by R. Lee Smith
It was the flicker that bothered her the most. That deepset, arrhythmic flicker, caused by the shadows moving just under the surface, not often and not always in the same way. She tried to puzzle out just why this bothered her, and saw only the slow opening and closing of a dead man’s mouth.
Second-bell rang, ending the breakfast meal. The hall stayed empty. There were never enough students to fill it. Unless, she supposed, they were all called out of classes to watch someone graduate. Or die.
Alone, unwitnessed, Mara stroked the ugly swell of the blister down to where it met the darker rock. She ran her fingers along that seam until she reached the underswell of its lowest point. There she picked at it, glanced once more at the empty tunnel, and finally spoke the Word of Malleation and pulled the rough stone back like wet clay.
There was more of the blister underneath. She guessed she wasn’t surprised. There would have to be a rim of sorts under the rock in order to anchor something of the lamp’s size, to keep it from dropping out and landing on some hapless student’s head. The parts of the lamp meant to be buried did not glow, but it was the same sallow color, had the same sick-smooth texture. All of that, yes, but the shape of what lay beneath was not a logical extension of the round bulge above it. Rather, it was a lumpy mass, wrinkled, distended, and thickly creased down the middle. She found the edges at each side, but the bottom of the thing just continued downwards into rock, gradually tapering and smoothing, but always with that central groove at the point of symmetry. Soon, she was on her knees and still searching for the place where it ended. It—
Mara’s mother had taken her on many outings as a little girl, in part because her innate indifference to those around her made her seem quite polite and civilized to the sort of people her mother associated with. When other little girls had gone on playdates for tea parties, or tried out for soccer, or just gone to the movies, little Kimara had been dressed in scratchy, miniature cocktail gowns to attend theatrical debuts and gallery openings.
It was a gallery opening she remembered now, filled with up-and-coming artists whose work often defied description, yet which was still somehow easily criticized and priced. Mara, left to her own devices, had gone quietly around the room, studying each piece on display as she sipped her ginger ale, and had been quite taken by a series there—a string of black-and-white photographs of commonplace objects, magnified out of all recognition. This colorless rainbow, a fingernail. This ocean of alien pods, the inside of an orange slice. She’d looked so charming there, with her little fluted glass and her serious frown, that her mother had offered to buy her one, and Mara chose the last of them: a heavily-shadowed mesa rising over a pock-marked and hostile landscape, which had in fact been an erect nipple. When the artist, whose bitter commercialism appealed to her precisely because he didn’t bother to disguise it, asked her what she liked best about the piece, she’d honestly answered, “It’s ugly,” a reply which made print in the next day’s Arts & Leisure section of the city newspaper, and which caused the artist himself no small amount of private joy.
That print still hung in Mara’s bedroom and she still studied it upon occasion, and found new ugliness to ponder, and that print was what she thought of now as she realized she was looking at the grossly distended chest and belly of a man, a man whose shrunken genitals and dangling legs were exposed by her curiosity, while his arms and face remained gloved in the enclosing rock, a man whose beating heart and torpidly drifting blood showed only as a flicker through the lampshade of his skin.
“What have you done?”
Mara stumbled back and was shouldered roughly aside by a squat, powerful body. Malavan threw her a scathing glare as he spat out the Malleating Word, doing what he could to knuckle the rock more or less back into place with his two, over-sized fingers. The harder he worked to restore the cave wall, the clumsier his efforts appeared.
“Where is she?” Mara asked hoarsely.
“Little fool! Get back to your—”
“Where is she?” She grabbed him, yanked him away from the lumpy mass of leg and stone he was attempting to marry, and shook him in the air. His teeth snapped together on his own tongue; blood sprayed her face in sputters. “Where’s Connie? You take me right to her, right now, or I’ll kill you!”
