by R. Lee Smith
“I know,” she said, and thought, ‘I never used to be either.’ But there was no point in dwelling on that now. She had the whole rest of her life to look back and see where this place had ruined her. “You actually ran for help.”
He hesitated, afraid to claim the truth for fear of it being misinterpreted as a grasping effort to win back her good grace.
“I can’t misinterpret a memory, Devlin,” she said patiently, and he jumped up and backed to the wall.
“You just did it again!”
“Yes,” said Mara. “I’m pretty much always doing it.”
“But…I mean…If you…”
“If I can read minds,” Mara translated, “Why do I bother asking questions?”
He nodded, shock-eyed and pale.
“Because it puts the answers right up on the surface. Just jumping in cold to look for something is the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“Oh.” And then, by God, the circle closed. “Can you teach me to do it?”
“No.”
“Please? Please! I swear I won’t bother you anymore! I’ll never say another word, just—”
“I’m not saying I won’t this time, Devlin. I’m saying I can’t. I’ve tried.”
“With her,” he said, meaning Connie.
“Yes.”
He was quiet, inside and out. Slowly, he came back to the bed, scratching at his sleeves in that neverending dance of nervousness he had. “Maybe I’ll be better than her. Maybe I have, like, a knack.”
“I think if that were true, you’d have proved it by now,” Mara said, as gently as possible. “The power I have and the powers they teach here seem to have a lot in common. How many arts have you studied, Devlin?”
He dropped his gaze, miserable. He did not count the classes for her, but they spooled out regardless: Growth, Allure, Imbuing, Sight, Transmutation, Malleation, Divination, Entropy, Force, every one of them with an eye towards escape and none with any effect. He had pursued them so stupidly—attending three or even five classes every day for so long that he was now banned from three of them, and one of these was Growth, which meant he would only keep getting older. Until he died in here.
“Please, get me out of here,” he whispered, dragging a knuckled hand against his eyes. “I’m begging you. I’ve been a fuckup all my life and I know I’ll only slow you down, but I can’t stay here. They’ll eat me when you’re gone.”
He believed it. More importantly, so did Mara. Whether she’d wanted him there or not, Devlin had been too obvious a fixture at her side. When she left, her enemies would become his.
And to be honest, if she’d wanted him gone, really wanted it, she could have done it that first day. She hadn’t. She’d kept him, tossing him the scraps of her company like he was any starved and hand-shy dog in an alley, knowing he would never make as good a pet as the one she’d lost, but he would serve to fill the void for now. Easy for the largest part of her to say, ‘So what?’ and act like it didn’t matter, but there was still a piece of her heart that recognized her responsibilities, a piece which had once had the chance to go her entire lifetime without killing anyone and had lost it in a single moment of blind rage.
“All right,” said Mara.
He looked at her without confidence, without faith.
“Yes, I mean it,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll get you out if I can. But don’t get all crazy with it. I’m warning you now, if it comes down to her or you—”
“I know,” he said. “It’s her.”
He was okay with it, too. There was no more ego left in him, no more ambition. Eleven years of demonic tests, dodging lions as he scampered from one impossible art to another, had wrung all hope out of him. He did not see himself as worth saving. He didn’t see a life out there for him if he was. All he had left was the fear of death right now, and all the bad ways there were for it to find him.
Mara fell asleep listening to those doom-filled thoughts. From the Panic Room, she watched Devlin tuck her in, one limb at a time, just as she remembered her many au pairs doing in her childhood before they went down the hall to do the sexthing with her father. When he was done, he crawled onto the bed beside her, careful not to touch her as he eased a corner of one robe out to use as a blanket. He watched her eyes move as she dreamed (that was actually kind of creepy, seeing her own face alone in the Mindstorm), believing now was the only safe time to think, now while she slept.
