by R. Lee Smith
“Bitter candy,” the demoness mused. “Such an unusual face. Pretty, but very odd.” She reached out to pet Mara’s hair, then rubbed some between her crooked fingers. “Do you know, she almost reminds me of…well, it doesn’t matter.”
Horuseps just smiled, his eyes narrowing ever so slightly.
“Such delightful eyes…” Zyera dropped Mara’s hair and touched one of those ghastly fingers to Mara’s cheek. Her mind was at once there, ripping through the Mindstorm in a callous, clutching act, only to bounce off the Panic Room. Without thinking, Mara reacted as if it were an attack, sending out a mindslap against the intruder, and connecting, somewhat to her surprise. Zyera let out a glassy shriek and stumbled back, both arms flying up and crossing before her face, all her roots and branches quivering as she stared at Mara.
The students and the demons both stopped any and all conversations mid-word and focused in on them.
“You look perfectly ridiculous,” Horuseps announced, his smile broadening. “Come, come sister. She’s not apt to bite if you offer your hand and keep to low tones.”
Slowly, Zyera’s arms dropped. On her face, a look of wonder spread, blanching the color out of her coral-like ornaments. “This is unexpected,” she breathed.
“Isn’t it?”
“A very pretty plaything.” Zyera looked at Horuseps, a solemn and matter-of-fact stare. “You’ll never keep her secret.”
“I know it. But before the sharing of my bitter wine—” He gave Mara’s shoulder a light squeeze. “—we have this unpleasantness to endure.”
“Ah yes.” Zyera gave Mara a long, considering stare. “You are new here,” she said at last. “And I don’t imagine you frighten easily, if at all. So only keep very quiet and learn what you can from what you are about to witness. What have you come to learn?”
Mara frowned, taken aback by the abrupt shift in questioning.
“She hasn’t,” Horuseps said. “She’s come to find a friend.”
“Here?”
Horuseps bent his head once in a mocking nod. “Isn’t it too delightful?”
Zyera didn’t look delighted. In point of fact, she looked alarmed.
“She went by Connie when I knew her,” Mara interjected, annoyed. “She’s a little taller than I am, with dark, curly hair and brown—”
“Impossible there should be another undetected!” Zyera said, still looking only at Horuseps.
“Agreed.”
“—brown eyes,” Mara finished. “Have you seen her?”
“Possibly.” Zyera shrugged, eying Mara with a distinct expression of unease. “Perhaps I do not see them all, but I see many in my time. Do I recall her? Ah, there is the true question. I am surrounded even now by a host of humans I do not recall. Do let me know if you find yours.”
Off she went, the slender tips of her coral forks swaying ever so slightly with her sensual stride. She was completely naked from behind, except for the belts. Her spine protruded here and there, delicately branching, crystalline.
“Zyera,” said Horuseps unnecessarily. His fingertips tapped along Mara’s shoulder in a distracted way as he watched her go.
“Friend of yours?”
He thought about it, his head cocked and eyes dim. “No,” he said at last, and smiled. “You are my only friend, dear Mara.”
The bells stopped ringing all at once. The silence that followed was a thick one as the students waited, some of them still staring in bewilderment at Mara, others gradually fixing their attention on the demons. Horuseps gave Mara’s shoulder another squeeze, but she knew better than to talk even without his warnings. She waited with the rest of them, mystified.
“We have very few rules here,” Horuseps said. He did not raise his voice, but such was the quality of the silence that it carried out as effectively as if he had. Releasing Mara, he stepped up to face the crowd, and those in front bowed to him. He walked among them, touching the backs of their heads as he spoke, idly glancing this way and that, strolling. “And we take pains that there are no surprises. Our ways are not secret. Nor, I think, are they difficult to comprehend. There are only a few inviolate laws and they are very simple.”
He turned around, walked back through the crowd until he came out of it and stood before the Black Door. He faced them again, resting his hands on his shoulders, his expression severe. “The breaking of those laws is never to be tolerated,” he said.
