by R. Lee Smith
“You won’t leave her like that if she can’t change herself back,” Mara said sharply, stopping on the stair.
“Certainly not.” He glided on a little further, paused, and came back to her. “Nor will I flaunt the laws of this school simply for that she shares my bed. There are no extensions.”
“How long does she have left?”
“Four years yet. Really, she’s made wonderful progress.”
“Do you think she’ll master it?”
He hesitated, one hand reaching up to stroke at the lips of the gash in his chest. “No,” he admitted. “There are some things she does quite well, if not without effort, and she may be able to speak the Word eventually, but she will never master the art. She lacks the capacity to make connections, and she will always need me or someone like me to make them for her.” He sighed, breath blowing light and sour through his chest into Mara’s face. “Which she seems to feel is only her due. As is so often the case with those who come here.”
He took a few sashaying steps, then paused and looked back again. “Horuseps says you are different.”
“Does he?” Mara felt her lips twisting in a rueful smile, even as she poked in vain at the tenebrous fathoms of Dalziel’s mind. “Well, if he told you I was a good student, he lied.”
“Oh no. He never said that.”
They climbed the stairs in silence and, with the light of the theater at last in sight, Mara gave in to her pricklish curiosity and caught at the demon’s indescribably unpleasant arms. “What did he say?” she asked.
Dalziel’s eyes rippled at he gazed at her. The slit in his chest breathed and finally said, “That I should expect you. That you were seeking a certain human and that it could possibly be dangerous to cross you in your search.”
“Dangerous.”
“Possibly, he said. And having met you, I dare say he’s right. I can count on the fingers of one hand—” He displayed them, squirming in the air. “—how many students have ever touched me of their own volition.”
She released his arm with a frown, and he started back up the stairs.
“A student who will do that, the first day she has seen me in all my repulsive truth, is a student who may do anything. I suppose we’ll see. For now, I see no harm in humoring you.”
“Humoring me,” she repeated, beginning to smile as she followed him into the theater.
“You and, of course, the Master you serve. I’ve no doubt it tickles him to see you so engaged in studies, and for today, you will be my pupil. It is well within my own interests to teach you well. Please.”
He gestured, and Mara stepped up off the dais and climbed the risers to take her seat beside Devlin, ignoring his furtive whispers. If he wanted to know what was down there so badly, he could walk on down and look for himself.
“And now, class, for the benefit of our newcomers…” Dalziel raised his hands, and when he had the respectful silence he was after, turned to face her and Devlin together. “A return to the fundamentals. What would you say is the principle element of Transmutation?”
“Change,” said Devlin promptly, as Mara said, “Relationships.”
They both looked at each other, she quizzically and he with dismay.
“It’s change,” he whispered. “Trans-mute? Get it? Mutation? Change?”
“That may be the goal,” Mara argued, “but what gets you there is how things are connected to each other, I think.”
“And why would you think that?” the demon asked.
“Because you said so.”
Without a mouth and without eyebrows, he looked surprised.
“You said your little friend had trouble making connections, that you had to do it for her.” And while he considered that—and what else he might have let slip, no doubt—she looked around at the rest of the class, tapping at every mind and closely examining a select few. “It’s more than just knowing the right Word, isn’t it? You have to direct this one.”
“One has to direct all of them,” Dalziel said slowly. “But yes, my art requires a certain…dexterity. In the art of Malleation, to which mine is closely allied, one uses the Word and guides its power to the intended finished form. One can illustrate this with gross simplicity as a straight line.” Dalziel held up his arm and spoke the Word. His hand drew up and became a perfectly-formed human one, as pallid and soft as the hand of a drowned man, but human. He closed his fingers, opened them, and they had become webbed. He turned his wrist, and suddenly his fingers drew out long and thin, the webbing between them stretching effortlessly until he had a pale bat-wing reaching out from his body, glowing white where the light shone behind it, enough to see the fine tracery of his veins and the delicate fluting of his thin bones.
Then it shrank back and was his hand again. “The only difficulty,” he said, flexing his limp fingers, “lies in using Sight to direct this force effectively, and to perceive the original form should it become lost to memory. But with Transmuation, one must divide one’s energies and one’s focus, directing each portion to its proper place in a chain linking the first form to its ultimate conclusion. Perhaps you would assist me in a demonstration?”
Mara stood up without hesitation and joined him on the dais. When he extended his hand, she offered her arm at once.
“We’ll begin with something simple. Transmute,” he said, not in the common tongue all the harrowed shared, but in that other one, the language that made Words of power. Pain knifed down into her bones and spread, warming her from within until her entire body felt charged by it, hot and light and not quite there. She felt Dalziel’s mind flare, and as she watched, fascinated, flakes of skin along her arm split away and rose up on fine stalks, sprouting hundreds of pale filaments to either side in a sharply-tapered shape. The burning sensation intensified briefly, almost blinding her, and then was gone, the Transmutation complete.
Feathers. He’d grown a patch of feathers over the back of her arm from her wrist right up to her elbow.
“That is so cool,” said Mara, touching them. They felt soft, undeniably real. She could feel her own fingers from a hundred quivering points where the feathers rooted to her arm. With effort, she found she could even fluff them out or make them lie sleek and flat. Feathers.
