by R. Lee Smith
Only an instant. Mara turned on Horuseps, not seeing the way his smile had turned to cautious alarm or the flinching movement at his side as Zyera and Letha retreated several steps. “Where is he?” she demanded. “Where is the coward?”
“Perhaps not the proper attitude to take into an audience,” Horuseps murmured, examining his fingers.
“I did what you said! I got rid of him!”
A flicker of something that was not quite sympathy crossed his face. “Then this won’t hurt as much, will it?”
Rage again, there and gone. Mara looked at her hand, half-raised, and lowered it with effort to her side. “If he thinks this is going to hurt me at all, he is dead wrong.”
Kazuul’s powerful voice rolled out before Horuseps could reply: “Pun unintentional, I presume?”
He strode in from the great stair and through the crowd, his green eyes stabbing out from the darkness. Students hastened to bow before him, and he cut an indifferent path directly through them to Mara, clearing his way with brutal sweeps of his bone-bladed arms. He did not seem to hear their screams or feel the weight of the bodies he hooked. When he reached her, he shook off the flotsam at her feet, and snorted when she kicked a flailing hand aside.
“You are very wrong,” she corrected herself, hardly able to speak past the anger chewing her up from the inside. ‘Be cool,’ she thought, and yes, she knew it. Be calm. But the rage wanted to sing so badly.
“Our laws are few,” Kazuul said. “And well-understood.”
“This is bullshit and you know it!” she spat. “He’s a nothing! He’s nobody! Let him go!”
“I? I did not pull him screaming from his lessons and order him to heel at thy shadow.” Kazuul raked his eye across Devlin and the man flinched as if physically burned. “Tis his will alone that hath set this wheel in motion.”
“You were the one who told him I needed taking care of!”
“I did not send him to thy side for all time, I only gave him the word that care must be provided thee one night. One night, after lessons had been concluded and the last bell rung, and still he hath spent every hour seeking thee, knowing well the consequence of his choice!” Kazuul showed his teeth to Devlin in a fierce smile. “He chose, Mara, to lay his hope at thy feet, rather than at mine. And he chose unwisely. Apart of which, thou didst require nursing. Now, had thee remained with me—”
“Oh now we come to it! No one walks away from you, and this is all you can do about it!”
“Nay, not all.”
Rage. She pushed it down, but it wouldn’t go far. It struggled in her chest, a clamber of killing power, coloring everything she saw with an aura of blood-red light. “You want to pick the next words you say to me really goddamn carefully,” she whispered. “What else can you do? Say it, you son of a bitch. Tell me the next time, it’ll be Connie.”
“Thou woundest my heart,” he growled, turning back to face her. “Never would I threaten thy best beloved.”
“What else then?”
“I could speak for him,” Kazuul said. Without taking his eyes from Mara’s, he reached out to cup Devlin’s face in one huge hand; he squeezed, dragging Devlin forward with his eyes bulging over the gasping-goldfish face he was making, to show her. “Because thou desirest mercy, and so well I love thee that I must give it.”
“Love! Mercy! You can’t even say the words with a straight face!”
“Tis all one to me.” Kazuul shrugged, tossing Devlin back into his executioner’s waiting claws, and folded his arms across his powerful chest. “Yet I do recognize the good intent with which thy friend did sunder our laws.”
“He’s not my friend!” Mara snarled.
Kazuul glanced back at Devlin, smiling thinly at the mark this heated declaration left in the other’s eyes, his mouth, his whole body. “Then what matter the fate that befalleth him?”
“Because it’s a damned trick, that’s what matter!”
“Thou hypocrite. Argoth.”
The executioner reached down over Devlin’s shoulder for a hold on the filthy robe, but he did not pull it away. He grinned at Mara, his claws digging in just above Devlin’s scrotum, and tapped a pleasant greeting at her mind. He told her he’d make it quick, if not painless, and he made sure she could hear the lie in his thoughts. He told her he’d save her out a keepsake, if she wanted one. Perhaps a belt.
