The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  He laughed at her and kissed her again.

  A mindslap hadn’t done much when she’d used it before; a hand slap, even less. Mara reserved her struggles, kicking when she thought it might do some good, as Kazuul slowly settled atop her, but her mind was elsewhere, observing her posture from every angle in the Panic Room, circling his mind for a crack in his defenses, searching in furious futility for some sign of weakness.

  But oh, his hands were rough and sure and they kneaded her buttocks, moving her against the solid bulge of his erection the way he wanted, the way he knew she wanted too. His teeth were careful as they scored across her sensitive skin, teasing as much as tasting. He knew he could make her want anything he did and this was precisely what made it torture.

  “Come to my bed,” Kazuul rumbled, grazing his teeth across the shell of her ear. “Thou hast been in every way save one mine own. Now I mean to mark thee, to fill thy sweet cunt at last, again and again. I am thy Master. I will take a Master’s privilege.”

  She tried to scratch at his thick neck and felt a fingernail break painfully deep. She tried kicking and could only drum her heels against the back of his legs. Kazuul relished the gyrations insolently, growling his pleasure until she finally stopped, and then giving her a little snap as if to get her going again. “Let me go,” she said, only said.

  “Thou hast my permission to fight,” he replied, pulling her makeshift toga up around her hips. “For all that thy fight is a lie. I smell the fragrance of thy woman’s flower and thou art more than willing. Welcome me to thee, my Mara. Art thou not wearied of half-satisfaction?”

  “Half-satisfaction is still damned generous where you’re concerned.”

  “Liar,” he said, unruffled, and swept her legs suddenly up, resting her ankles on his shoulders. “I give thee greatest pleasure only, but greater still remains when I am at rest within thy cradle and thou takest me as a woman must. Come, the mask of thy outrage has been well-torn by days and nights of rapture. Give to me all liberty or give it not, but I shall have thee and thou shalt howl with joy.”

  “Why are you even bothering to ask?” Mara snapped as he bent once again to cover her throat with his biting kisses. “You don’t have to ask to use your whore!”

  And after everything she’d done to him, that at last struck home.

  He recoiled, shocked inside and out, to stare at her. Oh, he made a swift recovery, but when it was there, it was sure for real. He shoved away from her, letting her half-fall down the pillar to land heavily on her feet, and snarled, “How dare thee! If thou didst lay beneath ten thousand men, still thou art no whore! And I have never taken thee as such, nay, nor ever named thee so! Ever hast thou been my precious and most favored, and I have taken nothing I was given and given gladly!”

  “I’m not giving it to you now!”

  His brows lowered slowly, pulling the smaller of his horns out of place, cutting deep lines of shadow across his face. She began to wonder if she’d pushed him too far. And then she had to wonder exactly how.

  “How many more days dost thou believe thee canst bid me dance to thy tune?” he demanded. “Thou sayest these things to stab at me and I am stabbed. Behold, I do bleed!” He swept a claw across his heart, opening a short gash without any sign of pain, only that thunderous stare. “Yet some things lie beyond endurance. I will not always suffer thy fits of whimsy in good humor.”

  “This is what you call good humor?”

  “Art thou broken?” he inquired curtly as the lips of his self-inflicted wound silently closed. The blood remained, rapidly drying to a dark crust on his thick hide. “Art thou impaled screaming upon mine hungry cock? Or art thou whole and belligerent before me in thy fragile mortal flesh? Dost thou not realize how readily I could take what I desired?”

  It was not the first time he’d put the question to her in some form or another, dangling it like a well-baited hook, daring her to bite.

  For no immediately apparent reason, Mara found herself thinking of vampires, those pesky old vampires which an Irishman had so firmly rooted in Transylvanian folklore to the ongoing contempt of its native cabdrivers. In particular, she thought of that delicate point of vampire myth known as the invitation. A vampire couldn’t simply enter his victim’s home, they said. He had to be invited in. Once done, he could always return at his leisure, but first, by trickery or seduction, he had to get that invitation. ‘I could take you anytime I wanted,’ Kazuul kept saying, always to the most defiant Mara, all but daring her to cry, ‘So do it! Take me and see what happens!’

