by R. Lee Smith
“Different magic?”
“Oh. I see. No, my dear. There are degrees of difficulty to each art, and to the ways in which arts may interact with one another. And so we each have our own specialties here and our own theater. Explore. Through each open door, you will surely find a demon.” He laughed and took her arm. “I advise you therefore not to open those closed to you. Come.”
She followed him out, through the empty beehive of the lyceum, and downward through another winding passage, riddled with archways and side-tunnels, until they came to yet another cavernous chamber. Alternating stalactites and stalagmites formed a fanged fenceway along the two long walls, behind which more of those yellow blisters glowed out. Rock rippled upwards along the ceiling in white-capped lines that emulated the cornices and sconces of a cathedral. Stone benches and columns set with what may well have been centuries’ of melted candles forced visitors to walk respectfully down the center of the long room, which was dominated at the far end by a vast slab of shiny black stone—a door. Ten meters tall at the very least, it spanned the full height of this great room, and was as wide or wider than the wall of Mara’s bedroom back home. It had no latch, no carvings, no hinges, no mark of any kind to spoil the mirror-like gloss of its surface.
“Where are we?” Mara asked, since she could sense that he wasn’t ever going to volunteer any information.
“They call this place the Nave,” Horuseps said. “And we call it simply the threshold, for beyond that door lies the graduate’s camber, and the last test of the Scholomance. Ask me no questions of the trial within. It is not for me to answer.”
“Fair enough. Is that the only way out?”
“Yes.”
“What about the way I came in?”
“The portcullis opens but once a year, dear one, and at no student’s behest.” Horuseps watched as Mara approached the black door and tentatively laid her hand upon it. “You don’t really want to do that, do you?” he asked, smiling.
“Probably not. How does it open?”
“With effort.”
Thinking of the doors in the Oubliette, Mara reached out through her hand and tried to touch whatever might be inhabiting the black stone. She felt nothing there, but sensed a leap of surprise from Horuseps and turned to see him only just composing himself. “Is there a problem?” she asked coolly.
“Not at all. You are perfectly free to experiment how you will, only be aware that the other students share this freedom, and our home defends itself blindly. Besides which, if you met immediately with success, where would you be but out of the Scholomance for another year? You’ve only just arrived. Do leave a little mystery for later delving.” Horuseps took her arm, gave the door a grim sort of backwards glance, and led her firmly away. “There, you can just see the main entry to the dining hall, my dearest. And through there, the reading room, for those few who have earned a Master’s favor. And through there and there and there, o so many secret places, but for now, down we go!”
Down again, out of the Nave on a wide, sweeping staircase that came out of its close-walled tunnel to arch down over empty space into a great stadium of a cavern. By the now-familiar flickering lights of the blister-lamps, she could see dozens of passageways over three separate floors, and at least a hundred students in black or white robes milling about below them.
“This is the ephebeum,” Horuseps said. “The student’s dorm, so to speak. Think of this as the exercise pen. I understand they have races here, and other games, some of which I suspect are rather unpleasant, but I trust you’ll make friends quickly. Or if not friends, at least an impression. There are many amenities provided here…the garderobe is to your left, and the baths upon your right, and the cells, of course.”
“Do you show every new student around?” Mara asked, knowing the answer already.
“Observe your fellows,” Horuseps replied dryly. The students scattered through the ephebeum were indeed staring, although they were all careful to keep clear of the demon and bow when he passed by. “Yet I confess you do interest me and so I suffer the infamy of it.”
Mara was reasonably certain that if there was going to be suffering attached to infamy in here, it was likelier to fall on her than on him, but saw no point in saying so. Being an A-student came easy to a telepath; she’d dealt with the fallout of favoritism before and she wasn’t worried now, just because the other students thought they could put the whammy on her. She’d tapped at nearly every mind she’d come across out of habit and found not even one of them who knew she’d done it, let alone one that could keep her out. She may not be able to make friends in this place, but she was confident she’d always see an enemy coming, as long as she stayed in the open.
