The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “But—”

  “Find her and then talk to me!” Mara snapped, turning on him in the ephebeum. “Don’t come crying at me with half-baked schemes and expect me to fall down on my knees in gratitude.”

  There was some sniggering at the edges of the room. It was never entirely empty at this time of day, and its two biggest lions—Le Danse and Loki—were only too happy to fix their eyes on a gazelle in distress. Mara marked them and, scowling, grabbed Devlin’s sleeve when he started to slink away, yanking him into step beside her. She wouldn’t leave him alone in their company when they were prowling. She wasn’t a killer.

  “She forgives you already!” Le Danse called, and one of the white-robed sycophants quivering at his elbow saw this as a golden opportunity to get on his good side. Leaping up, the man added, “Gratitude is not the only way to get her, boy! She’ll kneel for any reason at all, won’t you, pretty bird?”

  How thou singest…

  Her step faltered. She rubbed irritably at her temples, as if she could push the memory away. It meant nothing, after all. It was just sex, and like the song goes, just another brick in the wall.

  “A bird?” Le Danse asked, amused.

  “What else?” the other man called, wanting everyone to hear him now. “A swallow!”

  Mara turned around, already lashing out as hard as she could, not a slap this time but a roundhouse punch. Le Danse’s new friend jerked back hard enough to crack his head on the wall behind him. Color spiked across Mara’s mind, and then the man slumped backwards off his bench, saved from a second and nastier impact only because he landed head-first in Le Danse’s lap. He lay still. His foot twitched, but only once.

  The silence held for a moment, and was broken by Loki’s horrified giggles. Then there was a general rush of movement as students either gathered around him or bolted out of Mara’s path.

  “Is he dead?” Devlin asked uneasily.

  “Of course not,” said Mara, walking again. “He may even wake up in a day or two, if someone takes care of him.”

  “No one takes care of people in here.” Devlin ran a little to catch up to her, jogged back when she glanced at him, then trotted after her again. “Do you want to hear my plan?”

  “I don’t need to.” She went up to the dining room by the back way. Students tended to congregate on the wide stair that led to the Nave, and she’d dealt with them enough already for one day. Lamps flickered and came dully on ahead of her, flickered and died to black behind her. Devlin’s sandals flapping were the only sound and it wasn’t much. His misery hung over the whole of the tunnel, all the thought there was to read.

  “What is it you expect me to do with you?” Mara asked finally, fiercely. “Pull the sword from the stone and anvil, bring the tablets down from the mountaintop, and ring the fucking bells for freedom? You knew what you were getting into!”

  “So did Connie,” Devlin muttered, and when she glared at him, defiantly added, “People can be wrong, you know!”

  I was wrong about this place. Please come and get me.

  The ground was canting upward, twisting in on itself as it became the spiral stair, too narrow now to walk side by side. Mara used it to her advantage, quickly moving ahead of him, but Devlin had been in the mountain far longer than she and had adjusted to the steep stairs in ways she could only envy. He took them two at a time behind her, not even out of breath, and slipped in at her side again at the top.

  “You’re not my problem,” Mara said, speaking tersely to try and disguise the panting sound of her breath. “For God’s sake, you’ve had eleven years to escape.”

  He didn’t answer, but his mind was whirling…eleven years, gone. Eleven years, locked away in this place. This terrible place. Over and over, one thought cut across his chaos: There is no escape but one.

  Mara shoved his mind away from hers. “If that’s true, why come to me at all?”

  “You’re different,” he mumbled.

  “Oh bullshit. What a handy way to free yourself of any responsibility. Just wait for someone different to come along so they can take care of you.”

  She turned the sharp corner into the final long passageway, the dining room a circle of golden light and noise at the end of it. The kitchen doors were ajar, but as they approached, a hooked and scaly claw reached out, not a furtive movement at all, but a cold, deliberate one that shut them away from the warmth of the unseen fires and the smell of roasting, unknown meat. The doors were closed, one after the other, just before she could come near enough to look inside, ‘Like vampires closing their coffins,’ she thought, and smiled because there were no vampires in Romania.

