to learn how to fix her, to fix what you did to her, but that’s not what you’re studying, is it? You’re studying with Master Letha, you’re studying the art of Allure, so that you’ll never need to make them drunk again, you’ll just make them want you.’
The tray was uncovered. Horuseps passed a hand over it, solicitous as a game show hostess telling her what she might win. Beneath the lid were several objects, arranged in a neat, tight circle: a jade frog, a silver thimble, a painted clay cup, a golden egg-shaped censer, and a scrimshawed shark’s tooth.
Horuseps spoke while Mara studied these. It wasn’t English this time. The words twisted in her mind, wanting to catch, but their meaning eluded her.
Horuseps waited for a while, then heaved a theatrical sigh, turning his hands up in a gesture of resignation. His palms were unlined. He had no fingerprints. He covered the tray and his black-robed assistant picked it up. The incestuous Mr. Micheals took two steps after the demon, bent unexpectedly to vomit down his own front, and then had to stagger to catch up.
At the next table, Mara watched as the scene played itself out again. The initiate to whom Horuseps addressed himself did not respond, not even when touched. He/She just kept writing. Horuseps waited and finally moved on. His assistant gathered the tray, vomited again, and this time fell sluggishly over in the mess.
Horuseps, without tu
rning, raised an arm and laconically waved to the stairwell. Mara tracked the general path of his beckoning hand and saw a silent group of students whispering at each other. One of them came forward, easing down the stairs with a look of repugnance, as if she were stepping into a pool of hot human waste and not a library. The newcomer made her way to her fallen colleague, covered her ears briefly, then picked up the tray and its strange artifacts, and moved quickly to the demon’s side.
The next initiate listened closely to whatever Horuseps had to say, then looked at the tray. His face, even the little bit Mara could see of it, was a portrait of anguish—a drowning man looking at a bit of rope dangling just out of reach. Hesitant at first, then with a sudden desperate rush, he reached out and took the shark’s tooth. He looked at Horuseps—the demon merely watched, smiling—and placed it with a shaking hand on top of the frog.
Horuseps glanced back and locked eyes with Mara, as if to see for himself that she was paying attention. His smile broadened when he saw she was. Then, without warning, he swept his clawless fingers across the initiate’s face, shearing it open to the bone. The initiate fell back, arms raised and wildly waving. One of his eyes split and poured down his cheek, through his cheek, and out his screaming mouth. He spat, retched, then seized the chains connecting him to this terrible place and began yanking and beating at them in a state of pure hysteria. His fingers broke. One of them may have gotten caught in a link and ripped clean off, but he was not aware of it and so Mara couldn’t be sure. He scratched and pulled and screamed and screamed, and Horuseps moved on, holding out his hand delicately for his assistant to wipe clean on her sleeve.
Movement. Mara jerked around and saw the Scrivener leaning out over his desk, his head unerringly aimed at the shrieking, thrashing man on the library floor. The front of his body spewed out an arm to take his weight as he shifted himself forward. He grunted again, a sound of grotesque eagerness, then muttered and sank back behind the desk, temporarily lost.
Another test, then. She didn’t appear to have passed this one, but at least she hadn’t failed. Mara looked down. The pen was still in her hand, still resting where it had stopped on her half-finished page: the formula and ritual for the creation of a bottle-bred homunculus, translated from whatever this was into English. Time, turning pages, and candlesmoke would wear away these words someday and some other aspirant would spend his harrowing copying it over, effortlessly turning English into his own native tongue. And Horuseps would still be here, playing his inconceivable games with thimbles and frogs.
“I play no games, young one. Not here, at any rate.” A thin, black hand touched the book, turned it slightly at an angle so that, presumably, he could read it. “Elsewhere, many.”
Mara straightened the book with a curt tug and wrote a few words. It didn’t bother her that he’d heard those thoughts. It was always wise to keep a few out where someone could see them, particularly if you know yourself to be in the company of telepaths. If there was treasure at your feet, one was far less inclined to dig.
“You look well,” Horuseps commented, still standing behind her. “Much better than your fellows, and heaven knows, some of them have had long enough to acclimate. Who is Ka-nee?”
Mara’s pen jerked hard, leaving a black fork of lightning across her printed page. Angrily, she wadded it up, and threw it across the room. The Scrivener’s head snapped around to follow it; he panted hard, perhaps laughing.
“Fear not, child. Your mind remains fascinatingly closed to me, for the most part. But things, oh, things have a way of slipping out in the library.”
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” Mara asked tightly.
“Not particularly. I dismissed my students early.” His fingers scuttled along her scalp. “And I would much rather spend my time with you.”
“Charmer.”
“Mmm.” He was quiet, but not still. His hands moved over her freely, imperious as a man stroking his pet cat. “Look around you,” he said suddenly. “I command it. Look and tell me what you see.”