  Only she never had.

  Mara scooped up the hanging swath of her improvised clothing and hiked it high over her waist. With her hand, she parted the folds of her labia and gave herself a good rub, enough to show him moisture on her fingers, enough to let him hear its greedy kiss as well as see and smell. “Take a good look,” she told him. “Because a look is all you get.”

  He had, in fact, been looking—a hot, hungry, perfectly frustrated stare—but his eyes snapped up when she said that, blazing so as to stain his craggy cheeks the same sickly green color as his eyes.

  “I am going right up those stairs and you can’t stop me,” she said. “I’m going to fuck every man I see for, oh, at least a week. I’m going to work my way through every demon in the mountain. I’m going to start with Horuseps. I’ll probably finish with him too,” she added, letting her toga drop as she headed for the stairs. “He was that good.”

  “None shall have thee!” he snarled—really snarled, spitting flecks of saliva and showing the white spike of every fang. “My mark is on thee well!”

  “I guess we’ll see, but I’m betting I can make him forget that. I did once.”

  He lunged past her, slamming his fist down on the next stair hard enough to crack the stone. “Thou art not above my law!” he bellowed.

  “I don’t recognize your law,” she replied. “You were nothing to me but a quick and easy tumble before bed, and what did I tell you in the very beginning?”

  Every breath that came out of him was a snarl now, and it hurt her retinas to meet his eyes, but she stared into them anyway and showed him no fear.

  “When it stops being fun,” she said, “I quit.”

  “Dost thou think thee can but walk away?” He caught her, not by the arm now but by the throat. The power in those hands which had lifted her so lovingly and effortlessly only moments ago was still there, scarcely constrained. “All backs bend to Kazuul.”

  He’d taken her voice. She made a thought—Not mine!—and drove it at him like a fist.

  He roared, not with pain but with anger, a pure white anger that lit up his mind from the inside and illuminated in absolute detail every brick and mortar of the Fortress that housed him, every shuttered window, every forgotten crack. Mara was in before the battle-cry had finished. There wasn’t time for exploration, but she made good use of what moments she had, sweeping across the alien territory of this long-protected stronghold and out again with every access point committed to memory. He never knew she was there.

  “Thou didst tell me once thee desired not a gentle hand,” Kazuul spat, and drove her to the ground. “Thou wilt not have it!” He yanked his belt open, tore the plates and leathers away, and freed the enormous brand of his cock to raise in his fist above her.

  Mara reached up and closed her hand over his.

  He hesitated, but hardly enough to notice and surely not sufficient to defuse his wrath. Expelling a snarl, he grabbed her hair and pulled her roughly to her knees.

  She squeezed, sliding her fist up to the grip just below the swollen head of him, where she latched and lightly sucked. Kazuul hissed in a breath and hesitated again, but his claws remained firmly knotted in her hair, easing only a little as she licked a long, slow maze of whorls all down the underside of his shaft to tongue playfully at his tight scrotum.

  “Is this truce?” he grumbled, while she hummed against him.

  “No.” Her fist moved slowly up and down the spit-slic
k length of him. He was hottest where his skin was thinnest; his balls, swollen hard as stone and as heavy, burned her mouth, forcing her to lick in tiny sips. “I’m still really mad at you.”

  His claws relaxed a little more. She pulled back, opening her jaws to the straining point to take the entire head of him into her mouth, bobbing awkwardly as she tongued him. She looked up into his slitted eyes, the feral snarl just beginning to wane, and withdrew to massage her face. “Shall I Malleate myself and take it all?” she asked.

  “Never!” he said sharply, and then pulled his claws entirely, as if to make up for his tone. He rested his hand just so on her hair and closed his eyes, murmuring, “I’ll have thy truth alone, Mara. Always.”

