by R. Lee Smith
He let her go a few steps, then lunged for her and grabbed her arm. She sensed it coming and let it happen only because his desperation so completely precluded his doing any harm, but he flinched just as though she’d come around fighting all the same. “If I help you find her,” he whispered, already cringing back from her hot eyes, “will you take me with you?”
“No,” she said, and scraped him off her side with a shove and a mindslap. “You don’t know anything more than I do. You’re useless to me. And I am not Moses leading people to the Promised Land.”
He finally stayed back as she walked away, and she got the feeling he’d be crying pretty soon, but some perverse vindictiveness made her kick him when he was already down and soundly beaten. “Remember this the next time you see some scared new kid sidling up to you in the hall, Astregon,” she called. “Even a gazelle is better than nothing.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The lyceum was bigger than it looked, and it looked pretty big. Its tunnels crawled like roots through the mountain, senselessly forking and intersecting, sometimes climbing up and sometimes steeply dropping down, but always they led back to the main room and another passage. Mara climbed the spiraling stair around the lyceum’s outer wall all day, taking each open doorway as she came to it. She didn’t try to orient herself, or commit even a small part of the labyrinth to memory. She wasn’t going to be here long enough to need to know where all the Masters made their homes. Mara walked, her mind flying out ahead of her to tap at every living thing she encountered, searching only for Connie.
As the day wore on, more and more students emerged from their classrooms to sit in the central cavern or cluster around the lamps. As Horuseps had remarked, the matter under study had a way of repelling those who tried hardest to master it. The people she touched upon were worn, exhausted things that looked back at her with the murderous hostility bred by only the blackest frustration. She did not avoid them, but neither did she ignore them. Five times she was followed into the dark, empty forks of the furthest tunnels, and five times she was forced to turn around and deal with the wolf who tried to prey on her there. A good mindslap and the hard stone floor were more than a match for even the worst of men, and Mara moved on.
The lyceum ceiling opened over the stairs higher up, so that it might seem to those below that it circled around and met the rock, when in fact it merely passed out of sight. Probably to the belfry, Mara decided, but she went on ahead to look, feeling her way with one hand on the wall as she left the light behind her.
It was much slower going in the darkness. The stairs came to an end after a while and then the walls moved away, so that she found herself in a fairly wide tunnel. At one point, her trailing fingers brushed up against the solid, unpleasant lump of a blister-lamp. She started to feel for a switch, but gave up quickly. There were no switches in the Scholomance. **Light,** she thought at it, hammered at it really.
The lamp responded by leaking a weak, yellowed glow. Mara paused there, holding her palm over the repellent lamp to strengthen its power (which it seemed her touch did do), to let her eyes adjust. She looked back, although she knew she was alone here, and saw first the telltale bulge of another lamp on the opposite wall well in the distance, and another ahead of her. She saw benches pulled out from the stone, narrow enough to have passed beneath her outstretched arm without her scraping against them, and alcoves cut into the overhanging stone to allow for grotesque and fantastic carvings.
Mara left the lamp guttering behind her and went to light the next one, moving from one wall to another and examining all she passed. The walls were smoother here. She’d known that in a peripheral way as she walked beside them, but seeing their smoothness was another matter. A thick ribbon of carvings ran along them, about hip-height, just a tangle of ornate knots that seemed to her uneducated eye vaguely Celtic. The floor beneath her bare feet, also smoothed, and richly carved where they met the walls. Here and there were splotches of ancient wax, proof that there had been candles long before the lamps.
The ceiling gradually arched and the hall widened. The carvings became more elaborate and less abstract. Knots turned to flames, then to writhing bodies, and then whole cities of wild and wanton dancers who bathed in showers of fire and who executed mad orgies on beds of bone. Soon the carvings ate up all the stone surrounding her and still the passage went on, painfully straight and level, until suddenly, it stopped.