“Cool,” Dalziel repeated, and his eyes rippled. “The connection is a straightforward one, invoking only one degree of change. You! Calibos! Would you like to attempt to restore—”
“Wait.” Mara closed her eyes and flexed her mind. The room fell into the blackness of Sight, but through those eyes, she could See her own true arm still whole and unchanged beneath her new growth of quills. “Transmute,” she said, the Word falling effortlessly from her lips. Her flesh burned at once.
“Good gracious,” murmured the demon distantly.
Feathers. Skin. One degree of change.
She could feel the connection well enough, amid countless others all aching to be made, but just feeling it didn’t seem to be enough. She had to put a name to it, had to understand the relationship and make that a part of the will that moved the Word. Feathers and skin.
She remembered from biology class back in high school that feathers were, like hair or scales or fingernails, primarily made of keratin. She seemed to recall that they were different kinds of keratin, but the exact name wasn’t important. She doubted like hell that a four thousand year-old demon like Dalziel knew the word ‘keratin’ at all. But that was it, that was the element in common between both forms, and as soon as she had it firmly in mind, she could feel the Word throbbing to life, anchored to each quill. She tried to see it as Dalziel had described, as links of a chain connecting her current feathered form back to skin, using the concept of keratin as the central tie. Her body, hot with anticipatory power, pulsed brighter in the Sight as she willed the Transmutation.
Her arm itched maddeningly. The feathers quivered, but that was all.
‘Patience,’ she told herself in Ruk’s growling, good-natured voice. ‘A babe may fall many times, but the
way of the step is not changed.’
She knew she’d done it right, could feel the purity of the power as it forked out in both directions, the soundness of her connection, but she’d failed to hold her focus. It wasn’t like Malleation after all, where she could use it like a knife and just carve. And it wasn’t much of a chain either, although that was probably the best analogy Dalziel knew here in the mountain. But having attempted it, however clumsily, Mara had a much better grasp of how it worked, and she saw it now as a pipeline. The Word, like a sleeve around the magic, guiding it nowhere but across the connection, magnetizing it to her will. ‘Feathers to flesh,’ thought Mara, not in so many words, but in that pipeworked way, and said it again: “Transmute!”
She didn’t need to watch to know it had worked that time. She relaxed her Sight, let reality and color drop solidly around her, and showed her teeth in satisfaction as she rubbed the smooth, whole skin of her arm.
“But every cell in the human body can be considered to be connected to each other,” she mused aloud. “To stem cells, if nothing else, and stem cells can be anything. I could turn my skin into fingernails, or cartilage…or brains. Or…there’s iron in blood. Do you suppose I could turn my skin to metal? If I—”
She stopped there, because she’d looked up and seen Dalziel’s face.
Ruk had been pleased by her easy mastery of his art, and Horuseps, faintly annoyed but still amused when she walked away from him with Sight. She might have gone so far as to say impressed, but certainly not surprised. She knew that other students had to work for the little goals they reached, but to their instructors, Mara’s prodigious skill with the Words they taught her had seemed merely some clever trick. They weren’t in awe of her, and they certainly weren’t intimidated.
So she was utterly unprepared to see fear in Dalziel’s inhuman eyes, so much so that she couldn’t believe it was genuine even when she looked out and saw it in the Mindstorm. She had to touch the churning snake-ball of his thoughts, feel his dread for herself, before she could accept it, and then she had no idea what to make of it.
‘She is dangerous,’ he was thinking, his fear making even his mind clear to her. ‘More than even he suspects.’
The he was Horuseps (and for an instant, she could close her fist around that memory, could see him as he’d been down in Dalziel’s bedchamber, could almost hear the words he’d spoken, the ones that began, ‘She’s dangerous, son of Dal, and more so because she does not know where…’), but then his mind sank back beneath its primordial protection and she could read nothing more.
“I wouldn’t advise a self-trial,” he said finally. “But if you wish to make an experiment, I will give you whichever assistant you wish.”
Alarm popped in neon flares throughout the Mindstorm until it blotted out every other thought.
“That won’t be necessary,” Mara said, but she could see the pipeline in her mind. Flesh to blood, that was the trick of it, and from blood to iron. It would work best if she worked Growth in there somewhere, to improve the density of the blood, otherwise she probably wouldn’t get much more than a few dull scales. But with Growth, she could concentrate the production of iron at the midpoint of the pipeline and—
Well, she could probably change every damn inch of skin, if she wanted to. Make her own human suit of armor. With eyeballs and teeth.
“He’d suffocate,” Mara murmured, only dimly aware she was speaking out loud. “Iron doesn’t expand for breathing, and I don’t think I could make it…What about bones, iron bones?”
“Also lethal,” Dalziel replied. “Think a moment, how much heavier is iron.”
“He’d be crushed,” she guessed.
“Oh, secondarily, I suppose he would be, but what would kill our hypothetical target is the internal injury caused by having all his new bones rip away from their binding muscles all at once.” He paused, stroking his chest. “It is hypothetical, is it not?”
“I’d never set out to kill anyone.”