Mara felt a spike of fear, not her own, piercing the Mindstorm. She looked around in time to see a demon enter through a side-passage. The demon was a hulking thing, thickly-muscled and bristling with bony spikes, but it was the very ordinary humans he had gripped in each hand that held her attention. There were two—man and woman—and although both walked under their own power, the man was obviously afraid of whatever lay at the end of their walk. The demon who held him paid no attention whatsoever.
“It is forbidden,” Horuseps continued mildly, “to defy any order given by a Master of the Scholomance.”
Now she could hear him with her ears and not just her mind: “It won’t happen again, I swear it, I swear! Upon my mother’s grave, I swear it! Please, Master Argoth! It was only the once! It was her fault!”
The woman did not answer the accusation. Her eyes were huge and staring. Mara knew that look. She’d seen her mother wearing it almost every day.
“It is forbidden to remove books from the library without a Master’s permission,” Horuseps said.
“Please, Master, I—I—” The man’s frantic gaze lit on someone in the crowd. “Giova! Giova, tell him I am honest! Tell him when I swear a thing, it is true! Please!”
Horuseps paused and cocked his head, waiting patiently. Giova, whoever he was in the silent hall, said nothing.
“It is forbidden to linger more than ten days each year without attending a lesson,” said Horuseps. “As it is forbidden to linger more than ten years in the study of any one art.”
The man’s feet took smaller and smaller steps as he made his increasingly incoherent pleas and promises. Soon he was being pulled, then dragged along the floor when he stumbled to his knees. The woman just kept walking.
“And it is forbidden for our students to fornicate in such a manner as to possibly produce offspring,” Horuseps concluded.
“She seduced me!” the man howled. “She made me do it! She is a hateful, evil bitch! Siren! Destroyer of men!” The rest was lost in screams. His demon impassively picked him up and plunked him down before Horuseps, more or less on his feet. The demon, muscle-wrapped and spike-studded, managed despite his malformed face and sinister features to look bored.
“As rules without enforcement are meaningless, it falls to us to punish transgressions. Master Argoth.”
The demon, Argoth, reached down one clawed hand and ripped through the man’s robe, pulling it off in shreds with one easy sweep of his arm. The man did not seem to notice his nakedness. He had fallen into such a state of terror that it was all Mara could feel in this room where hundreds watched.
“Human called Rastan,” Horuseps said, cutting across the hysterics without dulling them any. “We have been told many tales of your sexual indiscretions in your time here, but we have given you the benefit of our doubt. Now, at last, you have been discovered by a Master of Scholomance in the act of releasing your seed within a woman’s womb. My judgment is upon you now.”
“It was her! It was her! She made me!”
Horuseps gave a nod. Argoth reached down and dug his claws impersonally into the man’s shriveled scrotum. His powerful arm rocked back in the same wide arc he’d used to tear the man’s robe off, but there was no more robe.
It looked, Mara thought, from the quiet haven of the Panic Room and its distancing monitors, as if he’d vomited out a stage-magician’s scarf—all glittery/shiny and tumbling to the ground with a flourish and a pause for the audience to gasp. Then everything came out of him. His legs flopped, limp as string. His emptied skin sagged outward, bulging with the weight of his meat and
bones. His mouth opened and closed once more. Even if Mara were in her body and right before him to feel the hot gore of it around her toes and smell the broken stink of him, she doubted anything could be worse than seeing his opening and closing mouth.
Argoth dropped the wet sack that used to be a man and stepped back, fastidiously shaking off his toes as he licked his claws. The woman behind him did not react. The clawed hands on her shoulders rested lightly. She was numb to fear, numb to panic, numb to all thought.
Mara looked around, tapping in mute astonishment at mind after mind, and finding only a dull spectrum of distaste, when she found any emotion at all. Some of them were bored, some viciously amused, one or two mildly aroused, but most were like the woman standing barefooted in her lover’s blood, only numb. The Mindstorm roared on, no louder and no more urgent than it had been at the airport.