His fingers were too long to get at her crushed up close like this. She could feel his limbs battering at her shoulders, but the distraction was negligible. He kicked at her, toe-claws tangling in her robe and shredding it open. If they’d been longer, or perhaps only sharper, the moment would have come to a swift and nasty end. As it was, Mara swung him around and beat his squawking, draconian head against the wall beside the petrified man’s glowing belly until he stopped. Malavan opened his mouth—Mara felt the Word he meant to shape flashing star-bright in the instant before he spoke it—and she closed it for him without thinking, smearing his features together into a mute, grotesque muddle. She did it while screaming Connie’s name at him. She did it without a Word of her own, but she would not realize this until much, much later. All her attention was directed on Malavan, on beating the truth from him. She did not know that people were pouring into the halls, drawn by the commotion. She did not know anyone at all was there until the hand closed around her throat.
Another caught Malavan around his scrawny chest, prying them apart as impersonally as if they were squabbling dogs. Malavan was then flung to the ground and Mara given a good, crisp shake.
“Kill her!” Malavan sprang up, carving at his face with both fingers to make a bleeding mouth for this strangled command. His skin was blotching up with crimson, putting his emotions on display for anyone to see. “Crush her! I’ll eat her guts!”
“Thou wilt do nothing, thou worm,” Master Ruk said calmly. It was his hand, Mara realized, and when he saw that she knew him, he placed her on her feet and released her. “Thou knowest well our lord’s law.”
“She struck me!” the smaller demon shrieked, shiny red and actually pulsing with the intensity of his rage. “She made blood in my mouth! My face! She used arts on me! Kill her! Kill her or I will!”
“So it may someday pass that all the worlds are made barren, save for Man and lessers such as thee, vermin. Until then—” Ruk swung one elephantine foot and knocked Malavan solidly into the wall. “—know thy place. Mara, child, no student may ever strike a Master.”
“Where is she?” she shouted at him. “Where is Connie? Don’t you lie to me!”
Ruk glanced at her hands, drawn into fists and raised against him, then reached out in a distracted manner and smoothed stone over the exposed legs of the dead/alive man in the wall. “Thou hast misunderstood the import of what thou hast seen.”
“Don’t you bullshit me, I’m through! Give me my Connie!”
Ruk heaved a breath that almost seemed a sigh and lifted his gaze away from her. “Leave us, all of thee,” he said meditatively, and Mara was very vaguely aware of a shuffling sound as the hall emptied of what few students had been drawn by this outburst. “And thee, worm. Lick thy wounds elsewhere.”
Malavan hissed, running both claws rapidly over his face. He could shape it no better than he could the wall.
“Leave,” Ruk rumbled, now fixing a narrowed and faintly-glowing eye upon his fellow demon. “Or I will finish what she hath begun.”
Malavan limped off, muttering threats and sneezing blood. Ruk watched him go and when they were quite alone, he turned back and gazed at Mara from his great height, unmoved by her anger, thoughtful. Then he reached out, took her wrist, and bent to touch her hand to his brow.
Contact brought her to him, and deeper still, because he had opened for her, opened wide, so that all his unnatural honesty came screaming out of him. “Demon, so humankind hath named us, yet we are not of the making of Man’s great enemy. We know no devil, have dwelt in no hell save this of our own devising. Souls are of no value to us, nor virgin blood, nor hearts, nor hope, nor flesh of any kind. Yet one of ten we claim and this even thou hast agreed to.”
“I don’t care!” Mara tried to yank her hand back, but Ruk held it fast in his grip, holding her to him, pinioning her with truth. “Take me to Connie, right now!”
“Those we cull serve the Scholomance,” he said, gazing into her hot, furious eyes. “In this way, in many ways. All who enter here accept this price.”
“You tell me where she is!” Mara stopped struggling and dug her fingers in like claws, binding her will to him and honing it for attack. “Or I’ll kill you!”
He did not flinch. He didn’t doubt her, either. “Thou hast seen how few daughters of the line of Adam come to us. I would have marked it if such a one had passed the threshold in recent years. There have been none in the three prior to thy coming. If she entered here within that time, then here, surely, she remains.”
He was telling the truth.
Ruk released her and straightened up, out of her easy reach. “Didst thou think we took our Tenth to rooms of pleasure and great riches? We take and use them, child. We feed them to the mountain and reap what harvest may be sown. Such is the bargain made between our kinds in the first founding. Yet this I tell you also—”
Mara lunged up and slapped her palm over his naked chest.