Kazuul gazed into Mara’s eyes. He was calm in ways she could only pretend at, calm and indulgent, calm and smiling. “The human is truant and this is irrefutable. Argue his reasons how thou wilt, it remains the human is truant. There is a penalty and that penalty is death. Yet it is within my power to alter his fate, and so it is also within thine. He hath spent three nights in thy bed. Come to mine one night only, and I will permit him to live.”
“That’s what this is about?” Rage, and this time, she let it come. “Then kill him!” she snarled. “Go on. You kill him, Kazuul. And when you do, I will turn right around and kill every goddamned person in this mountain!” Mara heard a collective clamor behind her, swung, and roared at them without even seeing them. “On your fucking knees, every one of you!”
They did it, the thunder of their obedience slapping at her ears, fueling her with the need to let go, to open her mind and let the rage all the way out, let it take her and him and all the world. She swung back with an effort to Kazuul.
He wasn’t smiling any more. The Masters behind him faced her with a single shared expression of alarm that was almost, but not quite, enough to penetrate her senses and cool her heart.
“There’s no law against students killing students,” Mara announced. “And I will do it. And when I’m done, I will go room to fucking room and kill all the rest of them. I’ll find Connie that way. How’s that, Kazuul? Who wins then?”
He gazed at her. The fingers of one hand drummed on his bicep. She stood shaking before him, power like a caged thing inside her, howling for release and she let him hear it. She meant it. His mind brushed cautiously at hers; she savaged it away, but not before he saw just how deeply she meant it. There had once been a time when she would have suffered almost anything just to know that no matter what else she was, she wasn’t a killer. But that dream was dead, and one death more or one thousand made no difference. She would kill them all.
Kazuul considered, and the longer his silence drew out, the more anxiety she sensed from the Masters. This wasn’t part of anybody’s plan, but they did not doubt for a moment that she could carry out her threat. Not the Masters and not the students, who huddled on their knees in the same thought-thick stupor that transfixed rabbits in headlights or any student in the malicious grip of any demon.
“My lord, we—” Letha whispered.
“Silence.” Kazuul glanced pensively down at Devlin, who was almost hugging his executioner in the extremity of his terror, but at least he was quiet. “It fascinates me, Bitter Waters, that you offer pleas for thy trinket’s protection, yet would murder for a man’s.”
“Don’t even pretend this is about him. It’s you and me. It’s always been that and all because you think you can hammer me into place—” Rage, fought and mastered…barely. “—but I will not go quietly, Kazuul! Drop it, drop him, or I’ll make you sorry you ever saw me!”
His eyes snapped up to hers, but not because she was shouting. Emotion of some kind seared into her, but it wasn’t anger and that was nearly enough to shock her out of her own. “Not with a thousand deaths,” he said intently. And showed his fangs in a smile. “Yet thou might make me gladder now and then. Look at him, Mara. Look at the boy thou art condemning and tell him the bed where thou hast already slaked thy passions is too great an offense to buy his life.”
Mara glared at him, hating him, but she couldn’t hold his easy gaze forever. Her own faltered, then shifted aside. She looked at Devlin.
He looked back at her, whiter than his neophyte’s robe, with Argoth’s hand a patient knot over his fear-shriveled genitals. His mouth worked, but he wasn’t aware of it, was
n’t trying to speak. He couldn’t even think. He waited with the rest of them, utterly at her mercy.
‘Do you still think I have a good heart?’ she thought distantly, and looked at Kazuul again. “Let him go.”
“Upon condition,” he countered evenly, and held up one claw. “Swear to it.”
“One night in your bed.”
“Aye.”
She shook her head, not refusing, but almost marveling. “You’d kill a man for that.”
“Readily. Wilt thou, to escape it?”
“Let him go,” she said again. “I’ll do it.”
He reached around at once, plucked Devlin from the demon who held him, and threw him nonchalantly at the door. “No student, however well-allied, may break our laws with impunity. Thou art expelled, human. Death alone shall meet thee here upon thy return.”
