The Scholomance
Page 36
The silence was ghastly, the whispers that broke it even worse.
“Mara…” Devlin raised his hand and dropped it again without touching her. He was afraid to touch her.
‘He should be,’ Mara thought wearily, looking down at the woman sobbing on the stone floor. ‘Look what I do when I touch people.’
She knelt. The woman shrieked and pulled away. Mara slapped her without emotion, stepped on her to keep her still, and spoke that intoxicating Word.
All around, students stared.
Mara returned the arm to its normal dimensions and let her go. The woman ran. Gazelles will do that. Mara moved past the silent, gaping figures of her fellow students and went back to her cell alone. The race was still being run. She ignored it. There were worse things.
* * *
That night, she dreamt of Connie and what she did to Connie’s arms.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Mara woke. She reached out in the darkness and touched the wall beside her poor bed. That was all for a long time. The stone was very cool and hard and rough under her hand. Grounding. Comforting, even, particularly after the nasty spate of dreams she’d had. She could have switched the monitors off and remained asleep, but just knowing what horrific images were birthing themselves in her subconscious made her abandon the Panic Room and wake. She wasn’t tired anyway. She wanted, oh, she just wanted to lie here.
Her fingers drifted over the rock. ‘Close thy useless eyes,’ she thought, and felt the mountain open around her. She Saw her cell through her fingertips, and Saw the space beyond its cramped dimensions. The Word for Malleation poured through her mind. Her lips moved to give it voice, and then the walls rolled back. It was easy, as easy as turning a woman’s arms to wings.
Mara sat up at the center of her new cell. She’d made the walls too smooth and now her breath echoed. She raised a bed beneath her, a bed like Kazuul’s, wide and rounded with a great bat-winged headboard behind her, but it was hard, hard as stone.
And why this bed, she wondered? A flex of mental effort stole the headboard back and squared out some of the curves, but the resemblance remained, at least to her mind. She wanted to go to him, right now. She didn’t trust the urge, but close inspection showed her no tampering in her thoughts, no trespassers in the Mindstorm. She just didn’t want to be alone.
And his bed was soft, not like this stone copy. She remembered suddenly, clearly, how it had felt when he lay her down—the first comforts since leaving home, the first gentle touches. She remembered how he’d arranged her across his tattered bedding, how his hands had rasped across her skin, and the hot ribbon of his tongue slipping inside her.
Right. And then he’d called her a wretched, loveless creature and laughed her out of his chambers. The insult didn’t bother her—all right, it bothered her, but she’d live—but the laughter did. She’d been wrong to give in to him once, and she hated knowing that she had to go back. He had nothing to tell her, nothing to give her. He had nothing.
But oh, his breath on her belly when he called her beautiful…the smoldering heat of his eyes as he lay beneath her, smiling as he watched her ride him.
Her loins throbbed. No, that was too gentle. She cramped with need, her sex already hot and aching, her womb an empty furnace. Mara drew her knees up and stared into the black as she touched herself. Her pussy felt swollen already, silky with dew.
‘I’m restless, that’s all,’ she thought. ‘I’m restless and I need to get laid.’
She put her hands on the bed—her empty bed—and Malleated through it to raise shelves on the wall. She had no books, but she couldn’t think of any other way to make the room look like a room. She could put her cup up there, she supposed. And her comb.
Mara got up and put her robe on. It wasn’t surrender, it was just…well, it wasn’t surrender. She was scratching an itch, that was all, no different than any other time she’d prowled out to find a man and make him take her home. Anyone would do, it didn’t have to be Kazuul…and it wouldn’t be. Not yet. Not until she had to.
The tunnels were empty where Mara wandered. First-bell had yet to ring and all the good and faithful students either slept or did their forbidden skulking more secretly than Mara. Tapping at dreams and fingering thoughts through narrow cell windows, she made her silent way to and from the ephebeum maybe a dozen times, until finally she walked up the center of the wide stair and across the Nave, to sit on a long, low bench before the Black Door.
