by R. Lee Smith
“Don’t think too harshly of me,” she said, moving toward the Nave.
That got a laugh out of him. “I could never be angry with you long, my darling. We understand each other too well.”
“That’s a tremendous comfort to me. Oh.” She stopped, brought Argoth’s belt out of her sleeve and tossed it toward him. It landed before the table and lay like a dead snake under the puzzled eye of the demons.
One by one, they turned to stare at Argoth.
“Have a nice night,” said Mara. She turned around and left. The last thing she heard as she crossed into the Nave was Horuseps saying, “When you see Kazuul, tell him I need to speak with him. And don’t wait until after he castrates you. You’ll forget.”
* * *
The hounds let her pass at their Master’s command (Mara gave him a bow for his trouble, which Suti’ok answered with bellows of laughter). She climbed down into the student’s wing expecting two things: Devlin waiting halfway up the stairs to meet her, and trouble waiting at the bottom. To her surprise, she found neither.
There were crowds of hungry students in the ephebeum’s front cavern, pinning their hopes on the hounds being called away before the last bells rang, but they didn’t pay her much mind. Oh, they blamed her for missing their dinners, but in an abstract way that was nearly devoid of emotion. The demons did what they did for their own reasons, and there wasn’t a person here who had not inadvertently provoked one of them to violent amusement in some innocent way. So they blamed her, but they weren’t about to confront her.
That eased her mind some. She was confident in her ability to defend herself against any one of them, but fending off a swarm of even the most inept wizards was a daunting prospect.
This group was nicely cowed, however, and too focused on missing dinner to make trouble for her. She crossed the open cavern, casting for the familiar jitters of Devlin’s mind as she reached into her sleeve for the scraps of food she’d taken—he’d done the same for her often enough—but couldn’t find him. Mind by mind, she tapped methodically through the throng, then gave up and just reached out and grabbed someone.
“Where’s Astregon?” she asked.
“Who?”
“That jumpy little pest who likes to hang out around me. Looks like a goat.”
“Oh.” And before he said another word, one image flashed in the fore of his mind: Devlin, dragged shouting into one of the ephebeum’s many tunnels. “Uh, I’m not s—”
Mara silenced him with a mindslap, grabbed back that flicker, and pulled it with her into the Panic Room where she could see every shade of danger in the Mindstorm while she studied it.
Devlin, dragged away. Two men, almost invisible in their black robes, until one of them looked back over his shoulder to laugh at their victim. It was a face she knew, and recognizing it, she understood why no one gave the abduction more attention than their lost meals.
It was Loki. Laughing Loki, La Danse’s ever-present henchman, so she could guess who the other guy was. And somewhere in the maze of cell-pocked passages, there was a race being run.
Mara turned around, rapidly comparing each tunnel mouth to the one in her stolen memory. When she had it, she emptied her sleeve of its distracting weight for the students to dive at and started walking. She did not run. There was a chance La Danse had merely seized an opportunity to play his sadistic games on the first gazelle he’d spied, but she doubted it. No, this had all the hallmarks of a deliberate stab at her, and she meant to answer it. She would stay calm, she would be careful, and she would turn his brain into soup.
The blister-lamps were only just beginning to fade down this corridor, which meant someone had been through recently who knew how to turn them on. They made a fairly obvious trail through the many crossways for Mara to follow, and where the lights ended, the screams began.
Rock absorbed so much sound…she was nearly at the cell before she heard him. His voice was raw, breaking down, and he’d lost the wit to make coherent words beyond the occasional, “Please, stop!” or “God, no!” or a howling effort at her name. He might have been screaming like this the entire time she’d been upstairs, enjoying her Master’s feast and playing games with Argoth under the table. The thought pierced her, and bled out fury. Controlling it left her feeling hot and not quite connected to herself. She was not aware of walking. She only felt that angry heat straining at her ribs and was there.