  “It isn’t funny,” the surly goat said beside her.

  “Grow up, Devlin. Learn to deal. Did they say that back when you were around? You brought yourself here. Get yourself out.”

  “You’re helping her!” he burst out. “You’re saving this…this Connie person!”

  “That’s the great thing about dealing,” said Mara, walking out into the dining room and giving a nod to the Master’s table. “You get to pick who you save.”

  And pick the plan by which to do it. Devlin’s wasn’t bad. Mara found an empty place at one of the tables and looked back at the demons. Only some of them were watching her today. The novelty must be wearing off. She sent a thought to Horuseps: **I’ll be joining you in class today.**

  His head tipped and he raised his cup to her. ‘Delighted,’ he thought. ‘I had begun to think you immune to my charms.’

  **I am. But not to my own desires.**

  ‘There’s a stirring thought,’ he told her, smiling, unstirred. ‘And where have your desires led you recently? I so missed your smiling face yesterday.’

  He was guarding himself well. She couldn’t see very deep inside him without letting him know she was looking, but what she could see made her suspect he already knew. All he wanted was to see her dance.

  **I’ve been around,** she told him, shrugging. **Did you want me?**

  She threaded suggestion beneath the words, well-hidden by idle curiosity above and suspicion everywhere that he might sense it if he looked, and of course he looked.

  ‘In every way,’ he thought back. He may have even believed he was teasing, but she could see beneath to the dark soil where her subtle ideas germinated. Her efforts were beginning to pay off already.

  Mara broke away and cleared a place at her table, slapping lightly and indiscriminately at the minds around her until she could take a loaf of bread without risking a punch. It was poor stuff to fight over—heavy, dark, and thick with sharp seeds—but better to her mind that the blood-heavy hunks of skinless meat or marrow-rich bones that filled the other platters. Devlin dropped onto the bench beside her, taking advantage of the void as slapped students shrank away, to help himself to the excess.

  “So I have a plan,” he said around a mouthful of meat as he stuffed wrinkled fruit and cheese into his sleeves for later.

  “Shut up, Devlin.”

  He hunched, picked at a moldy spot on his potato, said nothing.

  “Do you really want to help me?” Mara asked.

  “Yes,” he muttered, at one sullen and hopeful. He looked like the world’s largest toddler, promised a treat if he could behave, at a stage when good behavior was still more or less as thing of fiction.

  “Then don’t follow me to class today. I’m serious. I can’t have you with me today.” She could keep her own mind armored easily enough, but that wouldn’t do much good with Devlin psychically bleating out the plan to anyone who could listen. “Promise me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Oh, why indeed? As in, why did she always do things the hard way first? Mara reached rudely into Devlin’s head and got an expert hold on the place where suggestions rooted. “Don’t follow me to class today,” she said again, not speaking to him anymore but directly to his brain. He looked a little stupefied when she let go, but only a little. She’d gotten
pretty good at stuff like that in the past few years of dealing with her mother.

  The bells rang.

  Mara got up with the rest of them, clearing a path out of the general crush of students until they all learned to give her room. They didn’t all go meekly. Lions and gazelles, Devlin had said, and it seemed very true now, as so many students cringed away without thinking about it and others merely retreated to a better distance to see her and mark the face of another lion among them. She’d been subtle long enough; it was an intoxicating liberty to push back like this and not have to worry who saw her or what they would suspect.

  Intoxication could be dangerous. On the outside, Mara did not drink. Here, she did not revel in her advantage. She simply cleared her path and went on.

  She’d left Horuseps in the dining room, and took the most direct route to the lyceum, yet he was there before her when Mara reached his theater. There and standing motionless at the center of his dais, his arms crossed and hands cupping his shoulders, as if he had stood there a thousand years already and could easily stand a thousand more. He smiled when he saw her, long fingers twitching, wanting to relish her surprise.

