The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  Neither of them spoke for a time. He gazed around the Reliquary, playing idly with the objects within easy reach—all but the skull, which, though it sat right beside him, he neither looked at nor touched. Seemingly unbothered by the silence, the way in which he armored his mind told her that his serenity was, like so many things about him, a facade.

  Mara waited him out, inspecting the mirrors one at a time.

  “I do,” he said suddenly, softly. He stared straight ahead, his face half in shadow. The uncharacteristic gravity of his expression stole much of the haunting beauty that made mistaking him for a female so easy for others, and gave him instead an equally devastating handsomeness. “I believe in God.”

  Of all the answers he could have given, this was the one she’d least expected.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Ah well. I consider myself an artist in the medium of cruelty,” he said, giving himself a modest pat on the chest. The gesture could not even begin to cloak the bitterness in his light tone, or the snapping hate in his eyes. “As such, I can attest that the sheer spitefulness shown in the universe’s grand design simply demands conscious direction.”

  She had nothing to say to that.

  “No, child. I have never seen Him, trembled before His awesome voice, or beheld His fiery hand reached down to Earth, but I do believe.” He looked back into the opposite wall, his thin jaw very hard. “And there are nights I stare into the heavens and wonder what lies in store for me when at last I go to kneel before that throne. We are not immortal, for all that we are ageless.”

  Silence descended again, broken swiftly by his dry chuckle. “And other times, I confess I believe I will find that throne long vacant, tarnished by aeons of neglect. That God has fled, or worse, remains and has been driven as mad by His divinity as Man by his mortality. How fitting that would be. Still…the thought remains.” He glanced at her. “And you?”

  “I never thought about it,” she answered honestly.

  He nodded, smiling again, as if this answer were only what he had expected to hear. “Yet neither do you disbelieve.”

  Mara shrugged. “I never thought much about demons either, but here you are.” A stray memory bubbled up, and she had to laugh. “I didn’t believe in the Scholomance.”

  “The irony.”

  “I don’t think it’s ironic. I think it’s just an error.” Mara picked up Solomon’s cup again and ran her thumb over the empty place where a djinn’s soul-stone had once been. “Why do you keep these things if they don’t mean anything?”

  “Dearest, if they did mean something, they would be dangerous for us to keep. Therefore, holding them is valuable as a show of power over our braver students. Besides—” He took back the cup and admired it himself. “Some of them are pretty.”

  “Have you ever seen a real relic?”

  “With the existence of God in doubt, I must deny it, solely because a relic must be, by definition, a holy object. If you ask, have I ever seen a magical object, why, of course I have. The making of such things is even taught here, even the least of which could put any of these to shame. I suppose you think it isn’t the same thing.”

  “Is it?”

  “Magic bleeds, dearest, and nothing natural may staunch its flow. Eventually, even the most powerful talismans are rendered impotent. Without God, without eternity, can something truly be said to be a relic?”

  “Nothing natural,” Mara echoed, frowning.

  “Perhaps I should have said nothing of Earth, where magic is itself not natural.” Horuseps waved a hand dismissively and put the cup back on the shelf. “But there are other worlds, dear Mara. Worlds beyond measure, beyond all imagining. There are worlds were magic forms in pools as natural and as vital to life as seawater on Earth, and there are worlds so blasted by the lack that any power ignited there instantly is absorbed, as drops of water sprinkled over desert sand. Yet here we are.” He looked around the cavern, his mouth twisted. “And my belief in God must grow.”

  “Why don’t you leave?” Mara asked.

  He turned on her fast, hissing, “I was born here!” with violence enough to send her leaping away, a mindslap aimed and trembling right at the cusp of being thrown. “This is my world also and I have every right to—” He stopped there and simply looked at her, perhaps sensing her defenses armed. The lights of his eyes dimmed. He leaned back, waving a kind of apology at her as he said, “A moot point now, Bitter Waters. The destinations may exist, yet transportation, alas, has perished. Here we are. Here we remain. We have learned, as you say, to deal.”