There was a door here. At the very end of the hall, flanked by carved pillars and dully-glowing blisters, a door. Similar in many ways to every other door in the lyceum, she supposed, but much larger. Like all the theater doors, its face had been carved in relief to show a demon triumphant over a cluster of writhing, pleading supplicants, yet the supplicants in this case were not naked humans, but demons themselves, of many different kinds. She was pretty sure she recognized the tree-like Zyera among them, and she thought the angular one huddled near the bottom and clawing at his own back might be Horuseps, but for the most part, they were so grotesquely intertwined, she couldn’t make out individuals. All of this held a certain fascination for her but of course, what interested her the most was that the doors were closed at all. The backswept horns of one upturned face made clear handles, but when Mara gave them a cursory tug, they didn’t budge.
Mara put her ear to the door and heard, naturally, her own pulse echoing back from unmoved stone to her own ear. She rubbed her palms briskly on her robe, braced her feet, and gave the horns as powerful a pull as she could manage.
Futility.
Mara spent a few fruitless minutes searching without expectation for some secret latch or button hidden among the carvings. When she came up empty, as she’d rather thought she would, she found a place on the carved wall where she could lean and brood over the matter.
How likely was it really that this door led anywhere important? Her sense of spatial relationships were badly askew underground, but she knew she was higher than the portcullis where she and the other applicants had been brought in, much higher than the Oubliette, and she thought she was higher than even the Black Door and whatever lay beyond it.
The wall was not as flat as it needed to be. Stone elbows and gyrating hips shoved painfully into her back and kept her neck bent at an awkward angle. When she straightened up, light from the glowing blisters fell across the demon’s mouth, making him seem to sneer at her for giving up. Her own lips twitched sullenly back at it; she stayed.
So there were no mechanical switches…this meant the likelihood of a mechanical lock was also low. There had to be another way in.
On impulse, Mara touched it. Not the handle this time, but the door itself. Her hand traveled up over writhing knots of pleading demons to the Master who stood over them all. She wondered if it was meant to represent whoever was on the other side, the way the other theater doors acted as portraits for those who taught within. If so, this one cut an impressive figure.
It was a man’s shape, essentially. Heavily-built and wrapped in muscles well beyond most male proportions, he posed atop his writhing fellows with one clawed foot digging at someone’s spine, his arms slightly outspread to further emphasize his sheer size and strength, staring straight out and down at her. He had hair and he wore it in a high knot and a long fall that was, like the carvings around him, almost Asian and almost Aztec, but somehow neither one. A short ridge of blunt horns grew in symmetry along his hairline—the smallest perhaps thumb-sized directly over his eyes, growing progressively larger as they wrapped around his head, so that the ones sprouting above his pointed ears swept up and out like daggers. More of these bony nubs grew along his jaw, they outlined his thick neck, jutted from his wrists, ribs, thighs and biceps. The jagged points of larger spikes thrust themselves out from his shoulders, his back, even his hips. He wore some kind of layered skirt or complicated loincloth, baring his powerful body in defiance of any vulnerability, and the belt that cinched it all together was as sharply studded with points as he was. His eyes were deep-set, his mou
th somewhat snouted. She couldn’t tell if he were snarling or just grinning, but the effect was not a cheering one, whichever. Like a fun-house portrait, the demon’s gaze had a way of following her as she paced restlessly before it. She couldn’t say there was any malevolence in his expression, but it was disquieting to stand before it and feel, however foolishly, that she was being seen and sneered at.
That notion, illogical as it was, suddenly put her in mind of the Oubliette again, and the tar-thick intelligence which had sealed its doors. After a moment’s thought, she touched the handles here, but didn’t try to pull on them. Instead, she opened her mind to them, sending out thought like a spear, searching for that vital crack in an enemy’s armor. She got no sense of awareness, but there was more to the door than just stone, she was certain of it.
**Open,** she thought.
She felt, or imagined she felt, a subtle vibration under her fingertips, just briefly, pulsing once through the rock and into stillness once more. ‘The mountain’s heart beats only once a year,’ Mara thought vaguely and gave her head a shake to clear it. When she looked up, the demon’s stone face was looking down, his teeth bared in what struck her increasingly as a condescending smile.
