by R. Lee Smith
Horuseps opened the second shackle and stood up, gesturing to his waxen-faced assistant to take the tray. ‘This day was bound to come,’ he was thinking, as he watched her cap her inkwell and blot her last unfinished page. He didn’t have those thoughts out in the open, either, but down deep, where he thought they were guarded from her. ‘Bound to come, yes, but still my dawn to break. My secret…if only for one more night.’ Aloud, he said only, “If you’re quite ready…?” and held out his arm for her to take.
She took it and let him lead her up the stairs, out of the heavy air that pooled in the Great Library, giving him her very real relief to feel while secretly creeping about in his own dark mind. His thoughts of her were covetous, perilous things she did not dare to chase down or hold. Where he passed, students bowed to him. Where his gaze fell, even for a moment, they gathered in expectant dread. Quite a few lingered close enough that he had to wave them back in order to move through without touching them. From the flutterings of their unguarded minds, Mara knew they were trying to anticipate him, trying to come and collect Mara from him, because that was the way it was done here, but Horuseps kept her for himself. This was unusual, if not exactly shocking to the other students, and she supposed it would not make her any friends.
That suited Mara fine.
“Need you catch your breath?” the demon asked, once they’d reached the top of the fourth and last flight of stairs. The library lay beneath them now, the Scrivener and those who served him mere toys strewn about a careless playroom. There was no sign, here, of the Hell that held sway over every mind within.
“I can go on,” Mara said, though her legs were watery from the climb. She’d always considered herself fit enough, but fit meant something entirely different here. A lengthy hike through the wooded wilderness, a hard midnight mountain climb, a few days chained to a table, and then four flights of steep stairs after a diet of bread and water left her not just tired but a little dizzy. “I’ll get used to it,” she insisted.
“Will you? We have always admired that quality in humankind. We do not adapt well, you see.” Horuseps reached down to cup the railing over the short wall that separated the stairwell’s landing from a damned deep drop onto the library’s stone floor. His face was pensive, unsmiling. “And some of us, not at all. Still we survive.”
Mara waited him out, controlling her breath and flexing her legs.
“Tell me your name, young one,” Horuseps murmured, still gazing into the library. “I would know you better.”
She thought briefly of refusing—this wasn’t an order, and she still remembered how deftly he’d shied away from giving his own name as he took her to the Oubliette—but in the complicated ripples of his mind, she could see that evasiveness was just what he expected of her, that he had a plan even, a way to wrest it from her. So she said, “Mara.”
He looked at her, brows raised so that they arched straight out from his head for an instant before lying flat once more. Then he looked away again, laughing that mildly unpleasant laugh of his. “Mara. You give your jewels too freely, and hoard the most trivial coal.” He gave the locket at her throat a dismissive flick with one fingertip.
She covered it in her fist, scowling. “Try burning jewels some time. Value is relative.”
“How true.” He considered her, making no attempt to hide his pleasure, either inside or out. “Yet few there are who come here knowing no better than to guard their names. You make it all too easy for me.”
She laughed right back at him. “I love that you assume I told you the truth, and you this supposed expert on the ways of wizards and deceit.”
Again, he showed surprise, if not quite so deeply. He laughed with her, and his delight seemed genuine. “Did you indeed, child? Did you look into my face and lie?”
“It’s not such a scary face,” she said. “And no, not exactly. I just didn’t tell the whole truth.”
One word—precious—pushed in clarity outside the confusion of his hidden mind. He smiled at her. “Mara it is then. She of the Bitter Waters. It suits you.”
She shrugged.
“Come then, if you’ve quite recovered.” The demon took her arm again, and with that touch came another deeply-set and covetous thought: ‘I’ll never keep her secret from him.’
But just who the ‘him’ of that thought might be, Mara could not dig for without risking discovery. She let it go for now. She had time, after all, in which to dally with the secrets and the politics of the Devil’s School, but one must learn to prioritize. Connie came first.
There were several doors set in the topmost ring around the library. Horuseps brought her through one of them and into a narrow, winding hall choked with students. He cleared them with waves of his hand, by all appearances absorbed with lofty inner musings of his own, but Mara could feel him outside the Panic Room, where he no doubt believed he skulked undetected, searching for a door that did not exist. She let that go too, but she watched him closely.
“Why have you come here?” he asked at last, abandoning the effort.
“Why would you ask?”
“If I am to set you on your way, I had ought to know. You have endured much, wouldn’t you say, to languish now in ignorance.”
“I’d say that would be my problem more than yours.”
“Oh my bittersweetness, these games of yours do tempt me. Must I order you to answer?”
She laughed. “Would you need to know that badly?”
“My dear, there is no limit set upon a Master’s commands. I may make every one of them solely to vex you.” He gave her chin a tickle, then just as playfully lashed out and slapped a preoccupied student out of his path and into a jutting ledge on the tunnel wall. As the robed man fell heavily to the ground, Horuseps blithely continued, “So I do order you to answer. Why have you come?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Oh? Who?” He thought she meant a demon. He even wondered if it might be he.