  Mara could feel herself frowning. Horuseps, although he did not look at her, made another of those humorless half-smiles, and said, “Yet if we are such masters of magic, why not simply remake the old Roads and go where we will?”

  “Obviously, it’s not that easy.”

  “Oh, the pure hell of it is, it is that easy. It simply isn’t a power we possess. Only humans know the ways of opening Gates and building Roads, and they have forgotten how. Just as our magic eludes their minds, so does that one elude ours.” He was quiet for a moment. “That one,” he breathed, staring at the wall. And a little later, “All of us.” At last, he shook his head and said, “There again, behold the indisputable work of God.” He glanced around, his eyes lighting here or there as he studied the contents of the Reliquary. “Have you seen enough?”

  “I suppose so. Have you shown me enough?”

  “In this room, yes.” He caressed her cheek, then straightened up and clasped his long hands together. “You can, if you like, continue to search the tunnels without, as I know you’re keen to find your poor lost lamb, but if she has found her way here below, the story shan’t end well. We don’t come down here often.”

  “I would like to look, thank you.”

  He waited a moment, then laughed again, a far more natural laugh for him—one that was sly and filled with unspoken humor. “I note you do not gallantly urge me on about my own business, however.”

  “I want my story to end well.”

  A strange look came over his face, a strange feeling rippled across the well-armored surface of his mind. “One man’s happy ending is another’s tragedy, they say. It all depends upon one’s perspective.”

  “I’m only interested in my own.”

  “I see. Well, one can always hope. Even here…” Horuseps joined her out in the hall and looked back into the little room, his hand raised to close the rock over it. It seemed to Mara that his gaze rested on the little skull, and grew pensive again, eerily handsome in his gravity. “Even here, we are allowed hope. I’m not certain yet if that’s one of God’s little jokes…or His gift.”

  This side of him fascinated her.

  After a moment, he stirred, lowered his hand, and let the rock roll soundlessly in and seal itself. Horuseps smiled down at her—a broad, beaming smile—and gestured on ahead. “Any door you will, dear Mara,” he invited. “We’ll look for her together.”

  * * *

  A thorough search lasted all day and left Mara exhausted both physically and mentally. Horuseps, as good as his word, took her patiently turn by turn throughout the secret passages beneath the Nave, only returning to that cathedral-like cavern after the last of them had been opened, lit, and examined. They found artifacts from ancient lives in the form of candles, broken cups and bowls, even a heavy tarnished ring which Horuseps remarked was the signet by which they once denoted the acolytes, before they’d hit on the idea of different colored robes. They found several students hidden away to engage in furtive, often brutal acts of sex, although thankfully, none of it was of the sort that would have meant a tribunal. They found the skeletal remains of two others, both so decayed by time as to make her certain neither one could have been Connie. They even found the stash of some unknown student’s stolen library books, which Horuseps picked up and carried with him. But at last, there were no more tunnels to walk through, no more doors to open. She simply wasn’t down here.

  “This makes
no sense,” Mara snapped, limping over to a bench so that she could see the damage a day-long barefoot hike had done instead of just feel it. “She has to be here somewhere!”

  “Agreed. Yet try not to be so discouraged—my, that looks painful—you have already seen more of the school than most of your peers, and there is still much left to search. And really, this is a good sign—here, child, let me see it.” Horuseps put his books on the bench and knelt before her. Taking one of her sore feet into his cool, thin hands he gently began stroking it. “It takes determination and great effort to elude my eyes. If your little friend was merely lost, one of us would have surely found her by now. That we have not—” He released her foot, whole and pink and pain-free, and picked up the other. “—would seem to indicate that she must be actively hiding herself.”

  “Or someone else is hiding her.”

  “It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t mean a friend. I mean maybe someone took her and put her someplace. Maybe she can’t get to where we’d find her.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that isn’t true.”