The bells sounded, ringing through the rock in four separate, doleful peals. Last bell. Day’s end. The students lounging about the ephebeum immediately stopped whatever they were doing and gathered themselves up. More students poured in through other stairwells, chatting together in the way of students everywhere, and only a little startled to see a Master among them. They dispersed, quickly if not exactly quietly, vanishing down the many holes that opened in the high stone walls. In moments, mere moments, they were alone.
Mara stumbled, disoriented by the sudden psychic silence in a place she knew teemed with living people. Ever the gentleman, Horuseps caught her hand to steady her, and then just kept holding on, his thoughts squirming with black pleasure, but all he said was, “We’ve timed this well, haven’t we? Now to give you a cell to call home…and I know just the one.”
He led her out of the ephebeum and deeper into the mountain, past open doors and empty rooms, into narrower and darker corridors. The blister-like lamps that lit the tunnels came less and less frequently, and often stayed black until Horuseps lit them in some unimaginable way in the dark. He explained nothing, just kept walking in his swift, graceful way, humming a little under his breath.
“You’re sure this isn’t a dungeon cell?” Mara asked, frowning at a hanging stalactite as she ducked under it.
“You strike me as one who prefers her privacy over convenience. Here.” He stepped and touched the tip of one finger to the lockplate on an otherwise unremarkable door. It sparked and swung inward, groaning on its hinges.
The door was small, only a little taller than she stood herself and narrow enough that she had to turn sideways to get in. As small as the door was, the room was worse: Six stone surfaces, utterly smooth and featureless. The only light came from a lamp in the tunnel through the door’s narrow window that was the tiny cell’s sole ventilation. Using herself as a general instrument of measurement, Mara guessed the room to be six feet in height, three in width, and only five deep. To sleep, she would either have to draw her knees up or leave her feet out in the hall. That was assuming she could sleep at all on this floor, without even a straw mat for a bed.
“Well,” said Mara finally. “This is pretty horrible.”
Horuseps threw back his head and laughed.
“This is part of your sinister plot to force your students to learn magic, isn’t it?”
“Indeed it is.” His head cocked. “I must say, for someone who came here without any intention of seeking sorcery, you are proving remarkably amenable to its utilitarian uses.”
“All part of my charm,” Mara said distractedly, scraping her bare foot across the floor. It remained very hard stone. “If I ingratiate myself enough, perhaps I’ll wheedle a better bed out of you.”
“I? Not likely. Yet there are always beds for those who seek them ardently. And now, if you’ve no other questions—”
“One, actually.”
“Oh?” He’d already been walking away, but he turned back now, ingenuously cordial on the surface and distinctly wary on the inside. The lights of his eyes had drawn together, like wagons circling against Cherokee attack, she thought. “Pray tell me, child. Ever I am at your service.”
“Do you meet with everyone who enters the Scholomance?”
“I do.” Polite
puzzlement held him a moment more before comprehension smoothed it away. ‘Her Connie,’ he thought, and said, “You ask if I recall the friend you’ve come to find? Sadly, you are yourself the only applicant of note in many, oh, many dreary years. Perhaps she has indeed passed under my watchful eye, and certainly if she’s been harrowed, I spoke to her, yet I have not marked her.”
“I haven’t even told you what she looks like.”
“Dearest, were you to paint her image in the air before me and give me the day and hour of her entry, still I couldn’t tell you better. Time is all the same here, you’ll discover that for yourself, and human faces change as often as the moon’s. I cannot help you, to my regret.”
She studied him, his gracious smile, his slick and oilsome manners, and found them to be disturbingly sincere. When he spread his hands in a courtly gesture of honesty, she seized on it, boldly thrusting a part of herself into his mind while keeping a greater part back, hidden and quiet, to see how he dealt with her.
