by R. Lee Smith
Mara turned to watch until the demoness had vanished from sight down the stairs. She stood a moment, not thinking, and then went quickly to the doors and pulled them open. Letha had left no footprints on the dust that carpeted Kazuul’s abandoned theater, but the perfume of her body’s musk still lingered. She followed it down to Kazuul’s bedchamber and tore the curtains open.
He sat at his table, hunched in a brooding way over his cup, and he didn’t look around, only growled, “Away with thee. I’ll give thee no more ear, only the cut of my claws.”
“Jesus, fine,” said Mara.
He snapped around, the cup and its suspiciously thick wine flying. He stared for a heartbeat, then seized the great stone slab of the table and threw it into one of a very few standing pillars, smashing both. “Do not take that form with me!” he bellowed.
Mara tapped at him, making sure he could feel her own true touch, and the rage which howled through the Mindstorm blew out like a candle and was gone. His mind brushed back at hers, but she withdrew and sealed herself up tight. “I came for my robe,” she said.
He didn’t look for it, didn’t even turn his head. He came to her, his powerful mind still stroking gently at the Panic Room’s walls.
“Just the robe,” said Mara, as he swept one arm around her, pulling her against him. She turned her face away when he bent to kiss her, and he, undaunted, grazed his teeth across her cheek instead. She shoved at him; he would not be shoved. “Didn’t you get enough from Letha?” she snapped.
His snarl blasted into her ear, but he swiftly bit it back and tried a smoky purr in its place. “Still the vipers of thy heart. Thou remainest mine own.”
“Your property.”
She drove him back with that one, but not far, and not for long. Then he smiled. “My beloved,” he said, and this time when she turned her face away, he caught her chin and brought her firmly into his kiss. His inhuman mouth forced hers open. His tongue drove into her with violence and then began a lazy conquest. He pressed her against the wall and took from her easily in spite of her feeble struggles. Nothing she did to him had any effect. When he released her, it was with laughter.
“Thou wouldst seem to be recovered,” he observed as she struck a harmless fist off his broad chest. “Didst thou seek me out to test thy strength?”
“All I want—”
“Thou art wearing one.” The corner of his mouth twitched upwards. “For the present.”
“I want that one.”
“Indeed.” Kazuul stroked at her thigh, then began to draw her robe up as he nuzzled fondly at her throat. “Then thou shouldst do away with the first.”
She smacked at his hand. He dropped the robe and his smile and looked at her. Then he seized a fistful of robe at her shoulder, punched a claw through the taut cloth, and ripped it open from her neck to her knees. In two rough yanks, he peeled her free of the sleeves and snarled at her as she stood in its ruins.
“I was using that,” Mara said coldly.
Kazuul picked her up and threw her. She swept through empty space too shocked to cry out and landed in a deep drift of his tattered bedding. She sat up fast and he sprang after her, cutting the air into howls with his leap, towering over her in a black fury. His toe-claws scored at the stone edge of the bed, then he dropped into a bestial crouch and stalked towards her, fangs bared and snarling.
Mara gave inches grudgingly, lying down only as he rose over her, and when his face dominated all her sight, she said, “Sometimes I really hate you.”
“That will change.” He lowered his burning body over hers, pressing his weight atop her as he teased her lips apart with gentle bites. “Admit me, Mara.”
“No.”
He drove the plane of his hand between her knees and cut upwards, effortlessly wedging her thighs apart and settling between them. “Tell me why thou hast come to me,” he growled, grinding his covered hips against her naked ones in short, powerful thrusts. The aged leather and layered silks rubbed on her bare pubis to intense and terrible effect, igniting heat as effectively as if he’d touched a live coal to her, and like a live coal, it hurt. “Tell me truthfully. Tell me thee came to fuck me.”
She tried to laugh at him, but groaned instead, one leg wrapping of its own will around him. “I want my robe,” she insisted, digging her fingernails at his shoulder.
