by R. Lee Smith
“I’ve never heard of Rangard,” Mara said, writing. “Connie might have.”
“Ah.” Horuseps tapped his fingers on the table, reading as she wrote. “There have been precious little pickings for quite some time, but we’ve started seeing an abrupt increase in our admissions. And a considerable decrease in the quality of the aspirant.”
“You’re on the internet now,” Mara told him. “Get used to dealing with idiots.”
“Three thousand years,” Horuseps mused, gazing at the shelves above him. “A fair guess, conservative by some eight hundred. Why do you suppose I mention this?”
“You like to hear yourself talk.”
“I do. But this in particular?”
Mara looked up without raising her head from the detailed image of the summoning circle she was attempting to copy. “Enlighten me.”
“You call this a joke.” Horuseps waved his hand in an elegant, all-encompassing gesture. “Perhaps so. But after nearly four thousand years of our own company, should we not feel entitled to make our own entertainment?”
Mara put her pen down and folded her hands in deliberate, sarcastic imitation of his genteel posture. “That would depend. Am I a part of it?”
She felt his surprise, though he did not show it. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid you won’t believe me, and truthfully I can well understand why not, but no. You are not. You, my precious darling, are in bitter earnest.”
His sincerity, so much more disturbing than his oily lies could ever be, went as deep as she could touch. She frowned.
“The harrowing is no true test of a student’s mettle,” Horuseps said, breaking her gaze to glance idly about the tables. “Every mortal mind breaks upon the Scrivener eventually. Even we Masters are not entirely immune to his infection. And the knowledge gleaned is, unfortunately, quite random. It may come the first day, the second, or never in a thousand years. Of course, one tends to learn first what one is exposed to by proximity, and so one’s odds of harrowing successfully are better than, say, one’s odds of learning the means of trepanning, although the latter has come before the former in some cases.”
“Is that supposed to comfort me?”
“No. Why? Did it?” He smiled at her tight eye-roll, and then reached to pluck the quill from her fingers, holding it over her head like a playground bully teasing a timid child. “I might make the process easier.”
“And this is where I ask how and you make some sleazy innuendo, and I either act shocked or mercenary, depending on what you’d expect least, and eventually we’d fuck—” She noticed his eyes narrow at that, compressing the lights within into white slits. “—and you probably still wouldn’t do a damn thing,” Mara finished, snatching her quill back and dipping it defiantly. “This is my test. I’ll survive it without your help.”
“So be it.” Horuseps shrugged his thin, white shoulders and stood up. He walked away, not hurriedly, calling his parting shot back to her as he went. “You should know, dearest, that I have never made such an offer before, not in all the years of this, or any other, harrowing. And here you sit, surrounded by those who would willingly pluck out their own left eye to have what you so scornfully refuse. When next you are tempted to bandy bold observations of cruel jokes, look at your fellows in suffering.” He stopped on the stair and turned back, no longer smiling. “And laugh.”
* * *
Day and night were one in the library. Initiates labored or slept or howled madly as they tore at their chains, and each hour passed the same as any other hour that came before, but Mara knew it was night because there were no students on the stairs. Without witnesses, Mara sat on the edge of the bench to which she’d been chained, and stared at the mocking open mouths of the tunnels above her. She had finished copying Breaking the Moon some time ago, but was loathe to pick up another, loathe to imbed herself so soon in some new nightmare. The Scrivener never slept. Even in the Panic Room, she could feel his poison clotting in the air around her, see him moving through the Mindstorm like flashes of lightning, but he was no Overseer to demand she work for him. She was free for now to keep to her own devices, even if she couldn’t quite hold to her own thoughts.
She could not see how Connie had survived this. She couldn’t see how she would, either. It didn’t particularly disturb her not to know. She knew wasn’t very imaginative, but she always managed to get by.
This was different.