“A friend of mine.”
That stopped him. He stared at her, not shocked as much as intrigued. “A human? This…Ka-nee?”
“Connie, yes.”
The lights of his eyes spiraled together into twin gleams. “A lover?”
She laughed again, this time with sincere humor. “Jesus, not again. No. Just a friend.”
“Humans do not rashly enter Hell for the sake of friendship. Are you quite certain,” he inquired silkily, “it is not a lover? One of imagining, if not of fact?”
She kept laughing, although it died to soft chuckles soon enough, and shook her head. “No. And I’ll tell you something, since you seem so interested. I’ve been to bed with a lot of men, but there’s not one of them I’d run across a busy street for, much less fly to Romania and do time with the Scrivener. Sex isn’t the same as love, and taking a lover is sure as hell not a promissory note of my devotion.”
“Indeed? Then I think you shall do quite well here, Mara. The heartless often do.”
Her smile vanished. “I’m not heartless. And you’ve got no right to say so just because I don’t care about the people I fuck when I’ve come halfway around the world for my best friend.”
“Ah well. That is the failing of my kind, you see. We have few friends and little love.” He took her arm again and gave her a hard, sidelong smile. “Fucking is one of only a few passions we share with humanity, although not, I suppose, to the same degree.”
She didn’t know what she was supposed to say to that, so she only shrugged and started walking again.
The floor rose as the tunnel curved around. It was very quiet, particularly as crowded as the passage was. The rock, pitted and scored, vaulted and dripping stone, hoarded all sound. It had to be done deliberately. She remembered reading somewhere that only man-made caves echoed because their surfaces were made too smooth, but these were no more natural tunnels than the subway system in New York. Nevertheless, whoever had shaped them had been careful to simulate enough of the natural flow of rock so as to trap sou
nd, and if it was a psychological ploy, it was damned effective. It disoriented her, made her feel very small and easily misplaced.
“We will be coming soon into the lyceum, the college-proper, as you would say. Here you will find the theaters where every art is taught. You will find them empty now,” Horuseps said, waving a last cluster of students away. “Lessons are held between second- and third-bell. Students must return to their cells within a reasonable time, and of course, they are not permitted to wander after the last bell is rung.”
“Cells?”
“Ah, you think of prisons? No, these are honest cells, as for scholars of old…or religious disciples, I suppose. My theological education is severely outdated. But fear not, dear heart, there are no locks, no dungeons. Why would we need them?”
A good point. All the mountain was a dungeon.
“Here,” said Horuseps, as they came out into a great cavern. It was, as he’d said, empty now, but it could have held easily five hundred people without any of them touching, and it had been lightly furnished with stone tables and chairs. Water spilled out from several small spout-like protrusions in the innermost wall, collected in a crescent-shaped pool, the room’s only real decoration. The floor rose up along the perimeter, forming a spiral that narrowed as it climbed, giving the entire room the seeming of a cathedral or a beehive. Tall, heavily-carved doors stood open at evenly-spaced intervals along this wide path, and a short wall gave a nod to the prevention of accidental tumbles over the side. Light came from more of those glowing bulges of yellow rock dispersed along the walls and set in waxy columns of cave-stone, casting a sallow hue over Mara’s arms and turning the demon’s moon-like skin to corpse-flesh.
Horuseps released her at her first step away, resting his long hands on his shoulders as he watched her move to the first vacant doorway and peer cautiously within. She saw no classroom, but only another tunnel, pocked with open doors. “Wander here at your will,” he called, when she eased a short way into it, “and also at your peril. Here will you find all the wizardry of the mortal ages, but all things come at a cost.”
“And you teach here too?” Mara asked, returning to the great cavern.
Horuseps did not answer, but started walking, climbing the round flight of stairs to the first landing and passing several open doorways before he paused. When he saw her jogging after him, he entered. By the time she reached the opening, he was just a white blur vanishing around a corner. He led her on like this for some time, his mind disappearing in fits and lunges where the tunnel curved around on itself, until he came at last to a particular set of doors. There, he waited, one hand resting on the carved jamb, until she came up close. One of his fingertips tapped; she stopped before entering the room beyond and looked at the door instead.
The first thing she saw was the sinewy and contorted figure at the bottom—a naked man on his hands and knees, his neck arched and agony in his face, split down the middle where the two doors joined. Other figures surrounded him, men and women both, all nude, all straining upwards while huddled small. Mara backed up obligingly, trying to see the whole picture, and it was only then that she noticed the abstract lines carved above this teeming display of unhappy humanity was not so very abstract after all.
It was Horuseps, carved as an angular column. Horuseps with his hands on his shoulders, head bent…smiling. A very good likeness, actually, for all that it used lines so sparingly. And the people groveling at his feet were not writhing in torment after all, but begging him for knowledge, for magic, for power.
“A tad ostentatious, isn’t it?” Mara asked.
“A tad,” he agreed, and bowed, gesturing within. “Yet some might argue that I am deserving of it. For here do I instruct my students in the art of Sight, and there are none within this mountain who do it better. Behold my theater, Mara.”
