The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  Letha saw it, and the colors of her mind sharpened to brilliant edges. **Dare thee not to pit thy contemptible will against mine. Our lord may allow thee to bandy words with him, but I would as soon pull thy tongue as indulge thee. Mind thyself, mortal-born. Thou shalt not long have his protection.**

  There was no shiver in those thoughts. Mara felt her smile slip, testing them.

  Letha saw that too. Her bronze eyes widened, all innocence and feigned concern. **Why, thou seemest surprised! Dost thou think thee can forever flaunt thyself before our brothers and yet retain our lord’s favor? Or hast thou at last condescended to allow one of these glammar-suckling mortals to lie betwixt thy ready thighs?**

  Mara sent only wordless derision in answer.

  **Nay? Then who is the human who hath joined thee in thy bed as our lord doth patiently await thy return?** Letha asked sweetly. **I shall have to see if I can make it seem as interesting an account as Azkeloth’s charming tale of thee and Horuseps on the stair of the Great Library. I do hope thy pet recovereth as well once our lord’s ire is spent. Oh, thee he shall speedily forgive,** Letha assured her, stroking one hand lazily over her breasts as her lecture went on for the benefit of the raptly-staring students. **Until he hath tired himself of filling thy woman’s well, he shall never let his hand fall on thee in anger, yet surely thou hast seen with what tender mercy he doth treat his rivals.**

  The memory of Kazuul’s spike punching up between Horuseps’s thighs was never far—black blood pouring around Kazuul’s fist as he twisted the point deep in the wound, the shrill-cicada scream splitting the air, and the way he had turned afterwards to look at her, letting Horuseps drop from his fist to thrash on the floor in his own spreading gore. Now she saw Devlin in his place.

  Letha waited while the full consequence of this possibility revealed itself to her. Then she smiled again, all her delicate quills whispering like silk sheets as they rippled down her back. **Thou shalt tell him the boy is harmless. I will tell him he is not. And we shall see which of us he believeth best.**

  Mara did not answer. She shouldn’t have answered any of it. She shouldn’t even be here. She turned around.

  **Thou art in my grip as much as his, never doubt it,** Letha sent, as her lilting voice continued to give unheard praise to the art of Allure. **So down, mortal-born, down upon thy naked back before him. Give him all he doth demand and creep away to the depths before thou dost incur my wrath beyond all mending. I tolerate his fleeting whimsies for so long as they know their place, but I shall not be made the warden of she who seeketh to usurp me without a vengeance.**

  Mara swung back. “Do not threaten me,” she said, silencing the demoness and attracting every student’s startled eye. “Or we really will find out who he loves best.”

  That knocked the smile off Letha’s lips as effectively as a slap. “Who he believeth!” she said, interrupting her own lecture in clear, golden tones of fury.

  For a moment, Mara was confused. She ran back her words—loves—and felt as struck by it as the demoness seemed to be. She hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t even meant to think it. She needed Kazuul’s favor and protection; she neither expected nor desired his love, even assuming a creature like him was capable of such an emotion.

  But the word had a way of echoing in Letha’s increasingly agitated mind, until she turned on her restless, uncertain students with her hands hooked into claws. “Away, thou ravens! Thou carrion rats, thou jackals! Away, or I’ll mar thee so that even Malavan would not have thee!”

  And then she was directly in front of Mara, snapping through the space between them in an instant. Even angry, she was beautiful. She could contort her furious features in no way that she was not beautiful. Like the quills that grew from her flawless body, the most grotesque changes could only accentuate her perfection.

  The demoness sneered at her in that beautiful way as the theater emptied, and a snap from her molten-bronze eyes slammed the doors and sealed them in alone. Mara could sense her thoughts prowling just beneath the surface of her closed mind, but she kept them quiet in spite of her obvious rage, and her voice was still as sweet and smooth as chocolate when she said, “I suppose thou thinkest that the murder of thy fellow students has made thee mine equal, but I am yet thy Master and ever shall be.”

  “I never said otherwise.”