Her mind wandered. Impossible to keep focus in this place, even in the relative peace of the Panic Room. Thoughts came and went and took Mara with them, and the harder she fought to control their direction, the louder their gibbering insanity became. The tree that stands against the hurricane is broken; the reed that bends is spared. Mara bent and let the wind take her where it would.
The Scrivener, wrapped within his circular desk, let out one of his groggy, good-natured groans and exuded a lump of formless flesh with which to wipe at some of his many rheumy eyes. His, yes. Not ‘it’, but he. One day in the monster’s service had made it impossible not to know the Scrivener was male—somewhere inside that mass of amorphorous flesh—and she felt no small amount of gratitude that his masculinity was really more of a genetic code than an ever-present sexual urge, as was so often the case with people.
Even these people. Even the initiates drowning in the Scrivener’s miasma occasionally erupted in pointless, unnoticed orgasm when the inundation of stimuli touched upon some carnal trigger. This was just humanity. People liked to believe they were logical, reasonable, advanced, civilized. Mara knew better. People were nothing but animals in clothes—rutting, brutal beasts whose first instinct was always to bite, to feed, and to fuck.
Mara didn’t need a harrowing to know sex in all its many faces. She could not remember a time when she had not known it. Sex, like death, was everywhere, even though people didn’t like to talk about it. The things they did like to talk about—niceness, for example—Mara was still waiting to see. Her father had been in many ways an honest man who saw all women through the eyes of an alpha predator, which made living with him after she’d reached puberty uncomfortable for both of them. Then there was her mother, by all appearances asexual, who had nevertheless filled her days with substitutes for sex and maternity, both of which she considered failed in her own life: she had failed to produce a son, failed to hold her husband’s interest in the bedroom, failed to raise a proper daughter. Between them, there was Mara, who had heard every lascivious and breathless speculation ever made about her, beginning at the age of ten. She did not date, did not attempt to form relationships or play the feminine games of attraction, but when the urge came on her or when it seemed the best way to solve a problem, Mara used sex.
And she was good at it. Hubris on her part, perhaps, but it been a blow to her not-inconsiderable ego to hear insincerity when told how good she was, or worse, to hear a man’s mental ruminations on how best to tackle that tricky leak in the bathroom sink while grunting away on top of her. She wanted a man’s mind to wipe white with pleasure when he came to her. She wanted him incapable of speech, incapable even of screams. She wanted him to be afraid when he saw her again, by God, and she wanted him to remember her every sweaty unfulfilled night for the rest of his life. And getting it was easy, when all you had to do was open his mind and look inside. Conversation was pointless in bed anyway. Everyone lied about what they wanted; everyone lied about how it felt.
The initiate chained on Mara’s right began to throw up, his mind consumed by hellish images, purging himself with greater and greater violence until pain burst through his brain and he fell heavily to the floor. The Scrivener began to rock and grumble to himself, easing further and further over the desk until he finally poured out and over. Mara got up and backed away as the mewling mountain oozed under the table to suck up the fluids, first from the floor, then from the aspirant’s robe, and finally from the man’s slack mouth. Mara didn’t watch, but even closing her eyes couldn’t shut up the image. Sound became reality here. Everything b
ecame reality.
Mara went to the end of her chain and leaned against a bookshelf until the monster was finished. His feeding habits did not particularly scare her, although the sounds he made were certainly nauseating enough. There were at least a dozen initiates here in the library and she felt nothing for any of them. Most were as utterly unaware of her as a piece of furniture. What few did dimly see her through the haze of the Scrivener’s mind saw only competition in a place with little room for it.
Perhaps they were right to feel threatened. Mara was still the only one of this year’s aspirants to have fought free of the Oubliette, which meant that everyone she saw here were a year or more into their harrowing. Horuseps said the knowledge gleaned here was random. She could have years ahead of her too, and she rather doubted she’d remained unscathed for long, if she were even unscathed now. The Panic Room had not been designed to withstand the Scrivener’s toxic storm, and she couldn’t muster the strength of focus necessary to shore it up. When it broke (and all minds break upon the Scrivener eventually), there might not be any fixing it.