  She went to work, both hands on him and moving in opposing circles more appropriate to grinding pepper, but gentle for all that, while she licked and sucked at his glans. Now and then, she’d pause to knead and roll his swollen balls over her palm, using her other hand to glove his cock and pump it fast, or lubricate the hot shaft with complicated passes of her tongue, but he required little variation. She could feel his muscles tensing. Soon, he was making the coarse, bestial breaths that meant he was about to cum. He tried half-heartedly, once, to pull her up, but didn’t fight her when she closed her lips around his slick head and sucked the cum as it sprayed into her wet mouth. His claws dug at her scalp as she licked up every drop. She swallowed and he swore, vehemently but quietly, then gave her a little push away from him.

  “Return to my chambers,” he said, snatching up his loincloth.

  “No.”

  “Thou art not here as a student of the Scholomance.” He threw her a black, somehow reconciling sort of glare. “And thou art no longer bound to its laws. Thee risks no expulsion under my protection, and no tribunal.”

  “I’m not here as your sex-slave either, and I don’t have any other pet goats for you to threaten.”

  He spat a curse, then shook his head, his teeth bared in frustration. He dressed, cinching his belt with curt, vicious-sounding jerks, glaring at the wall and thinking too deeply for her to hear. Finally, he said, “Return then, when thy wanderings are ended. Sleep out each day with me, and I shall make no more demands upon thy nights.”

  “Oh sure, just sleep,” she said.

  “Aye.” He scowled, as if the words came with a taste he’d like to spit back at her. “Sleep beside me in my bed, and I swear to thee upon mine own eternal life that I will take no advantage.”

  “Ha!”

  “And upon that selfsame oath, I’ll press thee no further for the pleasures of thy flesh, if—” He paced a little away from her, then came back, plainly fighting against his better judgment. “If thou wilt threaten no more to lie with my brothers. Be mine, only mine, and I shall wait upon thy will.”

  She gave him a narrow, suspicious stare.

  He spread his hands. “Compromise.”

  It was a dangerous promise and she knew it, but couldn’t quite see how. She believed all along that his ultimate plan was a little more sinister than just having sex with her, and here was as good as proof. The truth was in him somewhere, locked away down deep with the rest of his secrets, and now she finally had a way in. She couldn’t go mucking through his mind anywhere else but right in the same room with him and she knew it. Wasn’t this her golden opportunity?

  She didn’t trust it.

  “All right,” she said. “For now.”

  He went ahead of her and opened the door. “Go where thou wilt shall be the whole of thy law,” he told her, then frowned. “And obey the given command of the Masters.”

  “Every Master, or only you?” she asked.

  He hesitated, then bared his teeth again. “Every,” he said at last, and growled as he looked away. “For now.”

  He retreated to his chambers then, striding down the risers as easily as if they were stairs and not looking at her again. She heard him swear once, after he was lost to sight, but that was all.

  “For now,” Mara murmured, and left him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  She tried to miss Devlin, but she didn’t. Neither was she grateful that he was no longer there when she went out, popping unexpectedly around corners when she was trying to pee, or yattering into her ear for hours on end when she walked herself through the uncertain passages and empty caverns of the Scholomance. He was just gone, and when she thought about him at all, it was with a kind of satisfaction that she had managed to keep her promise to him and get him out, mingled with faint outrage at the promise Kazuul had extracted from her to do it. But she didn’t miss him, any more than she’d missed Connie in the days, months, and eventually years after her best friend’s disappearance. She had looked for her, in her own way, and then she had boxed up her things and waited for their removal, and while she had also flown halfway across the world, climbed mountains, and defied demons to try and get her back, it remained true that the world had moved on and Mara had moved with it. She had loved Connie while she was there—her first, her best, her only friend—but she’d shed no tears once she was gone.

  Horuseps was right. She really did belong here.

