The Scholomance

by R. Lee Smith

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “I thought…if I could show him the boy was gone…” Horuseps shook his head. “But you let him in your bed, and that was all the unmitigated ass would hear.”

  “So he called a tribunal and he made me choose between watching a man get disemboweled or going back to the man who could think that choice up. And I…I went back to him. I went back and I stayed with him, in spite of everything. And if you look close and squint your eyes…” Mara demonstrated, stone-faced. She wasn’t good at making jokes. “…you can sort of see a pattern forming.”

  Horuseps raised his eyebrows slightly, tingeing the Mindstorm with very very cautious encouragement. “Does that mean you’ll be going back?”

  She shot him a dark stare. “What it means, precious, is that much as I’d love to tell you he’s made a fool of me for the last time, I am confronted with the inescapable truth that he never made a fool of me without my help. That’s an ugly thing to sit with in the dark for as long as I have today.”

  “This is starting to sound less and less like acquiescence,” Horuseps remarked, still smiling.

  “I had just begun to come to terms with the idea that all he wanted from me was sex. Well, he can get that from anyone, clearly. He can get it from her.” Mara’s lip curled on its own. She smoothed it out with effort and was calm. “Do you know what he told me when I walked in on the two of them? Do you know what he wanted his last words to be in that fight?”

  Horuseps took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I suppose you’d best tell me,” he said.

  “He called me his dog.”

  The demon raised his hand, made half a fist, then opened it again and covered his eyes. Whatever emotion there had been at the start of that gesture washed itself out in a wave of rueful humor. “No, he neglected to mention that.”

  “He made such a big goddamn deal out of my not being his whore so that he could call me his dog.” Mara thought about that, rubbing restlessly at the lip of her empty bed. “That makes sense, in a way. You have to pay for whores. You can kick dogs for free.”

  “Oh Mara.” He sighed at her, then reached and brushed the back of his glass-smooth hand against her cheek. “He does want you back, bittersweet.”

  “I don’t care,” she said, “about what he wants. I have reached the point where I don’t even care what I want as long as he doesn’t get what he wants, can you understand that?”

  “Oh yes,” said Horuseps, almost laughing, but not quite.

  “And he says I’m not going crazy, but I have had—I have embraced—the very irrational thought that while I’m still not willing to leave this place without Connie, I would cheerfully make him mad enough to kill me if it meant he’d never get to fuck me again.” Mara shook her head, marveling at these words just as if she hadn’t been the one to speak them. “Have you ever heard of the Stanford prison experiment?”

  “No.”

  “In 1971, some professor of sociology on the other side of the world used college students to prove that monsters breed in dark places.” She frowned. “There was more to it when Devlin told me about it, but that’s the gist of it. Not exactly shocking, is it?” The lamp in the tunnel began to dim again. Mara watched the light fade through her narrow cell window. “People are so full of dark places,” she said.

  Horuseps glanced around. The lamplight flared and shone out more brightly. He looked at her again, head canted, thoughtful. “I’m listening.”

  “I know you are. That’s probably the most dangerous thing about talking to you. I’m going to tell you one more thing, and then I’m going to ask you to leave. I could make you,” Mara said calmly, “but I’m just going to ask.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “I’m going to tell you about my father,” she went on, “because he has been the thought that kept coming to me as I sat here being angry at Kazuul, and I think I mentioned that I don’t, generally speaking, think about people.”

  “You did.”

  “My father had a way of looking at women, you see. He didn’t hate them and he certainly didn’t love them, he just saw them differently. He fucked a lot of them, but by the time he got around to fucking them, he almost didn’t have to anymore. He already knew he owned them.

  “This was the thing his girlfriends never understood about him,” Mara said, looking back through the Panic Room at the girls—and there had been so many girls—pulled over the years from Cade Warner’s unguarded mind. “Some of them slept with him because they thought he’d advance their careers and some because they thought he’d give them nice presents, but all my father wanted was sex, and he knew he was going to get it pretty much as soon as he met them. They were his dogs, you see, even if he never thought of them in precisely those terms. They came when he called them, did the tricks he taught them, and when he was done, he left them by the side of the road and got himself a new dog.”