He was not without defenses and he brought them up fast, but before he shoved her out, she sensed he was actually telling the truth. Maybe Connie was here and maybe not, he wasn’t in the habit of paying attention to students. Nor was he in the habit of doing mental battle with telepaths. She was very briefly tempted to wrestle her way back in, if only because she sensed she could do it, but in the end, that was a secret too precious to give up so early in the game. She let herself be rebuffed and looked evenly up into his furious face.
“I misunderstood,” she said, mimicking his open-hands gesture of a second ago. “I thought you were offering to let me look, to see for myself if you’d seen her, since she’s so far beneath your notice.”
His eyes narrowed coldly, but only for an instant. Then he pretended to believe her, relaxing the set of his pale shoulders and giving a cavalier wave of one hand, although his mind stayed tightly armored. “Perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. A mistake I’ll not make twice, child. I trust you’ll do the same.”
“My apologies, Master Horuseps.”
“Hm.” A smile cracked at the corners of his lips. “It’s going to be quite interesting to have you among us…for however short a time. I wish you luck in your search.”
“Do you?” she asked, raising her voice as he moved away down the hall.
“Oh yes,” he called back to her. She could hear the smile in his words, even though he did not turn. “After so many ages, even the worst difficulties can only be a passing entertainment, and I think we shall not see the worst from you, Bitter Waters. Luck to you and to your Connie, wherever she might be. No doubt we shall meet again.”
“No doubt,” Mara murmured, watching until the darkness and the rock swallowed him. She stood awhile in the hall, letting the silence settle around her, the reality of it all growing louder. With the demon out of sight, she no longer felt that eerie sense of displacement, of the Scholomance brooding over her like some dark and hungry djinn, and the urge was on her all at once to take a long step back and disbelieve in some or all of it. This place couldn’t exist. Hundreds of people did not disappear to live inside a mountain, and have nobody know about it. To live inside a mountain with demons, no less.
But the rock was real. it rippled over the ceiling like endless rows of elephant teeth, dripped out countless jagged claws and melted-wax ribbons. She could touch it and feel its slick, craggy reality cold under her fingers. She could hear it breathing in the way of caves, taste its musky minerals in the air. She’d never been spelunking before, didn’t know that a person could feel a mountain creeping in on you with all of its weight behind it, all that weight above you. Demons, magic, and hundreds of people had a way of fading in and out of a person’s grasp, but you sure couldn’t argue with rock.
Mara walked into her cell and stared at it for a bit. In a weird way, it was cozy. If she stood with her back to the door, she could almost be back in her first Panic Room, back in the Basement. ‘Welcome to the Scholomance,’ she thought. She’d done it. She was in.
Now what?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mara slept. It was impossible to say how long, with neither a watch nor a window at her disposal. Her sleep had been a fitful thing, easily broken and difficult to recapture, interrupted by moments of half-awake states in which the psychic quiet and colorful Mindstorm made her think she’d fallen asleep in her body and was now part of her dream, dreaming of being in the Panic Room. She began to feel more and more as though she’d spent the night in a drunken stupor.
The robe which was her only clothing was also her only bedding, and the stone cell was cramped and damp and cold in addition to being very hard. Far more damaging to her night’s rest was the strange muffling effect of the mountain’s enclosing rock, which all but silenced the chatter of stranger’s minds and made her feel deceptively isolated, although she knew she was surrounded. Even in the Panic Room, the Mindstorm was washed-out and smudgy in appearance. Now and then, some burst of noise and clarity betrayed the presence of some other student wandering close by in the hall, but that was all. It was strange and deeply unsettling, but Mara was exhausted and eventually, she slept.
When she did fully awaken, stiff and drowsy, it was to the sound of tolling bells. Not merely one or two peals, as she’d heard in the library, but a discordant mash of many keys and tempos, similar to the traditional songs of church bells. Similar, yes, but only on the surface. The song these dark bells told was somber enough, but the timing was bad, rushed, giving the impression of a sly, unpleasant giggle running through a eulogy.