Outwardly, Mara did not move, apart from a slight curling of her upper lip, but outward appearances ceased to matter. If Connie herself had walked by, Mara couldn’t have noticed. All her attention drew inward, flexing into focus for one explosive command. She felt it drive out of her with good, righteous force. She felt it slam home and drive itself in deep. ‘Open’ was the word she gave and that word resonated once, just once, seeming to blow itself up into something far bigger than its echo, something ancient and alien of herself.
The doors didn’t budge, not even to hum this time, but Mara, without any hesitation, slipped her hands down to the curved horns of the pleading demon, and pulled them easily apart. She was not surprised. It was impossible that any intelligence could hear that word and not obey. Late that night, she would think this hugely conceited of herself, but at the time, it seemed perfectly reasonable. She pulled the doors open and stood between them and felt, just for a moment, ready to take whatever hidden thing laired within and crush it in her fist.
‘I’m here to find Connie,’ she thought, and that tight, feral sense of triumph faded. Connie. Right. This wasn’t a challenge, but a search. She let go of the doors.
Air breathed over her in one long, slow draft, but only once. It brought with it a musty smell, reminding her in a vague way of attics or basements—a dark place, where forgotten things gathered dust.
Very dark. In the dim glow spilling in from the hall, Mara could make out the pregnant bulge of another lamp on her right, but it wasn’t working at the moment. Moving slowly, testing each step, Mara felt her way through the doors and along the rock wall until her fingers brushed over the waxy lump of the blister-lamp. Light was slow in coming and it guttered badly when it did, but it was illumination enough to make out the next lamp, and the next, until she had awakened all five set in the wide outer ring of this classroom.
Because that was just what this was, another theater. No bigger, and not really more impressive than any of those below her in the lyceum. Disappointed, Mara climbed carefully down the risers to the empty dais, then turned at the bottom and looked up at her footprints in the dust. They were deep, deep enough to cast shadows in the bottom. She was the first person to walk here in years, in centuries maybe.
They’d closed it off for some reason. Maybe the demon who taught here had died, or left the mountain, or moved on to another part of it to work. Strange, that they wouldn’t salvage any of his stuff, she thought, as she ran her eyes over shelves of glass jars and boxes, books and archaic objects, all heavily-grimed with neglect.
This was likely to be her only chance to fully explore a theater. Mara headed for the stair behind the Master’s dais. It was wide, steep, and dropped down into absolute black—too inviting to resist. She had very little light, none at all after she’d rounded the second corner, but she went slow and kept her hands on the wall, hoping at each step to come across one of the blister-lamps.
After an eternity of climbing down in a black spiral, she finally caught a glimmer of light at the bottom. It grew as she approached, enough to make out an open doorway, covered in layers of hanging curtains, no less. They waved in the grip of a cold breeze, spilling out slivers of tantalizing light with each lazy billow of crimson, black, and gold.
‘This is it,’ Mara thought, with no real idea of what ‘it’ was. She crossed the final distance in a few short steps, letting determination lead her when common sense might fear to tread. The curtains were thick and old, but although ragged, they didn’t have that greasy/fuzzy feel of neglected fabric. When she passed between them, they tried to cling to her, and she was compelled to move completely out of their reach, not into daylight, but into a natural light all the same.
The draft, of course. The freshness of the air she breathed. These things had been obvious to her, but the moon held her transfixed. The far wall was open, the whole of it, without a ledge or even a rail to keep idle wanderers from stepping off and into oblivion. Mara went, mindful of the danger, but she had to go. The moon would be no closer, really, for her few extra steps, but she went. She had forgotten it was so beautiful. She had forgotten how the stars would shine. And they were no different here, in the Scholomance’s mountain of secret arts, than they were out the window of her bedroom in her mother’s house. Somehow, that didn’t seem fair.