“Human called Alanza.” Horuseps did not raise his voice. If anything, he softened it some. The woman blinked twice and looked at him. She did not plead, not even with her eyes. Horuseps smiled at her, but his fingers curled restlessly over his shoulders, as though even in his play of sympathy, he could not resist the urge to clutch.
“This is the first we have heard of your disobedience. Of course, one lapse of judgment is one too many, and yet, there have been questions raised as to your willingness in the matter. What have you to say?”
Alanza had, seemingly, nothing to say. She stared at this gift of lenience as she’d stared at the execution and was silent.
Horuseps nodded just as though she’d given him some unheard, lengthy argument. His fingers twitched. “We can tolerate no fornicators amongst us. You have defied our laws. Yet some there are who speak for you. Therefore, know a Master’s mercy. You are expelled, human. Your return means only your death. Go.”
The demon who had walked her to this fate now gave her shoulder a little pat and lumbered over to the Black Door. It took no heaving, but opened with a touch, making no sound, admitting no icy draft or stench of brimstone. Mara looked and saw only shadows on the other side. She felt and felt nothing.
The woman, Alanza, did not move until the demon who brought her here came back and got her. She kept her eyes on Horuseps, turning as she walked until she reached the threshold. There she hesitated, showing the only sign of life since her arrival, and half-raised a hand, but her mind was so numbed over that Mara couldn’t tell whether it was a gesture of entreaty or farewell. In any case, it didn’t last. She turned away, small and white against the blackness, and padded quietly out of sight.
The door shut. That was all. There was no muffled scream, no roar, no ray of light around the jamb. Just the closing of the door and the loss of one more mind, one which had not been altogether there in the first place.
“So does their time end prematurely,” Horuseps said, looking out over the students. “They are not counted toward the Tenth.”
A gust of breath answered this—in some, it was a sign of frustration, and in others, relief. Both reactions struck Mara as odd, considering no one could possibly know where to start counting. But the crowd was breaking up, humans and demons alike departing down the dark halls that had brought them here.
“Do not think too harshly of us,” Horuseps said, rejoining her. “It is all for the better, I assure you, lest the mountain be filled up with human offspring.”
“Does every student have to attend these things?” Mara asked.
“You have just heard our only inviolate laws.” Horuseps tipped his head to study her, then looked sharply at the retreating rows of students. “Was she not among them? Your Connie?”
“No. She wasn’t.”
“Ah. No doubt she hid away in her cell when the bells tolled. Ask not, as they say.” He chuckled to himself. “We allow it, having learned long ago that the only thing that comes of forcing the weak-stomached to bear witness is a soured floor.”
“Not like it is now,” Mara said, with a pointed glance back at the eviscerated Rastan.
“That is but a small souring in comparison. Once one human purges, they all seem to follow along. The stench has a way of lingering.” Horuseps dropped his hand to the small of back, propelling her politely ahead of him. “I am pleased to see you in such admirable control, however. Such demonstrations are infrequent, but they do occur.”
“I’ll admit I didn’t know what I was getting into,” Mara replied, “but I knew it wasn’t nursery school.”
“What a delightfully callous observation. You’ll go far, dearest.” He gave her a pat to send her on her way down the wide stair into the ephebeum while he remained at the top. “It is not yet first bell, o heartless one, and while it is not forbidden to wander after hours, it is discouraged. Strongly.”
“I’m not heartless,” Mara muttered, and louder, said, “All the better to give me empty halls for my illicit affairs. Why would you make something like that forbidden and then provide us all with such perfect opportunities to do it anyway?”
“Consider it a trial of willpower. Did I not say there would be tests?” His head tipped again and he came a few steps after her before stopping. “I’m sure I need not tell you there are ways in which lusts may be satisfied without the risk of pregnancy.”
“Define satisfied.”
“One learns to adjust.”
“In light of the alternative, I’m sure one does.” She looked back in spite of herself. The Nave was just a glimmer of light and sculpted pillars from here, silent and empty. “What happens to him now?”