Her body, stirred by movement, pulsed with need, but one would never know it to look into her eyes, she thought. Her reflection gazed back at her from the Black Door’s polished face, unmoved, untouched by any emotion. The gruesome nightmares that had chased her out of sleep would seem to have left no mark on her, no dark and sunken stare, no gaunt and shaken countenance…only Kimara Warner’s snowy-eyed indifference.
Something moved behind her. She heard nothing, but saw it in the door, something crawling up the ornate stalactite/column at her back. Its eyes caught the sallow lamplight and gleamed yellow. It watched her from its perching place near the vaulted cavern ceiling, then leapt out—a scrawny, sag-fleshed thing that suddenly flattened out into a shape like a shadowy manta ray—and glided across the Nave to land against another column. She heard nothing, not even the scrape of its claws as it faded into the black.
She felt no menace from it, only a watchful hunger. It knew she wasn’t supposed to be here just yet. It knew also about the ache between her thighs, belied by her cold expression. Every breath it took brought it the musk of her aimless desire. Its penis, a black stinger carried at the tip of its lashing tail, curled up between its knobby legs where he could squeeze it. He thought of leaping out again—a stoop, a strike, a struggle—and then stabbing upward between those kicking thighs, and how hot and fine she would be…
Whatever it was licked his palm, rubbing the swelling tip of his poisonous tail, then jumped off the ceiling and soared silently away, to the Library, where prey could wriggle but never run. Not a Master then, to come down and punish her for her bold disobedience, but just another inhuman thing creeping about, like her, without permission.
Mara’s hand stole to her lap. She watched it in the dark mirror of the door as it slipped down to the crux of her thighs. Her fingertips pressed, rested, burrowed slightly, stroked twice, and lay still.
‘I’m lonely,’ thought Mara.
She stood up and walked, not back down into the student’s level and the safety of her cell, but onward, upward, and into the lyceum, where for all she knew, every demon was out and about and eager to call a tribunal.
But none of them were.
The open hive of that central cavern was just as empty and still as the ephebeum below her. Mara climbed the winding path past passageways filled with silent theaters, thinking, ‘Not Kazuul. Anyone but him,’ right up until the very top, and even into the ornate corridor that led to no one else but him. She told herself it wasn’t surrender as she walked past orgiastic carvings all the way to the last twinned pillars where his smiling/sneering face met her over his closed doors. ‘Not Kazuul,’ she thought, and opened them. ‘Or at least, not for Kazuul. It could even be a kind of torture for him, if I want it to be.’
And it was torture, every step. She climbed down the dusty risers and down the drafty stairs in distant agony, tugging at the neck and sleeves of her robe several times as she went, finally pulling the whole heavy thing off just as she came through the hanging curtains of his doorway. The sun was out—high noon, even earlier than she’d thought—and he was on his aerie, comfortably hunkered with half a loaf of dark bread in one hand, smeared with either blood or jam. He ate at leisure, watching the clouds pass over the lake below him, impervious to the bitter cold and howling wind, impervious to everything. She was halfway to him before he knew she was there, and he swung fast, surprise becoming anger becoming even greater surprise.
“Disrobe,” she said impatiently, walking even faster now that her goal was in sight.
“Disrobe,” she said again, angrily, grabbing at the complicated layers of leather and silk and chain, and yanking them away in a single piece as soon as he’d worked out the buckle. She threw it behind her, not caring where it landed or what it broke when it did. She reached up and snatched at the golden clasp that kept his hair back and pulled that away, too. His hair was too fine to catch in it, no matter how rough she was; it fanned out eagerly in the breeze, lapping at her wrist, swallowing her fingers. “Disrobe,” she whispered. He had nothing else to wear.
He bent. She turned her face away. He hesitated, then bit at the side of her throat, two short nips and then a long bite, his breath scorching her skin. She could feel in exquisite clarity the racing of her pulse as his sharp teeth pressed down, as she could feel his hidden thoughts churning behind his defenses.