  He’d lied to her. She couldn’t see his real thoughts, but she knew the lie when he spoke it and his hands were still stroking her feet. She’d heard him lie like that before, when he’d said he didn’t know why his fellow Master had chosen to spare the life of the doomed girl at the tribunal. This time, she wasn’t about to let it go.

  “Where do you think she is, Horuseps?”

  “I’m sure I don’t kn—” He looked sharply at his hands, then up at her. He let go of her foot. “Know,” he finished smoothly, and smiled. “There. All better.”

  “Do you think she’s dead?”

  He merely looked at her, his smile slipping by degrees until he was entirely serious. He sighed. “It’s possible,” he said quietly. “I shan’t lie to you.”

  “Not about that,” she observed. “Then where is she? I know you have an idea.”

  “I have many, and therefore, I refuse to speculate.” He glanced upwards and a second later, the bells rang, four of them. His mouth twisted, not into a victorious smile, which would have made her dead positive he had rung them himself, but in what sure felt like sincere irritation. He stood up as the first students poured into the Nave from the dining room, assuming his stateliest pose while attempting to continue the conversation without raising his voice. “What I will tell you now is that students die here quite often.”

  “Because you kill them.”

  “Some, yes. But by no means all, or even most. By far the greatest killer is illness or infection. Did you not wonder why it is always I who opens the portcullis, Mara? It is so that I can See the blood that is drawn from each aspirant, and cull death before it finds us. I’m sure it helps, but the damp, the chill, the mingling of so many peoples in such close quarters…all conspire to breed virulent, deadly disease. Were we to make a count even now, we would find not one human in five wholly free of it. Then we have the rock.” He reached out to give the wall behind her a pat. “Slick at times, jagged at others, and always unforgiving. Bones break, wounds fester, and students die.”

  “Let’s not forget those who kill each other,” Mara said.

  “Indeed, no. Nor those who kill themselves, although I daresay these are also well in the minority. There are humans of a predatory nature here, but well they know that when their prey are made extinct, they will have no one to feed on but other predators…perhaps stronger predators. And so they are careful, darling Mara, to let their rabbits slip the snare after they’ve had their fun. As for the suicides, well, it is fear of death which keeps our students so long among us.”

  “And how many students hide from you?”

  “How am I to answer that? I hadn’t yet realized we were missing the two whose unfortunate remains are cluttering up our saculleum. As I have mentioned, precious, there simply aren’t that many students we notice at all.”

  “Then what’s the point of threatening them with a tribunal if they cut too many classes? What, do you just pick a guy at random and say—”

  He held up a hand with a stern expression and she let that one go without finishing it, although she could feel her temper rising right to the limits of her control. “We have no need,” Horuseps said, frowning at her. “Our students hang themselves without our rope, dearest.”

  “But how can you tell?” she demanded. “If everyone is so beneath your notice, how can you be sure?”

  “It is difficult to explain to one without Sight…You!” His mind reached out past her, snatching at one of the students surrounding them. “Human called Enoch, come here.”

  An older, bearded man in a white robe came skulking forward at the command, his back bent and hands pale where they pressed together.

  “Now,” said Horuseps, knotting his fingers impersonally in the man’s hair and pulling him upright. “When I brought this distinguished gentleman out of his harrowing, I set a mark upon him, invisible, indelible. Here.” Horuseps touched one inky fingertip to the point between and just a bit above the man’s eyes. “The mark fades fairly swiftly, however. Each day, it must be renewed by passing through a Master’s door into the theater of his art. If ever I, or any other Master, were to discover a student in whom the mark of study has gone entirely dark, we have only to make a note of it. Here.” Now he gestured at the neophyte’s cheek, just below his eyes. “Upon the day of Opening, these marks of truancy are forgiven, the slate struck clean. Our fine friend here has somehow managed to allot himself three days truancy in a very short span of time. Naughty boy.”

  The neophyte’s eyes bulged. Mara tapped at him, frowning, and sure enough, he had spent three days sneaking down to the highest levels of the library to read rather than attend class.

