by R. Lee Smith
That didn’t help, for some reason. Now Connie sat and stared and thought of Papa Frankie in the ground, full of bugs.
“It’s not a bad thing,” Mara insisted, annoyed with herself. “The bad stuff is all the stuff that happens before, like when it hurts or when you’re scared or feel sick, or whatever made you die. That part ends.”
“But what comes after?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows for sure, no matter what they say. But we’ll find out someday and I’ll probably be as surprised as everyone else.” She smiled at that. “Nobody lives forever, Connie.”
“But aren’t you scared?”
“Of dying?”
“Yeah.”
Mara thought about it, very aware of Connie hanging on her answer because she knew Mara would tell the truth. Hell of a lot of pressure to put a girl six days shy of twelve, she thought, but not bitterly. It was just Connie, that was all. “I just want to do it right,” she said at last. “Being dead doesn’t scare me, it’s just what happens. But dying can be pretty bad. I think it’s okay to be scared of that part, especially if it’s a bad way to go, like getting sick, where you end up puking all the time and have to pee in front of people and everyone who sees you just feels sorry for you, like, for years and years. That’s harsh. I’d be scared of facing that.”
“He lost all his hair,” Connie whispered. “And he smelled bad. I hated having to see him. I hated having to hug him.” And she hated worse having to kiss his dead cheek, when all of it was over, because he was passawayed now and didn’t even know it was her anymore. All he had was the last time, when she hadn’t even wanted to be there.
“Nobody knows what to do all the time,” said Mara. “But the world just keeps going on. We might as well go with it, and maybe just try to be better.”
“Like how?”
“Like…” Mara looked at the grave again. “Like be nicer to cats. But don’t, you know, let it take over all the time. It doesn’t help you or the cat to get all crazy when you think about it. It’s dead. The bad stuff is all over, right?”
Slowly, Connie nodded. Then, almost unexpectedly (the thought did precede the words, but only by a second or two), she said, “You don’t think you’re very nice, do you?”
Mara looked at her, lopsidedly smiling. “No, I’m not.”
“You are, though.”
“No, but that’s okay. Being nice is like being pretty. There’s a scale, you know?”
“I think you’re nice.”
“Yeah and I bet Anna Slovak’s mom thinks she’s pretty, but she’s…she’s kinda hideous.”
Connie gasped, then giggled, then scowled. “She’s nice!”
“Mostly,” said Mara, who knew that no one was really very nice, and who would not be a bit surprised when, five years later, the girl everyone described as ‘sweet but shy’ to police and ‘mule-butt ugly’ to each other took a tryout baton and used it to put Holly Hoendekkar in the hospital after a particularly nasty comment at the cheerleading trials. Holly had to breathe through a hole in her neck for a few days. Anna even went to jail for a little bit. But yeah, mostly nice.
“Do you want to go home now?” Mara asked, knowing Connie did, and so she went too, and six days later, at Kimara Warner’s upscale and elegant birthday party, a very nervous Connie in a very secondhand dress gave Mara an eight-dollar locket on a gold-painted chain, wrapped in slightly used paper that had pastel balloons on it. Best Friends, it said on the front, but that wasn’t why Connie gave it to her, not really.
“It’s so you always remember,” Connie said with that shy Connie-smile, “that you have a heart too, and it’s a good one.”
In that moment, through Connie’s eyes, Mara saw herself, the better self, the Mara that Connie thought she knew. She would have given anything, anything, to be that person at that moment. It was the best birthday, the best of any days.
She put on the locket, ignoring the ugly flare of disapproval radiating out from her mother at the grown-ups’ table (where Mrs. Vitelli sat, as nervous as her daughter in her faded cotton dress and freshly-done hair, trying to disguise her churning nerves with loud laughter and horribly inappropriate good cheer). She put it on and kept it on, and no, it didn’t change her, it didn’t change anything, but she wore it just the same. Day in, day out, asleep and in the shower, for twelve years without fail.
Sometimes, she needed the reminder.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Returning to Kazuul had been a mistake. Even Mara made them now and then. And just as she had done on those other rare occasions, Mara did her best to learn from this one and move on. She ate. She slept. She searched the students’ wing of the Scholomance with the locket held out before her and even ventured down into the Great Library’s miasma to lift every aspirant’s hood and make sure Connie was not among them. She tried the labyrinth beneath the Nave without Horuseps, and managed to open most, if not all, of the doors again. The one place she did not go was the lyceum. Looking at the spiraling stair only reminded her of whose theater lay at the top and then she was angry all over again. She didn’t handle anger well and she couldn’t afford to lose her temper with him twice. She’d get over herself in time, but for now, she stayed out of the lyceum.
On the fourth day following her encounter with Kazuul, as Mara’s body slept and her mind hovered in the Panic Room watching dreams, her monitors suddenly registered a hand upon her shoulder. Not a subtle touch, but one that shook her boldly. She woke fast, ready for Kazuul and ready for a fight, and instead saw moonlight in the shape of Horuseps, sitting cross-legged at her side in the tiny cell, not smiling.
“I have just spent every hour since sunrise convincing him not to come down here himself,” he said without preamble. He did not identify the ‘him’.