  She’d seen this trick before, but it was still a good one. “Do you teach that here?” she asked, stepping down the risers to find a seat in the front row.

  “I? Only Sight. There was a time when we taught the art of Correspondence to our most promising students, but no longer.”

  “Were they blinking themselves out of the mountain?” Mara asked, smiling.

  “No. Midway through the walls.” And he smiled while she pictured that. “We’ve learned over the years to teach all that you learn here, not all that we know. No,” he said, as the lights of his eyes spun. “I see that you have never been deceived. Forgive my presumption, that I dare to lecture you as though you were any other human.”

  There was a joke in that somewhere, and she was the butt of it, but she couldn’t see how. Instead, she said, “I forgive you,” which needled him, so that was all right. “What can you help me to see, Horuseps?”

  “Oh, that’s refreshing. Most students have demands, not questions.”

  “You already know what I want. How can you help?”

  “Help. I see. You want my…help.” Horuseps strolled around to the fore of the dais and trailed his fingers along the rim of what looked for all the world like a tombola, the kind used in bingo parlors to mix the playing balls around. This one was filled with large round stones, shiny as jewels after years of tumbling together. “Sight is not an art in the strictest sense, but it is one of the ultimate powers, dearest, with countless applications. Most students seek me out at one time or another, but few master my lessons entirely. Sight is essential, you see, but it is the nature of vision to be selective. After all, it is Man who interprets what he sees, and Man is flawed.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Mara said dryly.

  Horuseps shrugged and nodded once. “So how can I help you, my most precious one? Let me think.”

  Mara waited while Horuseps posed and the classroom filled behind her. Beneath his mental armor, his thoughts were of her. She could see them now and then, eerily chaste, yet charged with carnality. He saw her as a sculpture—no matter how beautiful, how desirable, she was never to be touched.

  Which raised that same old question in Mara’s mind. Why not?

  “It is has been said,” Horuseps began, and the room fell silent, “that nothing exists in the dark that is not there also in the light. True, to a degree.” He walked around the tombola and seated himself gracefully at the corner, crossing one chitinous leg over the other and looking very lean, very graceful, very harmless. He smiled, and Mara felt the hot leap of arousal from out in the audience—male heat responding to female attraction. The demon’s smile widened. “Yet more exists than the human eye perceives. This, you have been taught. Proteus, tell me.”

  One of the black-robed students stood, staring raptly down at his instructor. It was not lust he felt, exactly, but he responded in that way even so. Power came with a Master’s favor, and Horuseps wanted him. This was another test, that was all, and when he had passed the last of them, he would have her (the anticipation of real sex after all this time, not the clandestine and unnatural fumblings with other students, or the humiliating mountings he had endured under the crushing weight of Master Ruk or Master Nezgulon, but real sex!) and she would give him the greatest magic, the magic she did not show to the weak. He licked his lips and said, “All living things emit the charge of life’s own energy. When perceived, it becomes power.”

  “When Seen,” Horuseps murmured, nodding approval, “it becomes Sight.”

  This seemed very similar to Malavan’s lessons, Mara thought.

  “Of course it is,” Horuseps said, turning to her at once. “There is only one truth.”

  “Then why so many arts?” she asked.

  “Oh my darling one. How many Christs came out of Galilee? And how many books have been writ of his one true word? Sight is selective. Man is flawed. And you, my dearest, are very young. Sit quietly. Observe. Proteus.”

  Mara ignored the snickering delight of those who believed she’d been chastised, and watched closely as lucky Proteus came down the risers to stand beside the false female he dreamed of penetrating. Horuseps trailed his hand over the tombola, then opened it and dropped one of the stones into his student’s waiting, sweat-shined palm.

  **He thinks you’re a woman,** Mara silently said.

  ‘Does he?’ Horuseps replied. He knew. Aloud, sliding his fingers through the tombola as one stirring bathwater, he said, “Each creature’s energy is unique unto itself. It surrounds you all, stains all you touch, and there remains where neither Time nor Element may wipe it clean. Only a fresher touch of living energy consumes its enduring print.”

