The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  “She’s useless to you, dear sister,” Horuseps murmured, smiling.

  “As useless as to you, and yet there is still fun to be had by her. Shall you hoard it?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  One of the unknown silhouettes suddenly stabbed what looked like twin swords into the table, using them to rock his small, thick body up onto his own empty platter. He (it was a he; no physical proof could be made out in this light, but even if Mara could not sense the masculinity in his mind, there was only a male strength and power in his stalking movements) pulled the swords and folded them against his body, walking forward on his knuckles like an ape—an ape in his prime and confidant of his authority—across the table, to leap down in front of it, and also into a puddle of light, so that he was suddenly and, she was certain, deliberately revealed.

  He might have been taller than her, if he stood upright, but hunched as he was, his eyes were on a level with hers as she sat. The hunch was no affectation. Oh, his back was straight, his torso long and powerful, but his muscular legs were bent back in the way of an animal, so that he walked upon the toepads of his thick feet. And it wasn’t his knuckles he balanced by after all, she saw, or at least, not many knuckles. He had only the one finger at the end of each muscular arm, and the swords now comfortably curving back against his ribs were the two lengthy claws that tipped them.

  Now he settled forward, sinking slightly upon his bent arms so that he stared up at Mara in a particularly brooding fashion, his shoulders rolling like a cat stalking squirrels. He had no body hair of any kind, but a number of fleshy rope-like tendrils grew from his head a little longer than his shoulders. They slid over his skin with snakish hissing sounds at his every movement, and as he studied her, their blunt tips gradually darkened to a deep, bloody red.

  “What are you called?” this creature demanded. His voice was hoarse and the words thickly-made. He wasn’t used to talking, which was strange, because he wasn’t much of a telepath either.

  “Mara,” she said, flicking a subtle question at her warden. Master Malavan, was the answer.

  “It is my command, Mara,” this demon, this Malavan, said next, showing his teeth to his fellow Masters in a grin, “that you attend my lesson.”

  “Cheat,” Zyera sniffed. She was the only one who spoke, but every mind that Mara could read had some derisive sting about it. Malavan thought he was doing something clever, that he was taking the first turn with the toy everyone wanted, but no one had any envy for him, only a cold and smirking contempt.

  “I’ll go,” said Mara, studying the other demons at the table. “But I thought students were free to choose their arts.”

  “Hereafter.” Master Malavan shrugged. “Should not your first be given special attention?”

  “That’s why I have a warden, isn’t it?”

  Malavan’s gaze shifted to the woman bowing low beside her. His expression puckered, meanly thwarted. He thought. Then he swung his arm. He did it fast, so fast Mara wasn’t even sure she’d seen it all. It seemed to her just that he’d rocked back and crooked his terrible claw in toward his body, only now it was dripping.

  Desdemona let out a gurgling, soundless shriek, bleating fear and disbelief and finally pain all over Mara’s brain. Mara turned around into a spray of hot blood and saw a gaping red chasm open over the woman’s face, splitting her nose and opening her mouth into a four-petaled orchid.

  “She’s sick,” Malavan said, dropping diffidently onto his knuckles. Some of the Masters at the table laughed.

  It was a fight not to show the shock she felt, but Mara managed. She wiped her face on her sleeve, smearing red across that crisp, new white fabric, and projected only irritation, irritation and calm. “That was unnecessary. I said I’d go.”

  “Now your reservations are at rest. Come.” He stalked ahead of her, but paused to glare at the woman until she, still screaming, forced her hands together and bowed for him. Then he continued out into the Nave, putting her utterly from his mind.

  Mara followed, watching students stare at her as she and the demon moved among them. They resented her for the preferential treatment, but oddly, they weren’t envious of it. A Master’s moods were volatile, and when interest faded, suffering began. For some of the Masters, the rewards were worth the risk, but this was Malavan. “What do you teach?” she asked.

  “What do you wish to learn?”

  “I didn’t come here to learn anything.”