  “Dear child, no—”

  “One of them tried to sue him after she realized she wasn’t getting promoted like she’d planned,” Mara said, watching that stolen memory play out across her internal monitor. “My father destroyed her case in court, and then fired her, and then made sure no one else would ever hire her, and then he had her beat up a few times, and then he never thought of her again. Not with guilt. Not with pleasure. Not at all. She was a dog. She bit him. He put her down.”

  Horuseps bent his head. His pale hair fell across his face, hiding his expression from view, but she knew that he was listening. He was always listening.

  “Lots of girls told my mother about the affairs,” Mara said, shrugging. “She cried, but she never talked to him about it. She used to hire girls to take care of me, knowing he’d end up fucking them, and when he did, she’d cry and fire them and hire a new one for him. It was annoying to have to live with that, but there wasn’t any point in getting angry at her. In getting angry at either of them, really. He saw them all as dogs, you see. Not just pets, but dogs. Do you know what sets dogs apart from every other domestic animal?”

  “They want to please their master,” Horuseps said quietly.

  “That’s right,” she said, looking at him. She hadn’t really expected him to answer. “They don’t always know how, but that is all that they do. They want to please their master. And a dog doesn’t care whether he’s a good man or not, just like a dog doesn’t care if you pet it or kick it. A dog will always come crawling back.”

  Horuseps started to say her name again, then simply closed his mouth and waited.

  “You’re very handsome when you don’t smile,” she told him, frowning into his solemn face.

  “I know.”

  “Do you think of me often? That day on the stairs?”

  “Yes.” The question provoked no surprise in him. The answer was no lie.

  “I don’t,” she said, and looked back at the lamp light. “I never thought of my father as a bad person. I still don’t. He was true to his nature, just the way you say. He had hundreds of women during my lifetime, and hundreds more before I knew him, but he never once took a woman and turned her into a dog. They did that themselves. I’m doing that…myself.”

  Mara got up and opened her cell door. She turned around, holding it, bringing the lamp in to shine its sickly light everywhere but on Horuseps himself. The demon remained as pale and pure as moonlight. “This is not a calm and rational decision,” she told him. “I’m aware of that. But I’m not going back this time. When I walk out of this mountain, it will be as Mara as not another in a long, long line of dogs for Kazuul to fuck and forget about. I’m ready to die if I have to, but he’s never touching me again. The Stanford prison experiment is over. Now please leave.”

  Horuseps sat for another moment or two in silence, his eyes glittering with movement, and then he sighed and stood up. “It’s been a long time in coming,” he commented on his way out, “but that might actually put him in his place. Then again, it might bring him here in a murderous rage. We’ll have to wait
and see. But there is just one thing I would like to say, child, and I ask that you hear me out.”

  Mara waited while Horuseps bent his head, selecting his words with great care. When he had them, he didn’t look at her, just stood in the passage with water dripping onto his shoulder and lamp light bleeding all around him. He said, softly, “You seem to expect our lord to show you something akin to patience and respect after his lifetime of conquest and devotion, all without the inconvenience of reciprocating it. And when he isn’t abject enough in his devotion, you walk away. And when you do go back to him, it is for sex. Not for the presents he could surely give you, and not for the power he would willingly lay at your feet, but only sex. And so it occurs to me, precious, that you are very much your father’s daughter.”

  “Is that all?” Mara asked stiffly.

  “Yes. I’ll leave you be, if you like, although you’re welcome to call on me at any hour. I miss you.”

  He walked away without ever looking at her again. Mara stood there long after he was gone, and when the blister-lamp again began to die, she let it and just went in and shut the door. She lay down on the hard stone floor beside her empty bed and put herself to sleep. She didn’t think about anyone and she didn’t watch her dreams.