  Mara frowned at the pebble Proteus held. She saw nothing but the rock itself, which put her firmly in the majority here, but at least some of the students did see more. Proteus, gazing into his own hand, could actually see it shining like a star, so brilliantly blue that it seemed white in his eyes. The sight filled him with adrenaline, with triumph. He still couldn’t See what he wanted every time he wanted to, but it was getting easier. He would master it some day, and when he did—

  Proteus looked hungrily up into the demon’s pale, pretty face. He dropped the stone into the tumbler, which Horuseps gently sealed. A pass of his long, black hand set it spinning, and then he just sat, flirting with the boy before him in every coy glance and predatory smile.

  **What are you going to do with him?** Mara asked without speaking.

  ‘Beyond a few hours’ sport, I don’t imagine much. But such delightful hours!’ The rocks settled. Horuseps opened the tombola and gestured within.

  Proteus picked up a long-handled spoon from the shelves behind the dais and came back. Through his eyes, Mara saw hundreds of dull rocks, worn shiny by ages of handling. He began to turn the pebbles over, searching for his own light among them. All of this, Mara could see, but when she withdrew to her own mind, there was nothing but a man in a Halloween costume loudly stirring a badly-cast cauldron full of rocks.

  ‘Did you think you would master my art in a day?’ Horuseps wondered.

  **Sort of.**

  ‘You must be American. No other country puts forth people so convinced of the power of possession. Yet magic is no trinket to be bought and applied by whosoever desires it. We allow our students ten years of training. Rarely is it enough.’

  **How good of you to remind me,** Mara thought, as Proteus succeeded in spooning out the radiant light of himself coating his own particular stone. **We Americans also invented the grand tradition of the hostile takeover.**

  ‘I don’t believe I’m familiar…?’

  Mara dove back into Proteus, boldly now, paralyzing him in an instant and then flipping through the years of his study with the image of that glowing pebble before her, listening for resonance. She found it, and under the demon’s curious eye, followed
it to its source.

  “You incorrigible cheat,” Horuseps said, marveling.

  “Anyway you can get it, right?” Proteus replied, slurring only a little. He had a pronounced overbite. He hadn’t been very aware of her until that moment, but hearing those words come out of him without his control spurred him to panic. She could feel his consciousness fighting her as a trapped moth fights against a window, easily ignored. And there. After six years of training, Sight came to Proteus.

  “It won’t be as meaningful,” said Horuseps, plucking the stone from Mara’s stolen hand and tossing it back into the tumbler. He gave it a spin and crossed his arms.

  “Funny, and perhaps relevant, story,” said Mara through the other student’s mouth, carefully playing and replaying that moment of remembered epiphany. “Connie had a lot of brothers. They played a lot of computer games. It’s okay, I don’t expect you to know what those are.”

  People had begun to whisper. Horuseps silenced them with a raised hand, then nodded politely for her to continue.

  “The point is, most of those games come with cheats that allow the player to, among other things, have infinite health, infinite armor, infinite ammunition…magic, in other words. Invulnerability. God-like power over every outcome. And watching them, I learned a valuable lesson.”

  “Pray tell.”

  “Whether it’s meaningful or not,” Mara said, settling back in her own body. “You still win.” She got up, climbed the dais, and flexed her mind to See. It was easy once you knew how, as easy as winking one eye, or raising one hand, or crushing the struggles of the man whose body you have possessed to better steal his memories. Mara reached into the tumbler and pulled out the rock that Proteus had touched. She tossed it to the demon, who caught it out of the air with a flick of his delicate wrist. “You just win faster.”

  Horuseps rolled the pebble slowly between his thumb and forefinger, erasing the white light of his favorite student’s touch. The lights of his own eyes spun at precisely the same lazy speed, growing dimmer as well. “You realize that once an art is mastered, you can never return to this classroom.”