No student may refuse a Master’s command. Mara tapped her pen sourly against the table and looked around. Through the haze of the Scrivener’s toxic aura, she saw aspiring students working. A few still had bread to eat. A few slept on their arms on the tables or lay in senseless heaps on the floor. A number of black-robed students watched from the higher floors—some with expressions of contemptuous enjoyment, but most watched only Horuseps and looked very much as if they wished to be gone. The Scrivener sat inside his desk, rolling his hundred eyes and grunting to himself in idiot joy. What did she see? What was there to see? It was the Scholomance, that was all. The world’s wealth of knowledge compressed into one room so that it could be made into shiftwork for infant magicians. Priceless books, books any one of those watching from above would have once killed to possess (and some had), now shuffled from shelf to shelf, practically untouched, essentially unread. She could be copying a phone book for all anyone would ever know.
“I see a joke,” she said, dipping her quill. “And it isn’t funny.”
“An astute observation,” Horuseps murmured, playing with her hair again. “But not quite what I was looking for. To put another way, my dearest, what is it you think we do here?”
“You harrow people.”
“Which means?”
“It means climbing a mountain maybe isn’t the best measure of a wizard’s potential. I suppose you think you’re panning for willpower.”
“Panning for…?” Horuseps trailed off as Mara fed him loud thoughts, images of mountain men scooping out the sediment of rivers and knuckling through the detritus for gold. He hummed pensively at the end of it, his fingertips tapping at her shoulders. “I suppose we are, in a way. In another way,” he went on, shrugging, “I don’t suppose we care. Such is the arrangement we have made. Knock, and the door must open.”
She didn’t inquire, although she knew he wanted her to.
He watched her write, not her hands, which moved in painstakingly level lines back and forth across the thick paper, but her face, as if he could read the book she copied there. After she had filled several pages (and had actually begun to forget he was there, due to the suffocating atmosphere of the Scrivener’s library), he abruptly cleared a place opposite her at the table and sat.
She looked up, seeing him all over again, and then retreated, dizzied and nauseous, to the Panic Room to continue her work.
Horuseps wiped away a stray drop of ink, then rubbed his fingertips fastidiously together while frowning at it, as though testing the ink’s color against his own blackened hands. “How long would you say the Scholomance has existed?”
“At least three thousand years,” Mara answered distractedly, pressing down a sheet of blotting paper over her newly-completed page. Whatever they were using for this purpose had a tendency to smear rather than soak.
“You say this because…?”
“King Solomon supposedly studied here and we know when he ruled. His was one of the first accounts of the Scholomance Connie ever read about. I heard all about him.”
“King…?”
“Solomon, right. Or Sulayman or Salomoh, or whatever his real name was.” She arched an eye up at him, adding, “If you can’t remember Connie from two years ago, I’m going to pissed if you remember King Solomon.”
“Forgive me, dearest, but we do tend to recall excellence when it stumbles upon us.” Horuseps smiled. “I’ve little doubt we’ll be given cause to remember you.”
“How flattering.” Mara dipped her quill and started in on a fresh page. Under her pen, the methods of binding ‘Spirits of Fire native to the Middle World’ were laid out in concise steps. Have the imprisoning object ready, and be warned to make it of lasting solidity and notable size. Bottles break, the text warned, and gems could be easily lost or stolen. Madness comes quickly to those in captivity. Beware of making the spirits in your service mad.
“So he was made a king over mankind…a good one?”
“Some people thought so.”
“And you?”
“I never bothered to look into it. He’s dead and dust three thousand years.” She copied a few more words, fought her way through a brief and blinding interlude of the science of anthropomancy, and added, “Honestly, I have to say that if he came here, the odds of him being a good anything are damned slim.”
“You’re here,” Horuseps said.
“I’m not a good person.”
He did not argue, although he did give her an appreciative chuckle. “So we do have legends among our alumni who seize even our notice. Solomon, von Brukenthal, Rangard, Crowley… Have you ever stumbled across them in your Connie’s investigations?”
“Some of them. Why do you ask?”
“An idle curiosity, my dear. They were not students in the traditional sense, but came to us, each one, daring to strike a bargain. The same bargain, actually. In exchange for limitless time among us and the freedom to leave uncounted, each swore to keep the legend of this school alive and bring new students to seek us…new blood, so to speak, to strengthen us in our solitude. We have not left our mountain since the days of its shaping, you see. The golden age of magic is long past and there have been many years when we opened the portcullis to no man.”
“So you let them go because they fed you.”
“An apt analogy. The bargain is well in our favor, particularly since none of them stayed long or learned much. Solomon learned the ways of summoning and binding and swiftly departed. Rangard was far more diligent, and did really rather well in his lessons, but one gets the impression he was not a patient man under the most ideal circumstances and circumstances were not at all ideal. Von Brukenthal scarcely left the library, but read all he could from the high shelves before he left us. Crowley, or Anhkafnakhonsu, as he insisted he was to be called, fluttered in and out of every classroom, but was repelled by the discipline one requires to master them, and soon scorned our company. You shall not find more devoted students than those we have imprisoned,” Horuseps added with a chuckle. “Freedom makes a man impatient.”