  “Nay? Down upon thy knees then, and kiss thy Master.” Letha thrust her chin forward, her mouth twisted in a savage smile. “Tis my command, thou child of crippled Earth, and as thou didst so recently observe, thou art my property also. Kneel.”

  ‘Never should have come here,’ thought Mara again, not without a rueful smile. She knelt and felt the stab of Letha’s bitter pleasure piercing through the Mindstorm as she bent her back and touched her lips impersonally to Letha’s perfect foot.

  “Nay,” the demon purred. “Not there.”

  Mara straightened slowly, cocking a cool eye upwards.

  Letha smiled at her. The quills that lined her hairless pussy rippled outwards, each black tip shining with clear drops of pungently sweet musk. Her nether lips parted, exposing the gleaming folds of her sex and the bronze pearl that crowned it, every part of her in sinuous motion.

  “Kiss me, clay-born,” Letha whispered, as the first drops fell from her quills and hissed tiny holes into Mara’s damp robe. “Kiss thy Master.”

  The theater doors opened. “Precious, that I have to see you first in the mind of—”

  Horuseps, motionless behind them with one hand upon each door, studied the tableau before him with a thoughtful expression. “Get up,” he said finally, his tone hard.

  “I was given an order,” said Mara as Letha snarled prettily.

  “I’m giving you another one. Oh dear, we have a dilemma. Shall we take the matter to Kazuul for judgment? Get up, Mara.”

  She got up. Horuseps caught her arm in a painful grip and pushed her roughly behind him. He stood and stared for a long time at Letha, but didn’t say another word to her, at least not one that Mara could hear. At length, he pulled the doors shut and then, and only then, did he turn around and look at her. “You’re not out of bed five minutes,” he began.

  “I’ve been out of bed at least thirty.”

  The lights of his eyes swept upward. He planted one hand firmly on her back and propelled her ahead of him down the winding stair. “Well. You’re as contentious as ever. I trust that means you’re feeling better. How’s your head?”

  “Fine.”

  He sent her a sharp glance. “No pain at all?”

  “A little when I first woke up.”

  “Good.” He faced forward again, his thoughts clicking through the air like beetles. “Very good. You saw Kazuul?”

  Mara’s jaw tightened. “Briefly.”

  “Hm. And then you saw Letha.” His fingers on her back twitched, lightly tapping. He was silent as they crossed into the Nave, but as he steered them toward the wide stair that led to the students’ level, he suddenly laughed. “I think you frighten her, precious. And before you start to feel too proud of yourself for that, you should know that she’s killed his paramours before and he’s always forgiven her. You’re different, but unless you want to stake your life on just how different you are, I advise you to leave her be.”

  “You’re just full of good advice, aren’t you?”

  “And yet, how strange that no one ever listens to me. Here we are. One of yours, I think.”

  They had come down into the ephebeum, and there, centered against the far wall where no one could help but see, his arms and legs sunk into Malleated stone and a spike stretching out his broken jaws, was a dead man. His face was changed and the mind that identified him was cold and gone, but someone had helpfully written the name LOKI over his naked chest.

  “I didn’t do this,” Mara said numbly. She looked around, but the handful of students sharing the cavern merely bowed their way quickly out of it.

  “Of course not, dearest. They did it for you. You’d rather the
y feared you than loved you, you said. Congratulations. It isn’t a long walk, is it?” Horuseps released her and rested his hands in their customary place on his own shoulders. “You honestly never saw it coming, did you? But then, it is so impossible to predict the ways in which humans show their worship. They used to kill their own infants on my altar.”

  “I didn’t do it,” she said again, found a neophyte peeking out from a passageway, and shouted, “I didn’t do it and I didn’t want it done!”

  The student vanished and Horuseps sighed. “But you allowed your eye to fall on him, oh my bittersweet. And they are not the only ones watching to see where your eye falls.” He was silent for a time, watching her stare at the dead man, and then he quietly said, “Everyone knows that you’re sleeping with your most devoted little servant.”

  She swung on him, her hands in fists. “I am not, goddamn it!”