  * * *

  First-bell woke her, just as it always did. She stared up into the absolute black of her cell until the bells rang again, then lit the lamp outside with a thought and got up. She didn’t see the point in searching for Connie, but she had nothing else to do.

  She was recognized when she came out into the ephebeum, not with surprise as much as alarm, although they all remembered to bow. Some of them had stripped her cell, after all, but she didn’t try to fool herself into thinking that was why they were all looking at her the way they did. They’d thought she was gone for good when she went away with Kazuul, that they’d only have to avoid her from time to time like any other Master. They didn’t want her living with them anymore. Rejection didn’t hurt…but something did. She went to the garderobe to pee, stood awhile over the hole, and then went upstairs.

  The lyceum emptied when she entered, students bowing themselves back into the Nave and avoiding her eyes as they hurried away. Mara glanced upwards as she crossed to the small pool, but the winding stair was empty, even at the very top. She wasn’t sure what she expected, really. It was early yet. Kazuul might still be taking his first meal—

  Mara cupped her hands under the icy spray that poured from the wall and splashed water over her face. She didn’t care what Kazuul was doing.

  A sharp whine drew her attention. She looked up just as Suti’ok stepped out from one of the tunnels and onto the stair. He glanced down in the worn, incurious way of any man walking home after a difficult day, and saw her. He stopped, and so did the four hounds following at his heels, but the one at his side came trotting forward, grinning nervously and arching its long neck as it came down the steps to meet her. Mara put out her hand just as though it were a strange dog she expected to sniff it. The hound rubbed its cringing face over her palm and then rose up on its hind legs to laugh its high, crazed laughter and dance its strange, shuffling dance.

  “Ska!” snapped Suti’ok. “Nodan! To me, thou rogue!”

  The four hounds behind him dropped and lay flat. The hound gamboling for Mara merely laughed again, eyes rolling happily in its misshapen skull.

  “Always thee,” he muttered, and started stomping down the stairs as his rebellious hound dropped to rub himself back and forth against Mara’s thigh.

  “Did someone die?” Mara asked. It was all she could think of to say.

  “Aye.” He scowled at the hound who only now came scampering back to him, then at Mara as she too came up to meet him. “But not thy Ka-nee.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Aye, for t’was the unfortunate favorite of Letha’s harem. ‘A small matter,’ she said to me, but who would have thought so small a matter to have so much blood in him?” He gave her a sour glance as she fell into step beside him, but that was all. The laughing hound squeezed itself in between them, panting and drooling and licking at one or the other of them as it kept pace. It wasn’t long before Suti’ok thawed enough to stroke its horrible head, and to grumble, “Her chambers, rank with sex and blood, hath required my hand since moonrise. T’was as if she painted it all solely to see me at labors. Such are the amusements of the high-born.”

  He said this last without looking at her, but with pointed bitterness. She couldn’t read him, but didn’t need psychic powers to know he wasn’t just talking about Letha anymore.

  “I shouldn’t have done it,” she said finally, not looking at him.

  He barked laughter at her like a blow. “Nay! What pangs of conscience are these? Thou didst press me to thy will more deftly than any of thy kind before thee. T’was near an honor to be so plied, and for certain t’was a pleasure. Takest thou satisfaction of it, for thou hast learned in so short a time to kill with thy lips…and with thy cunt. Letha herself could do no better.”

  That stung. “No one has to know,” she said.

  “Tis already known,” he shot back scornfully. “Not even thou art fool enough to believe otherwise, surely. It taketh but one human—one!—whose unguarded mind might carry our tale and t’was carried far.”

  “But—”

  “‘Where took thou thy clay-born pleasures?’ she said to me.” Suti’ok gave Mara a withering glance. “‘Whose bitter waters didst thou sip, and from what stolen chalice?’ Then she left me to clean the leavings of her envy, and if she did not go then to drip her honeyed poison in our lord’s ear, I know not where.”