Devlin, sprawled over the stone floor, slowly rolled onto his hands and knees. He looked at Mara. His mind beat at her like the wings of a trapped bird, but entirely without thought.
“Thou art not numbered among the Ten,” Kazuul continued. He stretched out one claw toward the Door and it opened in absolute silence—a door in a dream. “Freedom is thine, and ignorance. Go.”
Devlin crawled back and stopped, poised right on the threshold. He shivered. He wanted her to come with him.
“Oh get out, you idiot!” Mara shouted. “I was never here to save you!”
He flinched, hard. Devlin stood up, his robe rumpled, the toe of one flapping sandal sticking out past his ungainly foot. He looked at her, his face as stark as the moon against the blackness behind him, and then he turned around and slunk away.
Kazuul crooked his finger and the Black Door shut before Devlin was even out of sight. It seemed to Mara that he’d tried to turn around, that he might have tried to shout—her name blared star-bright in his mind—but then he was gone.
“Idiot,” Mara said again. Her voice shook. Too much anger and not enough time for it to come and go.
“I do hope that’s worked out the way you wanted,” Horuseps murmured.
Mara swung on him, but his back was to her. He stood very close to Kazuul, and no doubt did not know how his words carried.
“Because it certainly did not go according to any plan as I perceived it.”
“All rivers run to the same great sea.” Kazuul smiled at her over Horuseps’s shoulder. “I am contented with this ending.”
She had nothing to say to him, nothing at all. He’d taken Devlin away, ripped him out of her life with no more compunction than a sadistic child ripping the wings off a fly, just to see it hobble around without them. She had no one left now, no one she knew, no one to talk to…only him. The anger was gone, leaving her too tired for words. She thought of her cell—the soft sand and perfect darkness—and started walking.
“Fulfill thy promise, Bitter Mara,” he called. “Show me the measure of thy gratitude for my mercy.”
“Gratitude?!” She wheeled about and stared at him, then laughed in his triumphant face. “I wish I had fucked him,” she said, killing his broad smile in a stroke. “I really wish I had. He was an obnoxious little pest most of the time, but it would have been worth it to see you get his sloppy seconds.”
Horuseps heaved a sigh and passed his hand over his eyes.
Kazuul regarded her for a short silence and then smiled again. It didn’t quite touch his eyes. “Shalt thee renege then? Spit back thy oath to me now that thy pet is well away? No doubt it would give thee perverse pleasure to throw thyself under my claws for pride’s sake, yet I should only pardon thee, and there would we two stand. Nay,” he said, almost gently in spite of his cold stare. “Come to my bed, beloved one. Thee cannot win every battle.”
He took her hand and she did not protest. She walked beside him when he led her out of the Nave. She didn’t struggle even as he lifted her into his arms and spun her sickeningly through space and shadow and solid rock, to appear instantly in his bedchamber without the inconvenience of walking. But when he placed her on the bed and loomed over her in growling anticipation, she raised one hand and touched his broad, burning chest.
“You can’t win every battle either,” she told him. And then she dropped back to the Panic Room, forced her body into sudden sleep, and switched the monitors off.
“So there,” said Mara, and watched the Mindstorm.
* * *
It was cold that finally woke her, cold in shades of high-alert yellow across the Panic Room monitors. Mara returned to her body at once. If the trouble was severe enough to switch the screens on by themselves, she couldn’t afford pride.
To her surprise, she hadn’t been tossed out on the aerie (or over it). She’d been tucked neatly into bed, but her arm had wrangled its way out of the blankets, exposed to the icy wind that blasted in from outside. Her fingers were blue and somewhat swollen, numb to all sensation. She dragged it under the covers, heavy and unresponsive as a lump of wood, and lay with it across her chest until it woke up. It hurt a lot.
Besides that, she thought she was actually okay. It being impossible not to know when Kazuul had done any sort of sex to her, she could say with a great deal of confidence that he had not. He’d just put her to bed. Sometimes she really did not understand him.