The Scrivener crawled past, rumbling to himself in pleasure. The initiate he left behind was not dead, but neither was he sleeping. His eyes were only half-closed, and one of them was full of blood. A stroke, maybe? An aneurysm? Mara had no idea. Either one would be fatal, she supposed. In this place, an abscessed tooth could probably be fatal. It wasn’t as though there were a doctor on staff, or a pharmacy down the hall, or even so much as a bandage in the bathroom, if it came to that.
She should be more worried about that, but Mara had always been a fairly healthy person, even as a child, prone neither to the bumps and scrapes of youth’s exuberance, nor to the host of unsightly illnesses to which her age-mates were so susceptible. If something did happen, well, this was a school for magic, after all. Surely there must be some way to magically heal oneself. In any case, it did no good to sit here and stress over it. Mara believed in being prepared, but only if preparation were at all feasible.
But Mara rolled the initiate onto his side, just in case he had it in him to pull through. She was never going to be accused of having a compassionate nature, and she really didn’t care if he dropped dead on his own, but standing idly by while some guy choked to death on his own bile was just a little too much like murder for her taste. Mara knew she was a bit of a cold bitch, but she wasn’t a killer. She meant to get through this, but she wasn’t going to let it change her.
The Scrivener succeeded in pouring himself back into his desk. He settled there, swaying and gronking to himself, pausing now and then to aim his bland face at another initiate across the room. The one who’d tried to cheat his way out of his harrowing, Mara saw. In the hours since the injury’s infliction, the wound had worsened considerably. The empty socket leaked a constant colorless fluid, another reminder of the total lack of doctor’s care. He lay in a heap, arms out at angles with his bloody hands at the end of them like mangled, badly-fit gloves. He’d dislocated both shoulders and one ankle before he’d finally given up on breaking his chain. His pain was excruciating, but his hysterics had ended, even if his mind hadn’t quite returned from the shock-blank space he’d put it in. For the moment, the man was quiet, but he’d been screaming off and on all day, and once he started up again, he’d only bring the Scrivener onto him and Mara really didn’t want to see that again.
She withdrew to the Panic Room, where it was dark even if it couldn’t be quiet, and sat down on the concrete floor. She told herself it wouldn’t last forever. She told herself Connie was waiting for her, maybe right outside the library doors. She sat her body down at the table and put it to sleep. She did not watch her dreams. The Scrivener’s storm passed over her, and she sat there on the Panic Room’s floor and waited for the bells to ring.
She’d get through this, for Connie’s sake. She wasn’t going to let it change her. She just had to stay calm.
Mara’s mind drifted and the harrowing went on.
CHAPTER SIX
How many more days passed in the Scrivener’s service, Mara didn’t know. Even if there had been a window to show her days passing, even if the sun itself had risen and set across her own worktable, she couldn’t have done anything so complicated as count. Her world was full of knowledge screaming to be known, her mind was lord to a relentless siege, and every new hour’s struggle against the harrowing depleted whatever energy she might otherwise have had to spend on the reckoning of luxuries like time.
She kept her hands busy in the futile hope that it would put what was happening in her head at some distance. It didn’t. She tried to bind her copy of Breaking the Moon herself, but the work was too detailed and fussy for her fractured mind and she left it for one of the other initiates, one of the crazy ones. He had it done in less time, it seemed, than it took her to burn the old copy. She wandered the stacks at the far end of her chain looking for new work, hating even the touch of the titles—The Book of Black Earth, Openings, The Bleeding Bones, Circles of Innocents—but knowing she had to do something because she was still being harrowed and still being watched.
She copied books because it was the only thing, really, to do. Copying meant reading, or at least, letting the words she wrote burrow into her mind and fill it with senseless horror. Bread and water kept the life in her, but she was aware as she occupied the Panic Room that extending life was hardly the same as promoting health. As her strength waned, the power of the Scrivener became that much harder to hold back. He never slept. Soon, madness would no longer be the comforting fantasy of her more masochistic moments, but inescapable truth.