He was afraid of her. She’d made him nervous for some time, but now there was fear predominant over all. She had become a Master to him, all-powerful, unaccountable to any will but her own. He was afraid of her and with fear came the helpless awe-filled love of any primitive for his unpredictable and pitiless totem-god. He curled on his side at the foot of her bed and wanted nothing in the world, not even escape, more than he wanted to please her, his volcano, his comet, his moon.
His Master.
Well, thought Mara, watching him from the Panic Room. There were worse things to be.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mara awoke to first-bell with a slight headache throbbing behind her eyes, and a strong erection pressing at her from behind. She gave Devlin a jab with her elbow and he scooted away, mumbling sleepy excuses. She didn’t take it personally. Whatever else he might be, he was still a man and this was morning.
How did she feel? Her monitors in the Panic Room told her she was fine, if a little worn out. Being in the body gave her a much clearer picture of the little aches, pains, and disorientation that persisted, but she knew she was much improved even from yesterday.
“Are you hungry? You want to go get some food?” Devlin asked, scratching at his armpit, mostly as a means of hitching at the lie of his robe. He was hoping she’d go to the garderobe or something, give him a little privacy to take care of himself…and then he remembered she was psychic.
“Plus, it’s my room, asshole!” Mara snapped, making him jump. “If you have to do that, do it somewhere else.”
Breakfast. She wasn’t sure she had it in her to fight the crowd at the table, but the lure of solid food was strong. “And yes, go get me some food,” she commanded, shoving him off the bed with her foot. “And then go to class. I don’t know whether it’s you or me, but one of us is making the other one nervous.”
“I’ll go,” Devlin said hurriedly, and ran from the cell holding his robe up and out from his body like a comic housefrau running from a rat. She listened to the slap of his sandals until the stone passage swallowed it up, then rolled onto her side and closed her eyes again. Tired, she was so tired.
Maybe she really should have stayed with Kazuul. His bed was softer and, suspect broth aside, she had to admit he’d taken good care of her.
Mara didn’t need taking care of. And besides, part of his bedside manner apparently included letting his friends feel her up. The same friend he’d impaled on a spike for taking liberties with her just a few days before. No, she would not be going back to Kazuul to convalesce.
But she would go back once she’d recovered. She still needed him, and anyway…and anyway…
It felt good, being with him. As angry as he could make her, and vice versa, when they came together, it was…well, it was magic. She didn’t always like him and there were plenty of times when she hated him, but when he put his arms around her, she was ready. Even now, half-asleep and too weak to walk to breakfast, she could think of his mouth on hers and feel herself wanting him.
Mara dozed, not in the Panic Room where she could keep watch, but here in her own flesh, feeling warm and oddly contented in spite of her vulnerability. The next thing she felt was Devlin’s hand shaking her awake. He’d brought her two loaves of brown bread and three hard, wrinkled apples, and he insisted on sitting there and watching while she attempted to eat it.
Her stomach, which had for days taken only small sips of nourishment from Kazuul’s lips, cramped warningly after only a few swallows, but she still felt better, stronger, just for having chewed. She told him he could hav
e the rest, but he put it all on the bookshelf, “For later,” as he said.
“Now go to class,” Mara mumbled, tugging her neophyte’s robe up around her shoulders and thinking of blankets, all Kazuul’s blankets.
“I’m not sure I should. You look awful.”
“Best thing for me is sleep and I’ll sleep better if you’re not staring at me. Go away.”
“What if someone comes and I’m not here?” he argued.
“What if someone comes and you are?” Mara said with a snort. “What the hell could you do about it?”
He hunched in on himself unhappily. “I’d never let anyone hurt you.”
“Not if you could help it,” she agreed. “And we both know how unlikely that is. So go to class, Devlin.”
“Later, okay? I’ve been worried about you. I just…” He shook his head, staring fixedly at his feet, knowing it was no use trying to explain. The truth could only sound more and more pathetic. “I just need to make sure you’re all right for a while.”