“That would be between him and his God,” Horuseps replied, his voice stained by a certain sour amusement. He turned around and started back up the stairs. “As for the carcass, it shall be disposed of.”
“By whom?”
He stopped again, came back down with his head at an angle, smiling. “Are you volunteering?”
“Not until I know the method of disposal. For all I know, you’re eating them.”
“For all you know,” he agreed, blithely enough to be disturbing. “Master Suti’ok has gone to fetch the hounds. At first-bell, you’ll not see so much as a stain.”
“Hounds? You have dogs here?”
“Dogs? Nothing so prosaic. Our hounds are bred of demon stock.”
“Are they Masters, too?”
“No, although a very sound question, I applaud you. You may indeed encounter many terrible things within these walls, but Masters, my dearest, are those who teach. Only those. And if ever you hear your name called by a hound hiding in the shadows, and if ever he gives you dark command in the name of Master, I advise you in the strongest terms to find one for true and report it at once. But walk away, child, do not run. Running only attracts their attention.”
“Many terrible things,” Mara echoed.
“The Scholomance is more than thee and me, young one.” His thoughts, always dim and difficult to grasp, briefly drew into a dark focus, something about tribes—the Old Tribes or maybe the True Tribes, the words seemed interchangeable in whatever language he thought in. The tribes were broken. Then he glanced at her and his mind closed, leaving her with only a lingering echo of his strange emotions. “Much more,” he said, coming down the rest of the stairs to stand before her. “Yet there is time enough to learn as much as you would know. Return to your cell, my dear. I should hate to see you punished.”
She took a few steps to placate him, then swung back. “Who was it?” she called.
He too paused and turned back. “I beg your pardon?”
“Which one of you spoke for her?”
“Whyever would you assume it was a Master?”
“Please. No student would ever argue with one of you over something like this. Was it you?”
“I? No.” He gave her another of those speculative stares and finally smiled. “It was Master Kharnath. I can’t think you’ve met, so the information is utterly meaningless to you.”
“Why did he do it?”
“Is it so impossible to believe one of us capable of mercy and aff
ection?”
“Yes. Why did he do it?”
“I believe he was fucking her,” he replied mildly. He reached up and passed a hand over his left eyebrow, then returned it to his shoulder. “Does that satisfy you, darling?”
She thought about it and slowly shook her head. “It doesn’t follow.”
“No?”
“She’s gone either way, so why not let her die? And don’t try that mercy/affection line on me twice.”
“You disappoint me. I suppose that was bound to happen eventually, but I confess it comes as a blow.” Horuseps came towards her, his head canted and motionless at each step. “We do feel, Mara. Perhaps not in the same fashion or to so stirring a height as humankind, but we feel. The baser emotions come easiest, I admit that, but lust does not preclude love. Whether Kharnath truly cared for her, I do not know, but he asked that her life be spared. And one life, after all, means little one way or the other. To humor him, we spared her.”
He knew, though. Everything he said sounded plausible, but what he did not say spoke louder. She could see only the broadest outlines of his thoughts behind his curtained mind, not enough to guess whether that dark blot under the water were a rotting log or a hungry crocodile, but she did know that he knew why this Kharnath had saved Alanza’s life and he was not surprised by the reason, whatever the reason was.
At the same time, it felt like truth when he said his kind could have affection. At least, it felt like truth that he was disappointed when she said he did not.
She sensed that she could be sure, just dive in and take an unclouded look at him before he pushed her back out—if he could—but she was not wholly impervious to the memory of the hollow man’s mouth opening and closing one last time. She did nothing.
“It’s early yet. If you’ve other observations to make, perhaps you’d better return to my quarters and make them at your leisure.” Horuseps lifted one arm and swept it back in a grand invitation, smirking at her. “One may upon occasion bend the lesser of our rules, but it is a right that can be earned only with time. Formidable as you are, you may not wander at your will.”