“So thou art desperate to believe, but thou knowest the lie as well as I.” He caught her hand when she slapped at him, bit her palm until she bled, and then sucked slowly at the wound, purring, his tongue lapping and teasing at its lips in a brazenly sexual manner, and God help her, but she could feel an echo of everything he did in her aching pussy. “Thou desirest my bed and not thy garment. Tis in every touch of thee, save the lie of thy lips, yet I shall be thy fool and believe it. Tell me what thou wouldst have of me, o my beloved one. Tell me, and whatsoever you demand, so I shall give thee.” She writhed against his constrained erection and he smiled, thrusting at her even harder. “What shall it be, Bitter Waters? Thy robe…or my cock?”
The thought of walking back to her cell dug at her inexplicably, as sharp as daggers in her gut. She could see the stupid robe when she twisted away from him, see it lying empty on the floor, and for a moment, she felt every bit as limp and hollow as it looked in her eyes.
“I came to fuck you,” she whispered, slapping a hand over her face.
“Ha!” He pulled her wrist away, his eyes burning ferociously into hers. “Again!”
“I came to fuck you!” she shouted.
He reared up, lips stretched in rapacious triumph, to work his belt open, and Mara sat up in the same instant to shove him on his back. He went agreeably enough, growling as he watched her tear his sparse clothing away.
She mounted him with a snarl of her own, bucking him deeper and deeper inside her until he was wholly sheathed and she, riding wildly. Impaled on his blistering heat so fully, she could feel every beat of his alien heart like a hammer inside her, and she rode that too, pulling blindly at his spikes for leverage. He didn’t make a sound when she broke a thick point off one of the cracked ones, only dug his claws into her ass and began to yank her against him in even greater violence.
Why did it have to feel so good? She looked down and saw him beneath her—his head thrown back, his spikes gouging fresh tears in all his bedding, his every muscle standing out in stark relief—and saw a man in the agonies of death, not the ecstasies of flesh.
She hadn’t really seen the men she’d killed, but suddenly, unpleasantly, the two thoughts merged, and it was in that awful instant that she came. Climax like claws ripped through her even as all the frenetic heat of lust turned in a heartbeat to sick horror. She recoiled, kicking and screaming at him, and he opened his bewildered eyes and let her go.
She retreated in a thrash of limbs until her back struck the spreading wings of his headboard and there she sat as he pushed himself up on his elbows to gaze thoughtfully back at her. The candlelight turned his stone-grey skin to the sallow yellow of a corpse, and his eyes were sunk in shadows. He watched her without expression, his mind all that moved.
“What am I doing?” Mara asked. She tried to laugh. It was an even shakier effort than her words. “What am I doing here?”
The hot glow of Kazuul’s green eyes dimmed minutely. He sat all the way up, drawing in his legs and leaning on them in a comfortable manner, utterly ignoring the erection jutting wetly between his thighs. “And where else shouldst thou be? Building cairns? Singing dirges?”
“I killed those people. Why am I…fucking you?” She laughed again, pressing her hands to her head. “I don’t even like you!”
“Good,” he said, with disturbing sincerity. “Like, a pale word of half-felt meaning. I would rather have the red meat of thy hatred than the milky cup of thy liking until I have earned thy honest love.” His head cocked. “How long wilt thou mourn the deaths of those who meant to murder thee?”
“I’m not mourning them, I’m—” She stared at him, thinking
, ‘mourning me,’ and that was so ludicrous and baffling a thought that she couldn’t sit with it. She looked around, saw her black robe lying in a heap beside the broken pillar, and swung her legs out over the edge of the bed.
Kazuul caught her shoulder. She stiffened to shrug him off, but then just relaxed and sat there. She hated to think what she must look like, hunched and naked and still flushed from orgasm—sulky and slutty at the same time, and it wasn’t the sluttiness that bothered her.
“I don’t feel bad,” she said.
He shrugged, bone spikes clacking.
“I should feel bad. I should feel bad that I did it, even if I don’t feel bad for them, but I don’t. Instead I’m here…trying to cum my brains out with someone—” She glanced at him, eyes moving restlessly up and down his powerful frame, still wanting him. “—someone who’s arguably the most terrifying living thing in this whole damn world.”