“I’m fine,” said Mara, but she was falling asleep even as she said it. In another minute, she was in the Panic Room, watching on monitors as Devlin rearranged her on her bed of sand. Again it struck her how gentle he was, and how strange a quality that was to find in someone here. She wondered for the first time where he’d learned to tuck a person in, if he had little brothers waiting for him somewhere in the world…heck, if he had kids. She was right on the edge of waking up to ask, but let the urge drift away. She’d known him too long to start getting personal now, and once she’d gotten him out of here, she was never going to see him again. No doubt that would come as something of a shock to him once he found out, but that was his problem. Even in the Outside, he was going to have to learn to handle his own problems.
But he was right there in the Mindstorm every time she looked up, his concern blown out to three dimensions, surrounding her. He was there to cover her up every time she kicked a robe off, and to feed her bites of bread and hold her cup during her little snatches of wakefulness. He even ran and got her a chamberpot so she wouldn’t have to walk to the garderobe, and he emptied it without complaint. He did everything a devoted nursemaid should do, in fact, except go away, and at the end of the night he was still right there, crawling up onto the foot of her bed like a collie to sleep.
“You can’t live here,” Mara muttered. “You’re going back to your cell tomorrow.”
“Or the next day,” Devlin agreed.
“You’re an idiot and I want you out of here.”
“Goodnight, Mara.”
She sighed. “Goodnight.”
* * *
He stayed with her the next day too, but by the third, she was strong enough to drop a psychic seed in his head and make him go to class. It wasn’t quite as comfortable for her without him, but it was quieter and she was beginning to need the quiet.
She was still exhausted, not so much in her body, which had responded amazingly well to the two enormous meals Devlin provided each day (she ate everything but the meat, the origins of which were still questionable), but in her mind, where she had never been weak before. She actually needed to lie there and recover from a simple suggestion, something she’d been doing fairly regularly since she’d been ten. It was embarrassing, but other than that, she did feel better.
She rested for what might have been an hour after Devlin finally left her, and then left her cell, testing her strength with a walk to the ephebeum. It was busy, but not crowded. The first meal had ended and enough time passed to let the students clean themselves up if they wanted to. Now, the steadiest traffic was that which flowed up the wide stair to the Nave, but it came to an uneven stop so that they could all stare at Mara.
Facing into all those eyes, she checked the Mindstorm, but felt no menace, or at least, nothing pressing. There were plenty of people who hated her, but hatred was fine as long as it came alloyed by fear, and most of the people looking back at her had seen her kill. Students killed each other, of course, they killed each other all the time, but not the way Mara had, not one after another after another, slashing her way through screaming people like a scythe through wheat, without any effort, without any remorse. They said she was here to find someone, and most of them had, at one point, wished bitterly that it might have been their own self, but not anymore. No one could possibly be safe who had fallen under those terrible white eyes.
Mara’s tapping mind touched someone then, someone she had never expected to touch again. She homed in on it, frowning into a knot of white-robed neophytes, and at her first step towards them, they all drew apart, mercilessly exposing the very one she needed to see.
Loki looked at her, his hands half-raised, and a terrible rictus of a grin stretched over his strained features. He didn’t look the same at all—she didn’t need a point-by-point comparison in the Panic Room to see that someone had given him a whole new face—but it was him, and the longer she stared at him, the more his nerves tightened until they burst out of him as one of those unmistakable donkey-like brays of laughter.
She hadn’t killed him after all. Mara had only to turn her eyes in the Panic Room and see it all again in the memory monitor: her hand smearing eyes and nose and mouth together and leaving him to choke. But somehow he’d survived.
Mara tapped at him again as he stood there, frozen in her stare, and saw him staggering over the blubbery mass of boneless Proteus in her absence, seizing the spike that had been made to kill her, and plunging the pointed tip into the center of his face where his new skull was thinnest, opening a hole for one life-giving gasp, and then he ran.