He lifted his mouth, growled softly, then went to one knee. He bit at her belly, very gently, his teeth scraping at the jumping muscles just below her navel. His hands brushed over her thighs, gently opening her to him. He bit right at the crown of her cleft, his tongue snaking in to rub back and forth across her clit. He growled again. It wasn’t a sound of desire, not before and not now.
Mara fumbled behind her for the wall and found it just at the edge of her reach. Bracing herself awkwardly on one arm, she groped for a horn or a spike or something with the other, anchoring himself to him. She lifted one leg, let him help her find a way to bring it across his spiked shoulder, and rolled her hips forward against his mouth. He growled a third time; his back was tense under her bare foot, as hard as stone.
His tongue knew where to go, what to do. His claws dug at her buttocks now and then, flexing as with impatience or anger, as he pressed himself deeper. He explored all, returning again and again to the chapel of her clitoris to tease it from its silken sheath before plunging deep inside her to drink. He bit six times at her thighs, twice drawing blood, which he licked away. Mara didn’t mind. She came for him like the false tide that lapped at the lake’s shore, rolling in and out by her own will and not by any moon’s direction. Still the cramping insistence of her womb went on.
“Give thyself to me,” he murmured. His voice was tight with restraint, trying to be seductive through a timbre of frustration. “Beautiful Mara, lie beneath me. Open thyself—” His tongue snaked along her sex and thrust once, as deep as he could go, before he withdrew, seething. “—and admit me. I am thine, ever thine. I am thy lord and Master.”
She couldn’t answer him. It seemed to take all her willpower just to keep breathing. She stared at the ceiling, her fingernails digging at his scalp. She hated him.
He waited, breathing hard against her pussy, and each hot pant of air was a punishment.
“Let go of me,” she said at last.
Snarling, his claws clenched on her thighs.
She smacked at the side of his face, shivering at the delicious way her slap had vibrated through him and into her, and he snarled again and released her. Mara backed up, leaned against his wall, and ached.
Kazuul didn’t move. Hunkered low, spikes stiff and menacing, he lay his emptied arm over one bent knee and glared at her, somewhat coarse of breath. A smear of her blood darkened one cheek. She felt the light-headed and mercifully brief urge to lick it off. His teeth were bared, glinting. Between his powerful thighs, lost in shadows with the full sun behind him, his greatest weapon jutted toward her, blackly gleaming at its eager tip.
She told herself she hated him, hated him.
The dull green coals of his eyes shifted. He glared at the locket that hung over her breasts and his curled lip curled further. He looked at her again and the silent snarl faded. He thought, and she could hear those thoughts howling behind their many sound-proofed walls, unintelligible to her.
“I misspoke,” he said at last, spitting the words like bile.
“The hell you did!”
“I mocked thee and she for spite.”
“Don’t patronize me.”
He gave her half a smile then, one bitter with understanding. “Tis ever easier to bite than to make apology, aye, or to hear one.”
He stood up. She stepped back, hit the wall, and came furiously away from it to meet him. He caught her chin in a grip too quick and too tight to be the loving thing it mimicked. She could feel his thumbclaw pushing deep at her cheek, deep enough to threaten blood, if not quite enough to draw it. “Would that I could bite her from thy mind,” he murmured, and bent, his teeth shining. He hesitated. His mouth closed, firm but painless, over hers. He breathed into her. She groaned, fought briefly, groaned again, and kissed him.
There, against the wall with sunlight painting her right side and demon’s darkness at her left, they met in clawing, slashing, snarling, oddly-restrained little fits, interrupted by equally strange patches of mutual surrender. She slapped and gouged at him as he fought his tongue inside her, then arched as he relaxed to feel his claw-tipped hand cupping and kneading at her breast, only to kick and bite brutally five seconds or even ten, before riding the hand he thrust between her thighs to a slow and stabbing climax. She didn’t like him, but she wanted him. ‘Just an itch,’ she thought, reaching between them to grip the searing brand of his erection and feel it throbbing in her hand. Her own sex cramped in rhythm, and it was not sensuality as much as sickness.