He let her and spoke on, speaking truth: “I have seen our lamps set, every one. No woman-child born of Earth hath ever been so used. Thy lost lamb is not among them.” He let that sink and settle, then quietly added, “I did not mark her, this Ka-nee thou seekest, yet I can swear to thee and stand honest that she hath not left through the Black Door, nor been set alit. That she liveth, I cannot promise, nor more than I can tell thee she is dead. Take thy hand from my flesh, child. I have not given thee leave that thou mayest freely touch my body. Never do so again without mine invitation. Tis not my desire to see thee punished, yet I will before I am made thy plaything.”
Mara let her hand drop.
Ruk’s mandibles spread in a lipless smile. “I shall not order thee to speak words of apology.” And then he aimed a stern hand at her and said, “Yet rememberest thou, all Masters here are set above all students. Whilst thou remains among the latter, thou owest the former all respect, even lowly worms as Malavan. Do not sacrifice thy life for pride’s sake. There are some yet who value it.”
“Why?” she demanded. “Come clean about that, at least. There are hundreds of people in this mountain, dozens of other women. Why me? Why not them? Why not Connie?”
Ruk gazed at her for a long time. Under the misshapen mask of his face, his true self remained imprinted, and it was that Ruk looking down on her—ancient, pure, and untouchable. He opened his mouth.
“Don’t tell me,” Mara said bitterly. “I already know it’s a lie.”
He shrugged and did not deny it.
“It isn’t hate, what I’m feeling.” Mara rubbed at her chest, glaring without focus into the wall where the face of a man might be if it were not buried within rock. “It isn’t hate, but I want you dead anyway. How does that work, Ruk?”
His heavy hand rested gently on her shoulder. “With surprising ease.”
“I think I could do it, if I had the right Word,” she went on, almost to herself. “I think this feeling, whatever it is, is strong enough to fuel my will, even for that. I think I could kill you, maybe even all of you.”
Ruk did not reply.
“If she’s dead, I will. You should know that, in case you start thinking of this as fun again. If she’s dead, if you’ve killed her, I’ll bring this mountain down.”
“I believe thee,” Ruk said, but he was not afraid.
“Then tell me where she is! Tell me!”
“Lady.” He took her hand, brought it gently to his great heart, and pressed her palm to his honest flesh, gazing into her wild eyes all the while. “I know not.”
“Someone knows!” she shouted, her voice cracking in her tight throat. She yanked her hand back as a fist and stood there, shaking in the grip of helplessness and rage. “Someone has to know, damn you all! Someone knows!”
And all at once, she realized that someone really did. Breathing hard, pinned between fury and confusion, she retreated, never taking her eyes from Ruk’s. When she reached the corner, she ran. Not to her cell and not aimlessly through the mountain, but to the one person in all the Scholomance who would know where Connie was, if Connie lived.
The one person who knew everything.
* * *
There were students in the Great Library as always, clustered at the landings to take their malicious pleasure in watching the harrowed aspirants below. Mara beat a path through them and down, putting anger between her and the hammering wall of all-knowledge that rose up around her. It was enough to carry her across the floor to the desk where the Scrivener nested. His head rose as she neared him, swaying in thick enthusiasm, but she didn’t let herself see it, didn’t let herself wonder if he knew what was coming. She just ran and when she reached the desk, she jumped over it, arms out, and grabbed him.
The Scrivener roared, thrashing either with distress or dumb excitement, but didn’t shake her free. She wrapped her arms around his gelatinous neck, her legs around one waving arm, and dug herself in like a tick. Contact brought his mind to her, his mind, which was so much bigger than the world shrieking around them. He was the eye of the storm and the eye was quiet, absent of the shrieking, cataclysmic atmosphere pouring out of him. Mara lashed out, found a ripping place and worked herself in, birthing herself into his brain with tooth and claw and ferocious force.