  He threw an especially black stare at the ground then, and Mara realized they had come to the scene of their shared crime. The hounds, every one of them, slipped aside to sniff and lick along the stone where their Master had lain, but he moved on without stopping.

  “Why art thou shadowed at my side?” he demanded, summoning them back with a few curt gestures. “Thou art in no danger, and I would not defend thee from him e’er thou wert.”

  “I’m not afraid of him,” Mara said, and it may have still been the truth, but it had a mechanical feel.

  “Nor shouldst thou be, yet I cannot fuck him to forgiveness, so pardon me that I do not share thy courage. Vraka!” he spat suddenly, sending his hounds skittering back, unnoticed. “I dared to think thee might be different, but thou art proven the daughter of thy line, and I curse the day—”

  He stopped—his feet, his words, his thoughts. He stood rigid at the open door of his theatre for a moment, no more time than it took her heart to beat once, and then the Mindstorm came alive like lightning and struck her with all the unreadable force of his emotion. She staggered, catching at her head. He ran, and he screamed as he ran, and the sound was worse even than the hammer of his thoughts had been: “Ah God, let it not be!”

  Mara straightened up, her head throbbing with cast-off horror, fear, and pain. His hounds huddled together at the doorway, but none of them crossed the threshold, and even his laughing rebel crouched low, shivering in the intensity of animal confusion that easily turned to attack. Mara stepped forward and Suti’ok let out a wordless, keening howl, and whether they moved for her or for him, the hounds sidled back and lay still. They watched, whining, as Mara moved among them, but she too stopped at the threshold.

  She stood stunned, not so much by the sight as by the sound. What she saw littering the gore-slick floor could not have been much worse than what she’d left in the ephebeum the day of the attack—a dozen bodies, maybe twice that, skinless and twisted with the agonies of their death-throes—but it was not until she also saw the demon on his knees, weeping as he clutched one to his chest, that she really knew what she was looking at.

  She was pulled forward, feeling no emotion apart from freezing disbelief, her bare feet taking her across the sticky floor to the nearest corpse. No flayed and contorted student after all, but dead all the same, its throat torn open by one deep, sure s
troke of a clawed hand. The hound’s jaws gaped. Its tongue, swollen and black, lay like a slug in a puddle of clotting blood nearly the same color as its lifeless hide. Elsewhere in this chamber, Suti’ok wailed and wept, badly unnerving her. Death was everywhere in the Scholomance; mourning, unknown.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and was disturbed to realize she was. She touched the hound and felt it cool and wet as clay, unpleasant to feel.

  “Sorry?!” the demon choked, and raised his head to stab at her with his eyes. “Thou art sorry? What is the blood of nephalim compared to thine enjoyment? Nay! Thou hast had thy game of me! I’ll give thee nothing more and no forgiveness!”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “Lying bitch!” He struggled to his feet with the body hanging from his arms. “Didst thou think he would come for me as he did for Horuseps? Nay, how could he stab me deeper than this? Than this!” He looked down at the dead hound he held and folded over onto his knees again, pressing his face to the bloody gash in the creature’s side and sobbing.

  Mara backed away, unable to combat this battery of grief and pain. She’d never known how to deal with that, even when it came from humans. To feel it now in demonic force was an assault upon her senses. She owned this too, every bit as much as she owned nine deaths in the ephebeum, but by God, she wasn’t going to own it alone.

  She started out walking. She started cool, calm. She started that way, but there was blood on her hand where she’d touched the dead hound, blood on her robe where she’d knelt beside it. She walked faster and faster with the stink of death in her nostrils and by the time she was halfway up the lyceum’s spiral stair, she was running. She ran, even down the unlit stairs to his bedchamber, returning to Kazuul as blind by rage as she’d been on leaving him, and when she reached the bottom, she seized a chunk of stone from the doorway, made it malleable even as she pulled it free, and threw it all in one furious movement.