Nothing happened, nothing changed, but the air grew somehow denser. She wasn’t alone here. She knew she wouldn’t be.
“They told me the time between first-bell and last was daytime,” she said.
Her voice didn’t ring boldly out into the room. The open air pushed it back. The stone walls swallowed it. It was the voice of an insect.
His was far more impressive—deep and rolling, relaxed, even amused, but never human, never that.
“Days are that by which mortals measure time’s passage. For simplicity’s sake, we call it so. As our students seeth not the sky, what harm?”
Mara turned toward him, not fast. He rose from his lazy crouch in the shadows just as slowly, as deliberately. The carving on the door had been a very good likeness after all. His skin was grey and rough even to look at, like living stone, raised and thick where the ivory spikes pierced through. His hair was black and very fine, and waved out behind him in the same breeze that moved the curtains. His eyes glowed green, just a little.
“Shall I disrobe?” he asked, indicating the ornate buckle of his plated belt.
“Disrobe?” Mara echoed, frowning.
“So I must assume, as thou hast come to my bedchamber.” He motioned, and true enough, there was a bed, crafted in a wide oval, with a stone lip all around and great bat-wings looming at its head.
Mara raised her eyebrows. “Do you sleep?” she wondered.
“Nay, not often,” the demon replied affably. “Yet I do fuck, and one must have one’s comforts.” He cocked his head, spreading his mouth in a wide, humorless smile. “Thou dost not flee, nor rebuke, nor submit to me. How curious. I suppose thou hast some request to make. Speak it.”
“Is that my prize for finding you?” Mara asked.
“Thy life and mine indulgence should satisfy thy wish for prizes,” he answered. He came toward her, his eye roving freely as he circled and came to a stop before her, bringing his gaze up with aggressive insolence to at last meet her own. There, for an instant, his smile splintered. His nostrils flared. Slowly, his indulgent smirk melting into a look of narrowed disbelief, he reached up and touched a claw to the thin skin below her left eye.
She didn’t flinch.
The demon looked at them, each one in its turn, then at her altogether for a very long time. Suddenly, he smiled. “I see the glint of gold at thy slender throat,” he said, taking back his hand. His breath on her face was hot, like an animal’s. “Thou must belong to someone, to have
won such privilege. And yet thou art here, come seeking me.”
“I wasn’t looking for you.”
“Nay?” He straightened and folded his arms, smiling that tolerant smile. Up close, it had a distinctly predatory shine. “Then who?”
“A student,” Mara said. “She came here two years ago, a woman my age…perhaps you’ve seen her.”
“Nay,” he said, flicking his fingers on one bicep in an offhand wave of dismissal. “I have seen no students for many years. Centuries, perhaps. None save thee, o fearless one.”
“Why not? Did you stop teaching?”
He closed his eyes and opened them again. It was not quite a blink. His smile never shifted, but his eyes glowed brighter. “I tired of that game,” he told her. “Perhaps too soon. Thy manner is much changed from those I once knew…the world has moved on, and thou art new-come to it, I think. How many years hast thou?”
“Why?”
“I do not lie with children, no matter how prettily they do beseech me at my bedside.”
“After centuries of retirement, you’d be robbing the cradle even if I said ‘a hundred,’” Mara countered. “So what difference does it make?”
He uttered a low, noncommittal sound and eyed her again, unabashed in his scrutiny. “And how art thou called, thee of so many years?”
“You’re the Master here. You can call me what you like. Why all the questions?”
He chuckled, still inspecting the shape beneath her voluminous robes. “I wished to see how thou wouldst answer, and so I have. Even silence telleth secrets here. Evasiveness doth scream them. Yet I will have thy name.”
And then she felt him, reaching his mind like a hand into hers, open so as to snatch something out. He struck the solid wall of her Panic Room. She waited to see shock broaden the features of his inhuman face, but it never showed. He looked thoughtful, only that, and even a little pleased.