She didn’t need it identified.
“Let him,” she snapped, sitting up.
Horuseps looked pained. “Precious, you don’t mean that.”
“The hell I don’t! Do you know what he is to me? He’s a nuisance, that’s all! I tried to deal with it by giving in to him even when I knew that was a mistake, and it blew up on me, so fine. I can live with that, but I don’t need the peace and quiet so bad that I’m going to put up with his—”
His what? What had it all boiled down to but a little name-calling? She’d done all the slapping and the storming out. If anyone ought to getting pissy here—
Horuseps waited patiently, his hands folded in his lap. He looked tired.
“I don’t need to put up with him,” she finished, and threw herself back down as violently as she could without hurting herself, rolling away from him. “You can tell him I hope he enjoyed himself, because it is the last fucking he ever gets out of me. I’m through.”
“Yes, and ten minutes after I delivered your message, he would be right here, fucking you until he broke either your bones or the wall. I allow him nine minutes to charge bellowing through the Scholomance,” he added lightly, “and one minute to kill the messenger. Really, darling, I thought we were friends.”
She stayed on her side, facing the dark, fuming.
“Once more,” Horuseps said after a moment. “Meet with him once more. Give him the chance to—”
“No.”
“Think what your refusal means to your search, to your Connie.”
“He doesn’t know her. He doesn’t know anything. He’s useless.”
“His power—”
“I don’t need it. I can find her without him.”
Another short silence.
“You’re just as stone-stubborn as he is. I hope you appreciate that. I’ll be here all day,” he muttered, and sighed. “Precious, I don’t know what you’re expecting, but this mountain will stand up on swan’s feet and fly before he ever apologizes.”
“I’m not interested in his apology.”
“You can’t avoid him forever.”
“Sure, I can. He’s put himself in the most avoidable spot in the whole damn mountain.�
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“You have no idea how angry you are making him with every day that passes.”
Mara bolted up, shouting, “He should have thought of that before he called Connie a miserable worm!”
“And so should you,” Horuseps snapped back, seizing her locket and shaking it in his fist. “Before going to him wearing the token of someone else’s love!”
Mara drew back, still flushed and breathing hard, but beginning to be confused as well.
“He has always been first in the eyes of his supplicants. You put your Connie above him even in his bed…How did you think he was going to handle that?” He released the locket with a snap of his wrist. It bounced off her throat and spun, lying tangled over her breast in its cheap chain.
“I’m through with him,” Mara said again, but not as heatedly as she had before.
“No you are not,” Horuseps shot back, biting off each word. “Not for so long as you live by his grace in his mountain! Must I remind you of that? And you, darling Mara, light of my lonely heart, you are a hair’s breadth from finding yourself chained to the foot of his bed until you learn to appreciate him better, which knowing the two of you, is going to take at least a thousand years, and in the meantime, you will lose every hope of ever finding your lost Connie!”
“I don’t respond well to threats.”
“Neither does Kazuul!”
She looked away, pushing her anger down and trying to think. She couldn’t fight him, she knew that. Even if it was just him and not every demon under his command, she could never fight Kazuul. His physical strength aside, he could easily crush her with no more than the power of his mind.
But he hadn’t. Even when she slapped him.
No. She didn’t need him. She could find Connie without—
It occurred to her only then that every resource he had at his disposal to help her find Connie was also a resource he could use to shut her away. The revelation overwhelmed her with frustration and a feeling of helplessness so new to her that she almost couldn’t recognize it, and both together combined to make a churning pit of purest anger.
“I can’t,” she said finally, calmly. “I can’t see him right now or I’ll just make things worse. I’m furious with him.”
“I understand. You’ve no idea how well. And I think I can convince him to wait…if he knew that you were coming.” Horuseps watched her glare across the dark cell. “Are you?”
“Looks like I have to, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What does he expect me to do?” Mara demanded scathingly. “Love him?”
“Probably.”
“After he tells me how incapable I am of loving anyone? After he calls me a…a terrible, wretched—”
“He doesn’t think things through,” Horuseps agreed with a sigh. “He only knows that he wants you…and you want someone else. If you knew him as I do, you’d realize he’s actually trying very hard.” He waited as she seethed, and quietly said, “Shall I tell him you’ll be back?”
Stiffly, she nodded.
“Soon?”
“Sooner than I want,” she said with a tight laugh. “And if he expects me to be happy about it, he’s got a hell of a disappointment in store.”
“Very well.” Horuseps started to rise, then abruptly leaned over and brushed his lips against her cheek. It was a distinctly unpleasant feeling, and she had to fight not to reach up and crush the lingering sensation like a spider. “I know this is difficult for you, precious. I doubt you’ve ever had to capitulate so entirely to another’s will before, and I sincerely sympathize. It wasn’t easy for me either.”
“How often do you have to chase down his women for him anyway?”
“As they say—” He smiled thinly and stood up. “There’s a first time for everything. Sleep well, Bitter Waters.”
He let himself out, and after a while, Mara lay back down and rolled over.
She had to go back. Not today, she knew that already, and not tomorrow either. But soon.