He grunted, neither flattered nor offended.
“I’m not a good person. I’ve known that all my life. I’ve learned to be okay with it, but damn it, I am better than the kind of person who would kill nine people and then fuck you.”
She tried to get up again, and again, he stopped her.
“I don’t want to be here anymore, Kazuul,” she warned him. “You want to finish, you can bring Letha back.”
Now his annoyance stabbed the Mindstorm, but his tone was even as he said, “Thou wouldst yet be with me if thou had not worked thy vengeful will upon thy marauders.”
“That’s awfully presumptive.”
“So what matter their deaths to thee now?” he went on. “Thou art what thou art. Thou owest their bones no apology.”
“It never occurred to me to apologize. Jesus, I need to get out of here.” Mara looked around, but she didn’t mean this room, and he knew it as well as she did. “I think I’m losing my mind.”
“Nay.”
“Don’t you ‘nay’ me, you don’t know a goddamn thing about me! I killed nine people in at most three minutes, and maybe that’s all in a day’s work for you, but it’s fucking new to me! No one sane loses their temper like that!”
“Nay, I say.” The hand on her shoulder patted her twice and removed itself. “Thou hast developed admirable control to fit thy little purposes in thy short life, but thou art become many times more powerful in a sparing handful of days and thy controls have not grown in accordance. Thou art sane enough and thou wilt learn to master thyself once more in time.”
She heard the low clack and rustle as he recovered his belt, felt the bedding shift as he rose. He dressed, showing no emotion at the abrupt end that had come to this interlude beyond a slight tightening of his lips. His gaze drifted as he cinched his belt, and then he took two steps, bent, and came up with her acolyte’s robe. He tossed it on the bed beside her and walked away.
“Why do you let me stay here?” Mara asked. “It can’t be just for the sex.”
“It could, I assure thee.” He kicked at a chunk of stone by his broken table and moved on.
“Don’t insult my intelligence.” She pulled her robe on, wincing at the smell, which was now mildewy as well as rank with sweat. “You know I’m not here to learn anything. You know I’m going to find Connie and take her away with me. I don’t think I can help but upset your perfect order while I’m doing it. Why do you let me stay?”
“Perhaps I do not consider thee a threat.” He crouched down to knuckle through debris.
“That would be a mistake.”
Kazuul straightened up with his dented silver cup in hand and came back towards the bed. “Is it?”
“I’m very dangerous when I want to be,” Mara muttered, and watched him pour himself more wine out of the ewer by the bed. “Ask anyone.”
“How frightening.” He drank, eyed her as he refilled the cup, and then grunted and looked away. “Thou dost remain for that thou hast mine interest.”
She hadn’t been expecting an answer. It made her suspicious and so she laughed at him. “I refuse to believe, after all the years of your life, you’ve found something entirely unique in the way I have sex.”
“So much I could not yet swear to,” he replied, only a little sourly. “Nevertheless, thy words hold a grain of unknowing truth. Tis not how thou movest that fascinates me, but what moveth thou to do so.”
“I told you—”
“Thou hast an itch,” he said for her, smiling. “Thou dost lie with me to ‘scratch’ it. Ah yes. A plausible enough excuse. I pretend to believe it.”
“It’s not always a lie.”
“Aye, that I do believe.” He offered her his cup, drank it off when she shook her head, and dropped it indifferently beside the ewer when he was done. He looked at her for a long time as she sat there and ignored him. “Yet thy will matters little when thou art come to me,” he said at last. “And I let thee stay, Mara, for that thou art mine own.”
She shook her head and stood up. “I refuse to be your harem, Kazuul. You can make me say whatever you want, but as long as you’re stupid enough to give me a choice, I will always choose to walk away when I’m done with you.”
“I could have forced thee to my finish,” he remarked, watching her prove it. “But I let thee have thy flutterings and never called thee fool for it. There was a time when even my hands were unbloodied.”
Her step faltered. She almost looked back, almost.