Mara got up, doing her best to walk out the aches and pains of her night on the floor as she followed the sound out into the winding, sparsely-lit passages. Horuseps had really put her in the outskirts. It was some time before she saw another student and he was also moving towards the bells. As she kept unobtrusively at his back, he led her out of the tunnels, through the ephebeum, and into the heart of the mountain, picking up more and more people as they went. All the Scholomance was gathering, it seemed, and where they gathered was in the Nave, before the Black Door.
Acclimating to the crush and pulse of so many minds after her night of unnatural quiet was not difficult, but it wasn’t pleasant either. She found a place far back along the wall from which to view the proceedings, where she could be dizzy without being obvious about it.
“Ah, you came!”
Robed figures bowed aside for Horuseps. He paid them no mind, as careless in his step as if he were walking through fields of corn. All his attention—his glittering, starlit eyes and easy smile—was for Mara. He lifted one long hand from its resting place on his own shoulder to cup hers, bringing her with him away from the wall and back through the gathered students. “I thought of fetching you out personally, but of course, that would hardly be proper for either one of us. Not that there are no Masters here who show favor to one above the others, but I have a reputation to maintain, you understand.”
She didn’t, but accepted his rambling words at face-value, meaningless as they were to her ultimate goal. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Shall you have a guess?”
Mara looked thoughtfully at the crowd of shifting, muttering students, and then ahead, where the knot of them had thinned out and a few demons stood instead, watching Horuseps escort her towards them. She could feel her scalp crawling the closer she came, as if their cast-off excitement were setting a static charge in the air, but it was a very strange sort of anticipation.
“It isn’t a graduation,” she said finally.
“No?”
She wanted to tap at a few minds to make sure, but not with Horuseps here, not with his hand on her shoulder, his naked thumb caressing her naked throat. Physical contact always gave her an advantage when she was looking for a way into someone’s head. The advantage may be mutual, and while she believed the Panic Room was mind-tight, reaching out to tap someone just might expose her. She wouldn’t risk that with Horuseps so obviously playing a trapdoor spide
r.
“No,” she said instead. “If it was, there would be a few people dumb enough to want to be in the front row, to catch a peek inside, thinking it would mean something when it was their turn. Some of them want to see…but no one wants to be that close.”
“You sound very certain.”
“Just look at them.”
They weren’t frightened, these watchers in robes. There were only a few with that pale, waxy pallor that meant real nerves at work, but no matter how unsuccessfully they played at stoicism, the Mindstorm was hot with dread. And no, they weren’t jostling to get closer to the door or trying to count backwards through other graduations they may have seen. If anything, they cringed back from it, crushing at the walls in small groups to whisper at each other. The only anticipation she could see flashing through the Mindstorm was of a low and sadistic sort.
“What then?”
“I don’t know.” Mara puzzled at the windows of the Panic Room for a few moments more, then shook her head in defeat. “Have you come to watch newcomers like me doing a loyalty oath or something? Am I supposed to cross my heart and kiss the door?”
“No, but what a splendid idea.”
“What have you there, Horuseps?” one of the demons asked. It was female, weirdly beautiful despite hundreds of coral-like growths sprouting from the back of her head, neck and shoulders, all tangling together and reaching upwards like the branches of a dead tree. Her hands were uneven, gnarled things, dripping fingers like roots, but they were graceful enough as they plaited together at her smooth hip. She wore only a single length of plain white cloth, gossamer as spider silk, that hung from her throat to the floor, held against her body only by the strategic application of several tight belts. She came the last few steps to meet them, eyeing Mara with the polite interest of a woman meeting a good friend’s new dog. “I hadn’t realized your tastes had changed so,” she said, smiling. “From red meat to candy.”
Horuseps laughed. “No, Zyera, this is our newest student. Mara, she is called.”