  “So I hear.” He took her out through a tunnel and down a well-lit stair, not one she knew. It wound around and around and suddenly came out again, not in the lyceum, but on the catwalk above the Great Library. Malavan moved on without stopping, but Mara simply had to go to the balcony and look down.

  Even at this height, the Scrivener was not lessened and his place in the library drew the eye. He was his own well of gravity, sucking in the light and vitality of the room’s inhabitants as much as sight. Funny. She could not see the Hell of the harrowing, but it was there, just four long flights of stairs below her. All the knowledge of the universe was there, curdled into madness, but she couldn’t see it, not with her eyes, not even in the Mindstorm.

  Master Malavan waited for her at the passageway that led to the theaters above. Patience was not natural to him, but he was content for now to watch her and guess at what she must have endured. Listening to the things he imagined was worse than what she had to remember. Mara left the Scrivener to his initiates and ascended to the lyceum.

  Students swarmed in the great cavern, a mass of white and black blobs moving down tunnels and through doorways. They bowed if they saw Malavan, but most had their hoods up to keep the dripping ceiling off, and Malavan was not so noticeable a demon as coral-edged Zyera or glowing Horuseps. He didn’t seem to mind. His thoughts, armored in strangeness, seemed fixed on a single point and she thought it had something to do with her.

  “You never said what you taught,” she remarked, extending a piece of her mind like a needle to circle the armored dark that was his.

  “Growth.”

  “Good for gardening, I suppose.” She thought loudly of what possible use turning saplings into trees might be, and while he focused clumsily on that, she slid that needle in, quietly, painlessly probing.

  Malavan grunted and glanced at her, unaware of her infiltration. “It is the art of all life force. I think you are the first even to think of trees and fruit and growing things. Most consider my art solely a means of preserving youth or the vitality of one’s seed.”

  “Invigorating my seed never occurred to me,” said Mara, probing deeper. No, he was no telepath, but his mind remained irritatingly dark all the same. When she’d been younger, Mara had spent a number of afternoons dragging her au pair to the zoo because she’d heard that chimpanzees were intelligent and wanted to know what they thought, and those experiences were very much like this one: Malavan was intelligent, as the apes had been in their way, but his mind was just too strange. He wasn’t human. He wasn’t even…whatever Horuseps was. She could probably learn to read him in time, as she could have learned to read the chimps, but that wasn’t why she was here.

  Besides, she got the broad strokes. She could sense the currents of his thoughts, his basest emotions and how they changed when he thought of her. Now, for example, she could feel his crawl of crude amusement as he looked at her feet, at her toes in specific, and how they winked in and out of sight under her robe. Why in God’s name he should be hung up on that she couldn’t begin to fathom and was afraid to examine too closely, lest she give herself away. If the price of disobeying a Master was death, she could only imagine the penalty for trespassing in his head. “Eternal youth must appeal to a lot of people, though,” she said, withdrawing.

  “Studies require lifetimes. Man is mortal.” Malavan glanced at her, so suddenly that she thought at first he’d felt her retracting her needle, but no, he was grinning. “Do you not wish to live forever?”

  “That sounds pretty awful, actually.”<
br />
  He faced forward, grunting to himself again, or maybe laughing, it was hard to tell.

  “You’d outlive everyone you cared about,” Mara said. Without meaning to, she thought of Connie, an old woman, and herself, still young. It made her feel something. She wasn’t sure what.

  “Life requires few things to sustain it. Love is not among them.”

  “Neither is magic.”

  Malavan hissed laughter out his teeth. “A point,” he said, and stopped before an open theater door to rise up on the points of his claws, almost but not quite on level with her eyes. He smiled, or tried to smile. “Study with me. I can give you a thousand years of power if you will stay with me, stand at my side, and call me…Master.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  His eyes narrowed. He dropped back onto his knuckles. “You’re lying.”

  “I do that a lot.” Mara moved into the circular room and down the descending rings to find an empty place in the second row. Even with forty-three other students sharing this space and forty-three other minds clamoring in her head, the round benches were mostly vacant.