“How comforting.” He stirred himself to look around, letting his eyes move slowly over the knots of whispering students in the theater, making her aware of them with his attention. “It will be interesting to see how long your pacifist convictions survive here.”
“I never said I was a pacifist. You could do a lot of damage without killing someone.”
“A true, if heartless, observation. Somewhat less comforting.”
“I’m not—”
“It’s time for you to leave,” Dalziel said softly. “I suspect you have what you came for…and I think my children would feel less threatened if you went now.”
His ‘children’ held very still, staring, some of them even holding their breath as they watched her. Devlin was up there, she remembered, as uneasy as the rest in this moment. More so even, because he’d been there that day with Ruk too, and he knew better than anyone here what she was capable of when her curiosity was piqued.
“Fine,” said Mara, turning away. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Master Dalziel.”
“Was it?” He bent his neck in another of those almost-bows, his eyes never leaving her face. “I only wish I could say the same, although I confess I find you rather less disagreeable than others of your kind. Good day to you, Mara. Do feel free to drop by again sometime…briefly.”
* * *
She went back to her cell (alone, ultimately, although she had to chase Devlin off three times before he finally quit following her) and fixed her bed. Turning the rock to sand was easy enough, but she spent a considerable amount of time trying in vain to find a way that would allow her to turn it into something even better—down, or cotton maybe. She could sense some connection existed, but without a way to name it, it could not be harnessed, no matter how much will she put behind her Word. Still, sand was a definite improvement. Once she’d spread her red and white robes over it to keep the grit away, she lay down to try it out and was asleep in minutes.
From the Panic Room, Mara watched her body dream and contemplated her next move. She could think of nothing.
Infuriating. She had survived the trials of the Scholomance, mastered three of its arts, and for what? She was no closer to finding her friend than she’d been on arrival. She wasn’t even really looking anymore, she was just…passing the time.
Where hadn’t she looked? She had searched all the obvious places and Connie just wasn’t there. What did that leave, for Christ’s sake? The mountain was a maze in three dimensions, and any wall could be Malleated. The demons knew more than they were telling her, but nowhere in the stolen glimpses she’d had of their minds had she seen Connie, so what good were they or their secrets?
Kazuul. Kazuul was still good. He owned all the others, and as dangerous an opponent as he was, the fact that he wanted her still gave her an edge over him.
Unbidden, the memory of how she’d gone to him during the day came to mind, and came to life across one of her monitors. Annoyed, Mara snapped it off before the image could show her anything too embarrassing, but now the thought was there and could not be dislodged.
She’d gone to him, all right. No one had forced her up the winding stair or laid in any will-devouring suggestion to make her open his door. She’d gone on her own two feet. She’d kissed his mouth freely. Rode his hand to orgasm after blistering orgasm. She would have sucked his cock if he’d offered it, and hadn’t some part of her wanted him to offer?
He had a hold on her after all. Perhaps it wasn’t as strong as he liked to believe, but it was real and it unnerved her. She’d almost feel better if it was a psychic suggestion, because the alternative was that she’d gone to him…and she didn’t know why. Mara always knew why, always.
And she wanted to go back and she didn’t understand that either.
Lying on her soft bed of sand in her newly-enlarged cell, Mara slept and dreamed and even smiled a little. But in the Panic Room, the part of her that never slept hovered beside the windows to the muted Mindstorm, keeping watch over the dreams that Kazuul
dominated and the body that craved even his dreaming touch. She tried to think of Connie, lost in the dark and waiting to be found. She tried to think of the world outside, the real world, where magic was for children’s parties and demons belonged solely to bad horror movies. She tried to think of some connection that could bridge the two, if only her will were strong enough.
“Transmute,” muttered Mara, and covered her eyes.
She just didn’t know what to do.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She slept until first-bell the following day and woke more refreshed than she’d felt since even before her arrival. She dressed, visited the garderobe and the bath, and somehow picked up Devlin in between the two. He was antsier than usual, now that he had seen firsthand that her mastery of the art of Malleation was not a fluke. He’d heard all sorts of things by now—that she’d possessed Proteus in Horuseps’s class and somehow stolen Sight from him, that she’d been to the rumored Reliquary that supposedly lay at the center of the maze beneath the Nave, even (she rather liked this one) that she’d somehow obtained one of the Seals of Solomon and was using it to control the Scholomance’s demon Masters.
Devlin didn’t know what to believe, but he’d seen enough not to dismiss any of it out of hand. He looked at her as they bathed and saw, not a naked woman, but the thoughtful look on Master Ruk’s eyes as he’d set her back on the ground that day in the hall, the way Master Horuseps always seemed to be staring at her in the dining hall, the subtle tremor of fear in Master Dalziel’s voice when he’d sent her out of the theater. Some people even said she’d climbed to the top of the lyceum and not come back for hours.
He knew that one was true, because he’d followed her once (Mara glanced around, frowning). He’d seen her go up there and because he, like every other student he knew of, had tried to solve the riddle of that place, he knew that there was no other way out. But when he’d crept in to find her, he’d seen only her footprints, some lit blister-lamps, and the sealed doors at the end of the ornate hall, just the same as they ever were.