The cell where they held him was shut, but not sealed. Mara banged the door open, as much to catch anyone behind it as to announce herself, but no one was there. No one was anywhere. The cell had been Malleated to three times its original size, but it was still small enough to see it all at once, and apart from Devlin lying on the floor, it was featureless and empty.
Devlin. They’d stripped him, tied him hand and foot, blindfolded and beaten him, but the game still appeared to be in the preliminary stages. He was more or less in one piece, although someone had been entertaining himself with a few dozen evil-looking stone needles, all of which had been left imbedded in their plaything. They were in his stomach, in the soles of his feet, his scrotum, the tender inner cavity of his elbows, they were in his nipples, his neck, his lips and his gums. Devlin didn’t even know his torturers had left him. With every minute movement, the needles quivered, wracking him with fresh pains as he pleaded to an empty room for it all to stop.
If they hadn’t bothered to stick around and laugh at him, then this had nothing to do with Devlin and everything to do with her.
The anger again. Mara could feel it lunging like a dog on a fraying lead, hungry to bite and difficult to rein in. She drew herself in and looked at the Mindstorm, muted by layers of rock except where Devlin’s fear and agony ate it up. She stepped out into the hall and probed to her limits in both directions, but felt nothing, no one.
Scowling, she went to Devlin and yanked the blindfold off. “Shut up,” she said, before he could do more than suck in a sobbing breath. She got his ankles untied, started to loosen the knot at his wrists, then changed her mind and went after the needles instead. The first one she pulled on broke into a handful of brittle flakes, each one its own razor. She stared at the shards in her hand, feeling again that red eclipse, and reminded herself to be calm.
Devlin let out a rusty shriek, gagged on his own blood, and then screamed through his savaged mouth, “It’s a trap!”
“I’m aware of that,” Mara snapped, plucking needles in quick, impersonal jerks. They bled, and for now she’d let them bleed, but when this was over, she knew she’d better do something for him. Malleate the holes shut, if nothing else, but they were bound to get infected. Why hadn’t she bothered to learn the word for Growth yet? Wait, who was the man Desdemona had wanted to fix her face? Shy-something, she thought. She couldn’t look it up now, pulling needles was too fiddly to risk doing from the Panic Room, but she’d find out and she’d make him fix Devlin up.
She was still calm. Angry, but calm. She believed Devlin when he said it was a trap and she believed that trap was about to spring its teeth on her, but then, she also believed she’d sense anyone coming when they finally rushed the cell and she believed she was a match for La Danse and his laughing donkey.
Mara didn’t have much imagination. Even knowing the cell walls had been manipulated in the past, she was taken entirely by surprise when the rock rolled back on either side of her and she was at once surrounded. They ran at her, not just one or two, but five of them, slamming into reality in a scant second and catching her completely unawares. One massive mindslap could have dropped them, or at least disoriented them long enough for her to run, but she couldn’t slap indiscriminately without hitting Devlin too.
She hesitated, and they were on her.
Mara didn’t know how to scream. The sound she made when the first blow smashed into her was more of a hoarse yelp and she knew it wouldn’t carry far in the sound-swallowing tunnels. Her feet went out from under her with a single expert kick, and then she was tumbling backwards wit
h hands all over her, grabbing her anywhere they could and pulling her into the black. Fists came out of the dark, fists hammering into her chest, her stomach, her face.
The lions had come for her. She couldn’t see them through the barrage of blows, but their minds shouted their identities along with their delight. La Danse and his little laughing friend, one of Ruk’s cock-sleeves from that day in the lyceum, one man she didn’t even know, and Proteus, Horuseps’s pet and reading partner. This was no spur-of-the-moment attack. They had been planning this for days, just waiting for Devlin to wander off on his own so that they could turn him into bait. Behind the Malleated walls, they had brought candles, so they could see her at their mercy. They’d made a wide ledge, just hip-high, against one wall. They’d made spikes on another one.
Dimly, she was aware of Devlin thrashing through the Mindstorm, all pain and panic and impulse. Everyone else was too busy trying to get their kicks in to notice when he snatched the last of the needles out of his feet and got his legs under him. She could sense him hovering at the edge of her perceptions, see the way she looked through his eyes as she fought back against the mob.