  Her days passed now in much the same way as they had before, fruitlessly. The first night that she had returned to Kazuul and approached his bed, she had not spoken to him at all, but when she had slipped beneath his torn blankets, he came at once to join her. She spent her sleeping hours staring fixedly into the body’s monitors in the Panic Room, but he had touched her only once—his hand gently brushing her hair back from her brow—and his mind never touched hers at all. It seemed the promise of an immortal was not the fickle thing of Man after all; she was entirely in his power and he took no advantage. It was unnerving.

  When first-bell rang to wake her, he had already repaired his table and laid out a Master’s meal across two golden platters, poured wine into two golden cups. She ignored it and his beckoning hand and went out to search for Connie, hungry.

  By the time last-bell sent her back to him at dawn, there was a second chair as well, neither so tall nor as imposing as his own, but harmonious in design, a queenly throne to sit opposite the king’s. She took her food and ate on the aerie, sitting on the floor, her back to him.

  Again, he lay beside her as she slept, and again, he touched her only once, this time to stroke her exposed arm before covering it over against the chill. And in the evening, beside the platter set before her untouched chair, she found something new: a gown to replace her much-worn robe. Neither acolyte-black nor neophyte-white, but a soft, shimmering silver, and not nearly as scanty as one might expect a frustrated demon to provide her. The neck was high, the hips concealed, and the skirts full and warm around her legs. A simple cut, but beautiful. Feminine. Regal. She put it on and ate on the aerie again.

  But apart from the ominously quiet hours she spent in Kazuul’s company, her nights passed just the same. She wandered—in the lyceum one day, the Nave the next, even the ephebeum again—opening every door she could and searching for recently Malleated walls which might conceivably hide her friend. She interrupted a number of lectures in the advanced study of arts, but the demons within dealt with her respectfully, allowing her to invade their private rooms if she remembered to ask, or just to sit quietly on some distant riser and hear the lesson. She went through all the right motions, but no longer considered it a search. Time itself seemed to hang, suspended, and she didn’t even know what it was all waiting for.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked one night, watching the sun set over the snow-capped mountains.

  “Thou knowest.” She heard the sound of snapping bone as he tore himself another bite from the unknown roast which was his breakfast. “I mean to lie with thee.”

  “What else?”

  He grunted, then rose and came to the aerie beside her. “Thou art all I have desired, throughout these empty ages.”

  She snorted and threw the rest of her tea out over the rocky slopes. Steam puffed up from the ice where it landed. Some uns
een creature above the aerie scrambled away, knocking pebbles loose to tumble down over the mountainside. Far, far below, the lake shimmered in the last light of day, all its edges frosted over, the water at its center as dark and round as a staring eye.

  “Believe it not?”

  “Was I supposed to?” she asked dryly.

  “Tis truth.” He crouched down close beside her, his shadow and hers merged to a single body. “What wouldst thou have of me?”

  “So you’re willing to bargain, are you?” She had to smile at him, at the scowl darkening his shadowed face. “Did you think all you had to do was trap me in your bed and I’d be immediately overwhelmed by lust for you?”

  “Aye.” He gave her a sidelong glance, sharp and sparking with frustration. “I knew thy will was great, yet did not anticipate thou wouldst deny me so long out of malice.”

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve complaining about malice after you sent Devlin to a tribunal just to get him away from me.”

  “He liveth.” Kazuul smiled into the dying light, his fangs gleaming in white points. “He liveth still.”

  “Sometimes you make me very glad that you don’t know where Connie is.”

  “Never would I cause her harm.”

  A bitter laugh was her only reply to that.

  “Thou wouldst despise me for it,” he said quietly.

  “I despise you now.”

  He looked at her and into her while she faced the mountains determinedly, answering neither his piercing stare nor the cautious touches of his mind. The sun was swallowed up, the last light taken. She had nothing else to look at and still refused to look at him or meet his sendings.

  “Nay,” he murmured, and combed his claws once down her hair. “Thou art not yet so great a liar.” He stood and smiled down at her as the wind gusted. “Shall I show thee a thing?”

  “What thing?”

  “A mystery I know thou hast often pondered. I’ll say no more. Aye or nay?”