  “Oh, sleep is all it is, I’m sure, but sleep is damning enough. Kazuul will never be content with anything less than your whole heart.”

  She looked at him.

  “Get rid of the boy,” said Horuseps softly. “Or he’ll do it for you.” Then he smiled. “It was so good to see you up and about, precious.”

  He left her, and she stood staring into Loki’s open, blood-filled eyes until the hounds came.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It wasn’t easy to push Devlin away. He came to her cell and she shut the door on him. He followed her to the dining hall and she refused to sit with him. He shadowed her down every tunnel until she shouted at him to leave her the fuck alone, but he never retreated far. Even when she was in the garderobe, he was right outside. His hurt battered at her mind, but she shut it out. She was doing it for him. He wasn’t her friend, but he was the only real human contact she’d had in this awful place, and she wasn’t about to feed him to Kazuul.

  He took it pretty well the first day, assuming it was another of her moods and she’d get over it, but by the third, something close to panic had taken him. Even Mara’s psychic seed ordering him to go to class broke upon that stony soil, and she was forced to stay in her cell while he beat his palms on the door and loudly begged to know what he’d done.

  “Would you shut up?” she demanded finally, flinging the door open violently enough to make him bolt halfway down the tunnel.

  “You said you’d get me out of here!” he howled, cringing by the lamp. “Now everyone thinks you’re mad at me and for God’s sake, you know what they’ll do to me!”

  “I can’t have you sleeping in here,” Mara snapped. “I will get you out. I said so, didn’t I? But that doesn’t mean I’ve adopted you, so give me some damn space!”

  He retreated a shaky step, hunched into the neck of his robe, wringing his hands.

  “You’re a grown man,” said Mara brusquely. “Stop trying to hold my hand everywhere we go.”

  “They’ll kill me.”

  “I’m going to kill you, Devlin!” She covered her face, fought down her rising temper, and looked at him again, more calmly. “Okay. I’m going to spell something out for you that I’m sure everyone else already knows. I’m fucking one of the demons.”

  “I know,” he said timidly. He even knew who, although Kazuul’s name was nothing but a word to him, an unknown quality made even more dangerous for the secrecy. “But they don’t care. I mean, I know we’re not, you know, that way, but even if we were, they don’t care as long as we don’t do anything that could, um, get you pregnant.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Mara said with a grim nod. “But Kazuul cares. He cares and he’s a raging egomaniac, so just back off.”

  Devlin shifted on his feet, slowly beginning to uncurl from his protective slouch. “You’re…You’re doing it for me?” he asked hopefully.

  “Devlin, I swear to God…”

  “I know!” he stammered, showing her his empty hands, raw and bloody from beating on her door. “I know, okay? We’re not girlfriends, but…but we are…I mean, we could be…regular friends. Can’t we?”

  She looked at him, and it was right at the tip of her control not just to tell him he meant nothing to her, but to shove it right into his skull. She’d never tried to send to a non-telepath before, but she sensed she could do it. It would hurt him a lot—on a couple of levels, she guessed—but she could do it and he’d have to know it was truth once it was ringing unmistakably in his own mind. He was nothing to her but a convenient navigator, a means to pass the time when she was in the mood for company, and an onus of responsibility she hated having to carry.

  He was searching her face, all flyaway hair and hanging robe. Her pet goat.

  “Whatever,” said Mara.

  “You saved my life.” Devlin hesitated a smile at her. “No one’s ever done that for me. Not even, you know, on the outside, where it doesn’t even matter.”

  Mara stepped back and started to close her door again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I make you angry a lot and I can’t seem to help it, but you’re not a bad person, you know? You’re really not.” He groped for something more to say (Mara saw it coming and flinched, hard). “You’ve got a good heart.”

  Water dripped steadily somewhere deeper in the tunnel. Her hand stole up and touched the locket through her robe.

  “Go away, Devlin,” she said tonelessly.

  “Okay. I just…” He thought of hugging her, chewed his lip a little, and then retreated down the passage, nervously tugging his hood up over his head for the anonymity it provided. “Okay. I’ll…I’ll see you around, Mara.”