Of course, ‘soon’ ought to be relative to a demon who had lived more than four thousand years by his own admission. With any luck, she’d find Connie and the two of them would be long gone before he lost his patience and sent Horuseps after her again.
Kazuul.
Mara shut her eyes, gritted her teeth, and eventually slept.
* * *
The second time she woke, it was to first-bell ringing through the rock. She sat up aching, as she did every evening, and felt a wall at each of her bracing hands, the door right at her toes.
Yet Horuseps had been here, she was sure of it. Her cheek still crawled from his kiss. She didn’t know how he’d gotten in or out, but she knew he’d been here, pimping her out to Kazuul.
All right, perhaps that wasn’t entirely fair. But then again, perhaps it was.
So his feelings were hurt, were they? Her twelve year-old birthday present was too much for his demonic heart to bear when he had to look up and watch her ride him. And three days without her had proved so painful that he had to threaten to chain her to his bed if she didn’t come back on her own. All to win her pale, wretched love.
There was no point in sitting here, making herself angry. She got up, tucked her cup into her sleeve, and felt her way out into the hall to light a lamp. She did not think about Kazuul. He wasn’t worth thinking about.
Bastard.
Mara found an empty room in the garderobe and relieved herself, still not thinking, but as she rinsed her hands afterwards, for whatever reason, her eye wandered back to watch her own yellow stream take itself away through the garderobe’s hole into the cistern below.
It sounded like a fairly deep drop. She remembered thinking that before. And the sound of water falling into it echoed loudly, as if it fell into a fairly wide room. She had thought that too.
Mara wiped her hands on her robe and walked over to the hole, ignoring the stench as best she could. She looked down, but the light from the room’s one blister-lamp didn’t reach far inside. And really, how badly did she want to see what was down there? A long drop? It kept the gasses and the smell under some sort of control. A wide room? So all four sub-chambers of the garderobe emptied into one big reservoir. What did she think, that Connie had flushed herself down the toilet?
Well…not this toilet. Mara prodded at the edge of the hole with her foot, then placed her foot directly over it. With her heel on the rim, her toes could just touch the opposite side. Nothing human was getting down there. Not in one piece anyway, although if someone were dismembered…
But as she stood there, the sound of falling water changed subtly, from the high flat smack of liquid dropping onto liquid, to the dull patter of a solid interrupting mass.
Mara moved her foot and aimed her mind down the hole.
She felt no one.
‘There’s something alive down there,’ she thought, and yes, she could remember thinking that once as well.
“Mara?”
“Devlin,” she answered, still gazing thoughtfully downwards.
“Um…what are you doing?”
“Where does all the water go, do you know?”
“Why would I know that?”
“Why doesn’t it fill up the cistern and overflow?”
“I don’t know. I guess there’s vents, like in the bath.”
“And where is the water coming from?”
“Rain?”
“Every day?” she pressed. “All year? At this rate?”
“How should I know? Maybe there’s a reservoir up top somewhere. Maybe its runoff from an underground river or something. What does it matter?” He joined her at the hole and also poked a sandal at it. “She’s not down there.”
“How can you be sure? Haven’t you ever heard something move down there?”
“Hey.” Devlin turned around and gave her a serious, frowning look. “I heard things moving around in the Oubliette with me too, but I knew I was alone there. Did you know that one of the first symptoms of prolonged co
nfinement is hallucinations? Closely followed by paranoia. It’s this place, okay? She’s not down there.”
His confidence was oddly soothing, no matter how certain she was. She allowed it to sway her for now and followed him out, but as she left, the sound of falling water changed again, as of that large body moving out of the stream.
They took the back stair up to the dining hall, the one that led past the kitchens, with Devlin chattering in her ear the whole way about claustrophobia and caves and people he’d seen go, you know, totally batshit in here, some of them after years of doing okay, right up until they started screaming and clawing at their eyes. One guy he saw actually took a potato—
Mara tuned it out. The kitchen doors were closed, and there was another room she’d never seen. Come to think of it, where were they getting all this food? Not just the meat, but the rest of it? The awful gruel, the grain for the bread, the milk and the rennet for the cheese, all the fresh fruits which the Masters enjoyed well outside of their season? She guessed someone could be using the art of Growth for some of it, but even if true, where was he doing it? There had to be a garden somewhere, perhaps on the outside, and that meant another way out of the mountain.
Mara paused by the last kitchen door and tried to open it. The latch turned in her grip, and then someone took it firmly on the other side and held it. Feeling through the stone was futile. She and the unseen other held their halves of the door and waited.
“We’re not allowed in there,” Devlin said behind her.
Mara let it go, frustrated. “I’ve looked everywhere we are allowed.” She watched the latch rotate back to its former position and then heard the faint click of a lockplate engaging. “How am I supposed to find her when—”
Kazuul. Kazuul, of course. She was supposed to go to Kazuul for permission, and after she’d properly subjugated herself, he might consider it.
“Bastard,” Mara spat, and started walking again.
Devlin cringed back.
“Not you.” She stepped out into the roar of the dining hall and glanced towards the Masters’ table, tapping a lackluster greeting at Horuseps.