“You did this to me!” she hissed, clenching her fist, writhing on his thrusting fingers.
“Have I? Then come,” he snarled into her mouth, into her soul. “Reap of my labors! Come and reap and sow again, but be with me!”
Her hand on him shook. She arched up, grabbing at his spikes for leverage, ready to be impaled, ready to be consumed. She locked her thighs around his hand, entirely suspended, and screamed when she came, screamed like a cat, screamed and stabbed at him with her own savage pleasure. She felt it strike, resonate, and then felt both the hot splash of his seed on her thigh and the hotter roar of his fury. She bit him purely by instinct, guided by that roar in ways she could not, in her throes, decipher. He came again, stabbing right back at her, and back and forth it went, ebbing a little at each echo, until they lay together in a damp heap on the floor, arms and legs entwined but bodies ruthlessly separate, feeling sun and shadow in icy unity, all panting breath and bloody lips.
The first bell rang.
Kazuul’s hand, resting possessively across her hip, turned to claws. He growled softly.
She started to shift away from him, to stand.
With an ear-splitting bellow, he seized her and threw her down on the floor, rolling over her, crushing her, panting into her face.
They stared at each other.
“Piss!” he spat, and flung himself aside, cracking two of his larger spikes without even seeming to notice. He got up and stalked to the aerie, dropping into a fuming crouch as the sun fell out of the darkening sky.
Mara collected her robe on the way out and left him without speaking.
* * *
She took a quick bath in the fountain of the lyceum, scrubbing away all proof of the encounter in just a minute or two, then ran down to the dining hall in good appetite. Devlin waved at her from the fringes of the farthest table. She ignored him and went to the central one, where the acolytes were concentrated, along with the most food. They tried—as any scavengers to any interloper—to shut her out, but a Mara fresh from sexual combat was not a Mara easily shut out. Her mindslap blasted half a dozen black-robes to the floor and she reached in to help herself to a stale loaf of brown bread and a crumbling block of cheese. There was meat as well. She left that and sat down at the end of the table to eat.
‘And good morning to you,’ thought Horuseps loudly, in tones that were faintly marveling. ‘Are you quite all right?’
**Shouldn’t I be?**
‘You look as though you’ve taken rather a nasty tumble.’
Mara started to la
ugh, realized there had been no double entendre in his words, and gave her tooth-bruised arms a thoughtful look. “Malleate,” she said in that ancient tongue, and, oblivious to the shocked quiet rolling out around her, restored her torn and tingling flesh. It wasn’t quite the same as healing, and if the bites were destined for infection, they were now set to be some nasty abscesses, but she looked better and that was the what mattered now. She bit into her cheese. It was hard and tart and wonderful.
Too late, she remembered that arts were not allowed in the dining hall. She swept her mind across the Master’s table, but felt no complaint (surprise from some, both pleased and otherwise, but no complaint), and settled down with her bread. It was still tough, still gritty, still packed with seeds, but good for all that. ‘Hunger is the greatest spice,’ she reminded herself, one of her mother’s many sayings in the days before she’d taken to compulsively nibbling Lunchsnax, and good sex made a hell of an appetizer.
Horuseps sipped at his wine, watching her. ‘When did you learn that, Bittersweet?’
**What?** she asked, distracted, chewing. **Malleate?**
Horuseps set down his cup with a loud bang, one black hand flying up to press at his pale brow. Pain radiated out of him briefly; he looked at her through the slits of his star-studded eyes, his lips pulled thin and unsmiling.
Mara let her bread lower. **What did I just do to you?**
‘You damned near gave my brains a stir,’ he replied, each word riding a wry throb of agony. ‘Magic is will, my dearest one. Mentalism is also magic, of a simpler sort. You—’
He stopped there, frowning.
Mara stood up, ignoring the rest of her breakfast as she approached the table. **You mean all I have to do is think an art at you? Even one like—**
‘Must you?’ he interrupted, pretending almost as much horror as he actually felt.
**I wouldn’t have used the real Word. I just can’t believe it’s that easy.**