  Far from projecting an appearance of size and strength, this persistent theme of oversized and empty rooms only served to instill Mara with a sense of vacuum, of some unhealthy place being slowly eaten away from the inside. The air of isolation and desperation infesting the students only made the analogy that much stronger. Everyone knew that something was preying on them, but as long as the predators fed them, no one seemed to care.

  Lambs among wolves, thought Mara. Lambs suckling of wolves. And if one or two got snapped up by their mothers, oh well, said the rest of them, it made the milk that much more abundant.

  Malavan descended to the dais, drawing silence like a curtain across the rings of students who gathered to hear his lesson. He swung lithely up beyond the lectern, reared, and jabbed his two long claws deep into the podium’s face, so that he might lean on them upright. He’d dug out two grooves of prodigious depth, proof of this comfortable habit of long age’s making. His eyes raked across them, everyone counted, even those sitting behind him in shadows, and when his eyes fell on Mara, he grinned.

  “All things that live,” he said, staring up at her, “bleed energy. It is the spark of all magic, the soul of creation, the very breath of Life. This is the art of Growth, to breathe in what God breathes out.”

  Mara settled in, bracing herself for a long stretch of boredom.

  “Death,” said Malavan. “Death is only ignorance. You are mortal—” His eyes burned into Mara’s. “—because you expect to be. Yet within your body, the countless fibres of flesh make and remake themselves, immune to decay, until ignorance and weakness of will corrupt them. The years, like beetles, burrow in. You soften. You wither. You collapse.”

  Amazing how many people responded to those words with real fear. Mara propped one foot up on the riser in front of her and wiggled her toes, trying to distract her teacher. It worked. That was pretty amazing, too.

  “Mortality is an unnecessary limitation,” said the demon, staring raptly at her foot. “Yet mortality is not the only enemy a student of Growth conquers.”

  Was it sexual? It didn’t feel sexual. She couldn’t read him any better now than she had before, but sex things had a way of rising to the surface of any mind. This fascination was more what one would expect of a man in a museum, as if toes were art.

  “I am reminded,” Malavan said, pulling his claws to drop comfortably onto his knuckles, “that human vanity is not the purpose of my art. Flesh is not the sum and substance of all power. Heed.” He walked to one edge of the dais, deftly stabbed the tip of his claw through a wooden box on one of his shelves, and brought it to the lectern. A few casual slices dissected the box handily and he brought out what looked for all the world like a shriveled testicle or a—

  A walnut.

  And as Mara watched, trying to puzzle out just why a demon would keep a single walnut in a carved wooden box with a lock on it, the demon spoke. Just once, one syllable of horrible sound that scraped out of his hoarse throat and twisted its way into Mara’s ears. A short word, almost a bark coming from him, and as Mara recoiled from the hearing of it, the nut cracked open and sent up a spindly, pale shoot.

  “Every instructor you meet within this mountain will tell you his is the greatest art,” Malavan murmured, seemingly fixated by the slow thickening and straightening of that slim, stretching stalk. “And each is, in its own limited way, truly great. Do not be deceived. Fiery shapes and monstrous transformation may impress the eye, but this…this is life itself.”

  Roots spilled over the sides of the lectern and dug in, boring into the stone as effectively as the demon’s claws. The stalk forked as it grew, darkened with bark, forked again. The podium creaked under its growing weight, snapped out a few shards, then let go with a crash. Students bolted back as the tree rooted itself to the dais and stabbed upwards, its branches beating at the walls, gouging grit from the high ceiling.

  “Life is always at its most terrible when it is young, when it is beautiful,” Malavan continued, walking along the raised platform’s edge, his head tipped on side to watch his creation’s growth. “This is why you all seek it, even when you do not understand its consequence. Life, growth…these are merely words to mean potential, and what is potential but unresolved ambition?”

  The tree’s thousand branches suddenly erupted in size, pushing out a hissing, furious cloud of new leaves. The green stink of it permeated the air. Waves of nausea echoing out from the students turned Mara’s own stomach.