It hadn’t been easy to find someone who would repair him, not with La Danse dead, not when everyone knew that he had been with the ones who had tried to take Mara down. Oh, but they’d been falling all over each other trying to be the one to fix up Mara’s friend, and what were a few pinpricks when Loki was trying to breathe through what he was pretty sure had been an eye socket? He’d managed to buy someone eventually, and for the full contents of La Danse’s cell, he had even gotten his face changed, so why was she staring at him like she knew who he was? Even his name was different now!
Mara looked away. She gazed across the open arena of the students’ wing, but the floor was smooth and unstained. She’d given Suti’ok and his hounds a lot of work, but they’d done it well. There was no sign at all of her rage. Nowhere, except in the survivors.
Loki, terrified, laughed again, covering the telltale sound as best he could with both shaking hands. Mara heard, but felt nothing. Let him live. She’d killed five people who hadn’t deserved it; she could let one live who had.
Mara left the ephebeum. She wasn’t alone when she first entered the bath, but she was by the time she’d worked her robe off. They all bowed before they left her, and left whispering.
She supposed she should have expected it, and further supposed it didn’t bother her. She had killed nine people, nine, when only five had attacked her. She owned that now, and she wanted to be sorrier than she was, but she wasn’t. All she could feel was a grim sort of confidence that now there wouldn’t be any more problems, tainted by the very faintest tinge of regret, not so much for the lives she had taken as for how it had changed her. No matter how powerful she was, or how she’d been provoked in her previous life, she had never killed anyone and she’d never intended to. She was not a good person and she knew it, in spite of Connie’s insistence to the contrary, but she was not a killer.
Only now she was. And now she had killed not just the people who had tried to prey on her, but people who had just been standing around waiting for dinner. People who’d never seen it coming. People who hadn’t cut her so much as a dirty glance in all the time she’d been here. And she couldn’t make herself feel bad.
Mara finished her bath, brushed her hair, and dressed in her old neophyte’s robe. Her black one was still in Kazuul’s chamber, she remembered, unless it had fallen off the broken pillar and blown itself out the aerie.
Two people came into the baths, saw her, and bowed themselves out again.
‘I want my robe,’ thought Mara, who had never in her life cared about the clothes she wore. It had nothing to do with the other students or with the cautious way they crept around her, as if she were another demon who would at any moment stalk them for her own cruel amusement. It was all about her robe.
The ephebeum quieted when she came into it. It was nearly empty now. Loki was gone. The few students lingering here before lessons watched her walk by as they would a Master among them, waiting to see if she wanted something before returning to their own pursuits. She wanted to believe that things would go back to what passed for normal here in time, that she would go back to being just another lion, and in the meantime…
In the meantime, she wanted her robe.
Across the Nave and into the lyceum, Mara walked without looking at the students who bowed to her, or tapping at their minds to hear what they were saying when they ducked away to whisper. She climbed the winding stair to the very top, took three steps into the straight-walled tunnel there, and stopped.
The lamps that lined the walls leading to Kazuul’s doors were already lit.
Well, she didn’t really think she was the only person who knew this place existed, did she? Particularly when she had been coming here so often, and she knew people were watching her. It was probably Devlin. He’d followed her here before.
But he couldn’t light the lamps.
‘I’m not going to kill anyone,’ thought Mara, and started walking again. ‘It might be a trap, but I will not lose my temper, even if it is Loki. It’s just as easy to put someone to sleep as it is to—’
To turn their blood to salt. To burst their bones out through their eyes. To catch them, crush them, cut them in half.
Kazuul’s door opened.
Mara stopped again, and watched as bronze-bodied Letha came gracefully into the hall. She was naked—she was always naked, why would Mara even notice that now?—and the slender quills that grew down her belly cut points of black shadow across her sex like hungry teeth. She saw Mara and smiled, her sensuous stride unaffected as she came closer, passed her, and continued on. She didn’t say a word.