Once feeling had returned and Mara was capable of flexing her hand without pain, she kicked the blankets off completely and got up. Her robe was still on the floor where Kazuul had dropped it after so romantically tucking her in, only now it was three times as heavy with winter’s slush. She draped it over the broken pillar again, but doubted it would dry anytime soon. In the meantime, one of the ragged sheets from Kazuul’s bed sufficed as far as her modesty was concerned. She headed upstairs, trying her best to reinvent the toga on the way, but stopped as soon as she reached the abandoned theater.
Kazuul crouched upon the dais, his broad back to her, his head bent low. He didn’t move, not even a half-turn in her direction to let her know he’d heard her. Only the subtle shifting of his longer spikes betrayed his breath. If not for that sign of life, he might have been a statue.
Curious. Mara’s first thought was one of queer recognition: This was surely what she looked like all those years ago, when she was in the Panic Room before it had a TV. No wonder it so unnerved people.
She finished tying off the corners of her toga and walked up to him. Her mind went out ahead of her, tapping at his. He tapped back distractedly. Their two minds twined briefly, like lovers’ hands across a table. She pulled away first.
“Did you enjoy your one night?”
He grunted, still deep within himself.
“Thinking of better days?” she asked, heading for the risers and the door.
He roused as one from sleep. “Better? Nay, but of ages long past. My best days yet lie ahead.”
“How unusually optimistic of you.”
“What knowest thou of my character, child? I am Hope incarnate.” He watched her climb the risers and when she reached the fifth, he said, “We all keep hidden a part of ourselves. For some, a larger part than others. Thee, to make example. Hast thou ever been wholly honest?”
“To Connie.”
“Ah.”
“And you?” She turned around, but the dais was empty. She had enough time for a flare of unpleasant surprise and then his breath was on the back of her neck, his hand sliding around her waist. She threw an elbow uselessly into his ribs and succeeded only in scraping herself against his hard skin.
“To thee,” he murmured, nipping a trail down the side of her throat to her shoulder. “Ever thee.”
“Let go of me.”
“Thou hast no one to return to.”
“Is that what you thought? That I’d throw myself at you just because I had no one else? I’ve been alone most of my life! I’m not afraid of it or you! Get your hands off me!” she snapped, shoving at them.
“Dost thou even comprehend how much of chivalry I have shown thee? And ever dost thou ask for more. Perhaps I am done with i
ndulging thee.” Always, his grip remained gentle, if unbreakable. His biting kisses stayed tender, his voice calm and playful.
“I don’t belong to you, Kazuul.”
“Oh, but thou art wrong upon that point.” He picked her up as easily as a doll and swung her around, first slamming her against a pillar and then crushing his own weight atop her. “Thou art mine,” he growled, nuzzling under her chin as she struggled. “My pet and plaything. Mine own. My property. My bitter wine to sip. Mine alone.”
He kissed her, his mouth closing hard over hers and forcing it wide. His tongue invaded. She bit and he withdrew with an exaggerated yelp, only to seize a fisthold on her hair and wrench her head back. He kissed her again, savagely now, his breath searing her so that she actually choked on it, and this time when he drove his long, pointed tongue to the back of her throat, she didn’t fight. Back and forth, miming the act of sex, he invaded her with his kiss before withdrawing to lick roughly over the leaping vein in her neck. Finally he pulled back, grinning, and she swung her arm and slapped him. The shock of the blow radiated up to her shoulder, but had no effect on him. She slapped again, and cut her palm on one of the short nubs of bone protruding from his jaw. He caught her wrist then, licked the wound, and ground his hips aggressively into her at the same time. He shuddered, sucking blood, then chuckled against her hand and finally looked at her.
“If thou dost escape me now in sleep, I swear thou shalt waken well-used,” he said. “I am no gallant knight to come and go at mine unattainable lady’s urging. When met with an enemy, I conquer. When met with flesh—” He lifted her thighs around him, lunging in close to snap his teeth right before her face. “—I rend!”
“And when met with a harmless idiot of a man, you threaten to eviscerate him and then throw him out of the mountain! I haven’t forgotten that, I haven’t forgiven you, Kazuul, and I’m not staying!”