Then he ran.
‘That’s how you survive eleven years in the Scholomance,’ Mara thought as rock walls wiped all trace of Devlin from her mind. And she had to laugh, even as the rage welled up and savaged her. She could expect no better from a man with a bunny tattoo.
“That’s enough! That’s enough! What—Where’d that numb fuck go? You were supposed to be watching him!”
“It doesn’t matter. Let him go.”
Proteus, the leader here, stuck his head out into the empty tunnel and then slammed the door on it and escape. He pulled his playmates off her, yanked her head up, and spat in her face. Then he grabbed her, threw her down on the ledge he’d made, and knotted his hand in her hair. She got the breath knocked out of her, started to struggle up, and got slammed down again, face-first, twice in sharp succession. It knocked her out, but only as far as the Panic Room, where she could just as easily force her battered brain to obey her and wake right back up. She wasn’t going to be unconscious here.
“It was your fault,” Proteus was hissing in her ear as she came groggily back around. “She was hurt because of you.”
She? She who? Horuseps was in his mind, Horuseps in Kazuul’s grip, suspended in the air over the dining table with a bony spike stabbed up between the demon’s thighs. His Horuseps, who had laughed at him when he’d come down into the theater that night, who’d laughed and waved Proteus off as if he were a bug, as if he’d never meant anything. Horuseps, who had been fucking this bitch on the library stairs, Danse said he saw them. Danse said Horuseps wasn’t a woman. But this bitch, this bitch was, and she was going to pay for ruining his chance at a Master’s bed.
Mara gathered what concentration she could muster and sent out a mindslap like a pulse in the open air around her. It didn’t feel very strong to her, but it did knock them all briefly back. Briefly. Then the fists rained down, hammering her head into the rock, and one of them, that one of Ruk’s, was screaming, “Kill her! Kill her! Kill her!” and leaping around like a damn ape.
She wasn’t prepared for it. As prissy as that sounded even to her, she wasn’t prepared. Never in her life had anyone laid hands on her in violence. Hell, few enough were those times hands had been laid on her in annoyance, in passion, or even in affection. Here was no demon, no monster, but just a man and that man was strong enough to make her struggles into his game. They meant to rape her and they meant to kill her, and there was nothing at all she could do about it.
Proteus spoke a Word, dragged handfuls of stone up and over her arms, sucking them down into rock to keep her helpless and his hands free. His friends were laughing—Loki’s donkey-like bray cut across her ears the loudest—jostling each other for the best view. Shock gave way to a grossly inappropriate sense of outrage; this couldn’t be happening, how could it be happening, and how could it dare to be happening to her? This storm of sick confusion swelled and swelled and suddenly popped as La Danse yanked her robe up and she felt the chill draft of the caves on her naked skin.
“She’s mine first!” Proteus snarled. “You hear that, you bitch? I’m going to fuck you. He’s going to fuck you. And when we’re all tired of using your whore-holes, I’m going to do to you what your cock-slave demon did to Horuseps.” He banged her head into the rock a few times, as if for emphasis. “I’m going to pound that spike up your cunt so deep, I stab you through the fucking heart! Do you hear me? Do you?”
She thought she would be terrified. Terror was the logical place to go, after all, and there was sure a part of her hedging inexorably into panic, but terror itself never came. Instead, and without a single hitch of transition, Mara fell from confusion into rage.
Not anger. Anger was a far gentler emotion for a far gentler time. Tantrums were had in anger, or shouting fits, or at its extreme, a sudden brawling spat. What took hold of Mara’s heart as her thighs were wrenched apart was black and throbbing, alive in some murderous, cancerous way that frightened her as much as anything happening behind her now. She had always been in control, all her life, even in her sleep. Now that control was gone and the rage swept over her, and as she felt the hot press of Proteus shoving his cock into her, some grotesque mimic of her childhood calm took hold of her and used Ruk’s voice to whisper, ‘Thou requirest not a direct touch…carve with thy will and not thy hand.’