  “Whatever,” she said again, without strength, and shut her door on the sound of oversized sandals.

  * * *

  Mara woke to the tolling of the bells. She sat up slowly, listening to the tangle of them, all crashing together without rhythm or harmony. She’d heard its like once before. A tribunal had been called.

  Mara was not so confident of Kazuul’s protection that she did not experience a twinge of dread, but she supposed if she were the subject of today’s entertainment, someone would have come to grab her before they rang the summons. Well, if she wasn’t in it, she guessed she could just go back to sleep, but what the hell. She was already awake. And as much as she did not want to see someone butchered, she did want to know what went on around here.

  So she got up and went to the Nave with the rest of them. She didn’t immediately think it odd that Devlin wasn’t sidling up to hang off the hem of her robe. He hadn’t been at the first tribunal either, or at least, she hadn’t noticed him. He didn’t really strike her as the sort who would attend one of these. Gazelles didn’t, for the most part. Eviscerations were the amusements of lions.

  So she was not much surprised when she came to the threshold of the Black Door, swept her mind across the clamor, and did not find her irritating little shadow. She was surprised, however, to see that the demons standing at the end of the Nave seemed to be waiting on her. She’d come to expect that sort of thing from Horuseps, but all of them? Zyera? Letha? Dalziel was there, one long arm wrapped twice around a column. Below him, Malavan stood as upright as his body allowed, all his weight forward on the outthrust swords of his finger-claws, craning his thick neck to see her in the crowd. Others she didn’t know well enough to name still watched her with only her face in their minds and anticipation tingling throughout their hidden thoughts.

  “What is this?” she asked, as ice took hold of her heart and the fires of rage began to sing down deep in her gut. She couldn’t fight them all, but by God, she’d try.

  “An unpleasantness,” Horuseps answered, stroking her hair in a pretense of sympathy. “I had hoped you would not witness it.”

  “Liar!” she spat, checking herself just in time to keep from slapping suicidally at his hand. “If you’ve found her, if you’ve trumped up some charge to kill her in front of me—”

  “Such a suspicious mind you have. My dear, vengeful young child, we would never arrange a mock trial. We have no need. We can exact whatev
er murder we desire when the mood is on us. The sad fact of the matter is, your fellow students provide us with an endless bounty of errors to fuel interludes such as this. But set your burning heart at ease, child. Our prisoner is not even female.” He patted her on the head and turned away, raising his hands for silence.

  “We have very few rules here,” he said, just as he had said once before. He left Mara, walking among the robed students who bowed before him and enjoying himself as he basked jointly in their adoration and her seething impatience. “And we are careful that you hear them all, understand them all, and appreciate the consequences of disobedience.”

  Malavan chuckled nastily, gouging his claws through the rock floor as he watched Mara. Several demons hushed him.

  “It is forbidden to defy any Master’s command,” Horuseps was saying calmly. “It is forbidden to remove books from the Great Library without the express permission of a Master of the Scholomance.”

  Watching her. Why were they all watching her?

  “It is forbidden for our students to indulge in such sexual games as could conceive offspring,” Horuseps said, and turned back toward the Black Door. His eye wandered over Mara’s way. “It is forbidden to linger more than ten years in the study of any one art, and it is forbidden to miss more than ten days each year of lessons.” He finished his stroll and faced out into the crowd with a good, clear killing field between them and the silent students. He rested his hands on his shoulders. “The breaking of these laws,” he said, “is never to be tolerated.”

  The doors deep in the shadowed side of the Nave opened and even before Mara heard his voice, all that was Devlin crashed into her mind.

  “Human called Astregon,” Horuseps said, gazing into Mara’s eyes, “you are found guilty of truancy.”

  “Kazuul put you up to this,” she said, watching the demon—the executioner—unconcernedly drag Devlin before the Black Door. It was Argoth, the same muscle-bound monster who had performed at the last tribunal, only he didn’t look bored this time. He tipped Mara a wink as he dragged his victim across her view, and for an instant, rage blotted out everything, everyone, even Devlin.