  “It is will that makes for greatness,” said the demon as branches groaned and spread, bowed by the weight of budding walnuts. “Life itself can become death in the hands of one who has the power, and the will, to command it.”

  The nuts began to drop, one by one, and then in a clattering, deafening hail. It lasted only a few seconds, and when it ended, the leaves buckled over, bleeding red and brown, and dropped on top of them.

  “It is not the word, but the speaker,” Malavan said. He twitched a claw and putted one of the nuts up in a high arc to land smack in the open box at his feet. He bound it together again with the same unreal agility he’d used to take it apart, saying, “Too many of you desire forever with no idea how to fill those endless years. But life can be deadly when it stagnates. Potential, undirected, rapidly decays. Ambition, without strength of will, cannibalizes itself. And magic, in the hands of the ignorant, becomes very dangerous.”

  That didn’t sound good. Mara got up calmly and started back up the risers, away from the giant, rapidly-decaying, magic walnut tree.

  The sound of dead wood cracking carried exceptionally well in the classroom. Some of the students shifted uneasily in their seats, particularly when Mara passed by, but no one followed her example. It was a test, they were thinking. A test of their resolve. And those who ran (Mara resented the notion that she was running) did nothing but prove themselves unfit before their Master.

  Malavan heaved a sigh, heard even above the ominous death-knells of the tree. “Have I no student of quality before me? Have I, after all, only dogs fawning at my knees?”

  “And bitches who run,” someone muttered—Le Danse, from the ephebeum. “I suppose it was the wrong kind of growth to hold your interest, eh?”

  His henchman laughed obediently.

  “If I were you, I would worry less about insulting me and more about how to avoid being killed by an exploding tree,” Mara remarked, still climbing risers, nearly to the door.

  Now Danse laughed too, somewhat hesitantly. “Idiot.”

  The sound of Malavan’s bone claws cracking down over the podium silenced him, silenced everyone. “You’ve ruined my surprise!” he snarled. “Now you share their punishment!”

  The double doors before her swung inward and slammed, trapping her inside. Mara stared for a second, then caught the carved handles and pushed, but might as well have been pushing at the wall.

  The tree began
to splinter, bulging outward as with terrible pressure, sending shrapnel of bark whipping through the air, some of them hard enough to chip the walls where they struck. The first threads of panic stabbed up through the Mindstorm. Students stared at each other, stunned, and Malavan crouched down at the edge of his dais and grinned at them.

  “Is there not one of you, not one, who can seize hold of the power I’ve put before you? Come, you dogs, the threat and the solution are one! You, Silvana? You, Mercutare? Revanche, will you not come and earn the favor I have so lavishly given you? Where is my pretty Adamantine’s will today? Do you think that I will save you? Do you think I will have you back if you survive disgrace?”

  The tree groaned.

  “For God’s sake,” Mara snapped, tugging futilely at the immoveable doors. “Someone pick up a walnut and grow another tree!”

  Students gaped at her in stupefied silence. The dead tree cracked, firing shards of itself ominously out in a wide fan that seemed, to Mara’s distracted eye, capable of reaching every corner, every riser, every unprotected point of this killing room.

  “Quickly,” Malavan murmured, tapping his toe-claws comfortably on the dais. “Else I have none to hear lessons tomorrow.”

  His voice broke them into a surge of motion as students dove for walnuts. Bare feet slipped on shells, heads conked together, but there was no comedy in the moment. Then, the shouting: the same word over and over, howling from mouth to mouth. It couldn’t have taken very long—the tree didn’t have very long in it—before the first green shoot went spiraling up the splintering trunk, quickly followed by another, then another. They grew at differing speeds, none of them so rapidly or well as Malavan’s.

  “Wrap it tightly,” the demon called out as the dead trunk sent out another shower of bark shards so sharp and dry, they might as well be stone. “Contain the whole or suffer the lack, as my sire would say. You see, Mercutare, you had it in you all along. Ah! Ah! Here is the test!”