“Theater?” she echoed, walking between the open halves of the carved demon to stand in his domain.
“All the world’s a stage, my dear. Do feel free to look around.”
Mara looked, and apart from the fact that everything was made of stone and lit by cancerous blisters of yellow light, it was identical to any number of lecture halls she’d sat in back in college. A number of wide benches fell in half-circles over a central platform where the instructor was meant to stand, and beyond that were a small assortment of teaching aids—urns and glass cases, wooden trunks, mirrors, and less identifiable tools of the demon’s mysterious craft. At the extreme opposite of this door, at the very lowest level of the room, another tunnel reached down into darkness.
“My private chambers,” Horuseps said mildly when Mara frowned in that direction. “Modestly attired…and not at all fit to receive company. Do forgive me.”
“How long do lessons last?” Mara asked, using the layers of benches as stairs on her way down to the platform at the bottom. They made for very steep stairs. “I was told from second-bell to third, but how long is—oh, very good,” she interrupted herself, looking sharply around. “I just realized…nine rings, with ‘dais’ at the center. That’s hilarious, Horuseps.”
“Thank you. I wish I could take the credit, but alas, it wasn’t my joke. As for lessons, they are taught all day. We Masters require little in the way of respite and you’ll find that the material under study rather repels close examination.” He joined her on the platform. His thin fingers drifted down her back and up again, toying with the ends of her hair while she inspected the shelves at the back of the classroom. “Students tend to come and go several times throughout the day in an attempt to master what they pursue. How long, you ask? I can only tell you that the lessons take as long as they take. We are not timekeepers here.”
“How bohemian.”
“Hardly. We may have few rules, but what rules there are must be obeyed on pain of death or expulsion.”
Mara had to smile, even as she was distracted by what appeared to be the skeleton of a two-headed bird mounted under glass. “Expulsion. Is that as good as death, or worse?”
“That would depend, I suppose, on how one is expelled…or through what window.” He made another pass down her hair, lifting it now to breathe in whatever scent clung to her. It couldn’t have been a pleasant one, all things considered, but he smiled as if it were dewed with rosewater. “Now hear me, bitterness, and heed well, for ignorance is deadly here. You have won the right to study, but that right must be protected. You shall be required to attend lessons and you shall be expected to apply yourself to them. Do not smile,” he cut in sharply, his eyes flaring. “Many has been the craven mortal who sought to present himself poorly at an art he had mastered so that he might linger past his appointed hour.”
“So you are timekeepers.”
“What cheek.” He bent, stole another breath from her hair, and murmured wordlessly to himself. “Many come here believing the price of tuition to be low…but having achieved what they set out to achieve, suddenly realize that one-tenth is rather a large number after all. Only we Masters keep an accounting. None of them are given to know where the cruel cut falls. And so there are always some who seek to hide in their lessons, rather than to learn from them. But we are not in the habit of harboring refugees. There lies your only warning.”
“I have no intention of staying longer than I must.”
“In order to find your friend, yes.” He chuckled. “And how is it you plan to take her away?”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, but for argument’s sake, what happens if I decide not to go to lessons but just to study on my own?”
“On your…?”
“You have enough books, surely.”
“Surely.” Horuseps rolled one shoulder in a gesture that was not quite a shrug but was probably meant to look like one. He couldn’t pull it off without collarbones. “Yet books may not be removed from the Great Library without the permission of a Master, and seldom do we give it.”
“What happens if you catch me reading in my room?”
“Need you ask?
You will be punished.”
“Yes, but there ought to be several degrees of punishment in this place.”
“True, yet all of them, I assure you, are punishment enough.” He placed his hand on her back and, with gentle pressure, led her back to the benches. He climbed without effort, pausing at each step to wait for her ungainly company before continuing on. “Ultimately, it comes to our good judgment whether a student is making the best of his education here, and our judgment is absolute. Make use of our advantages, young one, and you need not suffer it.”
“I’ll remember that. What is the ‘appointed hour’ of each class?”
“Every student is free to pursue whichever art he will, until mastery or until ten years have elapsed, whichever comes first.”
“Ten years?” Mara echoed, staring at him.
“Time flies,” said the demon dryly. “We aren’t teaching automotive repair, dearest. Magic eludes the human mind by its very nature.”
“But…” Mara took the last two benches quickly and returned to the passage outside, looking left and right at the other doors she saw, and that was just here, in this tunnel. “Do all of these doors lead to a different classroom?”
“A theater,” Horuseps corrected, joining her. “Yes.”
“And every doorway in the big r—in the lyceum,” she said. “They all open on tunnels like this?”
“Yes.”
“How many of you are there?” Mara asked.
The little smile he wore became unexpectedly hard. “Not as many as we’d like,” he answered. “Certainly not as many as find their way here.”
“Do you all teach?”
“All those you find in the lyceum,” he said, but he was taking a greater care in the way he answered now. His mind darkened, deliberately armored against her.