  “You can see this?” Mara asked dubiously. She looked, but no angle, no flex of mental effort, nothing permitted her any special vision.

  “And I teach others to See, also. Run along, Enoch. In the same manner, each instructor marks his students indelibly for each year of attendance. We don’t have to remember them,” he concluded as the neophyte raced off down the wide stair to the ephebeum. “We have only to read what’s written. The irony of this is that if a student were only to stay truant, he could avoid his tribunal indefinitely. Perhaps your Connie knows this.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “But you don’t believe it.” Horuseps studied her out of the corner of his eyes as he watched the students clear the stair. “You don’t have a very high opinion of your little lamb’s intelligence, do you?”

  “She’s here, isn’t she?”

  Horuseps chuckled.

  “Connie always did have more enthusiasm than study-smarts,” Mara admitted. “And enthusiasm can take you only so far. If you haven’t got anything to back it up, you end up…”

  “Here?”

  “In a bad way, regardless of where.”

  “You’re here,” Horuseps observed with a small smile.

  “I cheated my way through school,” Mara answered. “I don’t have any more brains than Connie, but I’m not enthusiastic either. I think it evens out.”

  “I see.” The Nave was nearly empty now, and Horuseps looked up again with that same distracted, annoyed expression. “Forgive me, Bittersweet, I’ve kept you far longer than was my intent. I release you to your bed of hunger and to sleep.” He bowed low, and turned away.

  “Won’t you offer to take me back to your place and feed me?”

  His mental armor was so well-prepared that she couldn’t even tell if she’d surprised him. He glanced back, his brows twitching, but his smile was only polite. “I’m afraid I must decline your most intriguing offer tonight. I’ve business elsewhere.” He started away, paused, then said, “If you seek the comforts of cup and platter, perhaps Kazuul could accommodate you?”

  “I’m hurt. You’re throwing me over.”

  His smile remained, still polite, only slightly strained. “It is complicated,” he said.

  “
How so?”

  “Because you complicate them.” He bowed again, placed his hands to his shoulders, and swept away.

  She wasn’t alone long.

  “Hey!”

  Mara sighed. She’d felt him in the crowd, of course, and knew that he’d been lurking behind a pillar, but she had rather hoped that he would move on without her.

  “Hey!” A hand caught her sleeve and tugged it. “Hey, I saved you some dinner. Where were you all day?”

  “Busy.” Mara headed for her cell. Her overused legs still ached, particularly in the knees, but her feet felt great.

  “Doing what? Here. I was worried about you,” Devlin continued as Mara gazed contemplatively into her hand, dripping now with greasy chunks of much-handled meat. “Someone said they saw you leaving with Master Horuseps this morning and he never showed up at class.”

  “Why was anyone even watching? And do you have any bread? I can’t eat this.”

  “Um…no, but I have a…a…Christ, I don’t know. A turnip? Is this a turnip?”

  “It might be a parsnip,” said Mara doubtfully, exchanging the meat for the knobby root he offered.

  “Some kind of nip, I dunno. And what do you mean, ‘Why were they watching’?” Devlin gave her look of scorn that would have done Le Danse proud. “People notice you, and even if they didn’t, they’d for damn sure notice Horuseps. Where did you go?”

  “He was helping me look.”

  Devlin gave her a blank stare. “For what?”

  “For Connie, you ass.”

  “No, I meant for what as in, what for? Why was he helping you? Masters don’t help.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it amused him. Maybe it was the first time anyone had asked. I don’t really care.” The parsnip, or whatever it was, was hard as wood in her hand. She tucked it into her sleeve, ignoring the urgent snarls of her stomach, determined not to wolf anything until she got to her own private cell.

  “Did you find her?” Devlin asked, trotting at her heels.

  “Is she standing here, you idiot?”

  “That doesn’t mean you didn’t find…I mean,” he amended hurriedly, when she gave him a black stare, “She might have been hurt.”