No, there was no time, but the bells did ring. Sometimes it seemed only minutes apart, sometimes whole days, but they sounded all the same, reverberating through the rock where not even thoughts could penetrate, and waking her from the worst of the stupors. Students came with bread and water. Students came to empty the chamberpots. And students came with Horuseps, of course.
She never seemed to know when he was coming, no matter how dependably he followed the bells. He cut across her thoughts like claws, tearing at the little peace she’d wrestled for herself and supplanting it with his strange game of the tray, his toys, and his strange, indecipherable speech. Not always, but sometimes, he would return to her after making his rounds through the library, seeming to delight in her struggles to converse through insanity’s haze. Knowing that she was struggling made her work harder at appearing not to, which in turn entertained him even more. She began to look forward to his visits. This infuriated her and she punished herself in the Panic Room with memories of Connie.
And then it happened.
Horuseps set the tray before her. He lifted away the lid and indicated the small objects in their precise arrangement and said, “Turn the cup over, if you would, and kiss the frog.”
“What a classical sense of humor you have,” Mara said, writing in her book. “But no. I’d hate to think of where that thing could have been in this place.”
The demon’s mind sharpened. Not until she heard his thoughts (‘At last. And still sooner than anticipated.’) did she realize the words were not in English—not his, and not hers. She understood them anyway, but not the way she understood so many of the things that came to her in the Scrivener’s company, washing in and out again and leaving nothing behind but the unpleasant tang of their passage. It was his language she was speaking, and she spoke it as well as if it were her own.
“Is that it?” she asked, looking up at him. “Am I harrowed? Can I leave?”
“Traditionally, one must follow my instructions.”
“Do you really need to see me kiss a frog before I can leave this hellhole?”
His head tipped on side. “Shall you truly hold your pride higher than your release?” The lights of his eyes flashed and dimmed. He smiled. “Yet I must indulge you in your every whim, precious one. You may, if you like, kiss my hand instead.”
He held it out, palm up, fingers only slightly curled, waiting.
&nb
sp; “I’d hate to think of where that’s been too.” Mara turned the clay cup over and bent to press her lips perfunctorily to the frog’s carved head.
“No student is permitted to refuse the order of an instructor, were you not told?”
“You said, ‘If you like.’ Is that the way you give orders?”
Horuseps tipped his head the other way and lowered his hand. “I can see that you are determined to give us trouble, child. So be it. Even troubles can prove amusing for a time.” His smile thinned. “A very short time.”
Mara waited, resisting mightily the temptation to squirm now that release was so near, and at last Horuseps knelt before her. He gave her a sly glance as he cupped her heel in his smooth palm and raised her leg just slightly. His eyes closed. He drew in a slow breath and let it out with an oily chuckle before finally touching his fingers to the iron ring around her ankle. It fell away with a heavy clang, but Horuseps continued to kneel, in no great hurry to remove the other.
“You are very different from the others who seek this place,” he said, rubbing his thumb lightly over the smooth, pink band where her shackle had chafed the worst. “Humans, for all their stirring songs of freedom, take quite easily to captivity. Not you.”
“Then why are you prolonging it?” she asked.
“Ah well. I don’t need to engender your favor, dear heart. You need to engender mine.” He raised his gaze to hers; the lights of one eye flashed in a wink. “However shall you engender mine?” he inquired, and slid one hand slowly up her leg.
“Is this really where you want to do this?” Mara asked dryly. “Right here?”
He considered it, but even if he hadn’t been touching her, she would know the answer. His mind was mostly dark to her even here, where all things insisted on understanding, but not entirely. He was not immune to the disturbing effects of the monster at the room’s heart any more than she was, and as much as he would enjoy teasing her with her imprisonment, he did not like to dwell in the Scrivener’s library.