“I shall refuse to make a harem of thee, Mara,” he said. “I will stand quiet and let thee crawl upon me, tying thy strings where thee will, but thou shalt never move me. I am the master of my lusts and of my rage, and I am master of thee as well. And when I have thee at last, it will be at thy urging.”
“Ha!”
“Aye,” he said grimly, his eyes spilling light in blades down his cheeks. “I could have chains set on thee at any hour, but I need them not. Thou art bound to me already. So go where thou wilt, my bitter sip, and return when thou hast thy heart about thee. I would drink thy howls of rage as readily as screams of rapture, but I will never have thee,” he said, moving away into the shadows so that his voice came back distant and all around her, “save with the whole of thy heart.”
She wanted to laugh at him again, since that was such a patently ridiculous thing for him to say, after all that he had done, but couldn’t. She left him instead, unable to see him in his broken lair, but knowing he was watching her as she walked away.
* * *
She traveled back through the lyceum, seeing little, her mood unusually heavy. Looking back at herself was a painful effort. She felt exposed in every unplanned word that she’d let fall. Why had she spoken to him like that, like a…like a child crying for comfort? And why in hell had he answered?
She could trust him only when he was engaged in his single-minded pursuit of her. She could not predict him, perhaps, and certainly could not combat him, but she could trust that everything he said or did came straight from the cock. She liked that. She could control that. It hadn’t upset her to have her clothes torn off or to be flung across the room and into bed, because that was as coy as someone like him could get, but he’d had her atop him, had her solidly in his grip when all it would have taken was a few hard thrusts more, and he’d let her go. To have her flutterings, he said, which served him no purpose at all.
It was a trick. It had to be. A little playacted sympathy to melt her heart and bring her back without a fight the next time. And anyway, he could certainly afford to send her away. He had other recourses, didn’t he?
Mara paused, glancing down into the lyceum’s central cavern and the open archway to the Nave beyond. Then she turned around and went back up the winding stair. Not far, this time. It wasn’t Kazuul she wanted to see. She turned down a passage and walked, checking her progress against her memories, until she made her way to a very particular theater. The door was open. She stood just inside, looking down over the crowded risers to the dais where Letha spoke in exultant tones of beauty and attraction.
The demoness
glanced up. Her eyes met Mara’s. She touched a finger to her lips, thoughtful, and then smiled. “Let us speak therefore of sex,” she purred. “The first and purest magic, and one which even Man in his ignorance may share in shadow. Yet if that ignorance be lifted by mine art, aye, even the clumsy couplings of mortal flesh can become a mystery and a power.”
**I have lain with him.**
The thoughts were, if possible, even richer and more sensuous than Letha’s true voice. Mara waited a moment or two, then acknowledged them with a mental shrug. **So have I. Want to compare notes?**
**I have been his eager concubine ten thousand times and heard my name upon his blood-kissed lips. I have felt his body so tenderly a’crush of mine as his breath burned upon my throat, and I have begged him to make ever more use of me.** Letha’s fingers played across her smiling mouth, slipped down to caress her own neck. She spoke on to her students, but her mind was all with Mara, as poisonous in its beauty as the asp Cleopatra clutched to her breast. **What art thou to me? Egg, thou art. Suckling pup. Clay-born creature, undeserving of mine eye.**
**I’m not interested in your eye,** Mara thought back with unveiled scorn.
Letha’s smile broadened enough to show the gleam of her sharp, white teeth. **I could have him back at any hour that I desired it. Every chamber of his ancient heart is known to me, thou plume of smoke, thou ripple over water. We were playing games of flesh when Men yet burned their offspring in homage to the sun.**
**So take him.**
**At any hour,** Letha promised. **For the moment, he desireth thee, and so it is for his amusement that thou art permitted thy free footing in these halls, but he will tire of thee eventually. I have seen his fancies bloom and wither and fall forgotten throughout these ages, and here do I remain.**
It is a difficult thing to lie with thoughts, and all of Letha’s sendings were boldly made, except for this last, which shook ever so slightly with the words, ‘he will tire of thee.’ Mara told herself she didn’t care one way or the other, but still, it made her smile.