Proteus had her, skin to skin. Mara reached out through that contact and was inside him, easily and far, far deeper than he was inside her. His body moved and she saw every movement, every pulsing vein and floating cell. Her vision swam out of life and color to the empty black of Sight. Mara looked at him and spoke the Word of Transmutation, all her furious will in focus. Bone to blood, would have been her thought, but she did not need thought in that time of pure rage. The will and the Word were all.
Proteus collapsed behind her. She didn’t know it, didn’t feel him go down or even slide out of her. She didn’t hear the jeering of his friends turn to gasps and choking cries. She spoke a Word and the rock that held her become warm. She pulled her hands free, screaming that Word again even as she spun around and slapped. She did not see the face she hit, not before she struck him and not after, when mouth, nose, eyes and open bone were so hideously smeared together and he was down, down and choking on his own mangled flesh for want of air.
Rage. It was all rage, and rage did not burn the way they said it did. Anger burns. Rage sings. It sang in Mara as she threw herself at every movement, every living thing that shared her space. They were not men she killed—Kimara Warner could never kill a man—they were objects of disgust and disease, objects to demand a death. And she was rage, who gave it to them.
They ran, tearing open the door and sprinting out into the tunnel, screaming, scattering. She ran after, quickly saw that she was no match for their speed, and dropped instead, slapping her hands against the floor she made malleable, reaching through it as she had reached through flesh, and bringing the rock itself up in a wave to take one of them down, to fall over him, to crush him in its terrible fist.
Something was wrong. Her heart, beating too fast. Mara staggered, clutching at her chest as pain began to splinter through her, but a man broke from his hiding place in the shadows and rage was on her again. She ran after, chasing him around the muting shields of winding rock until she burst out into the brilliant open field of the ephebeum and he was hers. She lashed out in a Word of Transmutation—blood to salt—and screams became a curtain over every sense.
She attacked them, all of them, every moving thing, and anywhere her hand slapped into skin, she had a Word ready. Ribs burst through eye sockets. Lungs turned to scales. At one point, delirious in the grip of rage, she imagined she Malleated the air itself and drove it like an axe into someone’s skull. Then she stumbled, fell out of her body into the Panic Room and saw it blazing with the yellow light of danger. Her heart, her heart—mygoditsg
oingtoburstrightopenpopinmychestlikeameatballoon—and then she fell again, out of the Panic Room and into a thick, black ocean.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It wasn’t like sleeping and only a little like fainting in the library had been. She knew she was in trouble, but could do nothing about it. Eventually she came back to the Panic Room—it sort of bled in around her out of the black, taking on weight and substance over lengths of time she could not grasp but suspected were extreme—but nothing changed, even after it was solidly there and around her. On the monitors, she could see only a vague impression of her body lying somewhere and she had no control over it at all. She thought she might be in a coma.
There was nothing after that, nothing but yellow light in the Panic Room and the Mindstorm and the endless fight to take back her body and make it wake up. She was rewarded now and then with clawing spasms, but that was all. Each one left her with an impression of ground gained in the greater war, however. Only inches, maybe, but even inches could add up. The Grand Canyon itself could be measured if you had enough inches.
So Mara fought, and even if there was no time, she became very dimly aware that she was winning. Gradually, a sense of sound came to her on the monitors. A sense of gravity began to weigh on the arms and legs she could not quite move. She dreamt, off and on, proof of some return to thought. As she railed, she could hear the inarticulate grunts of effort that, somehow, escaped her slack and sleeping lips.
And finally, finally, she dragged herself out.
* * *
Mara heaved up from a leaden drift of blankets, her hands clawing at the air and feet kicking sluggishly. Her mouth opened. She yanked in air, heaved it out, and pulled it in again in the first ragged rhythms of breath. It hurt. Her eyes opened, swam shut, opened again and wrestled the world into focus. That hurt, too.