The Scrivener knew everything, it seemed, but he had never in his ageless life known pain. He thrashed, battering his desk to splinters and smashing Mara into the ground, but she would not be loosened. She just dug in deeper, aiming first needles and then daggers and finally spears of her own mind’s making at his until she’d cut him into bleeding submission. His agony was as formless as his will, easily shut out. The right jab finally stilled his contortions and he crashed to the ground and lay quivering with Mara still clinging to his neck, mercilessly peeling back the countless layers of his mind.
She heard her name, and at once, as instinctive and effortless as pulling a page of text into focus, she brought the speaker’s words before her endless ear. **—matters not, ‘tis the blood of a Master all the same!** someone was saying, but not out loud. These were thoughts, foolishly flying back and forth, unprotected, as easily seen through the Scrivener’s power as the most brightly-painted butterflies…and perhaps as easily caught and crushed.
**Her reins are his,** sent Letha, sulky but subdued. **He hath set her whims above us, and this we must endure, brother.”
**He hath set our throats open beneath her jaws! She is utterly beyond control—yours, his, everyone’s! Tis a matter of time, and precious little of that, before she learneth all the truth, and then what for us?**
Horuseps, smiling even in his mind. **Pray we have her lost calf to lay upon her altar, that’s what.**
**Oh aye, laugh, but she—**
And eyes were suddenly upon her.
**She has the Scrivener!** they thought, all at once, screaming it as alarm to every other mind in the mountain, to Kazuul’s, flaring hot and white above them all. **She is inside the Scrivener!**
Enough of this. **Connie!** Mara shouted. Not with her mouth, her mouth was useless. She had seven billion mouths now, fourteen billion eyes. She was the world in its entirety. She was every creeping thing under the eye of the absent God. **Connie, answer me! Answer!**
They were coming. Mara reached out through the Scrivener, and turned the air inside the Great Library to a scum of stagnant awareness, one a thousand times thicker than what emanated from him normally. It was easy. She had become him, become what he would have been with a consciousness at the furnace of his power. All around her, bodies hit the floor—aspirants dropped where they worked with bloody sockets for eyes; students tumbled in from the landings and spilt themselves over the stone floor, first screaming, then choking, then quiet. The first demon to reach the room, Mas
ter Dalziel, slithered in, met the poisonous fugue of a vengeful Scrivener, and clawed his way out again, spewing frothy bile over himself like any senseless student. ‘Oh, very good!’ she heard him think, astonished. ‘We’ll never get her out!’ And then he was howling for help.
**Answer!** The will and the Word, Ruk had said. The will and the Word, but any word could be a Word if there was only enough will, and Mara had all the world’s inside her. **Answer me!** she roared, and all of Earth groaned to hear her.
Her monitors were lighting up, spilling out into the Mindstorm, throbbing yellow urgency over all her vision. Her heart again, quivering as it tried to work with all this magic pouring through it. But it would last just a little longer, just one more cry.
Someone tried to Correspond in next to her, but she reached out through the Scrivener and batted him away before he could reach cohesion. His essence diffused, shrieking, and came together again with an ear-splitting bang, dropping whoever it was in a bleeding heap somewhere in the lyceum, unconscious for the first time in all his unnatural life. She could have killed him, and for one endless instant, she wanted to…but that wasn’t why she was here. Mara gathered the Scrivener in like armfuls of clay, giving direction to all his idiot power, and turned it out from her like a megaphone. **ANSWER,** she commanded, a word no longer, but a Word, a true Word, and her own command, one no student could refuse.
Resonance, no louder and no lighter than the tolling of a tiny bell after it has been rung.
Mara stilled, suspended in herself, listening to the timorous note of Connie’s life hanging in the air. Weakened, wretched, but alive.
**I’m here,** Mara sent out. **I’m here. I’m going to find you. I’m going to take you home.** She reached as one reaches to catch a bubble in her hand, and had time enough to feel the good, true touch of Connie’s mind, that lost and familiar shivering sense of twinned hopelessness and joy, time to know that Connie felt her, recognized her, knew she was coming, and then the Scrivener’s leprous heart erupted and it was all gone.